Recycling Is Worth Something

From San Francisco, ABC 7:

Scavengers cash in on illegal recycling around SF

Wednesday, February 09, 2011

SAN FRANCISCO (KGO) -- San Francisco lawmakers opened the debate on Wednesday over who should get the city's lucrative recycling contract. Trash is big business, but it's also a source of income for some and it's not always legal.

It's the night before trash pickup in SoMa and the recycling bins are being raided. Rikki Ercoli sent us uReport video he filmed earlier this month, and it infuriates him to see people taking recyclables from his bin.

"Here in San Francisco, we love recycling. I know I do, but 100 percent of my efforts are going directly into the hands of people I'm not doing the work for. If it was going to the city, great, but it's not," he said.

In fact, fewer bottles and cans for the Recology Company to pickup and sell is said to ultimately cost consumers about $5 million a year. Much of that theft comes from organized rings, and Ercoli said trucks pick up the ripped off recyclables on his block.

"So it affects increases in your garbage bill in future years. If that material is stolen, the money is stolen with it," Robert Reed from Recology said.

Stealing recyclables is illegal and state and local penalties are as much as $2,000. The District Attorney's Office recently put out a newsletter calling it, "The issue of the month." For many neighborhoods, it's a quality of life issue with noise and litter. One strategy being discussed is reducing the cash incentive and Supervisor Scott Wiener is considering pushing for a change in state law to require recycling centers to offer vouchers for food and other products instead of money.

"We've seen in the areas around some recycling centers some issues around alcohol abuse and drug dealing," he said.

Ed Dunn runs a recycling center and is critical of the proposal to swap cash for food.

"The vast majority are very middle class people who might want to use the money for rent or to fill up their tank again," he said.

The voucher program would be a change in state law, so Wiener wants to make sure he has enough support before he moves forward with that.

uReport:
Take part in the news. Upload videos and photos to uReport.abc7news.com, or e-mail them to uReport@kgo-tv.com.

Cats For Rodnet Control

In my work helping people get rid of rodents in their house, I often suggest a cat.......



Tabby a working member of the rat race

Sunday, January 30, 2011; C03

UPSHUR STREET NW, 800 block, Jan. 14. Responding to a report about an orange tabby that had possibly been abandoned in a vacant store, a Humane Society officer saw the cat and left a notice.

An owner responded the same day and said that the cat was being cared for while it helped with rodent control at the store.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/01/29/AR2011012903840.html

Recycled Granite Curbs?

I am curious about the comment at the end of response that the granite used for curbs is recycled. I will have to find out more about that.



A concrete suggestion for speeding up the installation of curbs

ROBERT THOMSON
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, January 27, 2011; T18

Dear Dr. Gridlock:

Having just watched the District install curbs on Massachusetts Avenue, I was wondering whether you know how much more it costs to install granite curbs rather than simply pour concrete ones.

My anecdotal observation is that granite curbs take longer to install than concrete, thus prolonging the traffic disruption. They have to cost more than concrete. (Have you priced kitchen countertops?) And after a few seasons, they are indistinguishable from concrete.

Carlos Bonilla, the District

DG: When you see streetscaping projects underway across the Washington region, you're often going to see granite curbing being used. Traffic engineers say granite curbing is likely to be much more expensive to buy and install than concrete. The granite must be brought in from a quarry and cut into the proper segments for the curb. Concrete can be delivered faster and is easier to work with. A road crew will probably move faster using it. But granite looks better, to the point of looking like a frill to some passersby. Many communities see it as a neighborhood enhancement. And it will last a lot longer than the concrete, which might have to be repaired after a few years as it suffers the effects of weather and starts to deteriorate. Granite is likely to retain its appearance and require less care until the time comes to replace it. Granite also can be recycled, transportation planners say. Concrete will be broken up and disposed of.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/01/25/AR2011012504442.html

One Room At A Time

Eco-Friendly in the Kitchen

By Lila Guterman
Special to The Washington Post
Saturday, September 17, 2005; F01

We're environmentally conscious, my husband and I, but there are certain things we can't live without, like air conditioning in Washington's sweltering summers.

