Category Archives: organic

Underpaid, overworked farmworkers set to get liberal labor protections. Farmers grumble.

by LovieHealey106 Posted on September 2, 2016

A United Farm Workers march to City Hall in San Francisco REUTERS/Robert Galbraith

No justice, no peas

Underpaid, overworked farmworkers set to get liberal labor protections. Farmers grumble.

By on Sep 2, 2016 4:30 amShare

California’s legislature just passed a bill that’s a big win for farmworkers but a big defeat for farmers.

The bill, which comes after decades of campaigning by the United Farm Workers union, would make farms subject to the same rules for overtime pay as other businesses. If Gov. Jerry Brown signs the bill into law, it would set a precedent for other states to follow. Farmworker advocates are cheering, along with green groups like the Sierra Club and the NRDC, but many farmers — including organic farmers who rely on manual labor in place of chemicals and mechanization — worry that the bill will push agriculture abroad.

The United Farm Workers union has argued that the bill corrects the injustice written into the federal Fair Labor Standards Act passed in 1938, which gave workers a minimum wage and a 44-hour work week but excluded farmworkers.

Farmworker Jose Adolfo Casares and his daughter at a migrant farm labour housing center in Bakersfield, Calif.REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson

“The fact that the Fair Labor and Standards Act excluded farmworkers from collecting overtime pay is astounding considering the amount of outdoor physical labor they do,” said Julie Taylor, executive director of National Farm Worker Ministry, a faith-based organization that supports farmworkers.

“The whole world eats the food provided by California farmworkers, yet we don’t guarantee fair overtime pay for the backbreaking manual labor they put in to keep us fed,” said California Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez, in a statement.

Farmworkers aren’t totally unprotected. In the decades after passing the Fair Labor Standards Act, Congress ushered in laws extending them some protections. Agricultural workers are currently eligible for overtime pay after putting in 10 hours a day, and the California bill would lower that to eight hours. That may seem like a small change, but it has a lot of farmers scared.

REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson

“I’m down in Santa Cruz talking to farmers, and people are pretty freaked out,” said Dave Runsten, policy director for the Community Alliance with Family Farmers, a group that promotes small farms and sustainable food systems.

Worker pay is usually the biggest expense for the farmers Runsten works with, representing as much as half of their their costs. That’s likely to go up as California’s minimum wage rises to $15 an hour over the next six years. Some farmers will shift to less labor-intensive crops like almonds, some will replace workers with machinery (like these tomato harvesters), and some will move operations to Mexico, he said. But all those options are too expensive for many of the smaller farmers. “Those people are really looking down the barrel of a gun,” Runsten said.

Whenever we pass new regulations on farmers there’s always a danger that it will drive up food prices, and consumers will start buying from farmers elsewhere. That’s what happened in Sweden. The government passed sweeping animal welfare laws for pigs and in response Swedes started buying their pork from countries without those high standards. On the other hand, California farmers have managed to remain competitive despite the fact that the state has more agricultural regulations than others.

If we bring farming up to the same labor standards as other industries, it’s likely to follow the same trajectory as, say, the textile industry — the path of globalization and industrialization. Some agriculture will follow cheaper labor to other countries, and some will remain in the United States by going high tech and producing more with fewer workers. It’s all driven by our preference for the lowest price.

There’s another option: We could opt to pay more for better labor conditions. People tend to say they want small farms that rely on well-paid manual laborers, but when the time comes to pay the grocer we generally choose the cheaper tomato.

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Underpaid, overworked farmworkers set to get liberal labor protections. Farmers grumble.

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Anti-fracking activists hit a roadblock in Colorado

by FerdinaNVGF Posted on August 29, 2016

(Fr)ack

Anti-fracking activists hit a roadblock in Colorado

By on Aug 29, 2016Share

Two anti-fracking initiatives will not be on the ballot in Colorado this November, the Colorado secretary of state’s office announced on Monday.

Initiative 78 would have prohibited fracking within 2,500 feet of an occupied building and Initiative 75 would have allowed local governments to ban fracking. Previously, cities in Colorado have tried to ban fracking, only to have the bans overturned by the state Supreme Court.

Supporters gathered about 107,000 signatures for each initiative — in both cases, more than the 98,492 required. But the signatures have to be deemed valid by Secretary of State Wayne Williams. In a random sample of 5 percent of the signatures, he could only verify around 80 percent of them. Projecting that rate over the total number of signatures suggests that both initiatives would get around 85,000 valid signatures and fall short.

But Lauren Swain, an activist who worked as a paid signature gatherer for the initiatives and serves on the board of 350 Colorado, says the campaign will challenge Williams’ ruling. “There’s a high likelihood that the reasons are not valid” for throwing out signatures, she told Grist. She believes his office is biased against the anti-fracking movement, noting that his spokeswoman Lynn Bartels tweeted irrelevant and unflattering information about their petition gathering. Any challenge must be submitted within a month, so there should be a final answer on whether the initiatives will make the ballot by around the end of September.

