Media Room
News
Use your voice! Tell Gov. Dunleavy to Reverse Veto on HB 51
House Bill 51 is the bare minimum Alaska needs to protect our water from harmful PFAS chemicals. After years of fighting for legislation around toxic PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances), Alaska House and Senate legislators passed House Bill 51, which served to phase out toxic PFAS chemicals from firefighting foams in Alaska. This bill was passed unanimously by the Senate, and nearly unanimously in the House. The bill is widely supported by people from affected communities, firefighters, health care professionals, Tribes, and Native organizations. To become law, it only needed the Governor’s signature, and last month, Governor Dunleavy betrayed ...
Publications
Alaska Community Water Quality Report: PFAS Contamination of Municipality of Anchorage and Fairbanks North Star Borough Waters
Alaska Community Action on Toxics (ACAT) conducted independent water quality testing in 2022 that showed PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances) contamination in Anchorage lakes as well as in Ship Creek. These results show contamination in lakes used for swimming and fishing. The results also show contamination in Ship Creek downstream from Joint Base Elmendorf and Fort Richardson (JBER), an important urban ecosystem for fish, wildlife, as well as fishing. The samples from 2021 and 2022 revealed the presence of toxic PFAS chemicals in all the water bodies we tested in both Anchorage and the Fairbanks North Star Borough.
Webinars
The Not So “Micro” Plastic Problem. A conversation with Matt Simon, author of “A Poison Like No Other: How Microplastics Corrupted Our Planet and Our Bodies”
For September’s CHE-Alaska webinar, we will be joined by science journalist Matt Simon, author of “A Poison Like No Other: How Microplastics Corrupted Our Planet and Our Bodies.” In the book, Simon reveals an entirely new dimension to the plastic dilemma – how microplastics break down into small enough pieces to enter lungs, be absorbed by crops, and infiltrate aquatic animals’ muscle tissues. Unlike other contaminants that are single elements or have simple chemical structures, microplastics represent a cocktail of toxicity: plastics can contain as many as 10,000 different chemicals – some which are linked to diseases from diabetes to cancers ...