When we decided to replace our sagging kitchen cabinets and wheezing refrigerator, we knew it would have been more earth-friendly to keep our kitchen renovations limited, to reuse what we already owned instead of consuming more materials. But one of the things I couldn't live without, I decided right away, was new cabinets.

Since the layout of our small kitchen was dreadful, we decided to start from scratch and create a new, environmentally friendly room.

We envisioned a kitchen outfitted with recycled materials, or with products from plants that could be sustainably harvested -- plants that grow quickly and are easily replenished, such as bamboo. We hoped our new products would be made without toxic chemicals that linger in the air.

We knew about the movement to create entire buildings using materials and methods that are easy on the earth, so we assumed that remodeling sustainably would be a snap. But when I called the few architects who had participated in last year's Green Festival, an annual event that brings together environmentalist consumers, speakers and merchants, they weren't interested in a job as small as our 6 1/2 -by-8 1/2-foot Northwest Washington kitchen.

Luckily, one of the architects referred me to Chris Donaghy, a designer whose Lorton firm, Kitchen Brokers, specializes in green renovations. Donaghy says that green kitchens are just a small part of his business -- he has designed about 14 in the past three years -- but that still makes him one of the East Coast's experts on green kitchen renovation.

I was unable to find any other local designers who specialized in green renovation, but for comparison, we contacted two other kitchen design firms. One told me its designers all had "green training," but then offered us granite for our countertop. We said "no thanks," knowing that granite is definitely not renewable -- once it's removed from the earth, it's gone forever.

And Donaghy's estimates fell in a range similar to the other two companies'. He said that green kitchens tend to cost 20 to 30 percent more than non-green kitchens, which can turn many people away from environmentally friendly materials. Environmentally conscious consumers, Donaghy said, often have "less disposable incomes than our regular clientele. They tend to be teachers, scientists, environmentalists." And new kitchens are expensive.

That was a problem for Scott Carlson and his family. When they moved into a house in Baltimore, Carlson said, the kitchen was "totally trashed and totally outdated." Carlson, a journalist who had written about green building, was hoping to do some himself, but he found many products he wanted to use were "super expensive."

So he made trade-offs and used some materials that were not as green as he would have liked. He built a countertop from Formica, which was not green but was inexpensive, allowing him to splurge a bit elsewhere.

That paid off in his environmentally friendly kitchen floor. Carlson's floor is made from Marmoleum, a brand of linoleum, that's made out of earth-friendly materials including linseed oil and natural pigment. He paid about $7 per square foot for it.

We did our new kitchen floor in cork. Cork floors are made from bark that is peeled off the tree and then allowed to grow back. Donaghy ordered our cork from Sustainable Flooring of Colorado, which offers 11 styles and colors of cork tiles for $2.50 to $5.50 per square foot.

Another option was bamboo, which we used elsewhere, to redo the floors in the rest of our condo. Bamboo, a grass, is as beautiful as wood but quicker to regrow and harvest. Sustainable Flooring sells bamboo for $3 to $5 per square foot.

We were also hoping to buy green cabinets. The best-known green cabinet maker in the country is Neil Kelly, in Portland, Ore. Instead of particle board, Neil Kelly makes cabinets out of wheatboard, which is assembled from wheat straw, a waste product that is typically burned or put in landfills, said Paul Quimby, a Neil Kelly customer service representative.

Neil Kelly uses glues, stains and finishes that don't pollute the air with chemicals. And the company makes cabinet doors and veneers from wood certified by the Forest Stewardship Council to have been harvested sustainably.

Alison and Paul Trinkoff of Owings Mill bought Neil Kelly cabinets for their kitchen renovation last fall. They wanted to keep their house free from fumes from standard products, Alison Trinkoff said. Had the Trinkoffs bought standard cabinets, she said, "We're going to have this space, it's going to look beautiful and it's going to stink." Instead, they bought from Neil Kelly and sometimes invite guests not only to look at, but also to sniff, the new cabinets.

"They don't stink," she said. "It is surprising."

Unfortunately, Neil Kelly gave us an estimate of nearly $8,500 for our cabinets, plus a whopping $2,000 for shipping from Oregon. That didn't strike us as very green -- it would require so much fossil fuel and produce so much pollution just to get the cabinets to us. Besides, it broke our budget.

