Eco & Energy

Patagonia i s an enigma.       It's founder, Yvon Choinard is a legend in so many ways. Patagonia was one of the first mainstream companies to be certified Cradle-to-Cradle .  Their Ventura based manufacturing plant is legendary for its surfer and laid-back culture. How does a $1billion company act like a small company?  How does it continue to outperform its competitors?  How does it do more for the environment and real sustainability than most other $1b c ompanies?  Read this Fast Company interview with it's founder and CEO:  ' Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard talks about the sustainability myth, the problem with Amazon—and why it’s not too late to save the planet '   https://www.fastcompany.com/90411397/exclusive-patagonia-founder-yvon-chouinard-talks-about-the-sustainability-myth-the-problem-with-amazon-and-why-its-not-too-late-to-save-the-planet here's one excerpt from  Yvon Chouinard: ' Ultimately, capitalism is going t...

There is no such thing as recycling.     The pop media and consumers are slowly (very! slowly) waking up to this reality.  I first posted that statement in 2005 after my internship with Dr. Michael Braungart at his EPEA office in Hamburg.  Only steel and nylon66 can be truly 'recycled', everything else is down-cycled.   That milk container, water bottle, plastic straw, etc. that you throw in the recyle bin ends up (if you're lucky) being turned into repurposed products such as plastic wood, plastic whatever - but at a HUGE expense.  It's cheaper to make a new plastic bottle than to make one out of recycled bottles. Hence, you'll continue to see a six pack of plastic water bottles selling for $1.  yikes!   And now comes an undercover report of Asian plastic recycling operations that show the reality of this 'recycling' process.   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8aVYb-a7Uw&t=646s Marketplace jour...

We’re excited to report that Earth Overshoot Day enjoyed yet another very strong following around the world this year. We have tracked over 5100 media stories in 86 countries. Many reacted, including Austria’s President Van Bellen who  tweeted about it . So did young Swedish climate change activist Greta Thunberg, prompting  10.5k people  to engage. Chile’s Minister of Environment and chair of the Climate COP25, María Carolina Schmidt Zaldívar, stated that “with Earth Overshoot Day occurring ever earlier in the year, the importance of decisive action is becoming ever more evident.” We also couldn’t agree more with former secretary-general of NATO, Javier Solano,  who wrote  that "the earliest ever Earth Overshoot Day is a stark reminder of how much we demand from our planet, and of the unprecedented energy transition required to combat global warming."  You can see more voices here. Did we miss anything worth sharing ? Please let us know.   ...

So you want to help the planet, do good things but can't seem to stop flying or having less kids?  Try biochar - it's an ancient miracle addition to soil that just may be a tipping point for our very tired soil AND is the process reduces the need for one of the BIG BIG culprits in CO2 levels increasing.  The majority most foods' carbon footprint is in the chemical fertilizers used to 'grow' the animals, fruits and vegies.  While all the attention is on the bad boys of the fossil fuel industry the biggest polluter of them all - the chemical industry - is getting a pass.  Our media considers this too boring to report on, since it won't sell more clicks, ads, or print. So here's all you need to know about biochar:  This is a new(?) miracle soil amendment that is rocking through farmlands around the globe - especially in the USA midwest.  Archeologists first discovered the concept of biochar when they unearthed some Aztec & Mayan ruins and found rich, n...

I am constantly impressed with our ingenuity.  And that's why I am a bit optimistic about our future on this planet.  While technology will not be solving most of our issues, it can contribute in a positive way.  In the 70's the term 'appropriate technology' became a buzz word.  To this day we are still trying to define what that means.  The best example of good appropriate technology is LED light bulbs.  They last a long time (until most manufacturers downsized their run hours from 100,000 hours to 20,000 hours - gee, I wonder why? ) Here's another one:  using our discarded plastics as road beds.  Not that we need more roads, but those colored (especially green) plastic bottles that can't be recycled back into something useful are being Vietnam to build roads.   Turns out that other Asian countries have also done this... when will the USA and Europe start doing that? I also found an interesting link on Vietnam's supermarket packaging....

I've talked about climate change (CC) a lot over the last two decades.  I am no longer a fervent believer in the mainstream, pop media version of CC - it's fear and scarcity based.  i think our whole media is becoming the 3rd political party, the 3rd rail, whatever you want to call it.   Fear mongering sells clicks, ads and stuff - and there's a lot of profit in it.  I'm a lukewarmer on CC: yes it's real, yes the world is warming up, yes humans are a major contributor, BUT we have no idea of what's going to happen.  We're extrapolating a whole bunch of loosely based assumptions on top of each other and crying 'fire' in a very crowded theater.  I say this with a background in modeling and statistics.   I remember getting into tensors in advanced algebra/calculus (i was a couple credits away from a math degree) and how difficult it was to predict weather patterns (in 27 dimensions!) and that was in the late 1970's.  Sure we've gotten...

There are so many chemicals in our everyday lives. And if you avoid a few of the most toxic ones - that bio-cumulate - you'll be miles ahead on many different fronts.  Smelling like a rose may be harmful to your health. Let's start with the fact that we don't know anything about the non-commercial characteristics of 95% of the chemicals used.  There are over 300,000 chemicals used in commercial processes, 85,000 chemicals are currently in the EPA database, and we know almost nothing about 75,000 of them.   The EPA requires  detailed information about a chemical only if one site produces more than 11,340kg of one chemical - wow!  and it's even bigger than that:      54,973,018. That’s how many registered organic and inorganic substances there were in the world when I wrote this sentence (in 2002) , according to the  Chemical Abstracts Service  (CAS). The  Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA)  gives the EPA in the U...