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Trump’s plan to swap food stamps for Blue Apron–style meals is seriously the worst.

by LisaXfc543 Posted on February 13, 2018

Here’s how humanity could all but ensure its own demise: Dig up all the coal we have left and burn it, warming the planet 4 to 6 degrees C.

But that worst-case scenario doesn’t match up with what’s really happening in the world, Justin Ritchie, lead author of a new study published in Environmental Research Letters, told Grist.

That’s because money spent on climate change measures goes further than it did 30 years ago. Plus, baseline trends show greenhouse gas emissions are on the decline. Most studies underestimate the effect these factors have on global decarbonization.

The study indicates that the goals outlined in the Paris Agreement are more achievable than previously projected — but that’s not to say humanity isn’t in deep trouble.

It’s not “4 to 6 degrees bad,” Ritchie says. “It’s 3 degrees bad. You can’t say we don’t have to worry about implementing policies, we do. But it’s not going to reach the truly catastrophic scenarios.”

Another recent study published in the same journal shows that if all the coal plants currently planned actually get built, humanity could blow past the Paris goal of limiting warming to 2 degree C above pre-industrial levels.

Ritchie said his research doesn’t counteract that finding. “There’s a whole range of scenarios that can occur,” he says. “What our paper is trying to do is look at that whole range and how can we design policies that are more robust.”

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Trump’s plan to swap food stamps for Blue Apron–style meals is seriously the worst.

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Harvey stirs up the way we feed people during disasters

by LatiaEmbry7 Posted on September 1, 2017

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

Each hurricane season, Brian Greene calls in reinforcements in the form of tractor-trailers. Long before a particular system is swirling on the horizon, Greene, the president and CEO of the Houston Food Bank, dispatches 40-plus hauls of disaster-relief supplies to local shelters so each outfit will have a stockpile of water, granola bars, and cleaning supplies. The idea is to get out ahead of any storm, and then hunker down. “That’s our normal plan,” Greene says. “And it looked pretty good.” But Tropical Storm Harvey wasn’t normal.

Under normal circumstances, hurricanes don’t hold steady overhead. “They’re not supposed to do that. They go 15 or 20 miles an hour. They hit you and move on and then you assess and then begin the follow-up work,” Greene says. But Harvey continued to assail the city for days, throwing a wrench in the food bank’s plans.

In a normal catastrophe — to the extent that any crisis is normal — “you’ve got maybe a 24-hour period where you’re shut down,” Greene says. In this case, the food bank was snarled for days — not because it had flooded, but because nearby roads had turned to rivers with white-capped waves. With the paved arteries clogged by churning water, supplies had to stay where they were.

On Tuesday, for instance, Celia Cole’s hands were tied. As the CEO of Feeding Texas, Cole was fielding calls from places that had run down their supplies. An assisted-living facility reached out: They were swamped by floodwaters and the patients and staff were out of food. Not even the largest vehicles on hand could make it through the water, Cole says. “It’s awful to say, ‘I’m sorry, I can’t help you.’”

Seven of the 21 food banks in the Feeding Texas network were affected by the storm. By Wednesday, water had begun to recede in some areas, and people began streaming to local food banks and pantries. But the work was just beginning.

The immediate aftermath of a storm is often much-publicized and scored with desperation: Picture cameras panning across grocery stores with bare shelves and glass doors fastened shut against the rain; shivering crowds and interminable lines snaking across a parking lot pitted with puddles. In these tellings, a storm’s consequences are like broken bones — clean, complete, emergent. The Washington Post reported that some stores were looking to turn a quick buck on the trauma, gouging prices on basic necessities like water, which was selling for as much as $8.50 a bottle. But across the food system, the impacts may be more like hairline fractures, partial and enduring.

That’s because the busiest time for disaster relief isn’t while winds are howling and rain is pelting down in sheets, Greene says. It’s after. And that’s also when donations might slow from a stream to a trickle, and when the landscape of need is murkiest.

The problem is, in the past, cities’ resilience plans haven’t considered the food system. That’s starting to change, Erin Biehl, the senior program coordinator in the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future’s Food System Sustainability & Public Health program, told me earlier this month. Biehl is the lead author of a new report that surveys the blueprints various cities have laid out to respond to disasters that could shock all aspects of the food system, from warehouses to packaging facilities and bodegas. Now and for the foreseeable future, Houston will be reckoning with the very conditions Biehl and her collaborators outlined.