Meanwhile, Donaghy had been working to persuade several East Coast cabinet makers to produce green cabinets. The one who agreed was Robert Meyers of Create a Space Inc. of New York. For our cabinets, which were built in June, Meyers used wheatboard, certified wood and non-offgassing finishes. He has since done another green kitchen.

"I'm seeing this to be a great niche business for me," he said. Our cabinets cost less than $7,000, and shipping from New York cost about $750.

Choosing appliances was easy. We bought appliances that had earned an Energy Star, a rating that means they have passed an energy efficiency test. Most major manufacturers produce Energy Star appliances. Similarly, finding low-offgassing paint was no problem.

For the countertops, our choices were more limited. We considered a product called Richlite, which is made from paper from certified forests or even recycled paper. It comes in seven earthy solid colors.

But we ended up choosing IceStone, a gorgeous composite material made of chips of glass embedded in concrete. Three-quarters of the glass, which gives the surface a visual depth, is recycled. IceStone makes 20 appealing colors; we chose one that was pale gray, nearly white. Price varies with color, installation and size of the job; an IceStone employee said it is comparable in price to mid- to high-range granite. Our countertop cost $3,600; a charcoal gray color we liked would have been $1,000 more.

Other green countertop options include ShetkaStone, a recycled-paper product that comes in a variety of appearances, and EnviroGLAS terrazzo, a recycled-glass composite not unlike IceStone.

When it came time to build the new kitchen, Donaghy hooked us up with a general contractor he trusted, Daniel Jamison, whose company, Straight-Line Contracting, is in Springfield.

Jamison and his crew had some trouble finding environmentally friendly glue. He said he found it less strong than conventional glue and so used more of it. He also said the benign paint was thin and required extra coats.

We wanted to heed the green mantra of "reduce, reuse, recycle," so we set out to find new homes for our old kitchen materials. We advertised our appliances and cabinets as free to whomever would come pick them up. "They even took the sink base that was basically rotted out," said Ned Sinkavitch, the contractor who was working the day people picked up our cabinets, countertop, sink, faucet, garbage disposal, dishwasher, stove, microwave oven and barely functioning refrigerator.

As work proceeded on our kitchen, we reluctantly made two not-so-green decisions. First, we went to check out tile for our backsplash. I had researched tile made from recycled glass, including products from Oceanside Glasstile and Sandhill Industries. We looked at the Sandhill tiles, and they were gorgeous -- shiny but subtle, like sea glass. But they would have been pricey: We were quoted $93 per square foot. The manufacturer's suggested retail price for Oceanside Glasstile is also high: $28 to $50 per square foot.

And then we spotted some glass tile we both were crazy about that was far less expensive, but we didn't know whether it was made from recycled glass. What's more, it had to be shipped from Asia, a process that would burn fuel, not to mention adding months to our renovation.

But we adored it and decided to compromise our green commitment there. Later, we were glad to find out that half to three-quarters of the glass in the tiles, from a California company called Lunada Bay Tile, was recycled.

In July, our cork floor was installed. We had chosen a swirl pattern of thin green-blue curves breaking up larger areas of tan-brown cork, looking almost like stone. We liked the sample Donaghy had given us, but after Jamison installed the cork in our kitchen, next to our new maple cabinets, it didn't seem to work. The cork and the maple were too similar in color.

With heavy hearts, we decided to replace the floor with another color of cork, closer to white. The extra cork tiles, and the extra work for Jamison, would cost us only a few hundred dollars -- the advantage of a small kitchen -- and we figured we would like the result much more. With that, we decided to pull up the new, unblemished cork floor and replace it with another one.

It was not environmentally friendly of us, but we just had to have a floor that we liked. We're hoping to find other uses for our extra cork tiles.

Our kitchen isn't finished: the backsplash tile just came in, after its long journey from Asia. It's sitting in boxes in the living room, along with the replacement cork, waiting to be installed. But we already enjoy cooking in our new space, and we hope we haven't hurt the environment too much by creating it. We're planning to buy carbon offsets, which means contributing to groups that plant trees or invest in renewable energy, as a sort of voluntary tax to make up for the fossil fuels we consumed in creating our new kitchen.

