Category: Environment

washingtonpost.com on a group of people who call themselves Compactors — citizens who have made a compact amongst themselves not to buy anything new for a year, except food and safety items (e.g. toilet paper, brake fluid). Everything else they obtain used, or make do with what they have. The group’s mission: “To go beyond recycling in trying to counteract the negative global environmental and socioeconomic impacts of U.S. consumer culture, to resist global corporatism, and to support local businesses, farms, etc. — a step, we hope, inherits the revolutionary impulse of the Mayflower Compact.” Predictably:

Some have called the Compactors un-American, anti-capitalist, eco-freak poseurs whose defiant act of not-consuming, if it caught on, would destroy the economy and our way of life.

But of course most Compactors have moments when there’s something they really need and don’t have the time or patience to scrounge, and they give themselves permission to slip when necessary. One member’s “drill bit moment”: “I needed it, and I don’t feel bad about it.”

I don’t think Amy and I are quite ready for Compacting, but we did join the Freecycle network last year, and have had great success getting our used stuff into the hands of people who need it, no commerce involved. And I’ve come up with some great entertainment for Miles through Freecycle — when I realized a few months ago that Mattell no longer made the simple, classic, orange Hot Wheels tracks and clamps, posted to Freecycle about it and by the weekend had not one but two complete sets of 1970s Hot Wheels tracks, cars, clamps, and jumps. Kept all that plastic out of landfills, had a great time with my son, spent $0, and felt great about it.

Some Compactors have said it’s tricky explaining to their kids why Santa traffics in used toys, but they’re not trying to make overtly political statements:

“We didn’t do this to save the world. We did this to improve the quality of our own lives,” Perry says. “And what we learned is that we all have a lot of more stuff than you think, and that you can get along on a lot less stuff than you can imagine.”

As consumers, we’re conflicted. We want the products we purchase to be pristine, untouched by human hands. But the very thing that keeps products perfect on the long trip from Asia is the thing that drives us nuts when we get the product home — the “ubiquitous plastic clamshell, resistant to scissors, razor blades and loud swearing.” Washington Post says consumer frustration with plastic clamshells has reached an all-time high, and that alternatives are finally on the way. This may be the last year we have to fish our items out of the dreaded translucent sarchophagi.

This year, Consumer Reports magazine gave an award for the worst plastic clamshell packaging to a warehouse-store version of a Uniden cordless phone set: It took 9 minutes 22 seconds to unwrap completely and nearly caused injury to the person opening it. According to the Consumer Product Safety Commission, injuries from plastic packaging resulted in 6,400 visits to emergency rooms in 2004.

The article barely touches the larger issue of the environmental impact of all that plastic, but hints that future packaging may be some kind of cardboard/plastic hybrid. But for me, that begs the question: What percentage of products could be successfully shipped and stocked with no packaging at all? Obviously not everything, but what’s wrong with sticking 100 widgets in a cardboard box with some kind of low-impact filler for padding, and letting us select items au naturelle from a crate, as is common with low-cost items found in your local Chinatown, or like virtually everything at Crate and Barrel?

Yes, theft prevention is also part of the equation, but let’s be creative here. We don’t just need different packaging – we need less packaging. A lot less.

The Packaging hall of shame is a nice idea but a small project. Someone could spin that idea off into a great little dedicated web site, collecting images and descriptions of heinous packaging from around the world.

Used to be that “organic” meant not only chemical-free, but also produced on small, sustainable, local farms. We paid a premium for these attributes because they mattered. But something funny happened on the way to Kellogg’s beginning production of Organic Rice Krispies (I’m not making this up) and Wal-Mart’s embrace of organic products.

Shouldn’t we be on our feet cheering to know that mainstream America will be eating healthier food, and ecstatic for all the cleaner air and dirt and water that will result? Well, yeah, except that it doesn’t work that way. Trouble is the USDA’s organic guidelines have been rendered nearly impotent under pressure from producers. And because there aren’t nearly enough small/local organic producers to supply clients the size of Wal-Mart. So ingredients are produced on factory farms, almost like before, and trucked long-distance to factories for production, burning just as much fossil fuel as ever.

