Photo by Sam Rae, under a Creative Commons license

Is San Francisco’s ban on plastic bags merely a band-aid solution to a deeper environmental issue? Anna of Bring Your Own makes a convincing argument:

Replacing plastic bags with paper and compostable does little to address the root of the issue: our disposable mentality. Yes, its potentially preventing plastic bags from winding up in the ocean, to be chomped by poor unwitting sea turtles…..but at the end of the day, a tremendous opportunity to educate is missed. We gotta start valuing our resources! Bring your own damn bag, use it over an over, take some responsibility for your crap!

She cites Ireland’s tax of 15 cents per plastic bag as a more effective solution. “People no longer looked at the nasty little suckers as expendable, valueless items, to be tossed unthinkingly,” Anna writes in her blog. “We HATE having to pay for things we think should be free…..and when we have to PAY, even a paltry sum of 10-15 cents, we immediately attach some value.”

It’s an indisputable fact that plastic bags are a scourge on our planet—each takes 1,000 years to break down into microscopic particles that wind up polluting our soil and waterways, not to mention enter our food chain through accidental ingestion by animals. (Thousands of marine animals die each year after mistaking plastic bags for food.) In the case of the endangered leatherback turtle, plastic bags masquerading as delectable jellyfish—its primary food source—are far too tempting to pass up.

San Francisco’s solution: Replace all petroleum-based plastic bags with bags made from recycled paper—which returns to the earth in about a month—or compostable ones made from plant starches. Corn plastics, such as the patented PLA, only decompose into carbon dioxide and water under industrial composting conditions, in special facilities that can subject compost to high temperatures—we’re talking about something like 140 degrees Fahrenheit—for long spans of time. That rules out utilizing your backyard compost pile or tumbler. PLA also poses a problem for conventional recycling facilities that aren’t equipped to handle this newfangled plastic. Unlike polyethylene terephthalate (PET), which can be broken down into pellets and fabricated into new products such as carpeting or fiberfill, PLA currently has few applications, largely because of its low melting point. In fact, recyclers see PLA as a contaminant if it’s mixed in with your PET recyclables—they have to fork out cash to get the PLA sorted out and disposed of. (This does not make them happy campers, as you can imagine.)

Paper bags are no better, and in fact could be far worse than their plastic counterparts. According to the EPA, paper bags generate 70 percent more air pollutants and 50 times more water pollutants than plastic bags do. Four times as much energy is expended in the production of a paper bag. Plus, it takes 91 percent less energy to recycle a pound of plastic than it takes to recycle the equivalent in paper. (And, regardless of the medium, there will always be antisocial yahoos who litter and don’t recycle. This is where educational programs need to come into play.)

So paper, plastic, or corn starch? If our society is ever to break from its throwaway, narcissistic mentality, the right, most ecologically beneficial answer would be “none of the above, I’ve brought my own.”

References:
1. Royte, Elizabeth. “Corn Plastic to the Rescue.” Smithsonian August (2006)

Photo by Old Navy

Wendy Richardson needs to blog more often. How else would I have found the U.K.-based Environmental Justice Foundation’s 2007 report, The Deadly Chemicals in Cotton? It’s a 40-pager, which may require more dedication than you currently have, but here is a sampling of the salient points, as outlined in the report’s Executive Summary. (Those two pages very worth a read-through in their entirety.) Global consumption of cotton, by the by, has doubled in the past 30 years.

• Cotton is the world’s most important non-food agricultural commodity, yet it is responsible for the release of US$2 billion of chemical pesticides each year, within which at least US$819 million are considered toxic enough to be classified as hazardous by the World Health Organisation. Cotton accounts for 16% of global insecticide releases—more than any other single crop. Almost 1.0 kilogram of hazardous pesticides is applied for every hectare under cotton.

• Between 1 and 3% of agricultural workers worldwide suffer from acute pesticide poisoning with at least 1 million requiring hospitalization each year, according to a report prepared jointly for the FAO, UNEP, and WHO. These figures equate to between 25 million and 77 million agricultural workers worldwide.

• A single drop of the pesticide aldicarb, absorbed through the skin can kill an adult. Aldicarb is commonly used in cotton production and in 2003 almost 1 million kilos was applied to cotton grown in the USA. Aldicarb is also applied to cotton in 25 other countries worldwide.