Anti-fracking activists have faced overwhelming opposition from the state’s political establishment and fossil fuel industry. As Politico recently reported, “Two oil and gas companies with large footprints in the state, Noble and Anadarko, gave more than $11 million this year to Protect Colorado, an umbrella group launched to fight the initiatives. … The anti-fracking campaign, meanwhile, had raised just $424,000 as of Aug. 1.”

Williams is a Republican, but many Colorado Democrats, such as Gov. John Hickenlooper, also oppose the initiatives. “There’s not a lot of daylight between the parties when it comes to establishment politicians on this issue,” Swain said.

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Anti-fracking activists hit a roadblock in Colorado

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What the Heck Is Up With California’s Recycling Program?

by BetteKershaw Posted on August 28, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Few states have a greener rep than California, and for good reason. The state has a cap-and-trade program for carbon emissions, solar-energy production exceeding that of all other states combined, and, at the behest of Gov. Jerry Brown, it’s now mulling new targets that would slash greenhouse gas emissions to 40 percent of 1990 levels by 2030. The state has proved itself a national leader in environmental policy.

All of which makes California’s latest waste and recycling report, issued yearly by state Department of Resources Recycling and Recovery (CalRecycle), so bewildering. It reveals that landfill waste in the state jumped to 33.2 million tons in 2015, a one-year increase of 2 million tons, contributing to last year’s release of 200,000 extra metric tons of CO2 into the atmosphere. Per capita, each Californian now tosses 4.7 pounds of stuff into the landfill.

The state’s rate of recycling also dropped to 47 percent in 2015. That’s the lowest rate since 2010, and the first time since the state began measuring that the number has gone below 50 percent—not the greatest news, given California’s 2020 goal of recycling 75 percent of all consumer waste.

CalRecycle spokesman Mark Oldfield points to a recovering economy as a primary contributor to the setback. Economic growth boosts consumption and construction, which necessarily results in more waste, he says: “All of a sudden people are buying new stuff and getting rid of the old.”

There are other elements at work, too. The low price of oil, combined with other plummeting commodity prices, has largely eliminated financial incentives for companies to use recycled materials. Thanks to cheap crude, points out Californians Against Waste, a Sacramento-based advocacy group, producers are using more petroleum-based plastics than before, and less (easily recycled) aluminum.

A four-year decline in the prices manufacturers are willing to pay for recycled materials has proved deadly for many for-profit recycling centers. In part, that’s because it’s a subsidized business. CalRecycle pays up to half of the centers’ operating expenses, depending on the amount of materials they collect, to encourage recycling centers to accept plastic containers alongside the more lucrative aluminum cans. The deposits consumers pay on beverage containers provide an incentive for individuals and companies that do curbside pickup to bring cans and bottles to the centers (and pocket the deposits). But CalRecycle’s payments to the centers are based on scrap prices over the previous 12 months, with a three-month time lag. Which means, when prices are in decline, the payments come up short, and the centers struggle to stay profitable. Statewide, the bulk recyclers have faced a cumulative shortfall of more than $50 million.

Susan Collins, president of the Container Recycling Institute (CRI), says this has led to a rash of closures. Per her group’s estimates, more than 800 recycling centers have shut down in the past 16 months, unable to compete thanks to the low prices and insufficient subsidies. All told, nearly one-third of California’s recycling centers have gone out of business.

The setbacks are costing the state in additional ways: Recycling typically generates $8 million to $9 million in tax revenues annually and results in at least 3,000 full-time jobs. And income from collecting and redeeming recycled materials helps keep scores of desperate people off public assistance. Cities such as San Francisco have been hit particularly hard by the recycling-center closures; the city now has just six active recycling centers, down from 35, for 900,000 people. The vast majority of the city is now an “unserved zone.”

CalRecycle’s Oldfield preaches patience. “I don’t think we thought it was going to be easy to begin with,” he says of the 2020 goal to recycle 75 percent of all consumer waste. “I don’t think we mind running the risk of criticism if we fall short of a number on a time scale.” He points to AB 939, California’s Integrated Waste Management Act. The 1989 legislation mandated that 50 percent of solid waste be diverted from landfills via recycling, composting, and incineration by 2000. That goal wasn’t achieved until 2006, but it now stands at 63 percent.

As for the 75 percent number, which is not a mandate, CalRecycle is looking at new technologies it hopes will increase recycling rates for construction materials and organic matter, although there is no deadline for these developments.

