Dunkin’ Donuts announced Wednesday that it is phasing out its landfill-clogging polystyrene foam cups in favor of paper cups. The company’s plan, which kicks off this spring in New York City and California restaurants with a targeted worldwide completion date of 2020, will prevent nearly 1 billion foam cups from entering the waste stream each year—and that’s a pretty good thing!
https://www.ecowatch.com/dunkin-donuts-foam-cups-recyclable-2532462231.html
The Danish capital ranks high on the list of the world’s healthiest and happiest cities. With obesity and depression on the rise worldwide, here are its lessons for how to combat them culturally.
Maybe it’s the Viking heritage. There is an icy open-air pool in the waters of Copenhagen’s harbour, and although it is mid-winter Danes still jump in every day. On the front cover of the city’s health plan, a lean older man is pictured climbing out, dripping, his mouth open in a shout that could be horror or pleasure. “Enjoy life, Copenhageners,” urges the caption.
It’s not every Copenhagener who wants to take strenuous exercise in cold water either for fun or to get fit. But the packed bike lanes of the Danish capital, even at this sometimes subzero time of year, are testimony to the success of a city that is aspiring to be one of the healthiest in the world. Copenhagen consistently sits at the very top of the UN’s happiness index and is one of the star performers in the Healthy Cities initiative of the World Health Organisation, which, almost unknown and unsung, celebrates its 30th anniversary this year. The initiative was the idea of a group of individuals inspired by the Alma Ata Declaration of 1978, which was about elevating the status of primary care and public health in a world where everybody equated healthcare with hospital treatment after you got ill.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/feb/11/how-build-healthy-city-copenhagen-reveals-its-secrets-happiness
Buckingham Palace outlined new waste plans and said there was a ‘strong desire to tackle the issue’ at the highest levels of the Royal household.
It is thought that the Queen became personally interested in the problem of plastic after working with Sir David Attenborough on a conservation documentary dealing with wildlife in the Commonwealth.
The new measures include gradually phasing out plastic straws in public cafes and banning them altogether in staff dining rooms.
Internal caterers at Buckingham Palace, Windsor Castle, and the Palace of Holyroodhouse in Edinburgh will now only be allowed to use china plates and glasses, or recyclable paper cups.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/02/11/queen-declares-war-plastic-david-attenborough-documentary/
Warning over wider global health impacts after findings reveal hundreds of tonnes of colistin – the ‘antibiotic of last resort’ – are being shipped to India’s farms.
Routine use of some of the strongest antibiotics, which doctors have said should be preserved for the most extreme cases lest resistance to them should increase and prevent their use for the diseases for which they are intended, is now a common practice in farming in the developing world. The consequences will be felt throughout the world because resistance to strong antibiotics is spread among organisms.
Germs with qualities that can make them dangerous to humans will, if untreated or poorly treated, mutate into more powerful pathogens that are resistant to treatment. Poor or inadequate public heath treatments assists this process, potentially spreading pathogens around the world.
A study by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism has found that hundreds of tonnes of colistin, described as an antibiotic of last resort, have been shipped to India for the routine treatment of animals, chiefly chickens, on farms.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/feb/01/indias-farmed-chickens-dosed-with-worlds-strongest-antibiotics-study-finds
Livestock raised for food in the US are dosed with five times as much antibiotic medicine as farm animals in the UK, new data has shown, raising questions about rules on meat imports under post-Brexit trade deals.
The difference in rates of dosage rises to at least nine times as much in the case of cattle raised for beef, and may be as high as 16 times the rate of dosage per cow in the UK. There is currently a ban on imports of American beef throughout Europe, owing mainly to the free use of growth hormones in the US.
Higher use of antibiotics, particularly those that are critical for human health – the medicines “of last resort”, which the World Health Organisation wants banned from use in animals– is associated with rising resistance to the drugs and the rapid evolution of “superbugs” that can kill or cause serious illness.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/feb/08/huge-levels-of-antibiotic-use-in-us-farming-revealed
One of the UK’s largest food suppliers has promised to eradicate food waste from its business by 2030, as part of a sweeping new sustainability plan.