• Despite being particularly vulnerable to poisoning, child labourers throughout the world risk exposure to hazardous pesticides through participation in cotton production. In India and Uzbekistan children are directly involved in cotton pesticide application. While in Pakistan, Egypt, and Central Asia child labourers work in cotton fields either during or following the spraying season. Children are also often the first victims of pesticide poisonings, even if they do not participate to spraying, due to the proximity of their homes to cotton fields, or because of the re-use of empty pesticide containers.

• Hazardous pesticides associated with global cotton production represent a substantial threat to global freshwater resources. Hazardous cotton pesticides are now known to contaminate rivers in USA, India, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Brazil, Australia, Greece and West Africa. In Brazil, the world’s 4th largest consumer of agrochemicals, researchers tested rainwater for the presence of pesticides. 19 different chemicals were identified of which 12 were applied to cotton within the study area.

(Emphasis is mine.)

Click here for more »

Photo by Brian Ulrich/The New York Times

Adam Drewnowski, an obesity researcher at the University of Washington, was stymied by the correlation between a person’s wealth (or, more important, the lack thereof) and the likelihood of becoming overweight. To find some answers, he gave himself a hypothetical dollar to spend at a typical American supermarket.

In today’s New York Times Magazine, the inimitable Michael Pollan relates how Drewnowski discovered that you got the most calories for your money among “the towering canyons of processed food and soft drink.”

Drewnowski found that a dollar could buy 1,200 calories of cookies or potato chips but only 250 calories of carrots. Looking for something to wash down those chips, he discovered that his dollar bought 875 calories of soda but only 170 calories of orange juice.

If you’re eating on a budget, Drewnowski concluded, your most-rational economic strategy is to eat nutritionally bankrupt empty calories and pack on the pounds.

Pollan asks: How did we end up in a economic situation where a pair of Twinkies—with no fewer than 39 ingredients, not to mention packaging and marketing costs—is markedly cheaper than a bunch of carrots? “For the answer,” he says, “you need look no farther than the farm bill.”

The farm bill, which is reexamined approximately every five years—it’s come around again in 2007—determines which U.S. crops will be subsidized by the government, and which will not.

Like most processed foods, the Twinkie is basically a clever arrangement of carbohydrates and fats teased out of corn, soybeans and wheat—three of the five commodity crops that the farm bill supports, to the tune of some $25 billion a year. (Rice and cotton are the others.) For the last several decades—indeed, for about as long as the American waistline has been ballooning—U.S. agricultural policy has been designed in such a way as to promote the overproduction of these five commodities, especially corn and soy.

The result, Pollan says, is a “food system awash in added sugars (derived from corn) and added fats (derived mainly from soy), as well as dirt-cheap meat and milk (derived from both). When it comes to supporting fresh produce, however, the farm bill leaves those farmers bereft.

As a result of encouraging overproduction, we also end up flooding overseas markets with a glut of cheap crops that undercut world prices, threatening the livelihoods of millions of small farmers around the world, especially in developing countries. And, according to Pollan, the post-NAFTA flow of the Mexican immigrants that gives Bill O’Reilly so much agita, is “inextricably linked” to the flow of U.S. corn south of the border.

Read the rest of this very important issue here. You can also urge your members of Congress to reform the farm bill via Oxfam America’s online system.

Related articles:
1. Unhappy Meals
2. The Vegetable-Industrial Complex
3. Wake up, America!
4. Michael Pollan vs. Whole Foods
5. The School Lunch Test

Poster by Natural Resources Canada

Another one of my (admittedly myriad) pet peeves: Idling cars, which spew just about as many pollutants as an ad-hoc convention of genitalia-impaired smokers does. I’d stick these flyers (provided by Natural Resources Canada) under people’s windshields if I could get reassurance that it wouldn’t just be a waste of paper. Or that I wouldn’t get shot. Right now, I’m the Queen of Dirty Looks.

NRCAN on why you should turn off your engine when parked, even if it’s only “for a little while.”

Conserve energy: You’ll help reduce needless greenhouse gas emissions.

Breathe easier: You’ll breathe more easily by combating problems like poor air quality and smog.