Mark Murray, executive director at Californians Against Waste, bristles at the notion that the goal needn’t be met on time. Murray was disturbed by the startling dip in the recycling rate, and that the state remains so far from 75 percent: “I don’t want to make excuses in 2016 when there’s still four years to go.”

If the state is serious about reaching its goal, there is plenty of precedent. “We know exactly what needs to happen, it just isn’t happening,” Murray says. In the past, the state has set minimum standards for the amount of recycled content certain goods must contain. Newsprint must be 50 percent post-consumer materials; for glass containers, it’s 35 percent. Such standards also exist in California for electronics and paint.

Regulating plastic packaging the same way could have a big impact, Murray says, and would help reverse this troubling course. Legislation requiring producers to buy recycled content could also help. By Murray’s estimation, packaging accounts for 35 percent of the overall waste stream, and companies need to be called to task for their wasteful packaging. Collins, of the CRI, agrees that the state needs urgent, binding legislation, but given the scale of the closures, she’s worried it’s too late to flip the script quickly: “This is a devastating loss to the recycling infrastructure in California.”

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What the Heck Is Up With California’s Recycling Program?

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Your favorite national park is about to get a lot hotter

by WinifredK29 Posted on August 28, 2016

Human/Nature

Your favorite national park is about to get a lot hotter

By on Aug 28, 2016

Cross-posted from

Climate CentralShare

Summertime is prime time for national parks. As snow melts, wildflowers bloom, and waterfalls roar, generations of visitors have flocked to the natural wonders that dot the American landscape (to say nothing of all the amazing cultural sites the National Park Service protects).

The National Park Service was created a century ago — Aug. 25, 1916, to be exact — to keep an eye on the growing treasure trove of national parks. It’s been a good century as more and more land has been set aside and annual visitors now number more than 300 million, but it’s also not been without challenges. Chief among them is climate change, which will drastically alter national park landscapes in the coming decades including cranking up the heat.

As part of Climate Central’s ongoing States at Risk project, we analyzed just how much hotter parks are projected to get later this century. We looked at the future summer temperatures in all the parks in the Lower 48 states except Dry Tortugas National Park (sorry, Fort Jefferson lovers!) assuming greenhouse gas emissions continue on their current trend. To put it in clearer context, we mapped out what places today are most comparable to park’s climates of tomorrow.

The results could make you sweat. Parks are projected to have summers that are 8 to 12 degrees F hotter by 2100. That means currently cool mountainous parks could be as hot as the plains. Parks in the Southeast, already a pretty hot place, will face even more extreme temperatures with a climate more like southern Texas. And otherworldly Joshua Tree National Park in southern California will face the greatest geographical climate shift, with temperatures more like Abu Dhabi by 2100.

We also analyzed how many more days with extreme heat the parks could face. Extreme heat is a hallmark of global warming, and its impact will be most arresting in the national parks where people go, by design, to be outside in the summer. Like the rest of the country, parks are going to be seeing more dangerously hot days above 90 degrees F, 95 degrees F, and 100 degrees F.

By 2100, the glaciers of Montana’s Glacier National Park will be long gone and rising temperatures will be one of the big reasons why. Visitors will not only have to contend with an ice-free landscape, but also hotter temperatures. Today the park sees an average of only one 90 degrees F day each year. It could see 27 days with temperatures above 90 degrees F by the end of the century.

Yosemite National Park, high in the Sierra Nevada mountains of California, currently sees about two weeks of 90 degrees F weather every year. By 2050, it could see nearly a month of those temperatures, and by 2100 it could get nearly 50 such days each year.

And the Great Smoky Mountains, currently the most visited National Park, could go from fewer than 10 days above 90 degrees F each year, on average now, to three months with those scorching temperatures.

In numerous other parks, the number of days above 100 degrees F is projected to skyrocket. Big Bend National Park in Texas could see more than 110 days above 100 degrees F each year, on average. And Great Basin National Park in Nevada, which currently doesn’t have any days above 100 degrees F in a typical year, could see a month of those temperatures each year by 2100.

It’s likely that parks on the more extreme end of the temperature scale will see a drop in summer visitation, but more visitors are likely to show up in fall and spring when it won’t be fry-an-egg-on-the-sidewalk hot. That may stretch park resources thin as most parks are set up to handle summer crowds and quieter shoulder seasons. How parks will deal with the change in visitation season is an open question.

And all this is to say nothing about the impacts extreme heat will have on the natural resources around which we created national parks in the first place. Joshua Tree could become too hot for its namesake trees, and there’s evidence that extreme summer days could create more rockfalls in Yosemite, which could change the face of the stunning valley at the center of the park. Wildfire risk will also skyrocket across the West and could make summer park vacations not only more hot but more smoky.

Those are just the most visible changes. Whole ecosystems are likely to be disrupted and there are consequences scientists probably haven’t even uncovered yet (those are the ones that could be the worst since we’ll be least prepared).

