A response to the New York Times Portrait of Grief Series

The profiles of Edelmino Abad, Paul Acquaviva and Donald Adams were the three profiles that stood out to me from the series. The details and imagery presented in the descriptions provided a snap shot of how these men lived.

Beginning with Abad, he was portrayed as a man who adored his wife and children and who also treated his coworkers as a second family. The opening line provides you with an image of Abad—the proud father—attending his children’s dance recitals, and then we hear from one of his daughters about how he supported her dream to become a dance instructor. I felt like I knew this man by the way he was described.

The profile of Paul Acquaviva was moving because beyond stating all of his achievements, it offered a snap shot of a man who married his childhood sweetheart and cried at the birth of his first child. These are the details that give you a sense of the way Acquaviva lived.

Lastly, I was struck by the profile of Donald Adams. The piece had strong imagery of the connection Adam had with his wife and daughter. There was a scene of Adams walking toward his house and spotting “his girls” waiting on the porch for him. But my favorite aspect of the piece was how Adam’s wife, Heda, described their relationship. "I was H. He was D. Just the first letters. That's all we needed."

E-Waste Solutions

Paul Cade, a sophomore in urban planning, scrambled to maintain order as he sorted an array of electronic waste that poured into Lincoln Hall on Saturday, February 21. The southeast entrance to the building was converted into a makeshift recycling center where local residents brought old computers and computer accessories, including monitors and printers. During the five hour period, student volunteers received more than five tons of e-waste - enough to fill a semi-truck.
The group collected old computers to be used in the upcoming Sustainable E-waste Design Competition, Cade said.

Registration for the competition opened on January 29 and will run until March 16. Teams consisting of up to five students will choose from the donated e-waste and present their re-imagined designs to be judged by a committee on April 16. The juried competition will be held on the UI quad and will be preceded by a sustainable design conference hosted by the UI Environmental Council April 8 – 10 that will be held in the Illini Union.

The Cade family is playing a key role in the production of the event. Paul’s sister, Amy Cade, a senior in industrial design, initially proposed a project using recycled e-waste to Art and Design professor William Bullock. Amy explained that her father, Willie Cade, rehabs electronic equipment and provides it to schools and civic organizations.

After learning about Willie Cade’s company, PC Rebuilders and Recyclers, professor Bullock went to see the operation and was excited to witness old electronic equipment being prepped for reuse because “in industrial design we are part of the problem,” he said.

“E-waste is a huge problem that is creeping upward and upward,” Bullock said. The end-of-life of (electronics) is not good and much of it we’re exporting overseas and, essentially, dumping our trash on foreign shores and it’s really tragic because (toxins) are leaching into the soil, air, water and affecting the environment adversely and the people who are around those things.”

And the problem of e-waste is growing. The Electronics TakeBack Coalition, citing Environmental Protection Agency data, released a report stating that in 2006 Americans generated 2.9 million tons of e-waste, of which 11 percent was recycled. Those findings were supported by Allen Hershkowitz, a scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council, who said in a Nov. 9, 2008, interview on 60 Minutes that, “We throw out about 130,000 computers every day in the United States.”

Energized by his visit to Willie Cade’s company, Bullock helped develop ARTD 391/351, a sustainable e-waste course, he said. According to the course description, the class covers relevant topics such as history and theory of sustainable design and e-waste design techniques. Course enrollment is not mandatory in order to enter the competition and participants may attend course lectures and seminars without enrolling.

Amy Cade enrolled in the class and she and her classmates conducted research and developed a report that will be presented to the University, which will highlight how it can play a role in e-waste reduction, she said.

One of the primary goals of this effort is to stimulate support for a new research institute at UI called the I-Care Center, which will work with the University as well as electronic manufacturers to reduce e-waste, Bullock said.
“(E-waste) has become a global problem and we just wanted to take a positive step (toward) doing something about it,” Bullock said.
The Office of Sustainability helped fund ARTD 391/591 and supports the effort to develop the I-Care Center.

“We think UI could be a real leader in this area,” said Office of Sustainability Director Dick Warner.

“The collection of e-waste is a sticky issue these days. But it will be much easier come January 1, 2010,” Willie Cade said. He is referring to a new law called the Illinois Electronic Recycling & Reuse Act. The law’s key sponsors are Rep. Elaine Nekritz and Sen. Susan Garrett. According to a published description of the law, “manufacturers of televisions, computers, monitors and printers are required to set up and pay for the collection, transportation, recycling and or reuse of obsolete products.” The Illinois Environmental Protection Agency will monitor compliance of the law, which also bans e-waste from landfills.

“The really good part about the Illinois law is that it gives manufacturers double credit for reusing the equipment. And that’s what we really want to focus on here is the reuse of this equipment – not just taking it and throwing it away and making (silicone sand) out of it,” Willie Cade said.

Manufacturers such as Apple also seem to be taking notice of this issue. In its latest advertising campaign, Apple is touting the new MacBook “as not only the greenest notebook Apple has produced, but the greenest family of notebooks.”

According to Apple, the new MacBooks contain “materials that are highly recyclable and free of many of the harmful substances found in other computers.”
Apple’s new advertising campaign would be welcomed by local residents like Gisela Kraus, 55, of Champaign. Krauss was one of the people who participated in the e-waste drive.