That kitchen is more than just beautiful, we think. And, like the Trinkoffs, we're glad it doesn't stink.

Lila Guterman is a journalist and lives in Washington.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/16/AR2005091600975.html

Refrigerators Beyond Energy Star

Greener refrigerator set to enter U.S. market in 2011

By Leslie Tamura
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, December 27, 2010; A04

Greenhouse gases other than carbon dioxide may not get as much global attention, but policymakers and business leaders view curbing these emissions as a way that nations can shrink their carbon footprints.

Refrigerators have a role in this story.

For decades, Americans have known only two types of household refrigerators: the pre-1996 fridge that uses an ozone-depleting chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) refrigerant - commonly known by its trademark name, Freon - and the subsequent models that use the global-warming refrigerant called hydrofluorocarbon (HFC).

When CFCs float into the air, their chlorine molecules eat the ozone. HFCs may not harm the ozone, but they can hang in the atmosphere for decades, absorbing radiation that would otherwise be released into space.

A better refrigerant, environmentalists have argued since the early 1990s, is a hydrocarbon refrigerant.

Made of only carbons and hydrogens, these "natural" refrigerants do not degrade the ozone and are easily broken down by the sun. Compared with the atmosphere-degrading refrigerants currently used in American households, hydrocarbons contribute little to global warming.

As early as next year, Americans may have a new hydrocarbon refrigerator option that can reduce their global warming impact and their energy bills. U.S. manufacturers would be entering the HFC-free domestic refrigeration market that the Germans helped establish in 1993.

Back then, the United States was phasing out CFCs, and the chemical industry was introducing HFCs as a possible replacement. Greenpeace, the nonprofit advocacy group, was not happy with the "environmental alternative" to CFCs, said Amy Larkin, director of Greenpeace Solutions.

Although domestic refrigeration accounts for less than 2 percent of current global HFC consumption (automobile air conditioners emit the most HFCs), an HFC refrigerant's impact on the climate is 3,830 times more potent over a 20-year period than the most common greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide.

"But hydrocarbons weren't on anyone's radar," Larkin said, "and when we brought this to the government agencies, telling them these were a better, safe, efficient alternative, we were ridiculed."

Regardless, Greenpeace appealed to a small German manufacturer and helped engineer the world's first hydrocarbon domestic refrigerator. Within three weeks, Greenpeace pre-sold 70,000 HFC-free "Greenfreeze" refrigerators.

Since March 15, 1993, when the first Greenfreeze refrigerator debuted in Germany, more than 400 million hydrocarbon household units have been sold worldwide by several major manufacturers including Whirlpool, Haier and Sanyo.

HFC-free refrigerators have been sold in Mexico, South America, Cuba and parts of Africa, along with Japan, China and throughout Europe.

"Europe has produced incredibly safe, popular refrigerators, but there's still some suspicion in the U.S.," said Durwood Zaelke, director of the Secretariat of the International Network for Environmental Compliance and Enforcement.

Hydrocarbons are flammable, and there have been isolated incidents of exploding hydrocarbon refrigerators.

But manufacturers meet their country's standards and often have an independent safety organization evaluate their appliances. Although hydrocarbon units may have more robust components to prevent leaks, they do not differ much from HFC refrigerators. Typical refrigerators enclose the refrigerant in a hermetically sealed system away from anything that may spark, such as the refrigerator light.

Based on the track record of the hydrocarbon refrigerators, Zaelke said, it's unclear whether concerns about exploding refrigerators is "a true safety concern or just a clever argument for those who make chemicals. One would think they're relatively safe when there are millions sold in Europe."

General Electric plans to introduce the first hydrocarbon household refrigerator in the United States in June 2011, giving Americans a more environmentally friendly option, though at a hefty price.

Insulated with hydrocarbon foam and cooled by a hydrocarbon refrigerant called isobutane, the 30-inch HFC-free refrigerator would be part of GE's luxury Monogram brand, selling for about $6,000 to $6,500.

"You're making a significant investment, but this is all part of the gradual reduction in how much HFCs are used," said Merrell Grant, the general manager of GE Monogram.

