Entries tagged with 'environment'
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Andrew Martin in his Feed column in the New York Times business section questions just how green the locavore movement is. What spurred his question? Researchers at UC Davis are conducting studies trying to determine the actual carbon footprint of local food. Isn't this kind of a silly academic exercise? We don't need a study to tell us that driving to a farmers' market every day in a gas-guzzling SUV to buy a pound of local produce leaves a heavy carbon footprint and is bad for the environment....
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Photo from dslrninja on Flickr.com When I order takeout from my local Thai restaurant, the amount of nonrecyclable plastic that is used to carry all that delicious food to me is absolutely out of hand. There are the thick, round plastic containers (which are no doubt a huge improvement in quality over their aluminum predecessors) as well as plasticware I simply don't need, plastic soup and rice containers, and, of course, the plastic bag that the whole thing was delivered in. And then when I think about the fact that all this plastic gets used only once, the real guilt begins to set in....
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The New York Times had a blog post the other day that was brilliantly titled Five Easy Ways to Go Organic. Throw "easy" and "organic" into the same title and you're bound to elicit a response. If they had thrown "cheap" in there as well, they would have seen thousands of comments on the blog posts instead of hundreds. The gist of the post, which was mostly gleaned from an interview with Alan Greene, author of Raising Baby Green: Switching to organic is tough for many families who don’t want to pay higher prices or give up their favorite foods. But by choosing organic versions of just a few foods that you eat often, you can increase the percentage of...
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Slate magazine compares the environmental effects of vegetarianism and omnivorism. Eating some meat may make better use of environmental resources than eschewing meat all together, but overall people are eating more meat than what nature can efficiently supply....
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The PB&J Campaign aims to raise awareness about the positive environmental impact one could make by simply eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich instead of a meat-based alternative. For instance, you could save 2.5 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions, 280 gallons of water, and 12 to 50 square feet of land by choosing a PBJ instead of a hamburger. If you're not a fan of peanut butter and jelly, there are plenty of other tasty environmentally friendly alternatives that can help slow global warming, reduce water waste, and save land....
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A few weeks ago, the website Blackle.com crossed my path and I was instantly fascinated, but I'm going to spare you a click and give you the long and short of it: It's Google search, but it's not sponsored by Google, and its black. Fine, go. Click, I know you're going to, anyway. Despite being a black-clad, large sunglasses-sporting stereotypical New Yorker, it wasn't the site's chi-chi and fashionable affect that drew me in, but that it was built on the notion that the color black uses less energy on the web, and even eensy amounts of savings—especially when you consider the scale of a web behemoth such as Google—add up. Sadly, this premise that black uses less energy than...
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Washingtonians are no strangers to canvas bags. Plenty of lobbyists tote eco-chic "Save the Turtles" or "Barack the Vote" sacks on the Metro. But remembering to pack that extra one for the grocery run after work is a whole 'nother story. Annapolis, our Chesapeake Bay-side neighbors to the east, have spearheaded a plastic bag ban, following the lead of cities such as San Francisco, which enacted a ban in March, and Oakland in June. A similar switch in D.C. might take some time. "It's a huge lifestyle change, and a bunch of people just won't remember to bring their own," said Whole Foods Mid-Atlantic marketing director Sarah Kenney. Our minds still think in terms of paper-or-plastic, she said on...
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How do you see this glass? If you're Martin Lagod, managing director and co-founder of Firelake Capital Management, writing in the San Francisco Chronicle, it's half empty and the tap you wanna top it off with is running dry: According to data collected from NASA and the World Health Organization, 4 billion people will face water shortages by 2050. Already in China, water levels in the Yellow River -- a source that supplies more than 150 million people -- are down 33 percent from the average. In China's cities, wastewater pollution and inadequate treatment facilities have contaminated the water consumed by more than half the population. Of its 669 major cities, 440 face moderate to severe water shortages. The Chinese...
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Large supermarkets and pharmacies will have to use cornstarch-based plastic bags or recyclable paper ones: Under the legislation, which passed 10-1 in the first of two votes, large markets and pharmacies will have the option of using compostable bags made of corn starch or bags made of recyclable paper. San Francisco will join a number of countries, such as Ireland, that already have outlawed plastic bags or have levied a tax on them. Final passage of the legislation is expected at the [Board of Supervisors] next scheduled meeting, and the mayor is expected to sign it. The pink plastic bags seen around Chinatown are safe for now....
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According to a survey from the Waste and Resources Action Programme, Britons throw out a third of all food purchased, about 6.7m tons of food a year: "Wrap figures suggest that around 20% of British climate change emissions are related to the production, processing, transportation and storage of food. The main reasons for having excess food were that more was bought than needed, that fridges were too warm and that many products with a short shelf life were not eaten prior to their best before date. Children refusing to eat food or pestering their parents to buy unwanted items while shopping further contributed to waste, Wrap said, along with informal or unplanned eating patterns." Appalling, but I can't imagine things...
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