Airline Recycling is a Hit-and-Miss Proposition Call it a fly-by-night operation. A flight attendant zips down the aisle, grabs an empty soda can from an airline passenger, mumbles any old answer when asked if it will be recycled, and stuffs the can in a trash bag. There’s really no way of knowing if the soda […]
Urban Community Gardens Fight to Save Their Space In the heart of downtown Manhattan, peeking out from between towering brick high-rises, is a little green oasis called the Liz Christy Garden. Inside, urban sojourners can watch fish and turtles glide beneath the surface of a pond. For others, the garden offers a rare opportunity to […]
Winter flooding in the Los Angeles area is often so severe that lives and homes are routinely lost in mudslides. Yet, the thirst for a stable water supply has defined this desert city. In 1913, the local water company built an ingenious but ethically dubious aqueduct to drain the Owens River 200 miles away into […]
After a Series of Tragic Fires, Loggers Go on the Offensive Wildfires ravaging the American West have citizens, civic leaders and environmentalists searching for answers. Many blame our country’s past attitude towards fire, and a U.S. Forest Service (symbolized by the venerable Smoky Bear) that has been suppressing healthy, natural burning for too long. Fuel […]
It’s a no-brainer, really: You get the big guys—governments, hospitals, universities, big corporations, everyone who buys in volume—to demand green products and attributes. As a result, suppliers are forced to green up their products if they want the business. Thus they invest in doing so, and the resulting sales volume creates a large-enough production of […]
It’s right there in President Clinton’s 1998 Executive Order 13101. "Agencies," it says, "are encouraged to use all of the options available to them to determine the environmentally preferable attributes of products and services
" Unfortunately, the key word is "encouraged," rather than "required," and that means the federal government is moving at its usual incredibly slow pace.
"Typically, we bring the concept of lifecycle pricing to the table," says Mark Petruzzi of Green Seal, which offers environmental certification for a range of products. "Looking only at the first cost of a product is a disingenuous way of doing things. With paint, for instance, you have to consider not only the initial price, […]
Highlights in recent green purchasing efforts around the country include these, part of an extensive Center for a New American Dream listing at www.newdream.org/procure/activities.html: Santa Monica, California, which is buying 100 percent renewable electricity for all city facilities, with a net reduction of greenhouse gases totaling 13,672 tons annually
From the time I was eight until I was 10, I lived in a pea-sized town down the road from the chemical plant and the munitions factory. Buffalo, Illinois had a bank, a grocery store, a post office and a park. And enough houses to hold three hundred people. This was where we moved, a few miles from my grandparents, after we left Phoenix.
Pleather is a Versatile, Though Controversial, Alternative to Leather Just when you were getting used to "fake" meat, faux fur and drinking milk from a plant, along comes "pleather," also known as "plastic leather." Before you hit the runway in your new non-leather jacket, however, you should know why some environmentalists still prefer hides or […]
