Tag: waste collection and disposal

A woman’s body was found in a bag at an abandoned bus stop. Malaysian police are investigating | CNN

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Hong Kong
CNN
—

Police in Malaysia say they are investigating the death of a woman whose decomposing body was discovered in a travel bag at an abandoned bus station.

A passerby found the bag near a building belonging to the state electricity company Tenaga Nasional Berhad earlier this week in Kulai, a district in the southern state of Johor, state news agency Bernama reported.

Kulai district police chief Tok Beng Yeow said the highly decomposed state of the body – which he estimated at more than 50 per cent – had hampered initial identification efforts, according to Bernama.

However, a preliminary post-mortem report by Sultanah Aminah Hospital suggested the body belonged to a woman over 25 years of age, who had sustained a head injury and may have died around two weeks ago.

The district police chief said an investigation is ongoing as he appealed to local residents to come forward with information.

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April 16, 2023
Who will end up paying for the banking crisis: You | CNN Business

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A version of this story first appeared in CNN Business’ Before the Bell newsletter. Not a subscriber? You can sign up right here. You can listen to an audio version of the newsletter by clicking the same link.

New York
CNN
—

It cost the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation about $23 billion to clean up the mess that Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank left in the wake of their collapses earlier this month.

Now, as the dust clears and the US banking system steadies, the FDIC needs to figure out where to send its invoice. While regional and mid-sized banks are behind the recent turmoil, it appears that large banks may be footing the bill.

Ultimately, that means higher fees for bank customers and lower rates on their savings accounts.

What’s happening: The FDIC maintains a $128 billion deposit insurance fund to insure bank deposits and protect depositors. That fund is typically supplied by quarterly payments from insured banks in the United States. But when a big, expensive event happens — like the FDIC making uninsured customers whole at Silicon Valley Bank — the agency is able to assess a special charge on the banking industry to recover the cost.

The law also gives the FDIC the authority to decide which banks shoulder the brunt of that assessment fee. FDIC Chairman Martin Gruenberg said this week that he plans to make the details of the latest assessment public in May. He has also hinted that he would protect community banks from having to shell out too much money.

The fees that the FDIC assesses on banks tend to vary. Historically, they were fixed, but 2010’s Dodd-Frank act required that the agency needed to consider the size of a bank when setting rates. It also takes into consideration the “economic conditions, the effects on the industry, and such other factors as the FDIC deems appropriate and relevant,” according to Gruenberg.

On Tuesday and Wednesday, members of the Senate Banking Committee and the House Financial Services Committee grilled Gruenberg about his plans to charge banks for the damage done by SVB and others, and repeatedly implored him to leave small banks alone.

Gruenberg appeared receptive.

“Will you commit to using your authority…to establish separate risk-based assessment systems for large and small members of the Deposit Insurance Fund so that these well-managed banks don’t have to bail out Silicon Valley Bank?” asked the US Rep. Andy Barr, a Republican who represents of Kentucky’s 6th district.

“I’m certainly willing to consider that,” replied Gruenberg.

“if smaller community banks in Texas will be left responsible for bailing out the failed banks in California and New York?” asked US Rep. Roger Williams, a Republican who represents Texas’ 25th district.

“Let me just say, without forecasting what our board is going to vote, we’re going to be keenly sensitive to the impact on community banks,” replied Gruenberg.

Representatives Frank Lucas, John Rose, Ayanna Pressley, Dan Meuser, Nikema Williams, Zach Nunn and Andy Ogles all asked similar questions and received similar responses. As did US Sens. Sherrod Brown and Cynthia Lummis.

“I don’t doubt he’s still fielding a lot of phone calls,” from politicians pressuring him to place the burden on large banks, former FDIC chairman Bill Isaac told CNN.

Smaller banks are saying that they’re unable to pick up this tab and didn’t have anything to do with the failure of “these two wild and crazy banks,” said Isaac. “They’re arguing to put the assessment on larger banks and as I understand it, the FDIC is thinking seriously about it,” he added.