Save money: You’ll save over 80 litres of gasoline per year if you reduce your idling by only 10 minutes a day.

Idling for over 10 seconds uses more fuel than restarting your engine.

Besides poster and flyers, you can also print stickers for your car, bicycle, or commuter cup.

[via Treehugger]

Illo by Stuart Bradford/Consumer Reports

Consumer Reports has just released the findings of its analysis of 525 fresh, whole broiler chickens purchased in 23 states last spring—83 percent harbored campylobacter or salmonella, which colonize the birds’ intestines and are the leading bacterial causes of foodborne disease that sickens 1.1 million or more Americans each year. (Interestingly, this was a “stunning increase” from its 2003 findings, where 49 percent tested positive for one or both pathogens.)

The spiral-shape campylobacter has seemingly wriggled onto more chickens than ever, because although the U.S. Department of Agriculture tests chickens for salmonella against a federal standard, no such standard exists for campylobacter. (CR insists that there now should be.)

The biggest surprise: Overall, chickens labeled organic or raised without antibiotics (and costing $3 to $5 per pound) were more likely to harbor salmonella than were conventionally produced broilers that cost around $1 per pound¹. (Tested were 10 organic and 12 nonorganic no-antibiotics brands, including three that are “air chilled” in a newer slaughterhouse process supposedly designed to reduce contamination.)

Most of the bacteria CR tested from contaminated chicken (both conventional and no-antibiotics) showed resistance to one or more antibiotics, including some fed to cluckers to speed their growth, as well as those we’re prescribed to treat infections. This wasn’t unexpected even in the no-antibiotics birds, says CR, because “those germs are widespread and can persist in the environment.”

Without knowing more about the magazine’s methodology, there’s not much I can say about its results, which seem to run counter to what we’d expect from organic animal husbandry. (Should we blame big-box organics for the dilution of stricter standards; who knows?) I mean, it’s no skin off my nose personally since I’m vegetarian, a position that’s proving increasingly merited in light of news that cows, pigs, sheep, and poultry are the world’s greatest environmental threats.

But even CR concedes that you should purchase any meat directly from small farmers, via farmers’ markets and Community Supported Agriculture programs, so you can engage in a dialogue with the farmer about how the animals are raised, what they eat, and so forth. And of course, CR’s analysis doesn’t take into account the fact that organically raised livestock isn’t force-fed pesticide-soaked, genetically modified corn feed mixed in with ground animal parts, or kept so tightly confined that they are unable to shuffle more than a few feet for their entire lives. (More reasons for eating organic meat here.)

Alright, I’m going to rip out the ol’ bleeding heart here: Organic animals are raised more humanely—with a species-appropriate environment to roam—and are fed well-rounded and nutritious diets that boost their health (and by that same token, yours) significantly. Smaller farms also means less manure, which is a human-health risk because any overspill can contaminate our water sources with E. coli and other pathogens. In just one region of North Carolina, for instance, hog farms produce 10 million metric tons of waste annually. That’s A LOT of poop to scoop.

And organic meat? Well, as far as I can tell, it’s not just a load of crap—which is more than I can say for some of the health and environmental policies in this country.

¹One exception was Ranger, a no-antibiotics premium brand sold only in the Northwest, which CR found to be “extremely clean.” Of the 10 samples it analyzed, none had salmonella, and only two had campylobacter.

More proof the government is trying to kill us: Shrubya’s (I just came up with that, you like?) brain trust, in its infinite, God-kissed wisdom, wants to take lead off the list of toxic air pollutants. Lead exposure, if you didn’t know already, can severly harm the nervous system, damage the brain and kidneys, and cause miscarriages in pregnant women. Fill out and send an online letter to the EPA to let them know this is a TERRIBLE IDEA. Like electing-George-W.-Bush-president terrible.

Photo by Stephen Toner/Getty Images

From the Chicago Tribune: “The demand for cheap Chinese goods is driving destructive logging around the world, threatening livelihoods and dividing fragile nations.”

Night and day, the timber ships reach this Yangtze River port, one of the world’s busiest clearinghouses for logs from every corner of the globe: Southeast Asia, the Amazon, Russia, the Congo.

Soon, this wood will be yours.