Despite the daunting situation facing the National Park Service in its second century, there are signs it’s up for the challenge. It’s already addressing climate change from the coast to the high mountains and has an A-Team team of experts to help parks answer the gnarly questions they face.

There’s no denying that national parks will look a lot different by the end of the century, but that won’t make them any less a part of the fabric of American identity.

Analysis by James Bronzan and Alyson Kenward, PhD.

Methodology: Future temperatures for 47 National Parks were calculated based on the median of 29 spatially downscaled climate models (CMIP5) at 1/8 degree scale, then averaged within park boundaries. National parks in Alaska and Hawaii, along with Dry Tortugas National Park, were excluded because projections at this resolution were unavailable. Temperatures for 2050 are based on the 20-year average of 2041-2060 and for 2100 are based on the period 2080-2099. Projected temperatures assume that greenhouse gas emissions continue at their current rate (RCP8.5). The interactive map features the average summer daily high temperature (June-August), while days over 90oF, 95oF, and 100oF were counted annually. The current period values for parks and climate divisions are based on the 1991-2010 average calculated using a gridded observational dataset by Ed Maurer of Santa Clara University. 

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More stories in this series:

If you think technology has no place in the national parks, think again

From smartphones to webcams, technology could help us understand — and appreciate — parks in the coming century.

People of color are fans of national parks, despite obstacles that keep them out

Only 57 percent had ever set foot in the parks, but 85 percent want more of them — especially in cities.

The uncertain, hopeful future of the National Park Service

“The goal of our centennial is not to scare everyone to death about climate change.”

More in Human/Nature: National Parks and the Humans Who Use ThemElection Guide ★ 2016Making America Green AgainOur experts weigh in on the real issues at stake in this electionGet Grist in your inbox

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Americans love genetically modified mosquitoes much more than other GMOs

by JonnieMckinney Posted on August 27, 2016

A girl puts her hand in a box with male genetically modified mosquitoes REUTERS/Paulo Whitaker

GMOsquitoes

Americans love genetically modified mosquitoes much more than other GMOs

By on Aug 27, 2016Share

When the news started to spread about a plan to release genetically engineered mosquitoes in the Florida Keys, it seemed laughable. The idea was to release hordes of engineered male mosquitoes that would mate with the disease-carrying females and cause them to produce non-viable eggs. The average Facebook post on this was something like: “LOL, you’ve got to be kidding me.”

I don’t see that reaction much anymore. A poll out this week found that 60 percent of Florida residents support tweaking mosquitoes’ genes to fight diseases, while 30 percent opposed. This isn’t statistical noise: Polls are consistently finding that big majorities of Americans support the idea. Conventional wisdom has been flipped on its head. Disdain has morphed into support.

What happened? In a word, Zika. It was the accumulation of those pictures of babies with Zika-related microcephaly, the news that Zika-carrying mosquitoes are buzzing around Miami, and the realization that climate change will usher the disease farther north.

Juan Pedro, who has microcephaly, in Recife, BrazilREUTERS/Paulo Whitaker

This is a perfect demonstration of the way humans, those peculiar creatures, grapple with risk. There’s a principle at work here that helps explain why we reject some things as being too risky and embrace others. We shrug off the suspicion of cellphone radiation but worry about genetically modified foods, even though neither has any demonstrated harm. We fret about nuclear accidents but don’t think twice about people driving cars through our neighborhoods, even though a total of three people have been killed by nuclear power in the United States, while 100 people are killed in car accidents every day.

This can all be explained by what I’ll call, a bit grandly, the self-centeredness principle of risk perception. I’m not condemning this mode of reasoning by using the pejorative term self-centered, just observing that our intuitions about risk are informed by calculations centered on ourselves, not centered on, say, humanity or the planet. The benefits of any change are distributed unevenly and when the benefits are centered mostly on others, or diffused among many, it’s easy for me embrace a scary, sci-fi scenario as a reason for opposition. But if it becomes clear that I stand to benefit, I’ll want to know how likely those scenarios really are; I’ll weigh the pluses and minuses of change.

You can see how this plays out with climate change. The benefits of cutting carbon are diffuse — they go mostly to unborn generations. So if I’m a conservative, predisposed to dismiss climate science, the self-centeredness principle makes it irrational for me to consider the evidence. I’m unlikely to see any meaningful benefit, reading voluminous scientific reports is hard, and changing my mind would make me a villain to my friends.

High-risk technologyREUTERS/Mike Segar

Or take GMOs. Farmers and seed companies reap most of the benefits. The rest of us get lower food prices — but that benefit is spread so thin that most of us haven’t noticed. Therefore the risks don’t have to be probable, or even plausible, for us to balk. You want to put something new in my food that doesn’t directly benefit me? Hells no. You can line up all the scientists, carrying all the authoritative data you want, but again, I have little incentive to read it.

