Dollars For Denim, a Phoenix, Arizona company, exports 8,000 to 10,000 pairs of used blue jeans per month to customers in Japan and Western Europe. Laurie Olson, owner of the company, buys worn Levi’s 501 jeans from thrift stores and directly from the public. She pays up to $10 a pair. The jeans are sorted and shipped from her reclamation center to overseas department stores and high fashion boutiques.

While Levi Strauss & Co., with manufacturing facilities in Belgium, France, Spain, Great Britain and the Philippines, can easily supply the world’s demand for new jeans, foreigners crave the jeans made in America, especially the vintage 501’s from the 1950s and 1960s. Young Japanese pay dearly for the jeans in an attempt to satisfy their fascination with American styles. Western Europeans also have a huge craving for the jeans, one that seems almost insatiable.

Ms. Olson’s clothing recycling effort has blossomed into a substantial business. Dollars For Denim has monthly revenues running from $100,000 to $200,000.

Vanpooling is a convenient way for many McDonnell Douglas employees at four of its sites across the country to commute, and to help clean the air. McDonnell Douglas operates more than 450 vanpools. In the St. Louis, Missouri area alone, nearly 245 vanpools bring 2,500 employees back and forth to work each day. For those employees, some of whom commute nearly 115 miles one way, vanpooling is the only logical alternative to driving alone.

“We pioneered vanpooling at our St. Louis location in 1979,” said Greg Lyle, manager of vanpool operations in St. Louis. “There were some government incentive programs that got us interested in trying it, and it really just snowballed. The cost of gas was going up, and people really liked vanpooling.”
McDonnell Douglas, a military and commercial aircraft manufacturing company, is the largest defense contractor in the country, and the largest employer in Missouri. Today, nearly 9 percent of the more than 32,000 employees at its approximately one dozen locations in St. Louis participate in the vanpooling program. Nationwide, McDonnell Douglas employees in St. Louis; Tulsa, Oklahoma; Huntington Beach, Long Beach and Santa Anna, California put nearly five million miles on their vans annually.

In St. Louis alone, according to Lyle, vanpooling saves more than 4 million gallons of gas and 50 million commuter miles each year. It also is responsible for reducing the amount of air pollution produced by vehicle emissions.

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OxiSolv Corporation, an automobile restoration facility located in Blaine, Minnesota, makes significant use of water in its daily operations. Finding a way to reuse the rinse water, which is contaminated during the process by both organic compounds and metals, was a challenge met with the help of the Minnesota Office of Waste Management, an agency that provides technical expertise and grant programs for innovation in the prevention and reduction of industrial pollution.
A filtration system has been devised that enables OxiSolv to reuse 300 gallons of water a day that formerly was sent down the sewers, and eliminates the pollutants from entering the water supply. The cost of this system, including installation, was approximately $5,100, compared to an estimated $18,000 to $22,000 for a conventional commercial system. Supply and waste disposal costs are about $90 per month.
“Not only has OxiSolv adopted this system to lessen the amount of pollution entering the environment,” said Glenn Knowlton, of OxiSolv. “It also is safer for the work environment and our employees.”
Using this new system at OxiSolv, the rinse water is first drained into a primary collector, where the largest particles are removed. The water is then pumped into a screen basket at the top of a large settling tank. In the settling tank, a flocculent is used to help settle out and remove some of the fine particles along with some of the heavy metals.
In the next step, the rinse water is pumped through an earth filter, where more of the fine sediment is removed. It is then pumped through two banks of sediment filters, and finally through a charcoal filter before being returned to the rinse tank for reuse.
What’s in it for OxiSolv?
The company saved nearly $15,000 in the development costs of its filtration system. It also uses 300 less gallons of water each day, reducing its water bill. At the same time, its new process prevents industrial pollution at the source and helps keep the water supply clean.

MASSACHUSETTS HEALTH OFFICIALS were worried about the effects of breathing second-hand cigarette smoke in stuffy railway cars, so they asked Massachusetts Institute of Technology to investigate. MIT’s conclusions, outlined in a letter from Professor William Ripley Nichols, were unambiguous:
“The products of the tobacco consumed mix with the air and render it oppressive to most nonsmokers…A very little tobacco smoke does indeed affect the eyes and throat of a person unaccustomed to its use, but our senses are often affected by quantities too small to weigh, too small even to detect by chemical means.”
That report was prepared 114 years ago. The only change since then has been a dramatic improvement in the means of measuring the chemical constituents of tobacco smoke and of weighing their deadly effects.
Using techniques that measure down to parts per billion, scientists now know that so-called passive smoke contains carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide, polycyclic-aromatic hydrocarbons, nicotine, inhalable particles and hundreds of other dangerous compounds. It also contains about 50 chemicals, such as benzene, which are known or suspected to cause cancer.

And researchers suspect carbon monoxide, ammonia, benzene and other toxins may be present in higher concentrations in passive smoke than in what a smoker inhales, which has been burned at higher temperatures that destroy some of the pollutants. In a 1986 report, Surgeon General C. Everett Koop said there is evidence “sidestream smoke may be more carcinogenic.”

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