It will be your hardwood floor and your coffee table, your bedroom dresser and your plywood—all stamped with the most successful label of our time: Made in China.

In less than a decade, China has transformed the global timber trade, importing more wood each year than any country in history and quadrupling the amount of wood products it ships around the globe.

And no one is consuming more of it than Americans. U.S. shoppers have become the world’s best customers of low-cost Chinese flooring, furniture and plywood, buying 10 times as much as a decade ago.

You can trace just one log’s journey to the port at Zhangjiagang from 3,000 miles of the Pacific across to Papua New Guinea, which “nearly abandoned logging until China came along.” The article tracks the log to the nation’s remote northwest province of Sanduan, where “millions in timber profits and payments have left children without shoes and schools without plumbing.” Then the log’s trail ends at its origin: a specific patch of forest where “the torn landscape of logging has left a tribal leader unsure [of] where to hunt for food and fearful for the future.” (And this is in addition to landslides due to soil erosion, as well as greenhouse gases from deforestation and the loss of our “carbon sinks,” both of which further contribute to global warming.)

Besides the socio-economic reasons for why we should care about where our wood comes from—and how responsibly it was harvested—is the fact that forests are our planet’s richest stores of biodiversity. The article continues:

Such tropical rain forests cover barely 6 percent of the planet but hold 50 percent of all the known organisms on Earth. Half of the world’s tropical forests have been felled already, leaving researchers to speculate how many species are going extinct before they are discovered.

That prospect makes New Guinea even more of a treasure in the lucrative world of biomedical research. Tropical forests hold unique value for researchers who rely on new genetic ingredients for cures and vaccines. By one count, no less than 40 percent of all prescriptions written in the U.S. are for drugs derived from plants, animals and microorganisms.

Loggers in Papua New Guinea are cutting so fast that experts calculate that the rest of its accessible forests will be cut down within 16 years.

“Those are some of the finest remaining forests in the tropical world,” said American biologist Bruce Beehler, who has made more than 40 research trips to New Guinea.

“If you take just 1 hectare [2 1/2 acres] of it, it probably has thousands of species living there—plants, animals and other life-forms—that haven’t been described by science. So we don’t even know what’s in that box that is being meddled with.”

Related articles:
1. Logging Decimates Africa’s Forests
2. Mail Call: Toxic Wood
3. Bring Your Ever-Lovin’ Own
4. It’s Getting Hot in Here: Act Now

Further resources:
1. Forestry Stewardship Council (FSC certification assures you that your product was made with wood from sustainably managed forests)
2. Sustainable Forestry Initiative
3. Co-op America’s Woodwise program

Photo by Ebby May/Getty Images

From The Independent: “Chemical pollution may have harmed the brains of millions of children around the world in what scientists are calling a ’silent pandemic’.”

The world is bathed in a soup of industrial chemicals which are damaging the intellectual potential of the next generation and may increase the incidence of conditions such as Parkinson’s disease, they say.

One in every six children has a developmental disability, such as autism, attention deficit disorder or cerebral palsy, the effects of which may be life-long.

The role of low-level pollutants, such as lead and mercury, on the growing brain has been recognised for decades and measures taken to reduce exposure to a minimum. But scientists from the Harvard School of Public Health, in Boston, say at least 202 chemicals are known to have the capacity to damage the brain and their effects at low levels of exposure are unknown. They say limits for exposure to chemicals should be set for pregnant women and young children, recognising the unique sensitivity of the developing brain, which is much more susceptible to the toxic effects of chemicals.

A selection of the 202 chemicals listed by the authors, including chemicals in household products that can cause serious accidents when ingested or have been used in suicide attempts:

Acrylamide
Used in adhesives, printing ink and agricultural sprays. Can cause drowsiness and hallucinations.

Cyclohexane
Used to make nylon, paint and resin removers, and fungicides. Can cause headaches and convulsions.

Acetone
Used in nail-polish remover and to make plastics, fibres and drugs. Breathing it over long periods can cause light-headedness and confusion.

Methanol
Used as a petrol additive and in spray paints. Can cause an effect similar to drunkenness followed by severe stomach, leg and back pain.

Trichloroethylene
Used in dry cleaning. Breathing it for long periods may cause dizziness, poor co-ordination and difficulty concentrating.