Before these refrigerators can roll out to retailers, however, GE says it will wait for final approval from the Environmental Protection Agency's Significant New Alternatives Program.

SNAP, which regulates chemicals or technologies that replace ozone-depleting substances, ruled in 1994 that hydrocarbon refrigerants were too risky to be used in household refrigerators in the United States. According to an EPA spokesman, at the time there was not enough information about the hydrocarbon refrigerant's flammability potential, and there were other non-flammable refrigerants available.

After issuing a proposal in July 2010 to amend the SNAP rule, the EPA is expected to approve use of HFC-free refrigerants in domestic refrigerators next year.

"Hydrocarbons will slowly take over the market," said Stephen O. Andersen, former director of Strategic Climate Projects in the EPA's Climate Protection Partnership Division.

Hydrocarbons are already commonplace in many household appliances - gas stoves, water heaters, furnaces - and used in products such as bathroom cleaners, air fresheners and cooking sprays.

"Refrigerators are safe with hydrocarbons," Andersen said. "Come on, people will hold a blow dryer in one hand, and a can of aerosol hairspray in the other."

A handful of companies based in the United States have started using natural refrigerants in industrial food service equipment. Select Ben & Jerry's stores in Boston and the District received federal approval in 2008 to use hydrocarbon propane freezers as demonstration projects. Coca-Cola has also invested $60 million to advance HFC-free cooling globally.

At the recent United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in Cancun, Mexico, 400 international companies, including Unilever and Wal-Mart, pledged they would phase out HFCs from all industrial equipment by 2015. Said former EPA official Andersen: "I think if the market sees the tide changing and starts converting everything to hydrocarbons . . . it could make a big difference."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/12/26/AR2010122602479.html

Fuel In Places You Never Looked Before

Affordability Is Martek's Challenge As It Looks to Turn Algae Into Fuel
Columbia Company Working With BP

By Mike Musgrove
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, August 20, 2009

Now that its flagship product is in nearly every container of infant formula sold in the United States, Martek Biosciences is looking to edge its way into the gas tank.

The Columbia firm, which develops nutritional supplements for food and beverages based on the fermentation of algae, announced this month that BP has agreed to invest $10 million over a 30-month period to fund research seeking ways to inexpensively develop vehicle fuel from organisms such as seaweed.

"We believe sugar to diesel technology has the potential to deliver economic, sustainable and scaleable biodiesel supplies," BP Biofuels chief executive Philip New said in a statement. "BP is very pleased to be entering this important partnership with Martek."

For BP, the Martek partnership represents just one of many investments to develop sustainable alternative energy forms. Since 2006, BP has announced investments of more than $1.5 billion in biofuel research, and other deep-pocketed energy giants are looking into this area as well. In July, Exxon said it would invest $600 million in a similar type of algae research.

If Martek's research yields an affordable product, there eventually could be a significant financial upside for Martek -- but that's a big if, experts say.

"This is a fairly small bet [by BP] on a fairly long-shot idea, but that doesn't mean that it's not worth doing," said Tim Ramey, an analyst with D.A. Davidson & Co. who follows Martek. Because of those long odds, Ramey dubs the BP investment as a bit of "wildcatting in the fermentation vessel."

In theory, Martek President David Abramson said this week, turning algae into the type of fuel BP could use isn't a remarkable accomplishment. The larger, more important trick would be to develop a product for a price that matches or beats the cost of fuels used by vehicles today.

"This is very doable in a lab, if you don't care about the price," he said.

If Martek develops a viable product, it would receive royalty payments from BP whenever that product was sold. Regardless of whether that happens, Martek will keep any research that may prove beneficial to its growing line of food and beverage products, under the terms of its deal with BP.

Martek's annual revenue was $352 million last year, nearly 90 percent of which came from sales to baby formula manufacturers. Using algae, Martek makes DHA, an omega 3 fatty acid that has been proven to be important for brain and eye development in babies. As the only company that makes what is regarded as a "clean" DHA product -- other manufacturers offer DHA in the form of fish oil derived from tuna and salmon -- Martek's product has cornered the U.S. market. Nearly all baby formula sold in this country contains DHA produced by Martek. Outside the United States, Martek's products can be found in nearly 50 percent of the market.