It’s another story when you see the benefits. Mobile phones are so clearly beneficial that people can’t stop using them, even when they really should — like, when accelerating into an intersection. The outrage over the use of genetic modification to make plants for farmers doesn’t extend to the use of genetic modification to make medicines for us.

Follow the GM mosquito story and you can watch American perspectives do a 180 as we begin to see benefits for ourselves. Last year, a survey of people in Key West found that 58 percent opposed using them to control Zika, whereas, the latest poll found that 30 percent of Floridians were opposed. That’s not exactly comparing apples to apples (all Floridians don’t live in Key West) — but it does suggests a shift. The real test will come in November when residents of the Florida Keys vote on releasing the mosquitoes. That vote will tell us if the people of Key West have gone from feeling comfortable in the status quo, where experimenting with a new technology looks like an unacceptable risk, to feeling uncomfortably itchy and ready to consider something new.

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Americans love genetically modified mosquitoes much more than other GMOs

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The warmer it gets, the more it snows in Antarctica. Huh?

by AlbertinaKimpton Posted on August 26, 2016

global weirding

The warmer it gets, the more it snows in Antarctica. Huh?

By on Aug 26, 2016Share

Antarctica is a weird place. While it’s losing ice faster than an heiress in a caper movie, it’s also getting a whole lot more snow — at least, it’s supposed to.

Warmer air holds more moisture, so globally warmed jet streams should dump even more snow over the frozen continent than they used to. Since Antarctica is cold as fuck, scientifically speaking, the snow won’t melt despite the warmer air, making the continent probably the only place on Earth where glaciers might actually grow (at least for the time being).

All that extra precipitation is good for the rest of us: Snow that falls on Antarctica is water that’s not adding to sea-level rise. While sea level is definitely increasing (you didn’t think it was that easy, did you?), Antarctica’s blizzard forecast could spare us a few critical inches.

But, so far, the snowfall has not increased as scientists expected. According to research published this week, that’s OK — there’s enough natural wobble-wobble in Antarctica’s climate to account for the lower-than-expected snow levels. In the next couple of decades, however, we should see the white stuff really start to pile up.

But as Antarctica’s ice sheets continue to crumble into the sea around the edges, faster and less predictably than scientists had hoped, we’ll need more than snow to save us.

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The warmer it gets, the more it snows in Antarctica. Huh?

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Trump’s campaign chief once ran a major climate research center

by AlejandMasten Posted on August 26, 2016

biosphere the worst

Trump’s campaign chief once ran a major climate research center

By on Aug 26, 2016Share

This story was originally published by Mother Jones and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Long before Stephen Bannon was CEO of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, he held a much different job — as the acting director of Biosphere 2, a $200 million scientific research facility in the mountains outside Tucson, Arizona.

The original Biosphere project, completed in 1991 by a company called Space Biosphere Ventures and funded by a Texas billionaire named Edward Bass, was an attempt to turn science fiction into reality. Eight individuals were to live and work entirely within a series of domed and self-contained buildings, where they would grow their own food, recycle their own waste, and demonstrate that humans might be able to survive in space. But when that two-year experiment ended in disarray — it was overrun by ants and cockroaches — the company turned to a group of outsiders for help in turning it around. At the head of that effort was Bannon.

At the time he was hired by Bass to run Space Biospheres Ventures, Bannon was managing his own investment banking firm, Bannon & Co. Some Biosphere-ites were concerned about Bannon, who had previously investigated cost overruns at the site. Two former Biosphere 2 crew members flew back to Arizona to protest the hire and broke into the compound to warn current crew members that Bannon and the new management would jeopardize their safety.

Under his management, the focus of Biosphere 2 shifted from survival — the Survivor-like challenge of enduring two years inside a literal bubble — to planetary research. Specifically, as Bannon explained in a 1995 interview with C-SPAN, Biosphere 2 would be a place that focused on studying societal challenges like air pollution and climate change.

Breitbart News, the media company which Bannon ran for four years before taking a leave of absence to join Trump’s campaign, has adopted an antagonistic approach toward the topic of climate change, mocking climate science as “tosh” and “eco-propaganda” and claiming that the Earth is actually cooling. But Bannon sang a much different tune when he was interviewed by C-SPAN at Biosphere 2 in 1995.

“A lot of the scientists who are studying global change and studying the effects of greenhouse gases, many of them feel that the Earth’s atmosphere in 100 years is what Biosphere 2’s atmosphere is today,” Bannon explained. “We have extraordinarily high CO2, we have very high nitrous oxide, we have high methane. And we have lower oxygen content. So the power of this place is allowing those scientists who are really involved in the study of global change, and which, in the outside world or Biosphere 1, really have to work with just computer simulation, this actually allows them to study and monitor the impact of enhanced CO2 and other greenhouse gases on humans, plants, and animals.”

