Tag Archives: market

Why San Francisco’s Journalists Are Investigating Homelessness

by DwightWight Posted on June 27, 2016

Mother Jones

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This Wednesday, June 29, Mother Jones will join dozens of Bay Area news and media organizations to begin publishing and airing an ongoing series of stories on homelessness in San Francisco. This push is part of the SF Homeless Project, a recently launched effort whose goals are detailed in the open letter below. Stay tuned as we explore the state of homelessness in our city, as well as its history, causes, and potential solutions.

To the city and people of San Francisco:

Like you, we are frustrated, confused, and dismayed by the seemingly intractable problem of homelessness in our city. Like you, we want answers—and change.

We see the misery around us—the 6,600 or more people who live on the streets of San Francisco—and we sense it is worsening. We feel for the people who live in doorways and under freeways, and for the countless others who teeter on the edge of eviction. We empathize with the EMTs, the nurses and doctors, the social workers, and the police. They are on the front lines of this ongoing human catastrophe.

Numerous noble, well-intentioned efforts by both public and private entities have surfaced over the decades, yet the problem persists. It is a situation that would disgrace the government of any city. But in the technological and progressive capital of the nation, it is unconscionable.

So beginning today, more than 70 media organizations are taking the unprecedented step of working together to focus attention on this crucial issue.

We will pool our resources—reporting, data analysis, photojournalism, video, websites—and starting Wednesday, June 29, will publish, broadcast, and share a series of stories across all of our outlets. We intend to explore possible solutions, their costs, and viability.

Though this is a united effort, we do not claim to speak with one voice. There are many lenses through which the issue of homelessness can be viewed. However, we do not intend to let a desire for the perfect solution become the enemy of the good. We want to inspire and incite each other as much as we want to prod city and civic leaders.

Fundamentally, we are driven by the desire to stop calling what we see on our streets the new normal. Frustration and resignation are not a healthy psyche for a city.

Our aim is to provide you with the necessary information and potential options to put San Francisco on a better path. Then it will be up to all of us—citizens, activists, public and private agencies, politicians—to work together to get there.

Signed,

The SF Homeless Project

@bayareahomeless | facebook.com/sfhomelessproject

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Why San Francisco’s Journalists Are Investigating Homelessness

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Here’s the Best News We’ve Gotten All Year

by AlfonzoIRKZ Posted on June 2, 2016

Mother Jones

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No joke. This may be boring as hell, but it really and truly is great news:

Federal Reserve officials strongly signaled they will toughen big-bank capital requirements even more than they have since the 2008 crisis, a move that will add to the pressure on the largest U.S. banks to consider shrinking. Fed governors Daniel Tarullo and Jerome Powell, in separate public comments on Thursday, said the Fed would require eight of the largest U.S. banks to maintain more equity to pass the central bank’s annual “stress tests.”

“Effectively, this will be a significant increase in capital,” Mr. Tarullo said on Bloomberg television….Mr. Powell said at a banking conference that the Fed’s move would make big banks “fully internalize the risk” they pose to the economy.

“I have not reached any conclusion that a particular bank needs to be broken up or anything like that,” he said. The point is to “raise capital requirements to the point at which it becomes a question that banks have to ask themselves.”

Bernie Sanders has campaigned heavily on the idea of breaking up big banks. But that shouldn’t be our goal. Our goal should be to make banks safer and to reduce the likelihood that they need to be bailed out in the future. That’s what higher capital requirements do: they force banks to carry a bigger buffer against losses, which makes them less likely to fail in any future downturn.

As it happens, new regulations put in place since the financial meltdown of 2008 have already increased capital requirements, but big banks still have an unfair advantage in the market: their funding costs are lower because investors figure they’ll be bailed out if they ever implode in the future. To make up for this, big banks should, as Tarullo said, “fully internalize the risk” they pose to the economy. In other words, if big banks have an automatic advantage simply because taxpayers have little choice but to rescue them in case they fail, they should be required to pay higher insurance premiums against failure. That’s essentially what higher capital requirements do.