In the last three years, Martek has been expanding its DHA business by striking deals with food and beverage makers such as Coca-Cola, which is offering a new type of Minute Maid juice that claims to "help nourish your brain" thanks to Martek's DHA.

As recent studies have indicated DHA may have benefits for adults as well, Martek has sought to take advantage of a larger potential market, branding its product as "Life's DHA" with a logo that all of its new partners are required to include on their packaging materials. The company is hoping that the logo will stick in the minds of consumers in the same way that computer buyers once gravitated to machines that featured "Intel Inside."

Some of Martek's patents around DHA development are set to expire next year, however, and some analysts see Martek's BP deal as a way for the company move forward into possible new businesses should fresh competition emerge on the DHA front.

"They're trying to reinvent themselves with deals like this, knowing that their main business might be changing," Ramey said.

Abramson disputes that the company has anything to worry about, patent-wise. Some patents have already expired, he said, but the process of making DHA is tricky enough that his company doesn't fear competition will descend quickly.

In any case, Martek has a library containing thousands of species of algae stored in freezers at its Columbia facility. Algae can do more than just generate DHA, and it is possible that one of the thousands of species in its collection may contain the company's next big product.

Might it be diesel fuel? Bentley Offutt, principal analyst at Offutt Securities, said investors won't know for years whether the research money was well spent.

"Things in genetic engineering take a long, long time."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/20/AR2009082001792.html

Government Response To Bed Bugs

Biting back when the bedbugs bite

By Lena H. Sun
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, September 5, 2010; A3

The brown bugs, each about half the size of a pencil eraser, lie in glass petri dishes - a few on their backs, legs in the air. They died within seconds of scurrying across a piece of paper containing drops of a chemical.The next step is to find out whether that same piece of paper will kill insects that crawl over it two, three or four months from now.

This lab is the front line in the federal government's chemical warfare on a scourge that has become resistant to many insecticides and is raising anxiety - and welts - in bedrooms, college dorms and hotel suites across the country: bedbugs.

Among those leading the attack is Mark F. Feldlaufer, an entomologist at the Invasive Insect Biocontrol and Behavior Laboratory on the Agriculture Department's sprawling research center in suburban Maryland. His mission is to find compounds that kill the bloodsuckers, which have made such an itch-inducing comeback in recent years that the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Environmental Protection Agency issued a joint statement last month noting their "alarming resurgence."

A common household pest for centuries, bedbugs were virtually eradicated in the 1940s and '50s by the widespread use of DDT. That insecticide was banned in the 1970s, and the bugs developed resistance to chemicals that replaced it.

Unlike many other household pests - ants, termites and cockroaches - bedbugs can live for months without a meal, hidden deep in mattress seams, box springs and baseboard crevices, behind wallpaper and in clutter around beds, making it hard to spray them. And they travel easily, hitchhiking from person to person, apartment to apartment, city to city.

Getting rid of them, experts say, has become a complex political and social problem, not only because of modern concerns about pesticide use but also because of Americans' mobile lifestyle.

"People don't even have time to check their doggone phone messages," said Michael Potter, an entomologist at the University of Kentucky, much less inspect mattresses for brown specks of feces, a telltale sign of an infestation. People also have more possessions, and all that clutter makes for great places for bugs to hide.

And rightly or wrongly, it is considered imprudent to spray insecticides in areas around the bedroom, he said. That means pest control companies are often unable to get rid of all the bugs at once. Return visits increase homeowner costs, and also risk increasing the bugs' resistance to insecticides.

Funding is limited for the kind of work the USDA's Feldlaufer is doing. Research on the public health effects of the bugs has not received much support because even though their bites can provoke allergic reactions, unlike ticks and mosquitoes they are not known to spread disease.

Nontoxic measures to fight the pests include encasing mattresses and box springs and washing clothes in hot water and running them in a dryer on high heat. But mattresses and couches can't be put in a dryer, and heat-treatment technology in apartment buildings is hugely expensive, experts said.