One of the primary takeaways from the CLF report is the paramount importance of connected networks. In the wake of disasters, the first major food hurdle is “figuring out who’s got what and who needs what,” says Roni Neff, the director of the CLF’s Food System Sustainability & Public Health research program. Greene experienced that challenge while working at food banks in New Orleans when Katrina swept through. “One of the most frustrating parts was how communication utterly, utterly broke down,” he says. Drenched landlines were unreliable, and cell towers were finicky. “It took weeks before we even found our staff,” Greene adds.

Now, in Houston, the team has outsourced and centralized contact information and plans at the state level, and stored it on the cloud. They leverage extensive communication networks to stay in touch with 600 partner organizations, including churches and community centers. “Everything we do is a collaboration,” Greene says. “Everything.” Feeding Texas also has a disaster coordinator on staff, who works out of the state’s department of emergency management.

In Houston, trucks are arriving from all over the state, and from others, too. “North Texas is already sending aid to shelters and at the conference center in Houston. Those were all part of a very coordinated network and everybody is standing by to respond,” Cole says. Corporations are pitching in to boost supply. Greene says Kellogg’s is dedicating 125 truckloads of cereal to the relief squad.

The Houston Press and Chronicle maintained running lists of restaurants and stores that were creaking open their doors amid the risk of flooding, or mobilizing as hubs of relief efforts. Some served free meals to first responders; others solicited donations of blankets, diapers, baby formula, and single-serving, packaged snacks and ferried them to the George R. Brown Convention Center, which is sheltering residents displaced from their homes.

Many families will have long-term needs, too. The melee delayed the start of the school year — and, by extension, the meals that students would have received in the cafeteria. Submerged businesses may be closed for weeks or months, slashing the paychecks of workers who earn hourly wages. In turn, their food budgets may be precariously slim. “If you’re on the margin and you just lost a quarter of the month’s income, you’re in trouble,” Greene notes. Staring down crumbling walls and blooming mold, it’s hard to decide how to allocate thin resources. People will struggle for a toehold as they repair their lives. “We’re anticipating what’s going to be sort of like a refugee crisis once people are actually able to get out of Houston,” Cole says.

On the policy side, one intervention is a temporary stretching of SNAP benefits. In anticipation of the deluge, the Texas Health and Human Services Commission put in a statewide waiver request on Aug. 26. Through Sept. 30, SNAP benefits can be used toward hot, ready-to-eat food items that are usually exempted from the program. The change may be a lifeline in Galveston. The island city was lashed with more than 22 inches of rain, and 37,371 of its residents received SNAP benefits in 2011. In the event that the food system is still shaken a month from now, a USDA official says the department will consider extending the waiver upon request from the state.

Neff wonders whether some repercussions might be even more wide-ranging. Reports of drowned fields and escaped livestock raised questions about the effects on farmers and the meat industry. With some refineries flooded or otherwise damaged, Neff says, fuel prices might rise, cutting into grocery stores’ margins and perhaps leading to mark-ups for consumers.

That all remains to be seen. The next challenge is scaling up, and doing so accurately. Outside of storm season, the Houston Food Bank moves about 350,000 pounds of food a day, six days a week. That number balloons when the bank springs into crisis mode. After Hurricane Ike struck, the food bank shuttled 500,000 pounds a day. This time around, “we just say, ‘OK, this is a lot bigger. Call it a million,’” Greene says. From there, the food bank has to tinker with its regular operations. How many additional forklifts do they need? How many more trucks?

It’s difficult to anticipate the magnitude of a storm — and what will be required to respond to it — before it’s baring its teeth. From a distance, Greene says, it’s tricky to imagine what damage might follow. Afterward, even from the ground, it’s hard to deduce a precise need from a quick survey of wreckage. “We won’t really know how this will pan out until it’s over,” Greene says.

So the best estimate is just that — but, ideally, a generous one. “There’s a big Katrina lesson. Whatever you do, do not fail people now when they need you most,” he adds. “So if you overshoot, you deal with the consequences of that — but the consequences of undershooting are far worse.”

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Harvey stirs up the way we feed people during disasters

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Harvey is changing the way we feed people during disasters

by JungCurtin5 Posted on September 1, 2017

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

Each hurricane season, Brian Greene calls in reinforcements in the form of tractor-trailers. Long before a particular system is swirling on the horizon, Greene, the president and CEO of the Houston Food Bank, dispatches 40-plus hauls of disaster-relief supplies to local shelters so each outfit will have a stockpile of water, granola bars, and cleaning supplies. The idea is to get out ahead of any storm, and then hunker down. “That’s our normal plan,” Greene says. “And it looked pretty good.” But Tropical Storm Harvey wasn’t normal.