This is fair. However, higher capital requirements also make big banks less profitable, which in turn gives them a strong incentive to downsize all on their own. And that’s how it should be. There’s no reason for the Fed or anyone else to pick and choose banks to break up. We just need to make sure they’re reasonably safe and are operating on a level playing field. If we do this, we’re providing an organic incentive to downsize. The banks themselves get to decide whether and how to do it.

The only bad news here is that the Fed is unlikely to raise capital requirements enough to suit me. Nonetheless, this is very much another step in the right direction.

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Here’s the Best News We’ve Gotten All Year

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Your Favorite Artisanal Food Brand Is Probably Owned by a Huge Company

by ChandaEager6519 Posted on May 21, 2016

Mother Jones

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Big Food is in a pickle. Its core business—packaged, pre-cooked fare—remains profitable, but sales are shrinking. Consumer distrust is mounting. One response has been to maintain profits by slashing expenses. Conagra, the behemoth behind such one-time powerhouses as Chef Boyardee canned spaghetti and Pam spray oil, recently announced it would cut $300 million in annual costs and lay off 1,500 workers.

Another time-tested strategy is to snap up smaller, independent companies operating in niches of the industry that are actually growing, like organics, for example. That means that what started as your favorite local organic food brand—Naked Juice, Dagoba chocolate, LaraBar—now belongs to a much larger, much less local company.

Last week alone, three much-loved small players succumbed to the appetites of larger players:

• Spam king Hormel gobbles up an organic peanut butter player. It might seem bizarre that Hormel—the topic of Ted Genoways’ excellent 2011 exposé on working conditions on the slaughterhouse floor—would drop $286 million on nut-snack company Justin’s, which started as a stand in the Boulder Farmers Market in 2004. But Hormel has been diversifying away from canned pork for a while. It spent $700 million to take on supermarket peanut butter titan Jiffy in 2013. By broadening its portfolio to include Justin’s—probably most famous for its organic peanut butter cups—Hormel is adding rapid sales growth. Hormel had already displayed its taste for the sweeter growth prospects and profit margins offered by organic and “natural” foods when it spent $775 to buy niche meat player Applegate a year ago.

• A very European-like midsize cheese-maker gets snapped up by a European giant. Switzerland-based Emmi is a globe-spanning cheese titan with $3.3 billion in annual sales. Its offerings now include those of Cowgirl Creamery, which sells about $20 million per year of cheeses from cows raised on the lush rolling hills of Northern California’s Marin County. For US cheese lovers like me, the thought of Cowgirl falling into the maw of a large company is like seeing your favorite local coffeehouse get bought by Starbucks. Although, to be fair, Emmi isn’t exactly Kraft—it sells some pretty high-quality cheeses in the United States, like gruyere. And as the San Francisco Chronicle notes, Emmi has already demonstrated its fondness for Northern California cheese—it bought Redwood Hill Farm and Creamery last year and Cypress Grove Chevre in 2010. Another European behemoth, Heineken, also bought a bit of Northern California chic when it gulped up a 50 percent stake in craft-beer maker Lagunitas last year.

• A great Sonoma County niche winery gets swallowed by a California-based titan. Full disclosure: I can’t afford to drink them very often, but I love the lean, light, pretty wines of Sonoma County’s Copain, which makes about 20,000 cases per year. I don’t love the big, high-alcohol ones favored by Kendall Family Wines, which are cranked out at the rate of 5.6 million cases annually, from wineries that span the globe from California to Chile to South Africa. So I won’t be toasting this deal (the price of which has not been disclosed.) But I do hope it signals a shift away from the “jammy fruit bomb” style that has dominated the wine world for decades, a stubborn trend ably skewered by Jonathan Nossiter’s excellent 2014 documentary Mondovino.

In all three of these deals, the charismatic founder(s) of the smaller company has vowed to maintain full control of the brand’s quality and vision as it moves forward under the shadow of a conglomerate. Here’s hoping they do.