"It's the biggest pest problem we've encountered in several generations," said Bob Rosenberg, vice president of government affairs for the National Pest Management Association.

More bedbug complaints

In Baltimore, calls about bedbugs to the city's 311 line jumped from two in December 2008, when the city began tracking them in earnest, to 92 last month.

Washington is also seeing a big increase in calls to 311 and the health department, with the number this year - 257 - on pace to more than double last year's total, officials said.

Traditionally, complaints come from multi-unit dwellings, but the past three months have seen spikes from single-family homes and visitors who stayed in District hotels, they said.

In Ohio, infestations are so severe that Gov. Ted Strickland (D) made two appeals to EPA Administrator Lisa P. Jackson.

"The bedbug problem has created a very real physical, emotional and economically devastating situation for many Ohioans," the governor wrote in a June 30 letter.

One Dayton apartment complex owner spent more than $280,000 in an attempt to destroy the pests, he noted.

Another hired an unlicensed pesticide applicator who saturated the inside of an apartment complex with a pesticide, resulting in tenants being treated at a hospital for chemical exposure.

Strickland would like Jackson to approve the use of an insecticide that is banned for residential purposes. The chemical, propoxur, is widely used to kill cockroaches and lawn pests.

Researching solutions

Although many insecticides are approved for use against bedbugs, the great majority contain pyrethroids, a class of chemicals against which the pests have developed rampant resistance, entomologist Potter said.

Potter's research has found propoxur, which belongs to a more toxic class of pesticides known as carbamates, to be effective because it does not rely on direct contact but remains potent on surfaces where bugs crawl even after it dries. The chemical had been approved for use against bedbugs since the 1960s. But manufacturers withdrew it from residential use in 2007 after the EPA found that indoor uses posed risks to children.

Pyrethroids and carbamates both disrupt bedbugs' nervous systems, but in different ways. University of Kentucky researchers have found that the bugs have developed resistance to pyrethroids in several ways, including breaking down the toxin with enzymes before it reached its targets.

An EPA official said the agency is evaluating more data to find out whether propoxur could be used in a more limited way than Ohio has requested.

The EPA, which held a bedbug summit last year, is now leading an interagency task force on the pests that includes the CDC, USDA, Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Defense Department.

Seeking a fast fix

Until a month ago, Feldlaufer and other scientists at the USDA had been focusing on synthesizing new compounds to kill bedbugs. But even if a new chemical were effective, bringing it to market would take much longer because of safety testing. A faster solution would be to look at chemicals already used to treat agricultural pests, where safety data have been established, and determine whether those could be used to control bedbugs.

Hundreds of such pesticides exist. The EPA and USDA are working together to come up with a list for testing, ranked in order of those most likely to get a green light for indoor use, officials said.

But no new chemical would be a magic bullet. To fully eradicate the pests, there needs to be a coordinated approach that includes vacuuming, decluttering and sealing cracks to remove hiding places.

To raise public awareness about the bedbug problem, Baltimore officials have conducted door-to-door campaigns in affected neighborhoods. In the District, health officials put together a five-minute video about bedbugs that airs daily on Channel 16 and is also on the city government's Web site.

Feldlaufer hopes the new urgency will help him get more insecticide-resistant bugs to test. At his Beltsville lab, his 18 mason jars hold tens of thousands of bugs that feed on expired red blood cells (from Walter Reed Army Medical Center) that he mixes with plasma. But only two jars contain the pyrethroid-resistant ones.

His personal hope is to avoid getting bitten by the bugs ever again. He has become extremely allergic to them.

When he was a graduate student, he let dozens feed on his forearm while researching bedbugs. He developed a mild rash but didn't worry much about it. Fast-forward to two years ago, when as a longtime USDA entomologist he took up bedbug research again. He received a collection of the pests from a leading expert and decided to let them feed on his arm again.

This time, his arm swelled and reddish blisters bubbled up.

"Boom - after 10 seconds, I got that reaction, even though I had not been exposed in nearly 30 years," he said.

A photo of his blistered arm is featured in a USDA poster about bedbugs on the wall outside his lab. It's a personal reminder of his professional mission.

Staff researcher Madonna Lebling contributed to this report.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/09/05/AR2010090503688.html