A spokesperson from the FDIC told CNN that the agency “will issue in May 2023 a proposed rulemaking for the special assessment for public comment.” In regard to Greunberg’s testimony they added that “when the boss says something, we defer to the boss.”

Big banks: “We need to think hard about liquidity risk and concentrations of uninsured deposits and how that’s evaluated in terms of deposit insurance assessments,” said Gruenberg to the Senate Banking Committee, indicating that smaller banks that are operating carefully could be asked to bear less of the assessment.

A larger assessment on big banks would add to what will already be a multi-billion dollar payment from the nation’s largest banks like JPMorgan Chase

(JPM), Citigroup

(C), Bank of America

(BAC) and Wells Fargo

(WFC).

The argument is that the largest US banks will be able to shoulder extra payments without collapsing under it. Those large banks also benefited greatly from the collapse of SVB and Signature Bank as wary customers sought safety by moving billions of dollars worth of money to big banks.

Passing it on: Regardless of who’s charged, the fees will eventually get passed on to bank customers in the end, said Isaac. “It’s going to be passed on to all customers. I have no doubts that banks will make up for these extra costs in their pricing — higher fees for services, higher prices for loans and less compensation for deposits.”

It’s hard out there for a Wall Street banker. Or harder than it was.

The average annual Wall Street bonus fell to $176,700 last year, a 26% drop from the previous year’s average of $240,400, according to estimates released Thursday by New York State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli.

While that’s a big decrease, the 2022 bonus figure is still more than twice the median annual income for US households, reports CNN’s Jeanne Sahadi.

All in, Wall Street firms had a $33.7 billion bonus pool for 2022, which is 21% smaller than the previous year’s record of $42.7 billion — and the largest drop since the Great Recession.

For New York City and New York State coffers, bonus season means a welcome infusion of revenue, since employees in the securities industry make up 5% of private sector employees in NYC and their pay accounts for 22% of the city’s private sector wages. In 2021, Wall Street was estimated to be responsible for 16% of all economic activity in the city.

DiNapoli’s office projects the lower bonuses will bring in $457 million less in state income tax revenue and $208 million less for the city compared to the year before.

Beleaguered retailed Bed Bath & Beyond will attempt to $300 million of its stock to repay creditors and fund its business as it struggles to avoid bankruptcy, reports CNN’s Nathaniel Meyersohn.

If it’s not able to raise sufficient money from the offering, the home furnishings giant said Thursday it expects to “likely file for bankruptcy.”

Bed Bath & Beyond was able to initially avoid bankruptcy in February by completing a complex stock offering that gave it both an immediate injection of cash and a pledge for more funding in the future to pay down its debt. That offering was backed by private equity group Hudson Bay Capital.

But on Thursday, Bed Bath & Beyond said it was terminating the deal with Hudson Bay Capital for future funding and is turning to the public market.

Shares of Bed Bath & Beyond dropped more than 26% Thursday. The stock was trading around 60 cents a share.

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March 31, 2023
Parisian streets littered with trash after wave of strikes | CNN

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Paris
CNN
—

The City of Lights has a garbage problem.

Massive strikes in Paris against pension reform this week are affecting trash pickup services in the French capital, with piles of waste sitting on many of the city’s normally picturesque streets, including those just steps from monuments like the Eiffel Tower and the Arc de Triomphe.

As of Saturday, about 4,400 tonnes of trash were awaiting collection, a spokeswoman for the Paris mayor’s office said. The spokeswoman said that the problem is a blockage at trash incinerators caused by the strikes. Garbage trucks have thus been unable to pick up waste in much of the city because they have nowhere to put it.

Not all neighborhoods have been equally affected. The municipal government is in charge of garbage collection in half of Paris’ 20 arrondissements. Private contractors are responsible for the other 10.

Municipal services like trash collection in Paris have been affected since Tuesday, when strikes saw flights and trains canceled and delayed; oil refiners blockaded; schools shuttered; and left thousands without electricity. The French capital was the most affected, with nearly 60% of its primary school teachers walking out and the local metro forced to cut service to all but the busiest times.