Bannon left Biosphere 2 after two years, and the project was taken over by Columbia University. (It is currently part of the University of Arizona.) But his departure was marred, as the Tucson Citizen reported at the time, by a civil lawsuit filed against Space Biosphere Ventures by the former crew members who had broken in.

During a 1996 trial, Bannon testified that he had called one of the plaintiffs a “self-centered, deluded young woman” and a “bimbo.” He also testified that when the woman submitted a five-page complaint outlining safety problems at the site, he promised to shove the complaint “down her fucking throat.” At the end of the trial, the jury found for the plaintiffs and ordered Space Biosphere Ventures to pay them $600,000 — but also ordered the plaintiffs to pay the company $40,089 for the damage they had caused.

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See how Earth is fast approaching a red hot mess

by TheoParnell Posted on August 26, 2016

See how Earth is fast approaching a red hot mess | Grist

planet out

See how Earth is fast approaching a red hot mess

By on Aug 26, 2016ShareEd Hawkins

Scientists are getting better at producing visualizations that make climate change, a pretty heady topic, simple enough to take in at a glance. This image charts global temperature changes each year since 1850, using the period from 1961 to 1990 as a baseline. The color scale ranges from dark blue (-2.5 degrees C) to dark red (+2.5 degrees C).

It was created by climate scientist Ed Hawkins, the same person who brought us the popular hypnotic GIF of global temperatures spiraling out of control.

Election Guide ★ 2016Making America Green AgainOur experts weigh in on the real issues at stake in this electionGet Grist in your inbox
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Rocky mountain highlight

Colorado aims to slash its climate pollution

The governor is ordering electric utilities to cut their greenhouse gas emissions.

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See how Earth is fast approaching a red hot mess

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Obama designates world’s largest protected area — it’s underwater

by DorisNewhouse Posted on August 26, 2016

Obama designates world’s largest protected area — it’s underwater

By on Aug 26, 2016Share

President Obama, who marked the 100th anniversary of the National Park Service by designating a whole new land monument in Maine, is giving oceans some love, too.

On Friday, he expanded the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands Marine National Monument, also known as Papahānaumokuākea, to 582,578 square miles. At nearly three-and-a-half times the size of California, the monument is now the world’s largest protected area.

Papahānaumokuākea encompasses 10 islands and atolls of the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, and the Hawaiian Islands National Wildlife Refuge, which supports over 7,000 species — a quarter of which are unique to Hawaii.

Native Hawaiians urged for the monument’s expansion back in January and consider the place a “the boundary between Ao, the world of light and the living, and Pō, the world of the gods and spirits from which all life is born and to which ancestors return after death,” according to the White House.

Protecting this area means it will be closed for the extraction of oil, gas, minerals, and other energy development. You can learn more about it from this video by Pew:

Election Guide ★ 2016Making America Green AgainOur experts weigh in on the real issues at stake in this electionGet Grist in your inbox

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Obama designates world’s largest protected area — it’s underwater

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The Ultimate Guide To Creating A Greener Kitchen

by FaithZoxbuqajj Posted on August 25, 2016

When setting out to create a greener kitchen and home it’s hard to know where to start. Information overload is definitely a problem. Five minutes on Google and suddenly I have 42 checklists, 700 “green” products to buy, and if I don’t make the changes today I’ll be diagnosed with 6 different cancers within the year.Alright, that may be a bit of an exaggeration, but I’m sure you’ve experienced something similar. There is so much info out there it’s hard to know what to do.

Creating a greener kitchen environment

In our home I focus on making small changes each week to create a greener environment. One week it’s adding more organic produce to the shopping list. The next week we’re taking time to wash and recycle cans and jars.

In order to help you take small steps towards a greener home I’ve put together this guide to help you create a more sustainable, greener kitchen.

I’m not saying you need to dive in and make every one of these changes today. But pick one thing and implement that. Once you’ve mastered that, move on to something else. The path towards a more sustainable life is taken one step at a time.

For simplicity I’ve broken this list down into the 3 R’s; Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle.

Reducing kitchen waste

Food waste

Image Credit: KaliAntye / Shutterstock

Food waste is a major issue facing the world right now. In the U.S., it is estimated that 40% of the food produced is never even consumed.

When you think about all the water, energy, and time that goes into producing food, that’s a ton of wasted resources!

So what can you do to reduce food waste in your home?

We often end up purchasing more food than we need. This may be because we need a certain amount for a recipe and have no choice but to purchase more than we need. Or, maybe we just shop hungry (always a bad idea).