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Your Favorite Artisanal Food Brand Is Probably Owned by a Huge Company

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Welcome to the New Mother Jones

by HeleneAldridge5 Posted on May 16, 2016

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Forty years ago, operating out of a dingy office above a McDonald’s on San Francisco’s Market Street, a group of writers and editors inspired by Watergate decided to launch the equivalent of a crowd-funded media startup—a spiffy-looking new magazine, devoted to investigative journalism and supported by its readers. From the very first day, Mother Jones has emphasized making in-depth journalism look good, because powerful storytelling shouldn’t feel like homework.

In keeping with that spirit, we’ve decided to celebrate our 40th anniversary with a new design. These days when a magazine overhauls its look, the process normally works something like this: A new editor or creative director walks in, decides whatever came before was crap, hires an outside design firm or three, commissions a custom typeface or maybe 10, gets a team of web designers and app developers to translate that vision to the digital space, and lines up some celebrity buzz, and many, many months later, voilà! A redesign is born.

We did pretty much the opposite. First, except for the inspirational input of Luke Shuman, who helped our brilliant creative director, Ivylise Simones, design our new logo, we did this all in-house. We did it with the resources at hand. We did it in a few all-too-short months, amid our already awesomely hectic jobs. And, though we are over the moon about the new look for both the magazine and the site you are now on, we reverse-engineered the typical process, beginning with article pages on our mobile site and working back up the food chain, as it were, to the home page of MotherJones.com and then on to the print magazine. We did it that way, in part, because for far too long these three “products” looked nothing like each other; they’d each grown uniquely fusty. And we did it that way because every month 9 million people read our journalism—multiple new stories each day—via their desktops, laptops, tablets, and phones.

We wanted to give those 9 million people a better experience; one that was clean, easier on the eyes. We ditched a lot of clutter. Buttons for bygone social networks and services were banished from the page. So were an overwhelming number of links on the home page. We even cut down on the number of ad units per page.

We also wanted to make it easier for you to find our one-of-a-kind coverage about food politics and science and our signature investigative deep-dives. Both now appear on our navigation bar at the top of each page.

A new home page feature, called Exposure, will give you a dose of our commitment to photojournalism (the stunning pictures in our feature on Flint’s toxic water crisis are an excellent example). And for signature stories, we’ll deploy a photographically lush wide format, which will look eye-popping on your laptop and your cellphone.

We are also obsessed with our new favorite color, orange. We’ve used it to make links and other text easier for you to spot. And we are thrilled to be using a new display font called Mallory, from the Frere-Jones Type studio, that, in the words of the designers, “was built to be a reliable tool, readily pairing with other typefaces to organize complex data and fine-tune visual identities.” Our body font is Calluna.

Okay, now back to the “investigative journalism” part. Like most in our trade, we do a lot of things these days. But at the core of what we do, and why you read Mother Jones, is the promise that we’ll rake the muck, that we’ll afflict the comfortable and, as our namesake put it, “fight like hell for the living.” Our dedication to investigative journalism ripped the lid off the Ford Pinto cover-up soon after the magazine launched in 1976, and we exposed Mitt Romney’s “47 percent” remarks during the last election—a story that, though it arguably altered the course of history, notably never took a spin through print.

Today, when a Pandora’s box full of vulgarity, obstructionism, and authoritarianism has been let loose upon the political landscape, when spin has tucked tail in the face of bald-faced lies, when people from every walk of life and every political persuasion feel like the deck has been stacked against them and the dealer is cutting cards to boot, the fight for justice is more important than ever.

We have your back and we hope you have ours. This publication—which might more properly be dubbed a nonprofit, digital-first news organization with a magazine’s secret sauce, if that weren’t such a mouthful—has always relied on reader support. It was readers who pitched in eight years ago when we wanted to expand past a six-times-a-year collection of freelance pieces to become what the PEN American Center recently called “an internationally recognized powerhouse” that often puts “more well-known and deep-pocketed news divisions to shame.” You built this.