Under normal circumstances, hurricanes don’t hold steady overhead. “They’re not supposed to do that. They go 15 or 20 miles an hour. They hit you and move on and then you assess and then begin the follow-up work,” Greene says. But Harvey continued to assail the city for days, throwing a wrench in the food bank’s plans.

In a normal catastrophe — to the extent that any crisis is normal — “you’ve got maybe a 24-hour period where you’re shut down,” Greene says. In this case, the food bank was snarled for days — not because it had flooded, but because nearby roads had turned to rivers with white-capped waves. With the paved arteries clogged by churning water, supplies had to stay where they were.

On Tuesday, for instance, Celia Cole’s hands were tied. As the CEO of Feeding Texas, Cole was fielding calls from places that had run down their supplies. An assisted-living facility reached out: They were swamped by floodwaters and the patients and staff were out of food. Not even the largest vehicles on hand could make it through the water, Cole says. “It’s awful to say, ‘I’m sorry, I can’t help you.’”

Seven of the 21 food banks in the Feeding Texas network were affected by the storm. By Wednesday, water had begun to recede in some areas, and people began streaming to local food banks and pantries. But the work was just beginning.

The immediate aftermath of a storm is often much-publicized and scored with desperation: Picture cameras panning across grocery stores with bare shelves and glass doors fastened shut against the rain; shivering crowds and interminable lines snaking across a parking lot pitted with puddles. In these tellings, a storm’s consequences are like broken bones — clean, complete, emergent. The Washington Post reported that some stores were looking to turn a quick buck on the trauma, gouging prices on basic necessities like water, which was selling for as much as $8.50 a bottle. But across the food system, the impacts may be more like hairline fractures, partial and enduring.

That’s because the busiest time for disaster relief isn’t while winds are howling and rain is pelting down in sheets, Greene says. It’s after. And that’s also when donations might slow from a stream to a trickle, and when the landscape of need is murkiest.

The problem is, in the past, cities’ resilience plans haven’t considered the food system. That’s starting to change, Erin Biehl, the senior program coordinator in the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future’s Food System Sustainability & Public Health program, told me earlier this month. Biehl is the lead author of a new report that surveys the blueprints various cities have laid out to respond to disasters that could shock all aspects of the food system, from warehouses to packaging facilities and bodegas. Now and for the foreseeable future, Houston will be reckoning with the very conditions Biehl and her collaborators outlined.

One of the primary takeaways from the CLF report is the paramount importance of connected networks. In the wake of disasters, the first major food hurdle is “figuring out who’s got what and who needs what,” says Roni Neff, the director of the CLF’s Food System Sustainability & Public Health research program. Greene experienced that challenge while working at food banks in New Orleans when Katrina swept through. “One of the most frustrating parts was how communication utterly, utterly broke down,” he says. Drenched landlines were unreliable, and cell towers were finicky. “It took weeks before we even found our staff,” Greene adds.

Now, in Houston, the team has outsourced and centralized contact information and plans at the state level, and stored it on the cloud. They leverage extensive communication networks to stay in touch with 600 partner organizations, including churches and community centers. “Everything we do is a collaboration,” Greene says. “Everything.” Feeding Texas also has a disaster coordinator on staff, who works out of the state’s department of emergency management.

In Houston, trucks are arriving from all over the state, and from others, too. “North Texas is already sending aid to shelters and at the conference center in Houston. Those were all part of a very coordinated network and everybody is standing by to respond,” Cole says. Corporations are pitching in to boost supply. Greene says Kellogg’s is dedicating 125 truckloads of cereal to the relief squad.

The Houston Press and Chronicle maintained running lists of restaurants and stores that were creaking open their doors amid the risk of flooding, or mobilizing as hubs of relief efforts. Some served free meals to first responders; others solicited donations of blankets, diapers, baby formula, and single-serving, packaged snacks and ferried them to the George R. Brown Convention Center, which is sheltering residents displaced from their homes.

Many families will have long-term needs, too. The melee delayed the start of the school year — and, by extension, the meals that students would have received in the cafeteria. Submerged businesses may be closed for weeks or months, slashing the paychecks of workers who earn hourly wages. In turn, their food budgets may be precariously slim. “If you’re on the margin and you just lost a quarter of the month’s income, you’re in trouble,” Greene notes. Staring down crumbling walls and blooming mold, it’s hard to decide how to allocate thin resources. People will struggle for a toehold as they repair their lives. “We’re anticipating what’s going to be sort of like a refugee crisis once people are actually able to get out of Houston,” Cole says.