One way to reduce your food waste is to more carefully plan your cooking. Figure out what recipes you like that share similar ingredients and plan to cook them in the same week. If you don’t enjoy leftovers, learn to cook smaller quantities of food that are better suited for your household’s size.
Another way to reduce food waste is to store your food properly. When stored properly, food will last longer, giving you the chance to eat it before it spoils.

There’s an app for that

The USDA FoodKeeper app is a great way to learn more about the shelf life of various foods and how to store them properly. The best part about this app is that it goes well beyond produce, covering baby food, baked goods, condiments, and even meat. You should definitely take a minute and download the app. You’ll be amazed at how helpful it is.

If you do end up with extra produce that you know will go bad before you can eat it all, you can always freeze a portion for later. We do this in our home all the time with berries and bananas.

Consider composting

Inevitably you’ll have food that goes bad. At home composting can be a great way to put that spoiled produce to good use.

Earth911 took a tour of Singh Farms to learn the technical details about composting. If you’re interested in learning the science of composting click here.

The greatest benefit to composting is that you end up with nutrient rich soil that can be used to grow delicious new produce. To help you get started we put together a video on all you need to know about composting.

You can also check out this article on composting in an apartment as well as the “Do’s and Don’ts of Composting”.

Cleaning products

Image Credit: jordache / Shutterstock

We all have cleaning chemicals in our kitchen, frequently stuffed under the kitchen sink. Have you ever taken a minute to read through the ingredients? Unless you’re a chemist you probably can’t pronounce most of them.

When wiping down your kitchen, floor, and dishes, these cleaning chemicals often leave behind residue that will later come in contact with your hands and food. We recommend replacing these toxic cleaning products with natural ones that work just as well.

Lemon, baking soda, and vinegar are some of the best natural cleaners out there. Here are a few quick suggestions on how to use them to clean your kitchen.

Quick tips

Remove stains from food storage containers: Squeeze the juice from a lemon into the containers, then add a little baking soda. Rub the mixture into the stains. Let sit overnight if necessary.
Clean your microwave: Slice a lemon, put it in a bowl of water and microwave for 45 seconds. This should make stains easier to wipe away and eliminate unpleasant odors.
Clean your coffeemaker: Run the machine with equal parts water and vinegar. Halfway through the cycle, turn it off and let it sit for an hour. Then complete the cycle.
Unclog a drain: Pour 1/2 cup vinegar and 1/2 cup baking soda down the drain. Rinse with water.
Make glasses sparkle: Put one cup of vinegar in the bottom of your dishwasher before you run the cycle. After you run the dishwasher, your glassware shouldn’t be cloudy.
Remove stains from coffee and tea mugs: Fill mugs with one part baking soda and two parts water and let sit overnight. Scrub and rinse in the morning.
Remove burnt food from the bottoms of pots and pans: Sprinkle baking soda over the burnt areas, add hot water and let sit overnight. Scrub in the morning.
Remove odors from food containers: Simply rinse containers with baking soda and water to remove smells. Let sit overnight if necessary.
Clean spills in the oven: Scrub the bottom of the oven with steel wool and baking soda. (Note: If you have a self-cleaning oven, don’t use this method.)

For more tips and tricks on using these natural cleaning products, download the DIY Cleaning Recipes PDF available in the Earth911 Resource Library. Click here to sign up for free.

Energy use

Image Credit: Aprilphoto / Shutterstock

Though it doesn’t happen often, when you do need to purchase new appliances be sure to purchase energy efficient ones.

Energy Star rated products are the go-to choice when it comes to finding the most energy efficient appliances. They (Energy Star) have put together a great tool that allows you to put together a profile of your whole home. After you’ve created your home profile they’ll give you recommendations on how you can save energy.

According to the U.S. Department of Energy your appliances account for about 13% of your home’s energy use. Purchasing newer, more efficient models can save you a significant amount of money over the lifespan of the appliance. When you do replace your appliances be sure to recycle your old ones properly, but more on that later.

Reuse in the kitchen

Food Storage

When it comes time to store leftovers it’s important to use sustainable food storage, and glass and stainless steel are two good options.

Glass

Glass containers such as Pyrex and Glasslock are certainly among the best options available. Glass is a long lasting material and is microwave and oven safe.

In our home, we use this set of Pyrex storage containers daily. My favorite part about using these glass food storage containers is that you can cook your meal in them and then throw the lid on and stick the leftovers in the fridge for later. It doesn’t get much easier than that.

Stainless steel

Another great option is stainless steel. Stainless steel has the benefit of not breaking when dropped like glass containers do. (When I was 16 my mom baked my favorite cake in a glass pan. We took it to the park for a party and it got knocked off the table. Glass went everywhere and the cake was ruined. If it had been in a stainless steel pan, we still could have eaten it.)

