Photo by Stormi Greener - Star Tribune Earth Protector Eden Prairie Dump March

Children

Children consume too much fat, sugar (aspartame, corn syrup), salt and caffeine. They absorb larger amounts of air pollution than adults do from burning garbage, coal and oil, and emissions from cars, trucks and buses.

Help Children:
1. Improve diets
2. Avoid lead poisoning and asthma or reduce impacts
3. Implement interesting exercise programs

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Dioxin

Dioxin damages the immune system, reproductive system and causes endometriosis and cancer. You already have levels of dioxin in your body at which these problems are occurring as confirmed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency after a three year study completed in September 1994.

In a fifteen year study completed in 1993 at the University of Wisconsin, dioxin was linked with endometriosis...where uterine tissue grows abnormally within the abdominal cavity. It is painful and occurs in thousands of women, and usually requires surgery.

The main sources of dioxin are emissions from burning garbage, medical waste and vehicle exhaust.

HELP stop dioxin contamination
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Feedlots/Factory Farms

Animal industries pack billions of animals in huge buildings where they breed and grow them. The animals suffer their entire lives under unspeakable conditions. If you eat animals raised on factory farms you eat the fat and antibiotics that the animals eat. There won't be enough money in the world to cover all the medical needs of America's future fat-filled people.

Animal factory farms produce vast amounts of manure that is dumped in ponds or piled on fields as fertilizer. The runoff of manure from fields, or flooding from ponds, enters our streams, lakes, rivers, and underground water supplies.

What would happen if our attraction to animal-based foods diminished and at the same time our appetite and enjoyment for other foods, which really nourish and are far better for us, increased? The effects on our physical health would be immediate. Cancer and heart attack, the nation's biggest killers, would drop. So would many other diseases now linked to consumption of animal proteins and fats, such as osteoporosis. We would cease ingesting the drugs pumped into meat and poultry.

Animals suffer for food fat. Pigs are stacked in cages like cars in a parking ramp. They never go outside. They never exercise or relate to other animals until they are packed into trucks and taken to the slaughter house. Often in sub zero weather or sweltering heat. Terror is all they know on their trip to the slaughter house to become ham for the holiday, bacon and beef for the burgers, and fat for your arteries.

Cattle suffer terribly. Jammed into feedlots to be fattened before going to the slaughter house, they are sprayed with pesticides and loaded with various hormones and antibiotics through their food and by injection. When you eat beef you ingest the animals misery & the chemicals that were put in them.

The suffering of turkeys and chickens is as bad. They are more than likely raised in packed confinement barns where they are so crazed that their beaks are cut off when they are babies so they don't peck out the eyes of their neighbors. Most never go outside until they are taken to the slaughter house or soup factory. Cows and ducks raised on factory farms experience similar suffering and misery during their entire lives.

Isn't it gross to even think about eating chunks of flesh from animals who have lived miserable suffering lives packed in cages, feedlots or giant barns? People who sell or buy meat from suffering animals are partners in the cruelty.

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Fuels

Ethanol - an alcohol distilled from biomass, emits substantial quantities of aceta-aldehyde, which can speed ozone formation. its production is currently economical only with heavy government subsidies, and because it is often made from grain, its widespread adoption could result in a competition between food and fuel. The global warming implications of ethanol use depend upon the fossil fuel intensity of the agricultural production process. In the U.S. total carbon dioxide emissions from ethanol production are estimated to be 63 percent less on an energy-unit basis that those from gasoline production and combustion.

Methanol - would yield some reductions in ozone formation, vehicles powered by this fuel produce two to five times more formaldehyde, a probable human carcinogen, as do those running on gasoline. And if methanol is made from coal, as it might well be if it were relied on in a substantial way, emissions of the primary greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, would be 20-160 percent higher than from gasoline. In addition, methanol is a highly poisonous, colorless, odorless, and tasteless liquid that could contaminate groundwater in the event of leaking storage tanks and seriously harm someone if splashed during refueling. When ingested or absorbed through the skin, methanol is at least twice as toxic as gasoline.

Natural gas - offers reductions of from 40-60 percent for hydrocarbons and 50-95 percent for carbon monoxide, but an increase of 25 percent in nitrogen oxides. In addition, its use poses distribution and design problems and would reduce greenhouse emissions only marginally.

Hydrogen - We support hydrogen and electric vehicles.

HELP understand and switch to new fuels
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Fuel Cell

Fuel cells are to electricity what the chip was for computers. Fuel cells can turn fuel into electricity cleanly and quietly. The technology is ready to go right now. We have to simply make up our minds to amp up certain areas.

Fuel cells don't burn fuel so they have a minimal environmental impact. Fuel cells have no moving parts so they are noiseless and require very little maintenance. Fuel cells can be built in stacks as large or small as needed to allow planners to accurately meet actual demand.

Fuel cells produce heat as well as electricity making them excellent candidates for generating power and providing heat at office buildings, hospitals, hotels and factories or running electric motors in cars, vans, buses and trucks.

By stacking fuel cells one upon another and electrically connecting them, you can produce from a few kilowatts (kw) to several megawatts (MW) of electricity at a usable voltage. Facilities can add capacity in almost infinite increments as needed.

