8 posts tagged “environment”

clipped from www.nrdc.org

No one wants to give up on the holidays or the sense of abundance that the season bestows. The only question is how to be generous without bankrupting the earth. Here are some thoughts.

Give things people need and can use

Choose gifts made of sustainable materials

Buy locally made products

Look for used things with a provenance

Give things that reduce energy usage

Avoid excessively packaged products

Give tickets

Give a party

Give of yourself

Swap contributions to non-profits

clipped from www.recycleworks.

From Thanksgiving to New Years Day, household waste increases by more than 25%. Added food waste, shopping bags, packaging, wrapping paper, bows and ribbons - it all adds up to an additional 1 million tons a week to our landfills.

In the U.S., annual trash from gift wrap and shopping bags totals 4 million tons.

1.9 billion Christmas cards are sent to friends and loved ones every year, making Christmas the largest card-sending occasion in the United States.

The amount of cards sold during the holiday season would fill a football field 10 stories high, and requires the harvesting of nearly 300,000 trees.

38,000 miles of ribbon is thrown out each year. The Earth's circumference is 25,000 miles - enough to tie a bow around the Earth.

Half of the paper America consumes is used to wrap and decorate consumer products.

clipped from www.latimes.com

Despite the protests of more than 50 scientists, including five Nobel laureates in chemistry, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on Friday approved use of a new, highly toxic fumigant, mainly for strawberry fields.

Methyl iodide is a neurotoxin and carcinogen that has caused thyroid tumors, neurological damage and miscarriages in lab animals.

Many of the chemists -- who use small amounts of methyl iodide in their laboratories to attach molecules and are careful to avoid exposure -- said they are shocked that the EPA is allowing its use as a pesticide because it can drift into neighborhoods and pollute groundwater.

"It is potentially really toxic, and it's certainly very reactive. From what we know about its chemistry, we know this stuff reacts with DNA. It mutates it. So it's prudent to be as careful as you can with it," Bergman said in an interview Friday.

clipped from www.organicconsumers.org

Last year Americans spent nearly $11 billion on over 8 billion gallons of bottled water, and then tossed over 22 billion empty plastic bottles in the trash. In bottle production alone, the more than 70 million bottles of water consumed each day in the U.S. drain 1.5 million barrels of oil over the course of one year.

Not only does bottled water contribute to excessive waste, but it costs us a thousand times more than water from our faucet at home, and it is, in fact, no safer or cleaner.

Water aside, the plastic used in both single-use and reusable bottles can pose more of a contamination threat than the water. A safe plastic if used only once, #1 polyethylene terephthalate (PET or PETE) is the most common resin used in disposable bottles.

However, as #1 bottles are reused, which they commonly are, they can leach chemicals such as DEHA, a known carcinogen, and benzyl butyl phthalate (BBP), a potential hormone disrupter.