Massive protests have been staged regularly throughout France since January 19, with more than a million people coming out multiple to voice their opposition to the government’s plan to raise the official retirement age for most workers as part of reforms to the government’s pension system, one of Europe’s most generous.

President Emmanuel Macron’s government says the changes are necessary to make the system financially stable.

The trash buildup in Paris has been sparked health concerns among Parisians and local politicians. The mayor of the 17th arrondissement, Geoffroy Boulard, said in an interview with CNN affiliate BFMTV that he has asked Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo to hire a private service provider to intervene.

“We can’t wait,” he said. “This is a matter of public health.”

Boulard said he’s also worried about the proliferation of rats and rodents as well as Paris’ image.

Another local mayor, Jean-Pierre Lecoq of the 6th arrondissement, asked Hidalgo to intervene in an open letter he published on Twitter.

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March 12, 2023
Exclusive: Supreme Court justices used personal emails for work and ‘burn bags’ were left open in hallways, sources say | CNN Politics

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CNN
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Long before the leak of a draft opinion reversing Roe v. Wade, some Supreme Court justices often used personal email accounts for sensitive transmissions instead of secure servers set up to guard such information, among other security lapses not made public in the court’s report on the investigation last month.

New details revealed to CNN by multiple sources familiar with the court’s operations offer an even more detailed picture of yearslong lax internal procedures that could have endangered security, led to the leak and hindered an investigation into the culprit.

Supreme Court employees also used printers that didn’t produce logs – or were able to print sensitive documents off-site without tracking – and “burn bags” meant to ensure the safe destruction of materials were left open and unattended in hallways.

“This has been going on for years,” one former employee said.

The problem with the justices’ use of emails persisted in part because some justices were slow to adopt to the technology and some court employees were nervous about confronting them to urge them to take precautions, one person said. Such behavior meant that justices weren’t setting an example to take security seriously.

The justices were “not masters of information security protocol,” one former court employee told CNN.

In a statement attached to the final report, the court called the leak a “grave assault” on the court’s legitimacy and the marshal of the court issued a road map to improve security.

The report and the new revelations of weak protocols come as the court is trying to protect its own legitimacy after an embarrassing leak and allegations (prompted by the recent rash of high profile cases breaking along familiar ideological lines) that it has simply become another political branch. The 20-page report and its still secret “Annex A” raised some questions as to whether the entire investigation should have been outsourced to someone without close ties to the court.

Former Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff reviewed and endorsed the Supreme Court’s internal investigation into the leak. However, the court did not disclose Chertoff had been paid at least $1 million in recent years to perform security assessments for the court.

The court declined to comment.

In her report last month, Supreme Court Marshal Gail Curley noted that the “court’s current method of destroying court sensitive documents has vulnerabilities that should be addressed.”

Three former employees told CNN of loose security around burn bags that are supplied to chambers to deal with sensitive documents. A burn bag is a security bag that holds sensitive documents which will ultimately be destroyed by fire or shredding.

There was no uniform rule that established a procedure for these paper bags with red stripes. Instead, the justices each have their own protocols. According to a source familiar with the court’s security practices, employees have the option to use the burn bags which are later taken to the basement of the building and emptied into locked bins so that they can be retrieved by a shredding company.

Another source questioned how the burn bags were handled before they were collected. The source said some colleagues would staple a burn bag shut. Others simply filled them to capacity and left them near their desks. But some burn bags were simply left in the hallway outside of chambers, presumably so that they could be taken to the basement. It would not have been difficult, the source suggested, for someone with access to the non-public area of the court to access sensitive documents.

Another vulnerability outlined by Curley was printer logs meant to track document production. A former employee highlights something that Curley did not detail: employees who had VPN access could print documents from any computer, making it difficult to track copies. Curley made an important concession in the report that some locally connected printers only logged the last 60 documents printed.

A look at the timeline of the leak reveals how such a system would be problematic for investigators.

That’s because the initial draft was distributed internally on February 10, 2022. But the leak investigation only started in May when Politico published the draft opinion. Some of those print logs would almost surely no longer exist because the 60-document threshold had been reached.

