Sustainability

Category Archives: Zero Waste

Americans waste 150,000 tons of food each day – equal to a pound per person


Research shows people with healthy diets rich in fruit and vegetables are the most wasteful and calls for better education for consumers

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/apr/18/americans-waste-food-fruit-vegetables-study

About 150,000 tons of food is tossed out in US households each day, equivalent to about a third of the daily calories that each American consumes. Fruit and vegetables were the most likely to be thrown out, followed by dairy and then meat.

This waste has an environmental toll, with the volume of discarded food equivalent to the yearly use of 30m acres of land, 780m pounds of pesticide and 4.2tn gallons of irrigated water. Rotting food also clogs up landfills and releases methane, a powerful greenhouse gas.

Researchers at the US Department of Agriculture analysed eight years of food data, up to 2014, to see where food is wasted and also what members of the public say they do at mealtimes. The research has been published in Plos One.

 

Pesticides Are Making Children Aggressive

“Pesticides cause a multitude of adverse effects on humans. However, they are especially harmful to children.”

Pesticides cause a multitude of adverse effects  on humans. However, they are especially harmful to children. They may have something to do with the mass-shootings in schools all over America because some of them are neurotoxins. This means they affect and damage the central nervous system and the brain – of all animals, including humans.

Warren Porter, professor emeritus of zoology at the University of Wisconsin, conducted experiments with ground water – water drawn from the ground of farms with typical levels of pesticides and fertilizers. He chose farm water contaminated with the insecticide aldicarb, the herbicide atrazine, and nitrogen fertilizer. He tested that mixture on white mice and deer mice.

The concentrations of the fertilizer with each of the pesticides (aldicarb and atrazine) in the ground water were of the order of magnitude the Environmental Protection Agency says the chemicals cause “no unreasonable harm to man and the environment.” In other words, Porter put to the ultimate test the assurances of EPA and the chemical industry about the toxins EPA registers (approves) – that they are safe and farmers may spray on crops Americans eat.

Porter discovered the mixture of common ground water and farm chemicals had detrimental effects on the animals’ nervous, immune, and endocrine systems. The mice became aggressive and had problems with their thyroid hormones. Their immune system was also compromised in its ability to make antibodies against foreign proteins.

Organic food means food without farm sprays, sludge, radiation, and genetic engineering. This healthy food is also political food: helping us to fight pollution and control by the agrochemical-industrial-political complex.

https://www.commondreams.org/views/2018/04/14/pesticides-are-making-children-aggressive

Wrapped in a Sea of Plastic

Half a century of this “uncontrolled experiment” is fast becoming as serious a problem as climate change.

Plastics everywhere was bad enough, but now multiple studies have found that 94 percent of our drinking water and 93 percent of sampled bottled water worldwide are full of plastic particles and chemicals, including BPA, heavy metals, phthalates, pesticides, PCBs and other chemicals, many of which are linked in animal studies as well as some human studies to cancer, premature puberty, reduced immunity, birth defects, endocrine disruption, insulin resistance, and other major diseases.  And we have no idea and neither does the FDA, EPA, or any other federal agency, whether this lethal cocktail, which binds together with other toxins, is having an even more profound impact on our health and that of our kids.  What we get now from those agencies is “conflicting findings” and “uncertainties” about the potential impact of plastics-related chemicals. What we do know is that governments only test or analyze the impacts of individual chemicals to determine the levels of potentially life-threatening exposure, making it impossible to figure out the combined total load of chemicals from plastics our babies can safely absorb.

https://www.commondreams.org/views/2018/03/31/wrapped-sea-plastic

Try ‘Wildevore Diet’ For Healthy Living

We have all heard of vegetarian, vegan and flexitarian diets. But have you heard about wildevore diet? Surely, no! Nowadays, dieting is considered a national obsession among everyone. These types of diets mentioned above are definitely healthy and less fatty, but it might have a negative impact on one’s health and sense of well being. Concerns about climate change, environmental stress and animal welfare mean that “what we eat is an ethical as well as a health issue.”