On the policy side, one intervention is a temporary stretching of SNAP benefits. In anticipation of the deluge, the Texas Health and Human Services Commission put in a statewide waiver request on Aug. 26. Through Sept. 30, SNAP benefits can be used toward hot, ready-to-eat food items that are usually exempted from the program. The change may be a lifeline in Galveston. The island city was lashed with more than 22 inches of rain, and 37,371 of its residents received SNAP benefits in 2011. In the event that the food system is still shaken a month from now, a USDA official says the department will consider extending the waiver upon request from the state.

Neff wonders whether some repercussions might be even more wide-ranging. Reports of drowned fields and escaped livestock raised questions about the effects on farmers and the meat industry. With some refineries flooded or otherwise damaged, Neff says, fuel prices might rise, cutting into grocery stores’ margins and perhaps leading to mark-ups for consumers.

That all remains to be seen. The next challenge is scaling up, and doing so accurately. Outside of storm season, the Houston Food Bank moves about 350,000 pounds of food a day, six days a week. That number balloons when the bank springs into crisis mode. After Hurricane Ike struck, the food bank shuttled 500,000 pounds a day. This time around, “we just say, ‘OK, this is a lot bigger. Call it a million,’” Greene says. From there, the food bank has to tinker with its regular operations. How many additional forklifts do they need? How many more trucks?

It’s difficult to anticipate the magnitude of a storm — and what will be required to respond to it — before it’s baring its teeth. From a distance, Greene says, it’s tricky to imagine what damage might follow. Afterward, even from the ground, it’s hard to deduce a precise need from a quick survey of wreckage. “We won’t really know how this will pan out until it’s over,” Greene says.

So the best estimate is just that — but, ideally, a generous one. “There’s a big Katrina lesson. Whatever you do, do not fail people now when they need you most,” he adds. “So if you overshoot, you deal with the consequences of that — but the consequences of undershooting are far worse.”

More here:  

Harvey is changing the way we feed people during disasters

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It’s Time to Stop Shaming Poor People for What They Buy With Food Stamps

by Selina56N8452582 Posted on January 18, 2017

Mother Jones

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

Poor people who receive government food aid use it to load up on Coke. Or so The New York Times suggests. Under an image of a shopping cart stuffed with half-gallon jugs of soda, The Times’ Anahad O’Connor writes in a widely shared recent piece that the “No. 1 purchases by SNAP households are soft drinks.” SNAP refers to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly known food stamps. By contrast, he writes, among non-SNAP households, “soft drinks ranked second on the list of food purchases, behind milk.”

SNAP is an important program in a society with a 13.5 percent poverty rate and growing inequality. According to a 2015 report from the White House Council of Economic Advisers the “large majority of households receiving SNAP include children, senior citizens, individuals with disabilities, and working adults,” and “two-thirds of SNAP benefits go to households with children.” Here’s more:

SNAP benefits lifted at least 4.7 million people out of poverty in 2014—including 2.1 million children. SNAP also lifted more than 1.3 million children out of deep poverty, or above half of the poverty line (for example, $11,925 for a family of four)

Unfortunately, as University of Minnesota public affairs professor Joe Soss argues on Jacobin, the O’Connor article presents a skewed picture of poor people engaging in tax-payer financed bad behavior. “The poors! They’re behaving badly! And government handouts paid for with your tax dollars are to blame,” Soss writes. Such an attitude about the safety net neatly mimics the ideology now ascendant in the GOP-controlled Congress, perfectly encapsulated by this infamous 2014 National Review article, “White Ghetto,” which depicts SNAP recipients using their benefits to buy soda by the case load and then trading it for cash, drugs, and even sex.

In that context, Soss is right to characterize the Times piece as a “political hack job against a program that helps millions of Americans feed themselves, and we should all be outraged that the New York Times has disguised it as a piece of factual news reporting on its front page.” I’m sympathetic to Soss’ view—I made a similar argument in this 2015 piece on SNAP.

Indeed, the O’Connor piece is based on this recent US Department of Agriculture study comparing the grocery purchases of SNAP and non-SNAP shoppers, tracked at a a “leading grocery retailer” over 2011. Its conclusions are quite different than those trumpeted by O’Connor. The report found that “There were no major differences in the expenditure patterns of SNAP and non-SNAP households, no matter how the data were categorized.” That conclusion comes on the heels of a 2014 USDA study finding that SNAP participants are no more likely to consumer sugary beverages than their non-SNAP peers.