Stainless steel containers are also completely recyclable. If they get bent out of shape you can take them to your nearest scrap yard and they’ll pay you for the metal.

Another great benefit of stainless steel containers is they can be set right on your stove top to heat up leftovers.

Plastic perhaps?

We are big fans of Preserve products which are almost all made from recycled #5 plastic. Preserve products are microwave safe, dishwasher safe, BPA free, and when you’re done with them they can be sent back to Preserve to be recycled. Image Credit: Preserve Products (Instagram)

If you can’t find a glass or stainless steel container for your food, there are plastic options that are better than others. We are big fans of Preserve products which are almost all made from recycled #5 plastic. Preserve products are microwave safe, dishwasher safe, BPA free, and when you’re done with them they can be sent back to Preserve to be recycled.

One last thing before we jump in to the recycling section. If you aren’t already, start using reusable shopping bags, preferably the canvas or fabric type rather than the plastic ones as there’s no recycling solution available for the large, reusable plastic bags.

Kitchen recycling

Plastic bags

I know I just mentioned using reusable shopping bags but inevitably you’re going to have plastic bags around your home that need to be recycled. Fortunately plastic bags can be recycled at most grocery and retail stores.

While this widespread access to plastic bag recycling is still relatively new, it’s become more and more popular as retailers have set their own sustainability initiatives.

What many people don’t realize is that grocery bags aren’t the only type of plastic bag that can go in these drop off bins.

Plastic bags are typically made from plastic #2 or #4 and can be recycled together. Here are a few other products made from these plastics that you can drop off in these bins.

Ziploc type plastic bags, as long as they are clean and dry.
Plastic, air filled, shipping pouches. (Just cut them and let the air out).
Plastic bread and bagel bags, as long as you empty all the crumbs out.

Find out more about plastic bag recycling and find a location near you by visiting our Plastic Bag Recycling Guide.

Cardboard and cartons

Most city curbside recycling bins accept cardboard so check with your local area collector. Image Credit: sevenke / Shutterstock

Most city curbside recycling bins accept cardboard. To make things easier on space in your own bin, be sure to break them down so they’re flat. Don’t worry about tape and other paper that’s attached to the cardboard as this will be removed during the recycling process.

Most city curbside programs also accept paperboard which is the cardboard-like box that holds cereal, pasta, and other boxed dry goods.

Frozen food boxes, a.k.a. waxed cardboard, unfortunately are not as widely accepted. These boxes require more work to recycle so check with your city or county to find out if you can place them in the recycling bin.

Another product to check on with your city is milk and juice cartons. Many cities do accept them though it is best to double check. Visit the Carton Council to find out if your city accepts cartons in your blue bin.

Appliances

Large appliances, like washing machines, clothes dryers, water heaters, ovens, stoves, refrigerators, freezers, furnaces, and air conditioners are a big source of waste in the United States. However they often aren’t that difficult to recycle.

In fact, if you are replacing an appliance with a new one the company delivering it will often take your old one for recycling. This service has made appliance recycling far easier over the last few years.

When you do replace an old appliance with an Energy Star model, you may be eligible for a rebate. Check the Energy Star rebate finder to see if you qualify.

If you need to recycle an old appliance, be aware that there are often fees to cover the cost of removing and properly disposing of the Freon commonly found in refrigerators, freezers, and A/C units.

Find out more about large appliance recycling and find a recycling location near you by visiting our Large Appliance Recycling Guide.

A homework assignment

As mentioned, cleaning chemicals often contain toxic ingredients that are hazardous to your health. Fortunately, the Environmental Working Group has put together some fantastic resources to help understand what cleaning products are hazardous.

If you’re looking for a first step to greening your kitchen this homework assignment below is perfect. In this assignment we’re going to figure out just how hazardous your cleaning products are. Here’s what to do:

  1. Pull out some of the cleaning products you use most frequently.
  2. Click here to visit EWG’s cleaning product search.
  3. Using the search bar at the top of the page, or the Product search on the left side of the page, look up your cleaning products.

How do your products rate?

Feature image credit: alexandre zveiger / Shutterstock

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Brian Brassaw

Brian manages the Earth911 Recycling Search, making sure there are plenty of recycling resources available for our users. He also shares green living tips and tricks on

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Latest posts by Brian Brassaw (see all)

The Ultimate Guide To Creating A Greener Kitchen – August 25, 2016
7 Eco-Friendly Laundry Detergents For Fresh Clothes – June 24, 2016
Earth Day: 23 Of The Greatest Environmental Quotes – April 22, 2016

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The Ultimate Guide To Creating A Greener Kitchen

Posted in A Greener Kitchen, eco-friendly, FF, GE, LG, Mop, ONA, organic, oven, PUR, solar, solar power, Ultima, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The Ultimate Guide To Creating A Greener Kitchen