Mark Morford, for the SF Chronicle:

“Organic,” according to the lobbyist-friendly USDA, does not have to mean the food is grown using sustainable (read: nondestructive) farming practices. It does not mean locally produced. It does not mean the ethical treatment of animals. Nor does it mean the companies that produce it need be the slightest bit fair or trustworthy or socially responsible. All it means now: no pesticides, no chemical fertilizers, no bioengineering. And those compromises mean “organic” is a shell of its former self. Which brings us back to Kellogg’s Organic Rice Krispies. Industrial to the hilt, not the slightest bit locally grown, not the slightest bit sustainable, from the same company that poisons your kid with Pop-Tarts and Froot Loops and Scooby-Doo Berry Bones … Kellogg’s Organic Rice Krispies. It’s sort of like saying “Lockheed Martin Granola Bars” or “Exxon Bottled Spring Water.” Self-immolating, and not in a good way.

J-School professor Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma (a fantastic read) has been engaged in a public exchange of words with Whole Foods CEO John Mackey on that store’s failure to live up to the healthy/organic image it sells. Read his two latest letters here and here.

Technorati Tags: organic, pollan

We sometimes regard fish farms as a way to raise seafood in a controlled environment, not subject to oceanic pollution and other factors that ravage aquatic populations. But in reality, there’s often a horrible backfire to cultivating artificial populations. According to Environment News Service, as many as 95% of wild salmon migrating past commercial salmon fisheries are devastated by parasites raised within the facilities.

The debate over whether to buy farm-raised or wild salmon has long been a hot one, with many eco-conscious lox lovers opting for the wild-caught variety. But that may not be an option much longer, thanks to some tiny tagalongs. The Environment News Service reports that deadly sea lice have been feasting upon the flesh of juvenile wild salmon on their way out to sea. It sounds like a Halloween horror story, and indeed there is a daunting villain: the massive commercial fish farm industry. According to a recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, “[p]arasites from fish farms kill as much as 95 percent of young wild salmon that migrate past the facilities.”

It’s ironic. Build a fishery to create sustainable artificial populations, and in the process end up devastating the remaining natural population.

Plastics made from corn (PLAs) are advertised as “biodegradable.” And they are. IF your back-yard composting bin is capable of reaching 140 degrees for a stretch of 10 days or more. And that only happens at industrial composters specifically set up for this kind of thing. In the average home composting setup, corn plastics remain unchanged after six months, leading to accusations of false advertising on the part of firms like Wal-Mart, which pushes corn plastics to consumers as part of its new push to green-wash their image.

Smithsonian: So, yes, as PLA advocates say, corn plastic is “biodegradable.” But in reality very few consumers have access to the sort of composting facilities that can make that happen. NatureWorks has identified 113 such facilities nationwide—some handle industrial food-processing waste or yard trimmings, others are college or prison operations—but only about a quarter of them accept residential foodscraps collected by municipalities.

I’m in the middle of reading Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, so my head has been swimming with corn-y thoughts lately. More later.

via Boing-Boing

Many congratulations to the National Resources Defense Council for their recent strides in protecting whales and other marine mammals from mid-frequency naval sonar.

Two weeks ago, NRDC attorneys raced to court to block the U.S. Navy from unleashing a barrage of ear-splitting sonar into the waters off Hawaii as part of a massive military training exercise. Whales exposed to mid-frequency sonar have repeatedly stranded and died on beaches around the world — but the Navy refused to adopt even common-sense measures during peacetime exercises to help protect marine life from this deadly threat.

In an infuriating attempt to avoid our lawsuit, the Navy took the unprecedented step — on the eve of the Fourth of July weekend — of declaring itself exempt from the primary U.S. law that requires measures to protect marine mammals. But the court sided with us and found that the Navy’s planned sonar use violated a second key environmental law as well, noting that NRDC had submitted “considerable convincing scientific evidence” of the dangers of sonar to marine life.

The judge blocked the navy’s exercises and ordered them to sit down with NRDC and come up with a set of measures to protect whales and dolphins from the brain-splitting blasts.

Go mammals (us and them)!