The Daily Dish: May 10, 2016

New York City retailers will be required to collect a minimum fee of five cents for carryout bags, plastic or paper. With limited exceptions, the bill will apply to retail, convenience, and grocery stores in the city, and these retailers will be allowed to keep the fees. Although the bill will go into effect on October 1, it will not be actively enforced until April 2017. City mayor Bill de Blasio has expressed support for the legislation. The main goal of the proposal is not to collect money from New Yorkers, but to change their behavior, and dependence on plastic bags, for the good of the environment. In other cities where similar fees have been enacted, there has been a rewarding drop in the use of plastic bags, which cannot be recycled.

 

The USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service has issued a second expansion of an urgent recall from Pilgrim's Pride Corp., a Texas-based producer of cooked poultry products. The update includes a larger distribution area, more production dates, and a total of 5,176,844 pounds of products that may be contaminated with extraneous materials. The initial recall identified approximately 40,780 pounds of products "that may be contaminated with extraneous materials, including plastic, wood, rubber, and metal, which was then updated to include more than four point five million pounds of poultry." The affected products were distributed to schools and other institutions nationwide.

 

For many around the globe, access to clean water is a luxury and a privilege, not a basic human right. But there's a new and innovative solution on the horizon: Scientists at the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre in India have developed a technique to filter seawater to remove the salinity. A pilot project currently in operation is capable of filtering 6.3 million liters of seawater daily. Although seawater has been desalinated before, this is the first time a technique has been used that is actually affordable. The same research teams also developed methods that can easily filter out chemicals and minerals and groundwater. Currently, the fresh water is being used at the Kudankulam nuclear reactor, and although it is safe for human consumption, it will not yet be available to the public.

 

That's today's daily dish, thanks for watching. Stop by tomorrow for another helping.