We’ve tripled the size of the newsroom and grown our audience twenty­fold, but we’re not done yet. In the coming months we’ll unveil some truly blockbuster investigations as well as our ambitions to be far bigger and better still. We’ll be asking for your help and your input on how to get there. You can read why you should consider joining our community of sustainers here. Let’s fight the good fight, together.

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Welcome to the New Mother Jones

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BinC Watch: Donald Trump Still Has No Idea How Government Debt Works

by Carina76B36539 Posted on May 9, 2016

Mother Jones

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Donald Trump last week:

I’ve borrowed knowing that you can pay back with discounts. I’ve done very well with debt….Now we’re in a different situation with the country, but I would borrow knowing that if the economy crashed, you could make a deal. And if the economy was good it was good, so therefore, you can’t lose.

Donald Trump today:

It was reported in the failing New York Times and other places that I want to default on debt. You know, I’m the king of debt. I understand debt better probably than anybody….But let me just tell you, if there is a chance to buy back debt at a discount, in other words, interest rates up, and the bonds down, and you can buy debt, that’s what I’m talking about.

….But in the United States, with bonds that won’t happen because in theory the market doesn’t go down so that you default on debt and that’s what happened. So here’s the story, just to have it corrected. If we have an opportunity where interest rates go up and you can buy debt back at a discount, I always like to be able to do that, if you can do it. But that’s all I was talking about. They have it like I’m going to go back to creditors, and I am going to renegotiate and restructure debt, it’s ridiculous and they know it’s ridiculous.

I’ll give Trump this much: it was ridiculous and everyone knew it was ridiculous. It was pure Trump bullshittery. But here’s the thing: even if you accept that this was what Trump was talking about, it’s still ridiculous. The US government isn’t a third party trading Treasury bonds. It’s the issuer of the bonds. If interest rates go up, should the Treasury refinance? No: it should keep paying the lower interest rates on its outstanding bonds. But what if interest rates go down? The answer is still no. Let’s hand the mic over to the Economist:

The interest rate on Treasury bonds is fixed. If the government issues debt during a low-rate period, that’s good news. To refinance that debt in a period of higher bond yields i.e., lower bond prices, the government would have to borrow from the market at much higher rates….Currently, most of the US’s longer-term debt trades above par value because it was issued at a time when bond yields were higher. For example there is a bond with a 2030 maturity and a 6.25% coupon; it trades at 152 cents on the dollar. Would it be worth offering 155 cents on the dollar upfront, and refinancing the debt at today’s lower rates? The dollar value of US debt would rise, not fall, in such circumstances.

In short, any voluntary deal with the market would require the government to pay fair value. And unless you think the Treasury bond market is mispriced (and it is the most liquid market on the planet), the government is unlikely to profit. It might be sensible for the government to alter the patterns of new Treasury issuance; borrowing long-term to lock in low rates for a generation. The Treasury has discussed the idea of refinancing illiquid bonds to improve market liquidity. But that is quite a different idea from Mr Trump’s proposal; the interest savings would be trivial.

Here’s the scary thing: debt really is one of the few things that Trump probably knows a bit about. It’s certainly bitten him in the ass often enough. And yet he still has no idea how it works. He continues to think that the federal government is basically the same thing as a trader on the Goldman Sachs trading desk.

It’s not. Whatever Trump is talking about, it won’t work. Sovereign debt is sovereign debt, and it gets paid off at 100 cents on the dollar. Trump may think everyone except Trump is an idiot, but I’m pretty sure the folks at the Fed and the Treasury are already keenly aware of how to handle open market operations to maximize value for the US government. Someone at the Trump Organization needs to clue him in about how all this stuff works.

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BinC Watch: Donald Trump Still Has No Idea How Government Debt Works

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Chart of the Day: Americans Are Pretty Upbeat About the Job Market

by DarleneDon Posted on May 5, 2016

Mother Jones

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How do Americans feel about the economy? Here is Pew Research:

Americans are now more positive about the job opportunities available to them than they have been since the economic meltdown….Today’s more upbeat views rank among some of the best assessments of the job market in Pew Research Center surveys dating back 15 years.

