Herbiv.org

Giant Garbage Patch Floating in Pacific →

An enormous island of trash twice the size of Texas is floating in the Pacific Ocean somewhere between San Francisco and Hawaii. […] The trash stew is 80 percent plastic and weighs more than 3.5 million tons.

Lazy Environmentalist Josh Dorfman Gives Green Tips to Save Money →

I generally agree with his standpoint. I’m sick of having to be on the bleeding edge just so you can justify saying you’re practicing a certain lifestyle (i.e. being “green”), being moderate is what I’m more about and I don’t think there is anything wrong in having some luxury if you can afford it. Also I love how he closes the interview:

Eat less meat. I’m not saying turn vegetarian, which can be a politically charged word, just don’t eat meat, maybe one day a week. Like adopt a meatless Tuesday. It will save money and make you healthier.

What Food, Inc. Can Teach Us About How We Treat Animals →

[…] when I watched this scene with an audience, I looked around to see that the vast majority of the crowd reacts viscerally: grimacing, covering eyes, wincing, looking away.

Make sure you go through the bullet points at the end of the article outlining major counter–effects of our current dietary habits and why they need to change.

Artificial Sweeteners Put to Good Use →

Scientists find that artificial sweeteners are ideal for following pollution in the waterways because of their distinct feature that they end up in our waste waters the same way they travel through our bodies — unchanged.

How Green Is Your Takeaway Container? →

Your food can’t go everywhere exposed to the elements; it needs packaging. Unfortunately, that packaging often takes massive amounts of energy to create, and much of it doesn’t properly decompose.

Chow rated some common ones and put it on a scale from 1 (bad) – 5 (good):

1. Styrofoam
2. Plastic
3. Paper or plastic bags
4. Cardboard boxes
5. Bioproducts (bioplastics)
6. …

Jump to the article itself to find out the rest and get more info on each type of the packaging.

via Swiss-Miss, via Coudal, via Design Applause

Earth Day: the ultimate empty gesture →

Thank God for Earth Day: another occasion for affluent white Americans to feel good about themselves by enacting some pointless environmental ritual.

One day is not enough, man up.

Red Meat or Chicken? Why It's Wise to Stay Away from Both →

You see, people often tell me that they’ve given up eating red meat out of concern for animals, the environment, or their health (or all three). […] cutting out red meat while still eating chicken doesn’t address the whole problem.

I really like the analogy they’ve made:

Here’s why: Both choices — beef and chicken — badly damage the environment, so choosing one or the other is sort of like the difference between driving a huge SUV and a Hummer.

If Everyone in the USA Went Vegetarian for Just One Day →

According to Environmental Defense, if every American skipped one meal of chicken per week and substituted vegetarian foods instead, the carbon dioxide savings would be the same as taking more than half a million cars off of U.S. roads.

Here are some highlights:

• 70 million gallons of gas would be saved — enough to fuel all the cars of Canada and Mexico combined with plenty to spare
• they’d save up on 33 tons of antibiotics
• it would prevent 3 million tons of soil erosion and $70 million in resulting economic damages
• 4.5 million tons of animal excrement would never be an issue to dispose of

Berkeley Farmers’ Markets Bag Plastic, First in Nation →

Single-use high-density polyethylene (HDPE) bags pose significant problems to the environment, wildlife, and human health through their production, use, and disposal. They can take from 400 to 1,000 years to break down, and their constituent chemicals remain in the environment long after that. Made from crude oil, natural gas and other petrochemical derivatives, an estimated 12 million barrels of oil are needed to make the 100 billion plastic bags Americans use annually—more than 330 per person per year, according to Worldwatch Institute, an environmental watchdog group. Most plastic bags are thrown away, clogging landfills, and, with less than one percent of plastic bags recycled, many enter the water ways eventually killing animals that ingest the plastic debris.