As for O’Connor’s factoid about how SNAP households spend more on soft drinks than milk—while the opposite is true for non-SNAP household—that’s true, but the differences are tiny, the new USDA report shows. While SNAP shoppers devoted 5.44 percent of their expenditures to soft drinks, vs. 3.85 percent to milk, non-SNAPers divided their spending share on the products roughly equally: 4.01 percent on soda vs. 4.03 percent on milk. For a $100 trip to the supermarket, in other words, non-SNAP recipients allocated on average 18 cents more on milk than their non-SNAP peers. And they allocate just two cents more to milk than they do to soda.

O’Connor does acknowledge that SNAP-subsidized poor people aren’t making uniquely bad choices at the supermarket—but he buries that fact. In paragraph three, we get the dodgy soda-milk comparison. It isn’t until way down in paragraph seven that he hints at the USDA researchers’ “no major difference” conclusion.

Beyond the implicit poor-shaming—unfortunate, given that Speaker of the House Paul Ryan now has a GOP president in place to sign SNAP-cutting budget bills—the Times piece also muddies a legitimate debate about what sort of diets should be subsidized by food aid. The experts quoted by O’Connor, including New York University researcher Marion Nestle and the food industry critic Michele Simon, want the USDA to ban soda and other junk food from SNAP expenditures. On the other side, according to O’Connor, stands the soda industry, which lobbies against such limits.

But as Parke Wilde, an economist at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University, notes, the debate is more complicated than that:

One would think from the NYT article that all the good folks favor the restrictions, and all the bad folks oppose. O’Connor didn’t say that the list of supporters for such proposals also includes conservative critics of SNAP, who sometimes include such proposals in an agenda that also has budget cuts, nor that the list of opponents includes anti-hunger organizations, who are concerned that the proposals would increase program stigma and food insecurity by discouraging participation among eligible people.

Wilde argues that soda restrictions in SNAP are worth considering—not in a knee-jerk way, but rather after seeing what happens in a carefully constructed pilot project. If the results suggest that soda restrictions end up reducing the quality of participants’ diets by driving them out of the SNAP program, the idea should be scrapped, he says. And if it results in people making healthier purchases, then restrictions make sense—especially if packaged with incentives to buy more vegetables and fruit. (Early evidence suggests that soda taxes, another policy tool for improving diets, might be effective as well.)

Such a dispassionate approach is difficult, he suggests, because of the “poisoned partisan struggle” over whether a robust safety net is worth having at all. And O’Connor’s piece, I fear, added more heat than light to the debate.

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It’s Time to Stop Shaming Poor People for What They Buy With Food Stamps

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Fox News Screws Up Its Latest Lie

by CarmaDickson Posted on December 28, 2016

Mother Jones

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

This post starts out in an all-too-familiar way: with a Fox News headline. Here it is:

Food Stamp Fraud at All-Time High: Is It Time to End the Program?

Now, the obvious response to this is twofold. First, they’re just lying, aren’t they? And second, this is like a headline that says, “Traffic Deaths at All-Time High: Should We Ban Cars?”

But at this point the story takes a strange turn. First, I have no idea where Fox’s $70 million figure comes from—and I looked pretty hard for it. The Fox graphic attributes it to “2016 USDA,” but as near as I can tell the USDA has no numbers for SNAP fraud more recent than 2011.1

But that’s not all: $70 million is a startlingly low figure. In the most recent fiscal year, SNAP cost $71 billion, which means that fraud accounted for a minuscule 0.098 percent of the program budget. Even if this is an all-time high, the Fox high command can’t believe this is anything but a spectacular bureaucratic success.

And it would be, if it were true. But it’s not. If you look at inaccurate SNAP payments to states, the error rate since 2005 has decreased from 6 percent of the budget to less than 4 percent. However, this isn’t fraud anyway: It’s just an error rate, and most of the errors are eventually corrected. SNAP “trafficking”—exchanging SNAP benefits for cash—is fraud, but it’s been declining steadily too, from 3.8 percent in 1993 to 1.3 percent in 2011 (the most recent year for which we have records):

So in any normal sense, the Fox story was a lie. SNAP fraud isn’t at an all-time high. It’s been declining for years. But here’s the thing: The fraud rate in 2011 may have been low, but this was in the aftermath of the Great Recession, when total SNAP payments were very high. So although the percentage is low, the dollar value of fraud clocked in at $988 million. Fox could have used this far higher number, which is, in fact, an all-time high. It’s only an all-time high because SNAP was helping far more people, but still. In the Fox newsroom, that would hardly matter.

