Whistleblower doesn’t publicize every recall announced by the Consumer Product Safety Commission, but I tend to pay attention to recalls of products manufactured or imported by Minnesota companies. I also gravitate toward products that malfunction in a spectacular way. This week brought news of the recalls of a Rocketfish universal portable power source and an Insignia 26-inch television, both of which demonstrated the capability of producing fire. In the TV’s case, someone’s hands suffered minor burns. Best Buy sold both of the Chinese-made products, the televisions for about $800, the power sources for about $100.

Just call it the Food and Nut Administration - the FDA’s home page now has peanuts on top, pistachios underneath, both of them suspected of spreading salmonella into the innards of Americans. Compared to the peanut product recall, which has dribbled out for months and continues to this day, the FDA appears to have taken a different tack with pistachios. The message: Don’t eat any of them until we tell you they’re safe. The nation’s second largest pistachio company has recalled 2 million pounds of pistachios - that’s a whole lot of shells for the compost bin.

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Every year, our friends at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency tell us how much toxic refuse is put into the air, water and earth, state by state, facility by facility. This immense data dump is known as the Toxics Release Inventory (TRI). It’s part of the post-Love Canal philosophy of “right-to-know,” that a community will benefit by knowing what nasties are coming out of smokestacks and discharge pipes and what’s being trucked to the landfill. The numbers don’t represent illegal pollution - these are legally permitted releases. The main page for Minnesota is a blur of numbers. The more interesting data are available by clicking on a county and looking at individual facilities and what they produce. You can also search by zip code to find out what you’re living around.

In Hennepin County, for example, you can search by facility. The big emitter is the Xcel Energy plant on Marshall Street in northeast Minneapolis, with 640,557 pounds of on- and off-site releases. It’s the granddaddy of Xcel’s power plants, burning coal to produce energy since 1911.

The good news is, the amount of “production-related waste” and facilities reporting releases have both been declining nationwide since 2001.

Minnesota ranks 34th on the TRI list for total poundage of toxic releases, just behind Washington State and ahead of Kansas. No. 1? Alaska. Last on the list? American Samoa, with a mere 5 pounds of reported toxic releases. There’s more than that in my garage.

Ouch! One bicycle rider broke a wrist when the handlebar stem broke. That was one of the three incidents that prompted Bloomington-based Quality Bicycle Products to recall about 8,600 stems used on its subsidiary, Salsa Bicycles. The Taiwan-made parts were sold by specialty bicycle retailers “nationwide from November 2007 through December 2008 for between $880 and $1870 for complete bikes. The aftermarket stems were sold at specialty bicycle retailers nationwide and via web sites from March 2008 through December 2008 for between $60 and $65,” the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission reports. More info on the recalled products in question is here.