When residents of San Juan County, Washington gathered to sign a petition to ban personal watercrafts (PWCs) in the waters surrounding the San Juan islands, they did so with the utmost confidence. Indeed, the county’s small towns, located near the Canadian border, overwhelmingly supported an ordinance to ban PWCs (marketed by Kawasaki as Jet Skis) and preserve the habitats of oceanic wildlife, like the orca whale.
Dolphins are typically thought of as deep-diving marine mammals, reaching depths of 900 feet and holding their breath for up to 12 minutes while searching for food. But scientists have discovered a group of dolphins off the coast of Hilton Head, South Carolina that have an odd, yet efficient feeding strategy that brings them to the shore to earn a belly full of fish.
When you’re in the brewery business, not every ounce of beer makes it to the customer. In fact, bad batches and spillage during bottling can add up to a lot of discarded beer, especially for brewers like Coors Brewing Company of Golden, Colorado.
Chicago’s new Museum of Contemporary Art was built with six tons of synthetic gypsum drywall. That in itself is not extraordinary: There’s wallboard throughout the museum, which opened to the public in July. But what is unusual is that the museum’s fourth-floor drywall is partially made of gypsum that had been used in an art project called "Sulfur Cycle" by Chicago environmental artist Dan Peterman.
When the first European travelers saw Hawaii, they thought they’d found paradise. But the 50th state, Hawaii is no longer so Edenic. Waikiki Beach has become a high-rise hell, and Honolulu, on the main island of Oahu, is America’s 11th largest urban center (though it remains the only U.S. city with a rainforest).
Environmentalists might not like credit cards, but at least they can get one that gives a portion of the money spent back to an environmental non-profit…
Its use predates Christopher Columbus, but this easy-to-grow plant fiber is capable of replacing wood as the raw material in paper, grows without the use of pesticides or herbicides and is one of the most versatile alternative resources of our time. And, in certain forms, it’s also highly illegal. It’s time to get reacquainted with hemp.
These days, people are spending more time outdoors for sun, sport and recreation–at precisely a time when depletion of the Earth’s ozone layer (caused by the release of chlorofluorocarbons [CFCs] from aerosols, refrigerators and air-conditioners) is putting us at greater and greater risk of sun damage.
Lighting accounts for 20 to 25 percent of all electricity sold in the U.S., according to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). With Americans paying eight cents per kilowatt hour, energy-efficient lighting is starting to look very appealing to consumers. And because energy costs can also add up quickly from frequently-used appliances, small changes can equal big-time savings.
Every summer through most of the 1980s, an awful smell wafted its way across the west side of Bridgeport, Connecticut–a stench ultimately traced to the premises of Herman Isaacs, Inc. Once you knew how the long-established company did business, it wasn’t surprising to learn that its operations stunk to high heaven. Isaacs, now closed, was a meat rendering plant; it bought spoiled meat scraps, animal carcasses, and other "offal" and transformed this waste product into an inoffensive, high-protein base for such products as designer soaps, medicines, candy (yes, candy) and a whole lot of other things you’d never suspect had meat in them.