Bottom line: Yes, Fox is lying in any ordinary sense of the word. But they’re also vastly understating the amount of SNAP fraud. Even when they’re trying to deceive their audience, it turns out, they’re also incompetent.

1SNAP = Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program = food stamps.

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Fox News Screws Up Its Latest Lie

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Is Zero Waste Just for the Young and Affluent?

by RosettaMaas2622 Posted on July 11, 2016

Many online commenters complain about the fact that Zero Waste blogs tend to be run by primarily young, affluent females who have the time and money to run around town, visiting numerous stores in order to source their favorite local, organic ingredients in fancy glass jars and stainless containers, before heading home to DIY everything from bread and yogurt to toothpaste and body wash. (I realize I, too, am guilty of giving this impression.)

For many, Zero Waste has become synonymous with privilege and wealth because there is so little online discussion about how people who donotfit those categories can possibly attain Zero Waste standards. This is hardly fair.

Just because someone has very little money or lives with disabilities doesnt mean they dont care about the environment, nor have the willpower and desire to implement waste reduction in their personal lives. More bloggers should be asking, “How does Zero Waste benefit people with disabilities and low incomes? Is it even realistic for those with limited physical access and tight budgets?”

Ariana Schwarz addresses this topic in an excellent article called Is Zero Waste Unfair to People with Low Incomes or Disabilities? Schwarz believes that Zero Waste is not ableist or discriminatory toward the poor. In fact, it provides great opportunities to improve quality of life.

Take packaging, for example.So often we think of single-used packaging as convenient, and yetlesspackaging is typically more accessible. Imagine opening plastic blister packs, Tetrapaks, and Tupperware or other food storage containers, with their one-handed peel motion; twisting up deodorant tubes and toothpaste lids; and opening rigid plastic packaging (such as the type toothbrushes come in) or Ziplocs while suffering from arthritis or ALS. Compare that to cotton mesh drawstring bags, wide-mouth Mason jars, and flip- or swing-top glass bottles, where access is easier overall.

In terms of cost, Zero Waste can save precious money.Investing in reusables that require an initial investment can save significant amounts of money down the road, i.e. cloth diapers, a menstrual cup, safety razors, etc. Buying in bulk quantities reduces cost and the number of shopping trips. Many bulk stores have low-positioned bins with lids that are easier to open and access from a wheelchair than reaching the tops of supermarket shelves.

Having tight budgets encourages people to grow their own food in abandoned or under-utilized spaces to save packaging and cost. There are many farmers markets in the U.S. that accept SNAP cards and food stamps; in Georgia, aspecial programeven doubles SNAP at markets.

Health can improve through implementation of Zero Waste practices. One commenter on Schwarzs blog wrote:

Zero waste has been a savior in cost and mental peace of mind. My apartment building is falling apart and the carpet full of allergens, but cleaning with vinegar, baking soda, and soap have gone a long way for my health and wallet (cloth towels instead of paper help too). Our allergies are much improved. We’re hoping to get a bidet soon; there’s one on Amazon for barely more than a jumbo pack of toilet paper. Same for being mostly vegan life is much improved and costs are way down.

Keep in mind that embracing small challenges, such as saying no to single-use plastic containers, utensils, and grocery bags, sends a powerful message to whomever has offered it to you, regardless of physical or financial challenges, and its important not to underestimate that power.

Zero Waste practices can benefit everyone, but responsibility does lie with those who do not struggle with barriers to accessibility to push this lifestyle more into the mainstream and make it even easier for everyone to participate.

Schwarz writes: Could you volunteer to collect food that would otherwise go to waste and redistribute them to the needy? Petition local shops for more accessible bulk bins? Or assist handicapped or elderly persons in your community with the grocery shopping?

What are your experiences with Zero Waste living? Do you live with a disability or on a low income that makes it difficult to implement environmental practices? Please share any thoughts in the comments below.

Written by Katherine Martinko. Reposted with permission from TreeHugger.

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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Is Zero Waste Just for the Young and Affluent?

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Elenco Snap Circuits Green – Alternative Energy Kit

by Myrna Posted on August 16, 2013

[amzn_product_post]

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