Cranswick yesterday launched its new ‘Second Nature’ plan, which features promises to switch to greener packaging and clean energy, as well as the headline commitment to ensure zero food waste.
The strategy comes hot on the heels of a promise to halve the company’s use of plastic packaging by weight by 2025, which was made last month amid a flurry of industry commitments to curb plastic waste.
https://www.businessgreen.com/bg/news/3026247/cranswick-cooks-up-plan-to-become-zero-waste-food-business-by-2030
The Polo Hemp Mill in Illinois began operation on November 20, 1943. At that time there were more than 3,200 hemp growers in the state.
Educational materials and propaganda videos such as “Victory for Hemp” were sponsored by the U.S. government, assuring cultivation would be backed by our military and economy.
Considering this happened 74 years ago this fall, we see the same struggles in the present-day relationship between farmers and industrial hemp in Illinois. This time around, a massive effort is required to establish sustainability and resilience within our agricultural system and the next economy, not the war effort.
Once again, farmers need assurance that hemp is a viable crop for their rotation and that hemp will not only benefit their pocketbooks as a fiber crop, but also is a powerful ally in environmental restoration.
Requiring little water and no fertilizers or pesticides to grow, hemp thrives in marginal soil. It removes chemicals that seep into waterways. It can replace paper products, reducing deforestation that encroaches on fragile ecosystems. And that’s just a start.
The market for hemp products is vast and growing rapidly. It includes durable textiles; strong, ecofriendly building materials; natural cosmetics; petroleum free bio-plastics and biofuels; beneficial, non-psychoactive medicines; and nutrient dense foods.
As a first-generation farmer, and a woman, I am so thrilled to have a future in hemp on my horizon. My devotion to this plant stems from a realization that regenerative agriculture is my only path to an honest living.
I’m Rachel Berry, and that’s my perspective.
http://northernpublicradio.org/post/hemp-offers-benefits-future
In Mike Nichols’s 1967 film, The Graduate, a disillusioned college grad, Ben, played by Dustin Hoffman, is taken aside at a party by a family friend, Mr. McGuire.
“I want to say one word to you, just one word,” Mr. McGuire tells him.
“Yes, sir.”
“Are you listening?”
“Yes, I am,” Ben says, nodding.
“Plastics.”
“Exactly how do you mean?” Ben asks.
“There’s a great future in plastics. Think about it. Will you think about it?”
The “plastics” quote became the film’s best-known line, and one of the best known in American cinema. And you know what? Mr. McGuire was right.
In the 1960s, plastics were mostly used for durable goods, from car seats to sleek, Italian-designed kitchenware. Shortly thereafter, the use of single-use, throwaway plastic for beverages, food, shopping bags and containers exploded, creating fortunes for the petrochemicals companies that would churn out hundreds of millions of tonnes of polyethylene, the most common and cheapest of the plastics.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/rob-commentary/plastics-there-is-a-great-future-in-bioplastics-will-you-think-about-it/article37669410/
UK 
High street restaurant chain Leon is to ditch plastic cutlery, it declared yesterday.
Throwaway knives, forks and spoons which end up choking the environment will be phased out within months at its 50-plus outlets.
The announcement is a victory for the Daily Mail’s campaign to end the scourge of plastics polluting the planet and will pile pressure on rivals to follow suit.
Coffee house Le Pain Quotidien has already switched to biodegradable alternatives but the trailblazers shame the majority of high street chains which still hand out plastic disposables.
An estimated 15 billion trees are cut down each year—more than 41 million per day. Given this pace of land degradation, it’s hard to imagine how traditional reforestation methods, which rely on the hand-planting of live seedlings, could ever keep up. BioCarbon Engineering offers another way—a device, no more than two feet in height, that has the potential to plant 400,000 seeds per day—150 times faster than hand-planting carried out by a human.
http://www.wri.org/blog/2018/01/tree-planting-drones-shade-grown-tea-businesses-are-making-money-reforesting-planet