Aniline
Used to make pesticides, dyes and rubber. Breathing in small amounts over several years may cause cancer.

Styrene
Used in making plastics. Breathing small amounts over long periods causes alterations in vision, hearing loss and slower reaction times

[via the Organic Consumers Association]

Related articles:
1. Pesticides in Produce
2. The Pesticide-Parkinson’s Equation
3. Grass! On! The! Loose! (Chekhov’s Eco Tip)
4. Lawn & Order
5. Vinegar: Disinfectant of Champions
6. Eco-Me Home: Green Cleaning Solutions
7. Pollution in People
8 . Eulogy for Swiffer
9. Maybe Baby: Chemicals & Kids
10. Why Pesticides Suck Reason #785

Photo from Oprah.com

Product Red saves African lives: “This season, you can actually feel good if your bank account is running in the red.”

[U2’s Bono] is bringing his good-faith efforts to the mass population, teaming up with the world’s largest clothing retailer, The Gap, to sell his “Product Red” clothing line. The Gap, itself a target of quite a few anti-sweatshop activist groups, is redeeming its image with Bono’s new line of t-shirts and jeans, some of which are made in factories in Africa in order to stimulate economic growth, and as much as fifty percent of the net sales of all Product Red items will go to purchase AIDS anti-retroviral drugs.

Product Red doesn’t stop at The Gap’s doors either. Apple has launched a Product Red iPod nano and Motorola a Product Red Razr phone, and Emporio Armani and Converse are also selling items under the label. Donations are made by each of these companies to provide AIDS medication.

I threw up this link partly for the crybabies who bawl about how the poor megacorporations JUST WANT TO BE LOVED. (Not that I care about them, because, trust me, I don’t.) But also mainly because my old grad-school roommate is a HUGE Bono fan of terrifying proportions and she would wallop me with a giant cannoli till I lost all consciousness if I didn’t give the man props. So this is for you, Maria. Because you’ve watched The Godfather trilogy far too many times for comfort and I’m afraid for my family.

And in case anyone thought I was getting soft in my old age …

Product Red kills African lives: “[S]pare me the fantasy that shopping till you drop somehow affects radical change.”

In the place of anything resembling citizenship we have consumer choices, “innovation” and above all brand marketing, which is even now in Product Red being cast as some sort of corporate largesse. (”Isn’t it so great that the Gap and Apple would submerge their own brand identity,” glowed many a business page article). Shopping is sharing, and the unprecedented accumulation of wealth squares entirely with “ending poverty”—just ask Gates or Warren Buffet. In their world, fighting AIDS somehow never seems to query how Europe and the US underdeveloped Africa and how the continent’s abundant resources are still exploited by the world’s wealthy.

And as this smart blogger points out, the AmEx board is stacked with former and current CEOs and directors of major Pharma companies who waged a genocidal campaign against the generic production of AIDS drugs. At 1 percent of AmEx Red profits, absolution comes cheap these days, don’t it?

Related article: Think Before You Pink

Microwave popcorn could kill you: “Want your lungs popped in a jiffy? Cook yourself a bowl of microwave popcorn.”

The chemical in question is called diacetyl. It’s naturally present in butter, and food manufacturers use a synthetic version of this compound whenever they want to endow a product with a buttery taste. Other products that contain this chemical include margarine, butter substitutes, cooking oil, lard, and countless frozen food products.

Diacetyl was widely accepted as safe and effective until dozens of workers at a microwave popcorn manufacturing plant in Jasper, Missouri, inexplicably developed a rare disease called bronchiolitis obliterans, which, as its Latin name suggests, is a condition that completely destroys the lungs.

British moms sell contraband junk food, kill kids: “Five months after the celebrity chef Jamie Oliver succeeded in cajoling, threatening and shaming the British government into banning junk food from its school cafeterias, many schools are learning that you can lead a child to a healthy lunch, but you can’t make him eat.”

“No matter how healthy it is, if kids don’t like it they’re not going to eat it,” said Julie Critchlow, a parent at Rawmarsh, a high school set between a sprawling housing project and the south Yorkshire hills. She mentioned the school’s new low-fat pizza and tagliatelle and meatballs as being particularly unappetizing to her children and said the cooks were so overworked that the baked potatoes were being served half-cooked.