There’s no significant partisan difference in views of the job market. However, older, poorer, and less-educated folks all report less optimism about employment than younger, richer, and better-educated respondents.

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Chart of the Day: Americans Are Pretty Upbeat About the Job Market

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Obamacare’s Competitive Markets Are Starting to Work Pretty Well

by FerdinaKimber Posted on April 27, 2016

Mother Jones

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The decision last week by United Healthcare to drop out of Obamacare got a lot of attention, but the truth is that UH was a pretty small player in the exchanges. What’s more important—but hasn’t gotten much attention—is the fact that more and more Obamacare insurers are getting close to profitability. Richard Mayhew comments:

2014 was a year where there were only guesses about both the Exchange population, the market structure, and federal policy structure (specifically the risk corridor revenue neutrality restrictions. 2015 had a bit more clarity on who was coming into the market, what was working and what was not working, and what federal policy on risk corridors would actually be. 2016 is the first year where the policies are priced on functionally decent real information and some of the amazingly dumb strategic decisions have been unwound through either course changes or through exiting the market.

As a simple reminder, competitive markets should see some companies make money and some companies that offer more expensive and less attractive products lose money. I would be extremely worried if everyone was making money after three years, just like I would be extremely worried that everyone was losing money after three years of increasingly better data.

Obamacare critics have spent a lot of energy trying to pretend that premiums on the exchanges have skyrocketed, but that’s never been true. What is true is that premiums started below projections and have since risen moderately as insurers get a better grasp on their customer base. This is how competitive markets work: players enter the market with prices designed to attract market share; customers pick winners and losers; prices adjust over time; and some companies are successful while others drop out. Eventually you reach a rough equilibrium, which we’re getting close to with Obamacare.

It’s ironic (or something) that the problems conservatives are making such a fuss about are the result of precisely what they say they want: competitive insurance markets. Apparently Obamacare has produced a little more competition than they’re comfortable with.

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Obamacare’s Competitive Markets Are Starting to Work Pretty Well

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Conservatives Just Lost a Big Weapon Against the Abortion Pill

by JimmyVRJYun Posted on March 30, 2016

Mother Jones

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The US Food and Drug Administration announced Wednesday morning that it had approved updated information for physicians about mifepristone, the drug known as the “abortion pill.” The move is a notable one in debates surrounding reproductive health: Research has consistently shown that the previous FDA regulations for the drug were outdated and ineffective, and anti-abortion lawmakers have long been using that to their advantage by requiring doctors to adhere to the original FDA labeling.

The new labels will list the recommended dosage to be taken as 200 milligrams; the previous dosage was 600. Medical groups such as the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists have been recommending that mifepristone be taken at lower dosage for years, because the lower dosage is more effective when used with a higher dosage of a second medication, misoprostol, which causes the uterus to contract. The lower dosage of mifepristone is less expensive for patients, and comes with fewer side effects. Patients can also take the pill up to 70 days after their last period, as opposed to the original 49 days.

As previously reported in Mother Jones, a 1998 study in the New England Journal of Medicine found that the original FDA regimen failed by the ninth week of pregnancy for one in four women (out of a sample size of 2,100). The abortions were either incomplete or the women were still pregnant. Although the outdated FDA labeling was never unsafe per se, 99 percent of women in the study experienced some negative side effect: nausea, cramps, faintness, vomiting, back pain, and fever.

The label update is a long time coming—the drug was first approved in 2000, and its labeling came from restrictions that were set in France in the 1980s. Anti-abortion groups and conservative lawmakers have used the outdated FDA regimen to restrict access to what abortion providers hail as a safe and simple method for women throughout the country. Arizona, Arkansas, Ohio, Oklahoma, and Texas all have laws requiring providers to adhere to the FDA labeling established when the pill first went on the market. Doctors in other states commonly practice “evidence-based” or “off-label” prescribing, meaning they use methods developed by physicians over time after a drug has been put on the market.

According to Molly Redden at The Guardian, the changes could also come into play in state law.