Curley did not go into great detail, but she did suggest the court “institute tracking mechanisms” in the future.

Another potential problem revolved – especially during Covid – around the possibility that opinions could leave the building. According to the report, Court Information System User Guidelines prohibit “attempting to leave facilities with Court Sensitive Information (hard copy or electronic) without proper authorization.”

But during Covid many such regulations were necessarily relaxed. And even with the rule in place, one source said, there were no mechanisms to check what was actually being taken from the court. To be sure, the hallways in the areas of the court that are closed to the public were guarded and protected by doors with a numerical code necessary to enter, but the code wasn’t necessarily changed very often.

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February 4, 2023
US citizen charged over alleged killing of DJ in Colombia | CNN

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CNN
—

Colombian authorities have charged an American citizen over the alleged murder of a female DJ in Colombia whose body was discovered inside a suitcase at the bottom of a garbage container.

John Poulos was arrested and detained at the Tocumen International Airport in Panama on Tuesday while trying to leave for Istanbul, the Panamanian National Police said.

During a televised court hearing in Bogota, lasting more than five hours, Poulos spoke through a translator to deny the charges, which relate to the death of Valentina Trespalacios, 23, a well-known electronic music DJ.

Trespalacios’ body was found by a recycler in the early hours of January 22 in a garbage container in the southwest of Bogota.

In a previous hearing on Thursday, the court heard details of a relationship between Trespalacios and Poulos.

Poulos’s defense alleged that there were flaws in his arrest and that due process had not been respected.

The Colombian Prosecutor’s Office and police say they have more than 300 hours of security footage in which Poulos and Trespalacios are seen in the days before her body was found.

Another hearing is set for January 31.

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January 27, 2023
A trash heap 62 meters high shows the scale of India’s climate challenge | CNN

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New Delhi
CNN
—

At the Bhalswa landfill in northwest Delhi, a steady flow of jeeps zigzag up the trash heap to dump more garbage on a pile now over 62 meters (203 feet) high.

Fires caused by heat and methane gas sporadically break out – the Delhi Fire Service Department has responded to 14 fires so far this year – and some deep beneath the pile can smolder for weeks or months, while men, women and children work nearby, sifting through the rubbish to find items to sell.

Some of the 200,000 residents who live in Bhalswa say the area is uninhabitable, but they can’t afford to move and have no choice but to breathe the toxic air and bathe in its contaminated water.

Bhalswa is not Delhi’s largest landfill. It’s about three meters lower than the biggest, Ghazipur, and both contribute to the country’s total output of methane gas.

Methane is the second most abundant greenhouse gas after carbon dioxide, but a more potent contributor to the climate crisis because methane traps more heat. India creates more methane from landfill sites than any other country, according to GHGSat, which monitors methane via satellites.

And India comes second only to China for total methane emissions, according to the International Energy Agency’s (IEA) Global Methane Tracker.

As part of his “Clean India” initiative, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has said efforts are being made to remove these mountains of garbage and convert them into green zones. That goal, if achieved, could relieve some of the suffering of those residents living in the shadows of these dump sites – and help the world lower its greenhouse gas emissions.

India wants to lower its methane output, but it hasn’t joined the 130 countries who have signed up to the Global Methane Pledge, a pact to collectively cut global methane emissions by at least 30% from 2020 levels by 2030. Scientists estimate the reduction could cut global temperature rise by 0.2% – and help the world reach its target of keeping global warming under 1.5 degrees Celsius.

India says it won’t join because most of its methane emissions come from farming – some 74% from farm animals and paddy fields versus less than 15% from landfill.

In a statement last year, Minister of State for Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate change Ashwini Choubey said pledging to reduce India’s total methane output could threaten the livelihood of farmers and affect India’s trade and economic prospects.

But it’s also facing challenges in reducing methane from its steaming mounds of trash.

When Narayan Choudhary, 72, moved to Bhalswa in 1982, he said it was a “beautiful place,” but that all changed 12 years later when the first rubbish began arriving at the local landfill.

