December 26, 2000

Environmental Watch: AMEC opens Olympia office, wins Russia contract

KIRKLAND -- Engineering and environmental services firm AMEC is opening an office in Olympia to address rising demand for natural resource consulting.

The office will be headed by Neil Amondson, a former Washington state senator and representative. Amondson is the founding director of the Lower Columbia River Fish Recovery Board.

Marine scientist William Brewer will also be located at the new office.

From Olympia, AMEC will offer Endangered Species Act compliance, watershed planning and management, wetland delineation and management, fisheries management, habitat restoration, ecological risk assessment, marine and aquatic surveys and stormwater facilities planning.

AMEC says that its capabilities in Olympia will be enhanced by its bioassay laboratory, located relatively nearby in Fife. The lab specializes in testing the toxicity of industrial, municipal and agricultural discharges and their impacts on plants, fish and other creatures.

In other AMEC news, the firm has won a major engineering contract for two new oil and gas platforms in the Russian Far East's Sakhalin Island territory.

The Sakhalin Energy Investment Co. -- controlled by Shell, Mitsubishi and Mitsui -- awarded the work, which will entail the preparation of specifications and studies to gain approval for the project.

The development costs for the two platforms are expected to be approximately $3 billion. The engineering challenges of the project are substantial, owing to the island's sub-zero winter temperatures and the tumultuous Sea of Okhotsk. The 602-mile long Sakhalin Island is located 24 miles north of Japan and east of the Russian mainland.

AMEC employs over 50,000 people worldwide in 40 countries with annualized revenue in excess of $8 billion.

NEBC hosts environmental dot.com lunch

SEATTLE -- The Professional Marketing Committee of the Northwest Environmental Business Council will host a lunch looking at the intersection of the Internet and the environmental industry.

Speaking will be Irvine Alpert, president and CEO of ProjectGuides.com. He'll discuss Internet tools like project management sites, exchanges and auction site, how they work and how they can improve businesses bottom line.

The lunch will be held Wednesday, Jan. 3 from 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. at the Rock Salt Steakhouse, 1232 Westlake Ave. N. in Seattle. The program is $25 for NEBC members and guests and $45 for non-members. For more information call NEBC at (888) 609-6322 or go to www.nebc.org.

Tire fee proposed to help recycling

PORTLAND (AP) -- Trying to restore Oregon's former place as a national leader for recycling old tires, a citizen's advisory group and others are asking the Legislature to step in and help create new markets for used rubber.

It could mean that consumers will be asked to pay a state-imposed fee, from $1 to $3, on each new tire they buy.

The plan stops short of recommending a specific fee, but it does emphasize that any dollars spent on improving the state's tire recycling rate come from somewhere other than the general tax fund.

Metro, the regional government overseeing the three counties in the metro area, also is mulling over legislative proposals aimed at improving the statewide tire recycling rate.

Last month the Association of Oregon Recyclers -- whose members include garbage haulers, local government officials and nonprofit recycling groups -- also endorsed a legislative proposal calling for a $2 to $3 fee on each new tire sold. Under its plan, the money would be used to establish a scrap tire fund providing seed money and other financial incentives to businesses that turn old tires into new products.

Nationally, about 70 percent of discarded tires are recycled into playground surfaces, rubber mats and other products. In other states, tires are also used in roadbeds and burned to generate electricity for manufacturing plants. But in Oregon, which has seen a decline in the number of manufacturing plants that rely on tires as an energy resource, seven out of every 10 tires discarded are chopped into pieces and sent to landfills.

Glacier calving 100 feet per day

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) -- The Columbia Glacier near Valdez is retreating so quickly that tour boats should be able to work their way up to its face within the next decade or so, a scientist says.

The glacier is shrinking as much as 100 feet per day. "That's really ripping along," said Tad Pfeffer, a University of Colorado researcher.

The Columbia Glacier is a massive river of ice flowing from the Chugach Mountains into a side channel of Prince William Sound. It has been rapidly sliding on its bed. The front of the glacier is breaking off icebergs, which can pose a threat in shipping lanes.

The glacier most likely will make a hasty retreat up the fjord or thin quickly and disintegrate abruptly, Pfeffer said. He is the chief author of a paper about the glacier that was published recently in Eos, an international scientific newsletter of the American Geophysical Union.

When it does disintegrate, "it should be quite a spectacular sight," he said. Tour boats -- in 10 to 50 years by the best calculations -- should be floating where the glacier is sitting today.

The scientist doesn't blame global warming, however, because other nearby glaciers aren't doing a similar disappearing act. Instead, Pfeffer thinks something complex is going on inside the glacier that's causing it to calve icebergs at an impressive rate.

"The loss of ice primarily is due to calving rather than to thermal reasons," he said.

"Green Cab" starts rolling in Boulder County

BROOMFIELD, Colo. (AP) -- You've heard of Yellow Cab. Now there's "Green Cab."

The taxis are fueled by natural gas and tracked by a high-tech system to offer an alternative in parts of Boulder County.

The six-car fleet of Ford Crown Victorias and Honda Accords, called EarthCab, started rolling earlier this month. It will pick up or drop off customers within a 6-mile radius of the company's home base in Broomfield.

Jim Merlino, EarthCab president, said fares are 4 percent lower than the competition because the company can get natural gas for only $1.15 a gallon and pass the savings on to passengers.

The company focuses on the growing U.S. 36 corridor between Denver and Boulder and plans to expand the fleet to 12 cars.

"It's amazing how much people are investing in the area," Merlino said.

Traffic along U.S. 36 grew from 45,000 vehicles a day to 76,000 between 1988 and 1998. And the demand for transportation is increasing every day with expanding office parks, new hotels and more retail centers, Merlino said.

Internal EPA critic reassigned

WASHINGTON -- The Environmental Protection Agency has reassigned an investigator who criticized decisions on toxic waste sites in Colorado, Idaho, Florida and elsewhere, prompting protests from several members of Congress.

Hugh Kaufman, a longtime gadfly within the EPA, had been the lead investigator in the EPA ombudsman's office until he was reassigned last week to an analyst's job. Kaufman and his congressional supporters say the move was retaliation for Kaufman's criticism of the EPA, an allegation denied by the official who made the job decision.

Sens. Wayne Allard, R-Colo., and Sen. Mike Crapo, R-Idaho, who have praised Kaufman's work on investigations they requested, criticized Kaufman's reassignment in recent letters to Fields.

Crapo has praised Kaufman's work in an investigation of the EPA's plans to invoke the Superfund toxic waste law to force a cleanup of mining wastes in the Idaho Panhandle. Kaufman has said Superfund should not apply because lead contamination, for example, was less than at another industrial site in Pennsylvania where the EPA did not invoke Superfund.

The mining industry is worried that using the Superfund law -- which requires polluters to pay for at least part of cleanup costs -- would hurt their business.

Tim Fields, the EPA official who reassigned Kaufman last week, said Kaufman's claims of political retaliation were "pure fabrication" and "another of his shams he's trying to pull." Fields said he reassigned Kaufman "based on some performance issues that occurred over the last two years."