Ewg Annual Report 09 1

a.r.09

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People are taking stock, keeping what matters and junking the rest.

That’s a good thing. Building a new future – for ourselves, for our kids, for the long run – doesn’t need to be complicated or cost money we don’t have. It’s all about taking care of the basics. Like –

dddIgnihic te solupta tiusdae quasperum volor aut est, ommolo optibustium natem non poruptasima

dolora volorrorrum ea ilignatio cone as ipsunte stotatet a quatet rae de laut evelectint utem qui re veles dolup-

tate eat id eatem asimodi berum quat. Litis re dolorpo ritaturem.

a.r.09

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annual.report.2009

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There’s only so much fresh water on this blue planet. We helped transform the national debate about cornbased ethanol with our August 2008 report, The Unintended Environmental Impacts of the Renewable Fuels Standard: Time to Change Direction in Biofuel Policy, that demonstrated that achieving the 2007 energy bill’s biofuels mandate would require billions of gallons of scarce water and expand the Gulf of Mexico’s “Dead Zone.”

Our October 2008 report -- Bottled Water Quality Investigation: 10 Major Brands, 38 Pollutants -- was featured in

more than two dozen newspapers, broadcasts reaching an audience of 12 million and a New York Times

dddIgnihic te solupta tiusdae quasperum volor aut est, ommolo optibustium natem non poruptasima

editorial that echoed our message, demanding bottled water “as good or even better than the lessexpensive stuff that comes out of a tap.”

environmentalists, consumers, health professionals and scientists – including two EPA science advisory panels, who issued rare public letters of protest. .

We neared the tipping point with our 7-year campaign for a

Our May 2008 analysis, Without a Paddle: U.S. Law Powerless to Protect Colorado River From Mining, unearthed a surge in

nationwide cleanup of perchlorate, a rocket fuel component and thyroid toxin. The Bush administration’s eleventh-hour refusal to regulate perchlorate as a water pollutant pleased the defense, aerospace and chemical industries, which have been lobbying aggressively to avoid an expensive cleanup of perchlorate spills at Cold War-era rocket launch and missile test sites and plant that produced rocket fuel. But it outraged and mobilized

dolora volorrorrum ea ilignatio cone as ipsunte stotatet a quatet rae de laut evelectint utem qui re veles dolup-

tate eat id eatem asimodi berum quat. Litis re dolorpo ritaturem.

mining claims for uranium, gold and other metals along the banks of the Colorado River. The report generated an outpouring of news and commentary by people alarmed at specter of toxic runoff and scarred landscapes along the great American river, which provides drinking water for 25 million Americans and irrigates millions of Western farmland.

After we documented that dozens of mining claims had been staked within five miles of the Grand Canyon, the House

Natural Resources Committee invoked a rarely-used emergency authority to ban new mining claims on more than 1 million acres around the national treasure.