All articles tagged with #toxic waste
The Calabasas community faced a serious environmental and health crisis after the 2025 Los Angeles wildfires produced massive amounts of toxic waste, including potentially hazardous materials from burned homes, highlighting the challenges of waste management and public safety in the aftermath of natural disasters.
Tesla faces a tumultuous week as it grapples with a voided CEO pay package, a lawsuit over toxic waste disposal, and a massive recall affecting over 2.2 million vehicles. Additionally, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is investigating 2,388 complaints of steering failure in the Model 3 and Model Y, with potential loss of steering control leading to crashes. The company has also been fined for violating the Clean Air Act and sued for improper hazardous waste disposal, ultimately settling for $1.3 million in civil penalties.
The Biden administration has proposed expanding the number of coal waste dumps that would be subject to environmental oversight, a decade after a string of toxic disasters from such landfills flooded valleys and polluted rivers in southern states. The Environmental Protection Agency now wants to end exemptions that left about a quarter of the roughly 1,000 coal ash dumps nationwide exempt from federal regulation. Coal ash contains toxic substances such as mercury, cadmium, chromium and arsenic, and its pollution often hurts poor and minority communities near dump sites that the EPA says is already “overburdened by pollution.”
High concentrations of DDT, a toxic pesticide, have been found on the seafloor off the coast of California, covering an area larger than San Francisco. The chemical waste was dumped by industrial companies for decades, and has been linked to cancer and disease in humans and the mass die-off of animals. The most concentrated layer of DDT is roughly 6cm deep in the sediment, and could be reintroduced to the surface by trawls or cable lays. Congress has allotted millions of dollars toward researching the issue and cleaning up the pollution.