Tuesday, December 25, 2007
Story on all the little + the big things we can do
Chicago's RedEye had a nice story that lays out the little - as well as the big - things that we can all do to help reduce our carbon footprint. It's amazing how quickly green issues have risen in prominence in the public's eye, yet constant reminders of the ways that our own actions are relevant, like this piece, are very important. Reporter Alexia Elejalde-Ruiz, who has covered environmental issues for some time, explores home energy, flying, driving, eating meat, recycling, etc. "If everyone in Chicago [used reusable bags], it would eliminate 601 million bags and save 4,508 tons of waste from going to a landfill." And how about the newspaper industry itself? Interestingly, the 1,500 daily newspapers in the U.S. use about 9.2 million tons of paper - consuming more than the book, magazine and catalog sectors combined. Yet it turns out they're the most recycled paper product around - and newsprint itself contains an average of 32 percent recycled fiber. (Still, it's a great incentive for going digital!) Anyway, enterprising reporting!
Tuesday, December 11, 2007
Chicago Tribune Interviews Weisman
Today's Trib has an interview with author Alan Weisman. An excerpt from the story:
Among those interesting facts:
- Humans use more than a third of the world's land surface for food production.
- In the ocean, north of Hawaii, there is a 1,000-mile-wide area containing 3 million tons of trash -- bottle caps, fish netting, six-pack rings, limp balloons, plastic bags and other detritus of human civilization -- that oceanographers have dubbed the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
- Over the past half-century, humans have produced 1 billion tons of plastic.
Virtually all of that plastic remains somewhere on the planet, and, even if humans disappeared tomorrow, it would stick around for a long, long time.
How long?
"No one knows," writes Weisman, "because no plastic has died a natural death yet. It took today's microbes ... a long time after plants appeared to learn to eat lignin and cellulose. More recently, they've even learned to eat oil. None can digest plastic yet, because 50 years is too short a time for evolution to develop the necessary biochemistry."
Provocative stuff, right?
Among those interesting facts:
- Humans use more than a third of the world's land surface for food production.
- In the ocean, north of Hawaii, there is a 1,000-mile-wide area containing 3 million tons of trash -- bottle caps, fish netting, six-pack rings, limp balloons, plastic bags and other detritus of human civilization -- that oceanographers have dubbed the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
- Over the past half-century, humans have produced 1 billion tons of plastic.
Virtually all of that plastic remains somewhere on the planet, and, even if humans disappeared tomorrow, it would stick around for a long, long time.
How long?
"No one knows," writes Weisman, "because no plastic has died a natural death yet. It took today's microbes ... a long time after plants appeared to learn to eat lignin and cellulose. More recently, they've even learned to eat oil. None can digest plastic yet, because 50 years is too short a time for evolution to develop the necessary biochemistry."
Provocative stuff, right?
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