“We saw the article in the News-Gazette and I thought it was time to get rid of the broken laptop. It broke recently and I didn't want to fix it because (it would) cost more than buying a new one and it was old anyway."

The Electronics TakeBack Coalition reported that 68 percent of consumers stockpile used or unwanted computer equipment in their homes.

“There are about 100 million computers being stored in homes right now. That’s about 1 per home,” said Willie Cade.

Kraus said she held on to the broken computer for two months. “Recycling is the best thing you can do right now, isn't it? Anything you can recycle, you should recycle – plastics, paper, cardboard, cans.”

After gathering a computer and five monitors, Paul Cade headed to a first-floor room in Lincoln Hall that his team will use for the next month to develop their design idea.

“We want to make a hydroponic farm, which is a farming system that uses no dirt, just water. (We hope) the computer will be able to control the nutrients that the plants will get. Then we will use computer monitors to give the plants light.”
Cade hopes the project will benefit from the five-member team that includes students from industrial design, international studies, urban planning and architecture, he said.

Supporting e-waste recycling efforts will offer many benefits to the local community, Willie Cade said.

"Eighty percent of the energy in the life cycle of a computer is used to manufacture it. So if we could reuse the silicon (contained in it), as opposed to grinding it up, we've done a much better (job for the) environmental process,” Willie Cade said. “Also, too, we've created local jobs. The whole notion of reuse and refurbishment is educational -- it creates local jobs. It's green and it's cost effective. Those are really the highlights of this (effort)."

On Tuesday night a marked silence fell inside the chambers of the Champaign City Council meeting. Prior to this moment, the proceedings proved to be uneventful as Council members voted unanimously to approve all but one agenda item.

The last item before adjournment was the public comment session. After Mayor Schweighart invited comments from the audience, Claudia Lennhoff, executive director of Champaign County Healthcare Consumers addressed the council.

Lennhoff, there to speak on behalf of the 5th and Hill Neighborhood Rights Campaign, informed the Council about the Ameren Open House meeting that will take place at City Hall on Wednesday, March 11, 2009.

“I am here because we just read Ameren’s report last week. And there is some new and important – and I would say – some shocking information from our prospective,” she said.

Lennhoff was referring to an ongoing battle between residents of Champaign’s 5th and Hill neighborhood and the utility company Ameren. The neighborhood is located near the site of contaminated property owned by Ameren, according to Lennhoff.

“Ameren, for the first time—after all their reports and after all their testing – identified large sections of the property that pose a (health) threat because of vaporization from toxins.

This risk of exposure to poisonous substances has been “a long-standing concern” for 5th and Hill residents, Lennhoff said.

“Ameren found that the test results exceed the safety standards for residential property. In other words, if there was residential property there it would be unsafe (for people living near the site). Of course, there is residential property 40 or 50 feet away (from the site) and they didn’t test outside the boundaries of their (property). But there is no reason to think that the vaporization stops at the boundaries of the fenced-in area,” she said.

According to Lennhoff, the report also stated that “the ground water is far more contaminated than we had ever been told or led to believe.”

“One of the water test wells showed the presence of benzene, a highly toxic substance in the ground water. Now the safety standards are five parts per billion, in other words, you don’t want a test result that exceeds five parts per billion. Well, from Ameren’s on documents, the test results for that particular well show a 1000 parts per billion.”

Council members sat quietly as Lennhoff continued to build a case against Ameren, eventually highlighting the City’s ground water restriction ordinance passed in 2007,which she said, exempts Ameren form having to clean up the contaminated area.

“On the surface the ordinance seems benign. It basically prohibits people from putting in wells to (access) water for potable purposes. It is important to understand that the only thing this ordinance accomplishes for the people of the City of Champaign is that it prohibits them from drinking contaminated water, which they have not been doing.”

The ordinance only protects people from exposure to toxins if they drink the water. “However, that is only one of three ways that people can be exposed,” she said. The other ways include “touching or tactile exposure and inhalation.”

“This ordinance only addresses one pathway for exposure – the ingestion pathway, which really has not been an issue because residents were not digging wells for drinking water and they were not hauling water in buckets from their flooded basements for drinking purposes. The ordinance does not prevent (contaminated) water from flooding their basements or from flowing into Boneyard Creek, or onto other people’s properties.”

Lennhoff said that the city ordinance allows Ameren to get away with not cleaning up the toxins because it claims that it is using the suing the ordinance to address the issue.

Regarding the ordinance Lenhhoff stated, “This is what amounts to an administrative slight of hand that allows Ameren to have the appearance that it is addressing contaminated ground water.”

Lennhoff hopes that the City Council members will not only attend Ameren’s open house meeting, but will also amend the ordinance that she said is allowing Ameren to avoid cleaning up toxins that are located in the 5th and Hill neighborhood.
In other Council news, the executive director of the Boys and Girls Club and 7 of program participants, presented Council members with commemorative plates as a token of appreciation for financial support.

Ideas for stories:
1. Cover the Ameren Open House Meeting
2. Follow up interview with Claudia Lennhoff
3. Interview Council members regarding Ameren issue