“But in addition to providing clearer guidance to doctors, the change could have the effect of undermining several state laws, supported by abortion foes, that force clinicians to administer mifepristone according to the old regimen that the FDA approved in 2000. The old protocols called for patients to make up to three separate trips to a clinic—one for the dose of mifepristone, one for the dose of misoprostol, and one for a follow-up—rather than a minimum of one, for the mifepristone, in addition to specifying the different levels of medication.”

The American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists released a statement in support of the new labeling, but warned that “there is still work to be done in updating the mifepristone label to reflect the current evidence.”

“For example, while the agency notes rare cases of fatal infections, it is important to note that no specific connection exists between medication abortion and these infections, which can also occur with other obstetric and gynecologic processes and procedures,” the statement reads. “The mortality rate associated with medication abortion continues to be lower than the mortality rate associated with childbirth.”

NARAL also issued a statement, saying the changes “will go a long way towards allowing women to make their own decisions about
their health care, and their futures.”

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Conservatives Just Lost a Big Weapon Against the Abortion Pill

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Apple says you can “feel really good” about buying its products. Don’t believe them.

by Brook30Mlem Posted on March 22, 2016

Apple says you can “feel really good” about buying its products. Don’t believe them.

By on 22 Mar 2016 3:24 pmcommentsShare

Lisa Jackson, Apple’s VP of environment, policy, and social initiatives, took to the stage at a press event Monday to discuss the company’s new environmental commitments. And from what Jackson, an ex-Environmental Protection Agency administrator, said, Apple’s doing pretty damn well. The details:

93 percent of Apple operations worldwide are powered by renewable energy
In 23 countries, including the United States and China, operations run on 100 percent renewables
99 percent of Apple packaging is recycled or sourced from sustainably managed forests
Apple is funding the preservation of a million acres of forest in China and 35,000 acres in the eastern U.S.

According to Jackson, this means that “every time you send an iMessage or make a FaceTime video call or ask Siri a question, you can feel really good about reducing your impact on the environment.” You can almost hear Steve Jobs patting himself on the back from the great Apple Store in the sky on the brand going green. But how much good is Apple really doing? Sure, 93 percent renewables is about 93 percent better than most giant corporations, but Apple puts a whole lot of crap into the world that we don’t really need. It’s called planned obsolescence, and it means that the constant release of new products makes your iPhone seem as unwieldy and slow-moving as a landline after a couple of years.

That’s the real problem here: It doesn’t matter how much Apple recycles or how many acres they save if they keep dumping new products into the market, as Andrew Freedman wrote for Mashable, “By constantly rolling out new products and encouraging consumers to trade in their not-so-old phones for new, upgraded ones, Apple is contributing to a consumerism that may be difficult to ever neutralize from a carbon standpoint.” Apple may construct their products in factories powered by the sun, as Freedman points out, what happens from there is hardly green: They ship these products from factories in China on planes and charged in places where coal powers the grid.

And the customer may use the phone for a shorter period of time than they might have used it otherwise. The company is promoting Apple Renew, a recycling program that lets you exchange your old device for an Apple gift card, but 70 percent of e-waste is likely to end up in landfills, anyway.

Apple events like the one on Monday convince many people that they have to be early adopters and get the latest and greatest gadget on the market. Clearly, the problem isn’t just Apple: It’s also us. We want the iPhone 10, we want the sharpest cameras and the newest apps and the phone that pets your head and holds your hand in the night. But we do need it? Hardly. In fact, research shows that consumerism actually makes us less happy, not more.

What you can feel good about is deciding to not upgrade your phone.

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Apple says you can “feel really good” about buying its products. Don’t believe them.

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How to Throw an Eco-Friendly Party

by GemmaGale929 Posted on December 26, 2015

We love throwing down as much as the next guy, but aside from the occasionalhangoverthe morning after, whatreallyhurts is seeing the amount of waste generated from a singleawesome night.

Dont get us wrongthe memories of a great party are worth the effort we put into throwing it, but plain and simple, we can do better when it comes to greening our events. Every year, Americans throw away 21.5 million tons of food and dispose of enough paper and plastic serveware tocircle the Equator 300 times.

