🚨 Take action: CA legislators are deciding NOW whether to approve a bill that would weaken hazardous waste rules for metal shredders.

Metal shredders handle huge quantities of hazardous waste, including materials that contain PCBs, mercury, antifreeze, oil, and explosives that can ignite massive fires. Just such a disaster occurred at the Schnitzer/Radius facility in Oakland in 2023.

But SB 811 would allow metal shredders to largely regulate themselves.

Tell legislators to vote NO on SB 811: https://baykeeper.org/action-alert/take-action-stop-toxic-metal-pollution/

#pollution #oakland #schnitzer
#metalpollution #bayarea

Good news! Newsom has vetoed a bill that would have created a loophole for hazardous metal shredding waste, including for the Schnitzer/Radius facility in #Oakland.

BIG thanks to everyone who responded to our action alert urging the governor to oppose this bill 🙏

Thanks as well to our wonderful partners at the West Oakland Environmental Indicators Project, Earthjustice, and NRDC

#pollution #sb404 #metalpollution #sanfranciscobay #oaklandca

https://baykeeper.org/enews/updates-for-october-2025/

Between 2010 and 2022, the number of satellites in orbit more than doubled. In the decade prior, the increase (from a smaller starting point) was just 17%. Ultimately, what goes up, must come down, and these satellites will all eventually crash and burn in the atmosphere - and indeed most countries legally mandate that their satellite operators to ensure this in a timely manner, rather than leave them in slowly decaying orbits for decades, causing a collision hazard.

However, when incinerating batteries, electronics and other metal rich objects in the open atmosphere, it appears we've finally stumbled across the fact that this produces aerosolised metal pollution. This supposedly unforeseen problem is also one that is set to worsen massively as we launch more and more expendable "swarm" satellites, thanks to galaxy brain geniuses like #ElonMusk and his #SpaceX billionaires toy.

Maintaining the current orbital free-for-all, where we delude ourselves into believing, once again, that we can sling as much junk out into the world as we want, with no consequences will never end well. There is undoubted use and value in being able to place objects into orbit, but we need to ask what is essential to us, given the resources consumed and negative impacts of our obsession, and what is just billionaires chasing fantasies and delusions of grandeur and immortality.

https://www.livescience.com/space/space-exploration/falling-metal-space-junk-is-changing-earths-upper-atmosphere-in-ways-we-dont-fully-understand

#SpaceJunk #Space #MetalPollution #Kessler #Spaceflight #Starlink

After a pair of kayakers discovered thousands of metal coils in the #Alameda shoreline, we investigated--and uncovered a long-forgotten toxic legacy hiding in plain sight.

Now our legal team is compelling the polluters & landowners to clean it up! https://baykeeper.org/blog/hiding-plain-sight

#waterpollution #pollution #metalpollution #alamedaca #alamedacalifornia #sfbay #sanfranciscobay