September 2007 | On Our Radar
Green Goes Postal
After Wal-Mart, the post office is the second-largest employer in America.
So when the USPS greens its parcel service — implementing “cradle to cradle” policy for all Express and Priority packaging — it’s more than just big news.
While a “cradle to grave” policy results in products eventually ending up in a landfill, “cradle to cradle” products are 100 percent renewable. The USPS collaborated on its new environmentally-sound packaging with MBDC, a firm founded in 1995 by architect William McDonough and famed “green chemist” Michael Braungart. MBDC’s chemists met with USPS suppliers, analyzed 14,000 of their ingredients, and made sure every last one met 39 criteria for human and environmental health, including toxicity, renewable energy, water stewardship and recyclability.
The new cradle to cradle standards will save 15,000 metric tons of carbon emissions annually. To get some perspective on that number, consider that the gigantic South By Southwest music festival in Austin, Texas generates only 250 metric tons of carbon emissions each year — and that’s from power sources, travel and transportation from around the world and wastes generated by printing, promotion and festival-related goods combined.
With the postal service, an industry leader, adopting rigorous new standards for sustainability — thereby pushing their suppliers to go green — it’s likely the ripple effect of this eco-consciousness won’t just expand to other shippers like FedEx and UPS, but also to related industries, like producers of packaging, paper, cardboard, tapes, adhesives and plastics. According to MBDC’s Executive Overview, the USPS’s new “products and services are designed based on patterns found in nature, eliminating the concept of waste entirely and creating an abundance that is healthy and sustaining.”
Now, if the USPS could only noodge the nation’s first-largest employer to adopt equally responsible policies...
— Lucinda Michele Knapp
Grow Your Own
Spend enough time at area farmers’ markets and you might start dreaming about giving your green thumb a more robust workout than simply tending the herbs in your window box. The good news is, with plenty of urban garden projects close at hand, you no longer have to move to the Central Valley to get your knees dirty and your fingers in the earth. Here are five of the best places in the Bay Area to till the soil with friends or learn to grow your own produce at home:
Alemany Farm This 4.5-acre farm sits in the shadow of San Francisco’s Bernal Heights neighborhood and serves the Alemany Housing Community. Volunteers show up on weekends and help tend to everything from cucumbers, zucchinis and sweet pumpkins to apples and strawberries — taking home a share of the bounty at the end of every workday. Alemanyfarm.org
City Slickers Farm City Slickers is on a mission to create a local food system in West Oakland, transforming empty lots into mini-farms and setting up produce gardens in the backyards of low-income residents. Volunteers can help tend the farms, set up the gardens or even work at the group’s farm stand at 16th and Center Streets on Saturday mornings. Cityslickerfarms.org
Garden for the Environment Amble on over to the city-supported but privately run Garden for the Environment in San Francisco’s Inner Sunset neighborhood and take a look at their half-acre demonstration garden to see how food can be produced ecologically in a small-scale, urban environment. You can volunteer to help maintain the garden or take classes in organic gardening and composting to learn how to grow your own at home. Gardenfortheenvironment.org
Ecology Center This Berkeley-based non-profit, a long-time advocate of sustainable living, offers periodic courses in everything from container gardening for renters to techniques for applying permaculture principles to your own garden. Ecologycenter.org
Copia, The American Center for Wine, Food, & the Arts When you feel like taking things upscale, toodle on up to Napa and check out Copia, which explores food as it relates to wine. Visit the edible gardens, which grow produce in groups according to the wines they complement, or attend one of the center’s daily lectures on a particular food that’s in season. Copia.org — E.B Boyd
Don’t Panic, It’s Organic. Sort of
With more consumers ponying up the extra dough for organic products, and big companies vying for a piece of what was formerly a mom-and-pop pie, the debate wages on over what percent non-organic ingredients can rightly go into organic foods.
Many organic food producers and supporters are dismayed by a recent U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) proposal that would allow 38 non-organic ingredients in foods that sport the organic seal — including hops, an integral ingredient in beer.
According to USDA regulations, a processed food product can pass as “organic” as long as it contains just 5 percent or less of USDA-approved non-organic ingredients. The company must also prove that an organic version is not available in the quality or quantity needed.
Until May 2007, there were only five ingredients on the list: cornstarch, water-extracted gum, kelp, unbleached lecithin and pectin. But in June, the USDA proposed adding 19 food colorings, two starches, casings for sausages, hops, fish oil and a handful of spices and other additives.