The two women, who are promoting the all-new ‘wildevore diet’, said that the new approach will help people to show how they can eat to benefit their own health while making planet-friendly choices at the same time. The Wildevore diet incorporates some of the philosophies of veganism, vegetarianism, flexitarianism, ethical omnivorism, and clean eating, but it looks more closely at the pressures on the environment and the impact that has on human health, according to The Ecologist.

The new eating approach identifies on how to make the best choices both ‘nutritionally and ethically’ and aims at educating the people about where their food originates from. Health problems Caroline Grindrod, an environmental conservationist, writer, and Wildevore coach, and Georgia Winfield-Hayes, a nutritionist both agree that the new eating diet is not for the “faint-hearted, requiring some serious homework and a desire to change habits.”

The system can work for vegans and meat-eaters, but there is an underlying need to understand the consequences of food choices. In the Wildevore diet, meat reared on regenerative farms and fed on natural diets is allowed for its human health benefits. Georgia, who has written extensively on human nutrition, said that a vegan diet does not ‘always’ provide the best results.

‘From a health perspective a vegan diet, in the short term is an amazing way to cleanse the body and this feels great,” Georgia said. “However, long-term it can create serious health problems. Soya, the main protein source for many vegans, is a hormone-disrupting food and can cause our own reproductive systems to stop working correctly,” she added.

https://www.mid-day.com/articles/try-wildevore-diet-for-healthy-living/19235171

‘Great Pacific garbage patch’ is 16 times bigger than we thought, scientists say

Scientists arrived at this figure, which is around 16 times higher than previous estimates, by assessing aerial images alongside data from ships dragging nets through the region.

Occupying the waters between California and Hawaii, the patch is the largest of five major offshore waste accumulation zones that result from converging ocean currents.

The research was conducted by scientists at the Ocean Cleanup Foundation, who are attempting to understand the true extent of plastic pollution in the world’s oceans.

“Overall you would expect plastic pollution is getting worse in the oceans because we are producing and using more plastics, globally and annually,” Dr Laurent Lebreton told The Independent.

https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/great-pacific-garbage-patch-plastic-pollution-oceans-environment-fish-a8269951.html

Most plastic waste appears to come from five developing nations in Asia.

Around 8 million tons of plastic waste is dumped in the ocean annually. That equates to emptying a garbage truck of plastic into the sea every minute , most of it single-use products, such as plastic bags, candy wrappers, sachets and soda bottles.

This mismanagement not only pollutes oceans and harms marine wildlife, but also makes life harder for locals, whether they are residents of neighborhoods that regularly flood (owing to drains clogged with plastic), workers at coastal resorts that cater to tourists or fishermen facing dwindling fish stocks. The economic implications are startling. Marine debris cost the 21 Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation member economies around $1.3 billion in 2008, and that number is only going up as the problem gets worse.

We’re encouraged that the world is waking up to the crisis of plastic waste in our ocean, and working together to resolve it. News outlets around the world highlighted the shocking video earlier this month of the British diver swimming through plastic waste off the coast of Bali. The recent World Ocean Summit, held in Mexico earlier this month, focused extensively on plastic waste. The sixth International Marine Debris conference convened last week in San Diego and highlighted new and emerging science that will help us tackle this growing problem. Earlier this year, Evian, Coca-Cola and other businesses announced efforts to address packaging waste and improve recyclability of their products. 

‘Dead zone’ in Gulf of Mexico will take decades to recover from farm pollution

A new study says that even in the ‘unrealistic’ event of a total halt to the flow of agricultural chemicals the damage will persist for 30 years.

The enormous “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico will take decades to recover even if the flow of farming chemicals that is causing the damage is completely halted, new research has warned.

Intensive agriculture near the Mississippi has led to fertilizers leeching into the river, and ultimately the Gulf of Mexico, via soils and waterways. This has resulted in a huge oxygen-deprived dead zone in the Gulf that is now at its largest ever extent, covering an area greater than the state of New Jersey.

A new study has found that even if runoff of nitrogen, a fertilizer chemical, was fully stemmed, the Gulf would take about 30 years to recover. Even this scenario is “not only considered unrealistic, but also inherently unsustainable”, researchers stated in the work, published in Science.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/mar/22/dead-zone-gulf-of-mexico-decades-recover-study

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