Rating child passenger safety laws relative to best practice recommendations for occupant protection

Background: State laws regarding child passenger protection vary substantially.

Objectives: The objective of this study was to develop a scoring system to rate child passenger safety laws relative to best practice recommendations for each age of child.

Methods: State child passenger safety and seat belt laws were retrieved from the LexisNexis database for the years 2002–2015. Text of the laws was reviewed and compared to current best practice recommendations for child occupant protection for each age of child.

Results: A 0–4 scale was developed to rate the strength of the state law relative to current best practice recommendations. A rating of 3 corresponds to a law that requires a restraint that is sufficient to meet best practice, and a rating of 4 is given to a law that specifies several options that would meet best practice. Scores of 0, 1, or 2 are given to laws requiring less than best practice to different degrees. The same scale is used for each age of child despite different restraint recommendations for each age. Legislation that receives a score of 3 requires rear-facing child restraints for children under age 2, forward-facing harnessed child restraints for children aged 2 to 4, booster seats for children 5 to 10, and primary enforcement of seat belt use in all positions for children aged 11–13. Legislation requiring use of a “child restraint system according to instructions” would receive a score of 1 for children under age 2 and a 2 for children aged 2–4 because it would allow premature use of a booster for children weighing more than 13.6 kg (30 lb).

Conclusions: The scoring system developed in this study can be used in mathematical models to predict how child passenger safety legislation affects child restraint practices.     

Adaptive Management and Climate Change Adaptation: Two Mutually Beneficial Areas of Practice

Adaptive management (AM) is a rigorous approach to implementing, monitoring, and evaluating actions, so as to learn and adjust those actions. Existing AM projects are at risk from climate change, and current AM guidance does not provide adequate methods to deal with this risk. Climate change adaptation (CCA) is an approach to plan and implement actions to reduce risks from climate variability and climate change, and to exploit beneficial opportunities. AM projects could be made more resilient to extreme climate events by applying the principles and procedures of CCA. To test this idea, we analyze the effects of extreme climatic events on five existing AM projects focused on ecosystem restoration and species recovery, in the Russian, Trinity, Okanagan, Platte, and Missouri River Basins. We examine these five case studies together to generate insights on how integrating CCA principles and practices into their design and implementation could improve their sustainability, despite significant technical and institutional challenges, particularly at larger scales. Although climate change brings substantial risks to AM projects, it may also provide opportunities, including creating new habitats, increasing the ability to quickly test flow‐habitat hypotheses, stimulating improvements in watershed management and water conservation, expanding the use of real‐time tools for flow management, and catalyzing creative application of CCA principles and procedures.     

The sustainable remediation forum

Regulators seem to currently be focusing on green remediation and not sustainable remediation. How can the industry change this perception so that a more holistic approach is followed?     

Study on the mechanical and environmental properties of concrete containing cathode ray tube glass aggregate

Cathode ray tube (CRT) glass is considered a hazardous material due to its lead toxicity. In addition, current disposal practices are being phased out due to their adverse environmental impacts. In this project, CRT glass was used as a fine aggregate replacement in concrete. Life-cycle material characterization was conducted by evaluating the durability and strength of the CRT-Concrete. Leaching tests were also conducted to investigate whether the material meets drinking water limits for Pb. Test results show that the plastic state of the CRT-Concrete was affected by the angularity of the glass particles. Moreover, the compressive strength of CRT-Concrete met and exceeded that of the control specimen. However, CRT-Concrete was susceptible to expansive alkali-silica reactions when more than 10% CRT replacement was used. Environmental leaching results show that lead concentrations from CRT-Concrete are below the drinking water limits depending on the CRT volume replacement and if biopolymers are used.     

Integrated Measures of Anthropogenic Stress in the U.S. Great Lakes Basin

Integrated, quantitative expressions of anthropogenic stress over large geographic regions can be valuable tools in environmental research and management. Despite the fundamental appeal of a regional approach, development of regional stress measures remains one of the most important current challenges in environmental science. Using publicly available, pre-existing spatial datasets, we developed a geographic information system database of 86 variables related to five classes of anthropogenic stress in the U.S. Great Lakes basin: agriculture, atmospheric deposition, human population, land cover, and point source pollution. The original variables were quantified by a variety of data types over a broad range of spatial and classification resolutions. We summarized the original data for 762 watershed-based units that comprise the U.S. portion of the basin and then used principal components analysis to develop overall stress measures within each stress category. We developed a cumulative stress index by combining the first principal component from each of the five stress categories. Maps of the stress measures illustrate strong spatial patterns across the basin, with the greatest amount of stress occurring on the western shore of Lake Michigan, southwest Lake Erie, and southeastern Lake Ontario. We found strong relationships between the stress measures and characteristics of bird communities, fish communities, and water chemistry measurements from the coastal region. The stress measures are taken to represent the major threats to coastal ecosystems in the U.S. Great Lakes. Such regional-scale efforts are critical for understanding relationships between human disturbance and ecosystem response, and can be used to guide environmental decision-making at both regional and local scales.     

Evaluation of California's safety belt law change from secondary to primary enforcement

Some states allow an officer to stop a vehicle for an observed belt law violation alone (primary). Most require that the initial stop be made for some other violation before a belt law citation can be issued (secondary). On January 1, 1993, California became the first state to implement an uninterrupted change from secondary to primary belt law enforcement. In six study communities, the percentage of drivers observed wearing seat belts increased from 58% prior to the law change to 76% soon thereafter. Drivers surveyed at DMV offices indicated that they had knowledge of the new law and were more likely to wear their belts now than in the past.