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Category Archives: Conservation
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Emily DeMasi in Conservation 11 days ago
If you have never had the chance to visit Lake Tahoe, please add it to your top 10 of U.S. sites that are a must see. Lucky to have had a reason to visit this summer, I was shocked by just how blue Lake Tahoe really is! But as it turns out, it’s not as… Read More…
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Heidi Tolliver-Nigro in Conservation 19 days ago
Feller-gatherer harvesting trees in the FSC- and SFI-certified forests of the Adirondacks for Finch Paper Recently, I blogged about a trip I made to Finch Paper in Glens Falls, NY, where I got to see sustainable forestry and integrated, environmentally sensitive papermaking in action. One of the most powerful images in my mind from the… Read More…
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Have you ever wondered what happens to all that waste paper you are encouraged to recycle? As far as most people know, it disappears into a massive, fuel-guzzling monster truck and magically reappears on the shelf of an office superstore nicely wrapped and bar-coded and ready to use again. So what happens in-between? There are… Read More…
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Keenan Shaw in Conservation 27 days ago
On Monday, the E.P.A. announced that over 100 cement kilns will have to reduce the pollution they emit. This will be very costly to the cement industry, with each producer estimated at having to spend around $1 billion a year to keep up with the E.P.A.’s regulations. A majority of the mercury and particulate matter… Read More…
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Jonathan Banco in Conservation 28 days ago
Today kicks off the American Business Conference’s 4th part of a global series of Sustainable Agricultural Summits. And what better city for this summit to take place, but San Francisco. California is home to 81,500 farms and ranches and tallied revenues of $36.2 billion last year alone. That figure represents 11.2% of the nation’s total…. Read More…
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I just spent three days at Finch Paper, one of the few remaining small, integrated paper mills in the country. Nestled in the Adirondacks, the Glens Falls, NY company invited a few industry analysts to tour their mill and forests and get an inside look at their environmental commitment. Finch Paper is one of the… Read More…
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Lane Jost in Certifications 63 days ago
San Diego lobster fisherman Shad Catarius (no relation to the spawning fish) supports an annual trapping tax of of $300 currently before the California legislature. The tax on the $7.8 million annual spiny lobster market would raise the cost for Catarius to make a living on his boat McGhee Marie. In a San Diego Union-Tribune… Read More…
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Please consider the environment before printing this email. We’ve all seen taglines like this. It makes us think about a very important issue, which is the environmental footprint of the media we use. Whether we are making decisions about the use of media for marketing, corporate identity, and administration or simply being consumers of media,… Read More…
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Looking for more reasons to hate spam? Here’s one. According to McAfee and ICF International, annual spam energy use totals 33 billion kilowatt-hours (KWh). That’s equivalent to the electricity used in 2.4 million homes in the United States, with the same GHG emissions as 3.1 million passenger cars using two billion United States gallons of… Read More…
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Cindy Tickle in Conservation 146 days ago
On April 15, bring a reusable travel mug into your local Starbucks and get a free brewed coffee. When you hear the date April 15 what comes to mind? Taxes, taxes and more taxes. Well, how about a free cup of coffee? Sounds too good to be true. There must be a catch, right? What… Read More…
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Jennifer Kaplan in Conservation 161 days ago
On March 19th the EPA and DOE announced new steps to strengthen the Energy Star program. A few days later the GAO issued a report showing that the Energy Star Program certification process is (nicely put) “vulnerable to fraud and abuse.” The day after the GAO report was issued I sat down with Andrea Fabbri,… Read More…
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A new EcoPinion report was released this week on consumer perceptions of the “Energy Star” brand for energy efficiency. The report contends that Energy Star is one of the few credible brands in the energy efficiency space, so there is a lot riding on its continued success and relevance, not the least of which are… Read More…
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My last post on questioning conventional wisdom on recycled paper generated some terrific comments. After all, when you look more deeply into some of these issues, they aren’t all they are cracked up to be. Is possible that post-consumer waste (PCW) paper isn’t as green as we think it is? The question was worth asking…. Read More…
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I’ve been thinking about postconsumer waste lately (apparently, I have too much time on my hands). What I was wondering was this: Postconsumer waste is only one of three waste streams for unused paper. There is also mill broke (scrap collected at the mill and recycled back into the same type of paper from whence… Read More…
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It’s the time of year when people are making resolutions to lose weight, better manage their finances, better manage their anger, and myriad other things. Is increasing your commitment to environmental sustainability on that list? As I wrote in my very first post for The Inspired Economist in the fall of 2008, the neat thing… Read More…
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Do you like to play with online tools? I do. I like environmental calculators. It’s fun to plug in a bunch of numbers and see what you come up with. Take environmental calculators offered by paper companies. Want to know how much you can green your print marketing just by making a simple switch? They’ll… Read More…
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Can you green your business for free? With the right qualifiers, you might. There is at least one company that will take a comprehensive look at your organization, project out the amount of money it can save on your electric bill by installing greener technologies, and outfit you — free — on a contingency basis… Read More…
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Scott Cooney in Conservation 292 days ago
Paul Hawken was the keynote speaker at the Sustainable Industries Economic Forum in San Francisco on Thursday. He had some inspiring talking points (the forum’s goal was to ‘reinspire the inspired’), but one of the key takeaways was in how we should be viewing sustainability. He started by saying that sustainability should be viewed as… Read More…
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Did you notice something different on the back pages of The Order of the Phoenix? If you live in the Canadian market, you might. The fifth book in the Harry Potter series has something unusual on its back pages. It’s an environmental audit. The audit, produced using New Leaf Paper’s Eco Audit Calculator, uses New… Read More…
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We all give to environmental non-profits for different reasons. Sometimes, with local groups, it’s to fight a certain development or to protest a local company’s toxic emissions. With national groups, it’s usually to fight policies we don’t agree with that come from governments or multinational companies. Sometimes we win, sometimes we don’t. And even when… Read More…
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Lisa Wojnovich in Conservation 372 days ago
Nitrous oxide, more commonly known at your dentist’s office as laughing gas, is now the most prevalent man-made substance damaging the ozone layer. And it’s a greenhouse gas. Sadly, the joke’s apparently on us. In a report published in Science on Friday, scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) located in Boulder, Colorado, have calculated… Read More…
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Researchers at the University of York have recently come up with a method of recycling that seems like it fell from the pages of a science fiction novel. They want to turn discarded television screens into components for biomedicine. The scientists have been studying methods of reducing the environmental impact of e-waste streams as part… Read More…
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Fred Etcheverry in Conservation 434 days ago
It’s no surprise that the United States Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufactures oppose the American Clean Air and Security Act, but so does Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth. Dow Chemical and Ford Motors support it.
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In the constant push for ever newer and greener technology and energy, we sometimes forget that it is often both simpler and cheaper to revisit old techniques in new ways. And that’s exactly what a group of researchers in California has done. By combining several old and well understood chemical techniques and reactions, they have… Read More…
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Slash-and-burn agriculture may be bad for the environment, but in southeast Asia, the cure may be worse than the disease. Endorsed by multiple governments, at both the local and national levels, as well as numerous business interests, everyone from individual farmers to massive corporations has been replacing the traditional slash-and-burn, more technically known as swidden,… Read More…