In the years since, the Bhalswa dump has grown nearly as tall as the historic Taj Mahal, becoming a landmark in its own right and an eyesore that towers over surrounding homes, affecting the health of people who live there.

Choudhary suffers from chronic asthma. He said he nearly died when a large fire broke out at Bhalswa in April that burned for days. “I was in terrible shape. My face and nose were swollen. I was on my death bed,” he said.

“Two years ago we protested … a lot of residents from this area protested (to get rid of the waste),” Choudhary said. “But the municipality didn’t cooperate with us. They assured us that things will get better in two years but here we are, with no relief.”

The dump site exhausted its capacity in 2002, according to a 2020 report on India’s landfills from the Center for Science and Environment (CSE), a nonprofit research agency in New Delhi, but without government standardization in recycling systems and greater industry efforts to reduce plastic consumption and production, tonnes of garbage continue to arrive at the site daily.

Bhalswa isn’t the only dump causing distress to residents nearby – it is one of three landfills in Delhi, overflowing with decaying waste and emitting toxic gases into the air.

Across the country, there are more than 3,100 landfills. Ghazipur is the biggest in Delhi, standing at 65 meters (213 feet), and like Bhalswa, it surpassed its waste capacity in 2002 and currently produces huge amounts of methane.

According to GHGSat, on a single day in March, more than two metric tons of methane gas leaked from the site every hour.

“If sustained for a year, the methane leak from this landfill would have the same climate impact as annual emissions from 350,000 US cars,” said GHGSat CEO Stephane Germain.

Methane emissions aren’t the only hazard that stem from landfills like Bhalswa and Ghazipur. Over decades, dangerous toxins have seeped into the ground, polluting the water supply for thousands of residents living nearby.

In May, CNN commissioned two accredited labs to test the ground water around the Bhalswa landfill. And according to the results, ground water within at least a 500-meter (1,600-foot) radius around the waste site is contaminated.

In the first lab report, levels of ammonia and sulphate were significantly higher than acceptable limits mandated by the Indian government.

Results from the second lab report showed levels of total dissolved solids (TDS) – the amount of inorganic salts and organic matter dissolved in the water – detected in one of the samples was almost 19 times the acceptable limit, making it unsafe for human drinking.

The Bureau of Indian Standards sets the acceptable limit of TDS at 500 milligrams/liter, a figure roughly seen as “good” by the World Health Organization (WHO). Anything over 900 mg/l is considered “poor” by the WHO, and over 1,200 mg/l is “unacceptable.”

According to Richa Singh from the Center for Science and Environment (CSE), the TDS of water taken near the Bhalswa site was between 3,000 and 4,000 mg/l. “This water is not only unfit for drinking but also unfit for skin contact,” she said. “So it can’t be used for purposes like bathing or cleaning of the utensils or cleaning of the clothes.”

Dr. Nitesh Rohatgi, the senior director of medical oncology at Fortis Memorial Research Institute, Gurugram, urged the government to study the health of the local population and compare it to other areas of the city, “so that in 15 to 20 years’ time, we are not looking back and regretting that we had a higher cancer incidence, higher health hazards, higher health issues and we didn’t look back and correct them in time.”

Most people in Bhalswa rely on bottled water for drinking, but they use local water for other purposes – many say they have no choice.

“The water we get is contaminated, but we have to helplessly store it and use it for washing utensils, bathing and at times drinking too,” said resident Sonia Bibi, whose legs are covered in a thick, red rash.

Jwala Prashad, 87, who lives in a small hut in an alleyway near the landfill, said the pile of putrid trash had made his life “a living hell.”

“The water we use is pale red in color. My skin burns after bathing,” he said, as he tried to soothe red gashes on his face and neck.

“But I can’t afford to ever leave this place,” he added.

More than 2,300 tonnes of Municipal Solid Waste arrive at Delhi’s largest dump in Ghazipur every day, according to a report released in July by a joint committee formed to find a way to reduce the number of fires at the site.