Throwing a party that’s less wasteful and more earth-friendly is pretty simplethese five tips will get you started.

Skip paper invites, save trees

First, theres a guest list to deal with. Paper invites are the very first thing to cut out when it comes to trimming the environmental impact of an event. In 2012, Americans threw away24.4 million tons of paperthat could beas many as 585 million trees.

Know whats classier than snail mailing paper invites? Calling up each and every guest to invite them personally. Then, send those who are available the details via email. If aesthetics areimportant to you, design a graphic for the email or usePaperless Post. Online invitescan also make it a little easier to connect guests with each other to set up carpoolsfeel free to encourage that.

If physical invitations are still a must, be sure to use post-consumer recycled paper, which helps keep used paper items out of landfills.

Use all-natural decorations

Decorating with plants is a lot prettier than using plastic accessories and other manufactured materials. Shop for flowers from the local farmers market to make sure youre getting the best seasonal options. Bunches of perennialred river liliesare a lovely alternative to poinsettias.Hellebores, also known as the Christmas roses, are beautiful for a white Christmas.Calendulasand tulips also start to bloom in December.

For an even smarter centerpiece, try potted succulents and herbs. Succulentslast long andrequire very little water, and they’re just asshow-stopping as traditional bouquets. Fresh herbs add a nice dimension of scents to the table, and can be used during a meal and post-party for future dinners. Both of these green options also make greatparty favors for guests.

As for lightingan essential aspect of the party moodkeep the switches off and opt for the amber glow of candles instead. Just be sure to choose beeswax candles (or make your own) instead of conventional wax ones, which are made from petroleum-derived paraffin.

Get creative with DIY hanging lanterns by tightly tying wire or string to the rims of small jars (underneath the notch where the cap stops in order to keep the jar from slipping out). Strew the strands wherever you want ambiance, drop a beeswax tea light into each jar, and light them.

Mind the dinnerware

Of course, the greenest way to go if this is a dinner party is to stick with your regular dishes, flatware, and glasses. Hitting up the thrift store to look for mismatched plates can add an eclectic vibe to the table. Invest in some nice cloth napkins to cut paper waste.

Expecting this party to be a big rager? Then reusable dinnerware might not be the practical way to gobut disposables dont have to be a complete waste.Sustainable, compostable plates, cups, and utensilsare a more earth-friendly choice.

Source food locally

Now to the most important element of any party: food!Finger foodscan help minimize flatware use. (Seriously, who doesnt love eating with their hands, anyway?)

Putting together a killer cheese plate? Imported camembert from Normandy is not the most eco-friendly choice. Go withartisan cheese from a local farmandshop locally as much as possible for any food that will be featured at your fete.

Serve seasonal, sustainable drinks

Hold up, we lied. The drinks are pretty crucial to a party, too. Create a seasonal cocktail using in-season fruit (winter options include cherimoya, grapefruit, kiwi, or pomegranate). Not into being a cocktail chemist? Olives are in season in December, too, so shake up an old standby: the dirty martini.

As far as beer and wine, going local should be pretty easy, sinceevery single state in the U.S. produces wineandhas multiple craft beer breweriesthese days. Pretty cool, huh? Whenever possible, select organic and biodynamic winesthoseproduced at vineyards that focus on every aspect of sustainability, from soil to the surrounding flora and fauna. For an added charm, use real fresh fruit slices as bottle stoppers.

In the end, going green doesnt requirea complete overhaul of your party prep. Even followingjust a few of these tips can go a long way towarda greener, healthier world this holiday.

byDana PobleteforThrive Market

More from Thrive Market:
Make Home Smell Like Christmas: 8 Natural DIY Tricks
Hot Cocoa Will Never Be the Same Once You Try These Chocolate Dipped Spoons
Sweet Orange and Aromatic Cardamom Add Wintry Flavor to Madeleines

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are solely those of the author and may not reflect those of Care2, Inc., its employees or advertisers.

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How to Throw an Eco-Friendly Party

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