Ronnie Cummins, executive director of the Organic Consumers Association, sees limiting the list of approved non-organic ingredients as a positive because it will prevent companies from using the more than 600 non-organic ingredients requested by food manufacturers. “Forty-three is a much better number,” he says. But he believes three of the proposed items — hops, fish oil and sausage casings — should not be allowed in any product called organic.
Anheuser-Busch — who launched two so-called “organic” beers, last September — lobbied heavily to get hops on the list. While the beer giant’s original recipe for their Wild Hop Lager and Stone Mill Pale Ale included 100 percent organic barley malt, it also included hops grown with chemical fertilizers and sprayed with pesticides.
The company’s claim that it couldn’t find enough organic hops didn’t hold water for many organic consumers who posited that the world’s largest beer producer (with its hefty resources, including its own hops fields) should be able to source whatever organic ingredients it needs.
After receiving a deluge of negative press and numerous petitions from consumer groups, Anheuser-Busch changed its tune, announcing that it will now stick to 100 percent organic hops. Cummins hopes their change of heart will hold, should the USDA proposal pass.
“The main problem is that we don’t have any objective criteria for defining what ‘availability of organic ingredients’ means,” he says.
Despite years of promising standardized guidelines, the USDA has yet to provide documents to help clarify this rule.
Amelia Slayton, president of Seven Bridges Cooperative, an organic brewery and home-brew supplier in Santa Cruz, encourages consumers to check ingredients lists on any beer labeled organic. “If it doesn’t specifically say ‘organic hops,’ question it,” she advises.
But rather than get depressed by big corporations wanting to enter the organic market, Cummins encourages consumers to be proud that they’ve been able to hold industry giants to a draw. “By bringing the court of public opinion into play, there’s no way these companies or the USDA can spin the continued lowering of organic standards as a good thing,” says Cummins. — Amelia Glynn
Don’t just get mad...get active
Al knows it. Leo knows it. And unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know it too. With summer temperatures progressively breaking records, Biblical storms and floods hitting Europe and South Asia, and films like An Inconvenient Truth and The 11th Hour raising awareness, the next step is taking action. Here are a few places to begin.
Canada’s Boreal Forest is being logged at the rate of two acres per minute just so that a whopping 20 billion catalogs can be mailed to American consumers each year. ForestEthics tirelessly campaigns to change this wasteful practice — recently garnering success in convincing Victoria’s Secret and others to stop turning endangered forests into advertisements for lingerie. Learn what you can to do help save what’s left of our old growth forests at forestethics.org.
September 29 marks the 14th annual National Public Lands Day, when over 100,000 Americans are expected to volunteer for cleanup duty from New York to California. Participants will also build hiking trails, plant trees and remove invasive plants. To get involved in your area, go to publiclandsday.org.
Sometimes the fight against global warming seems so overwhelming that we don’t know where to begin. Environmentaldefense.org makes it easy to be an Earth activist. The “Take Action” page of their website offers a host of ways to do right by our planet, and to urge others to do the same.
Vegansexual [vee-guhn-sek-shoo-uhl] noun
n. 1. A person who shuns physical intimacy with partners who eat animal products; n. 2. A social movement, first recognized in New Zealand, whereby vegans commit to engaging in sexual relations only with other vegans (and it’s not just because they taste better).
Usage in a sentence: “He may have had me at hello, but after the feta, foie gras and filet mignon, he had lost my vegansexual-ass by dessert, literally.”
Worth Repeating
“Anyone who can cast herself as a feminist icon while leading the attack on her husband’s mistresses, who thinks eight years of presidential pillow talk qualifies her for the presidential pillow, is plenty tough enough to smack around dictators.” — Columnist Maureen Dowd on Dem hopeful Hillary Clinton’s potential presidential ability (NY Times, 7/22).
“The so-called reincarnated living Buddha without government approval is illegal and invalid.” — New Chinese ban aimed at limiting the influence of the Dalai Lama and preventing his reincarnation without official approval (Times Online.com/UK, 8/4).
“As concerned consumers and environmentalists, we must be prepared to accept that buying local is not necessarily beneficial for the environment.” — James E. McWilliams, author of A Revolution in Eating: How the Quest for Food Shaped America, explaining that eco-conscious food-miles counters need to factor in other, more energy-consuming aspects of food production than shipping (NY Times, 8/6).
“Putting $1,000 in the pockets of 310,000 families with urgent needs is going to provide far more stimulus to the economy than putting the same $310 million in my pockets.” — Billionaire Warren Buffet opposing the proposed tax cuts on stock dividends that would reduce his tax rate from 30 percent to 3 percent, while his office secretary would still have a tax rate of 30 percent (Washington Post, 6/27).
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