Technical Information
Several kinds of fuel cells are being developed, each distinguished by the particular type of electrolyte.
Fuel cells are electrochemical electricity generators with three major parts: an anode (negative electrode), an electrolyte (electrically conductive medium) and a cathode (positive electrode). Chemical reactions within the cell produce either hydrogen or oxygen bearing ions at one of the two electrodes. The ions pass through the electrolyte and react with oxygen atoms. The result is direct current (DC) electricity. A conditioner then converts the DC power to alternating current (AC) power for customers' use. Water and heat, the byproducts of the process, can be recycled as steam.

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Garbage Burning

Burning garbage is the worst thing you can do with it. It releases the most toxic organic and metallic substances known to man (lead, mercury, dioxin, cadmium) into the atmosphere and spreads all over the world. Burning is the worst way to manage garbage. Earth Protector® supports reduce, recover, repair, recycle, compost and drain, crush and bury. This results in less need for landfill space than burning which leaves twenty five percent of what is burned left as poisonous ash that gets buried for eternity.

We are examining the anerobic digestion technology.

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Hydrogen – Solar

Hydrogen is made by splitting water (H2O) with electricity that has been produced from sunlight passing through solar cells. This process is called PV-hydrogen. Wind produced electricity could also be used.

PV means photovoltaic (foto-vol-tay-ick) - photo for light and voltaic for electricity. The "PHOTOVOLTAIC EFFECT" converts sunlight into electricity that's used to split water to hydrogen.

Using solar or wind to produce hydrogen via the electrolysis of water provides a means both of storing solar energy and of transporting it efficiently thousands of kilometers from the windy or desert areas where it is harnessed. Hydrogen is a clean-burning gaseous fuel that is easier and cheaper to move than oil, coal, or electricity. Moreover, hydrogen can provide the large amounts of concentrated energy needed by today's factories, homes, and transportation systems. It can be used, for example, to run automobiles using a fuel cell.

The solar/hydrogen combination could become the cornerstone of a new global energy economy based on renewable resources. All the world's major population concentrations are located within reach of sunny and wind-rich areas. The U.S. Southwest, for example, could supply much of the country with either electricity or hydrogen fuel. The pipelines that link the gas fields in Texas and Oklahoma with the industrial Midwest and the Northeast could carry hydrogen to these regions. While it is true that renewable energy sources are regionally concentrated, they are far less so than oil, where two thirds of proven world reserves are in the Persian Gulf area.

For Europe, solar power plants could be built in southern Spain or in North Africa. From the latter, hydrogen could be transported into Spain at Gibraltar or into Italy via Sicily, following existing natural gas pipelines. Within Europe, today's pipeline and electrical grids make it relatively easy to distribute solar energy. To the east, Kazakhstan and the other semiarid Asian republics could supply much of the former Soviet Union's energy. For India, the sun-drenched Thar Desert in the northwest is with easy range of the rest of he country. For China's 1.1 billion people, solar electricity could be generated in the country's vast central and northwestern desert regions.

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Lead Poisoning

When children are lead poisoned we all suffer.

Problem - Today in America there are 1.5 million children who are lead poisoned at levels that are damaging their brains (10 micrograms of lead per deciliter of blood - 10 mg/dl).

Cause - The poisoning is primarily caused when children ingest leaded dust by sucking on their fingers and other objects. The dust comes from gasoline, paint, coal burning and garbage burning. The dust is on the soil where children live and play, on carpeting and furniture and in window wells.

Effect - Experts agree that lead poisoned children suffer learning disabilities, reduced attention span, lower IQ's, increased nervousness and frustration, behavior problems and violence.
Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center have made the connection between lead poisoned children and violent teenagers. (Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA)

Solutions - Lead poisoning can be prevented by:
* Covering bare soil around houses
* Covering or removing peeling lead paint
* Cleaning or removing lead infested carpeting and furniture
* Covering or replacing lead painted window frames
* Modifying diets
* Filtering drinking and cooking water
* Washing hands frequently
* Removing shoes near the door
SPECIAL NOTE: Professional assistance should be sought for some of the above.

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Leghold Trap

The cruel and vicious leghold trap is already banned in 65 countries. Earth Protector® is working to ban leghold traps in America.

Today in America more than 10 million animals are caught in leghold traps. Once the vicious leghold trap shuts its steel jaws on an animals foot it can't get loose. The poor animal suffers terribly until the trapper comes and clubs it to death. Sometimes the animal chews off its own foot to get loose.

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Pigs

78 million pigs in the U.S. are raised on factory farming where they are experience incredibly brutal treatment. The sows are kept constantly pregnant or nursing in tiny confinement stalls.

Their piglets are taken early (3 weeks) and put in tiny cement pens until they reach 5 pounds and transferred to finishing pens where they spend the rest of their lives inhaling their own excrement in pens where they can barely move around.

That's almost the fun part of their lives compared to the brutality and cruelty they face when the time comes to go to slaughter.

The loading of trucks at the factory farm, the trip often in freezing or sweltering heat to the slaughter house and the terror experienced by the animals as they are unloaded by workers who scream at them and use whips and electric prods to move them along.

At some point along the terror trail death relieves the pigs suffering and they become food for the holidays and the days in between.

If you do nothing to help pigs from brutal conditions, you need to examine your life.

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