That’s the bulk of the waste from the surrounding area – only 300 tonnes is processed and disposed of by other means, the report said. And less than 7% of legacy waste had been bio-mined, which involves excavating, treating and potentially reusing old rubbish.

The Municipal Corporation of Delhi deploys drones every three months to monitor the size of the trash heap and is experimenting with ways to extract methane from the trash mountain, the report said.

But too much rubbish is arriving every day to keep up. The committee said bio-mining had been “slow and tardy” and it was “highly unlikely” the East Delhi Municipal Corporation (which has now merged with North and South Delhi Municipal Corporations) would achieve its target of “flattening the garbage mountain” by 2024.

“No effective plans to reduce the height of the garbage mountain have been made,” the report said. Furthermore, “it should have proposed a long time ago that future dumping of garbage in them would pollute the groundwater systems,” the report added.

CNN sent a series of questions along with the data from the water testing questionnaire to India’s Environment and Health Ministries. There has been no response from the ministries.

In a 2019 report, the Indian government recommended ways to improve the country’s solid waste management, including formalizing the recycling sector and installing more compost plants in the country.

While some improvements have been made, such as better door-to-door garbage collection and processing of waste, Delhi’s landfills continue to accumulate waste.

In October, the National Green Tribunal fined the state government more than $100 million for failing to dispose of more than 30 million metric tonnes of waste across its three landfill sites.

“The problem is Delhi doesn’t have a concrete solid waste action plan in place,” said Singh from the CSE. “So we are talking here about dump site remediation and the treatment of legacy waste, but imagine the fresh waste which is generated on a regular basis. All of that is getting dumped everyday into these landfills.”

“(So) let’s say you are treating 1,000 tons of legacy (waste) and then you are dumping 2,000 tons of fresh waste every day it will become a vicious cycle. It will be a never ending process,” Singh said.

“Management of legacy waste, of course, is mandated by the government and is very, very important. But you just can’t start the process without having an alternative facility of fresh waste. So that’s the biggest challenge.”

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December 10, 2022
Californians will soon be able to turn their remains into soil with human composting | CNN

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CNN
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California has become the latest state to provide its residents with an eco-friendly, if unorthodox, option for their remains after death: composting.

Governor Gavin Newsom signed the bill into law last Sunday, according to a news release from the bill’s author, state Assemblywoman Cristina Garcia.

The process is officially called “natural organic reduction,” and involves “fostering gentle transformation into a nutrient-dense soil, which can then be returned to families or donated to conservation land,” the release explained.

Natural organic reduction is less harmful to the environment than the other two legal options (cremation and burial), according to the release. Burial can allow chemicals to leek into the soil, and cremation requires the burning of fossil fuels and releases carbon dioxide.

The law will not go into effect until January 2027, according to the text of the bill. The law stipulates the Cemetery and Funeral Bureau, a subdivision of the Department of Consumer Affairs, will develop regulations for facilities performing the process.

In the release, Garcia called natural organic reduction “an alternative method of final disposition that won’t contribute emissions into our atmosphere and will actually capture CO2 in our soil and trees.”

“If more people participate in organic reduction and tree-planting, we can help with California’s carbon footprint,” she said. “This bill has been in the works for the last three years, and I am very happy that it was signed into law. I look forward to continuing my legacy to fight for clean air by using my reduced remains to plant a tree.”

Recompose, a company which has been offering natural organic reduction services since 2020, also lauded the law in the release.

“Recompose is thrilled that the options for nature-based death care in California have expanded,” said the company’s CEO and founder Katrina Spade in the release. “Natural organic reduction is safe and sustainable, allowing our bodies to return to the land after we die.”

According to Recompose’s website, natural organic reduction works much like composting your vegetable scraps does. The body is placed in a vessel along with wood chips, alfalfa, and straw. Over a month, microbes work to break the body down into a cubic yard of soil, which can then be used in a loved one’s garden, or anywhere else.

Washington became the first state to legalize so-called “human composting” in 2019. Lawmakers similarly cited the ecological benefits of reduction over burial and cremation.

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October 1, 2022