The fact that Rawmarsh now bans children who do not go home for lunch from leaving school has made things worse, she said, leading to an overcrowded cafeteria and the elimination of the old fast-food-down-the-road option.

“They shouldn’t be allowed to tell the kids what to eat,” Mrs. Critchlow said of the school authorities. “They’re treating them like criminals.”

Mrs. Critchlow has become a notorious figure in Britain. In September she and another mother—alarmed, they said, because their children were going hungry—began selling contraband hamburgers, fries and sandwiches to as many as 50 students a day, passing the food through the school gates.

Related article: Lunch Lessons: Changing the Way We Feed Our Children

Accidental drug exposure causes premature puberty in kids, “feminization” in boys, but doesn’t kill … yet: “[S]ome physicians worry that children are at higher risk of early puberty as a result of the increasing prevalence of certain drugs, cosmetics and environmental contaminants, called ‘endocrine disruptors,’ that can cause breast growth, pubic hair development and other symptoms of puberty.”

Dr. Dedekian’s first patient was evaluated for possible genetic endocrine problems and a rare brain tumor before the cause of her puberty was discovered. It turned out that her testosterone level was almost 100 times normal, in the range of an adult man. The same problem affected her brother.

The doctors realized that the girl’s father was using a concentrated testosterone skin cream bought from an Internet compounding pharmacy for cosmetic and sexual performance purposes. From normal skin contact with their father, the children absorbed the testosterone, which caused pubic hair growth and genital enlargement. The boy, in particular, also developed some aggressive behavior problems.

Related news: “Could chemicals have destroyed my sons’ chances of becoming fathers?”

Dear Chekhov,

Thanks,
Chelee

Click here for more »

Photo by David Royal/New York Times Magazine

Michael Pollan writes in today’s New York Times Magazine about “bad spinach the government will only make worse.”

If bagged salad greens are vulnerable to bacterial contamination on such a scale, industry and government would very soon come looking for a technological fix; any day now, calls to irradiate the entire food supply will be on a great many official lips. That’s exactly what happened a few years ago when we learned that E. coli from cattle feces was winding up in American hamburgers. Rather than clean up the kill floor and the feedlot diet, some meat processors simply started nuking the meat—sterilizing the manure, in other words, rather than removing it from our food. Why? Because it’s easier to find a technological fix than to address the root cause of such a problem. This has always been the genius of industrial capitalism—to take its failings and turn them into exciting new business opportunities.

He goes on to say that industrial farming and processing methods, both of which have been “industrialized and centralized over the last few decades” are putting our health at peril. The lethal 0157:H7 strain of E. coli, responsible for the latest outbreak of food poisoning, was believed to have evolved in the guts of cattle fed a diet of grain that “happens to turn a cow’s rumen into an ideal habitat for E. coli 0157:H7. (The bug can’t survive long in cattle living on grass.)”

Industrial animal agriculture produces more than a billion tons of manure every year, manure that, besides being full of nasty microbes like E. coli 0157:H7 (not to mention high concentrations of the pharmaceuticals animals must receive so they can tolerate the feedlot lifestyle), often ends up in places it shouldn’t be, rather than in pastures, where it would not only be harmless but also actually do some good. To think of animal manure as pollution rather than fertility is a relatively new (and industrial) idea.

Pollan makes a case for eating local, not just because we want to support farmers in our communities and eat seasonal fresh food at their most flavorful—or even because we want our children to recognize real food in its natural, unpackaged glory—but also for “hardheaded or pragmatic” reasons. Want to fight off a possible terrorist attack? Shop at your local farmers’ market or community-assisted-agriculture (CSA) program.

Our highly centralized food economy is a dangerously precarious system, vulnerable to accidental—and deliberate—contamination. This is something the government understands better than most of us eaters. When Tommy Thompson retired from the Department of Health and Human Services in 2004, he said something chilling at his farewell news conference: “For the life of me, I cannot understand why the terrorists have not attacked our food supply, because it is so easy to do.” The reason it is so easy to do was laid out in a 2003 G.A.O. report to Congress on bioterrorism. “The high concentration of our livestock industry and the centralized nature of our food-processing industry” make them “vulnerable to terrorist attack.” Today 80 percent of America’s beef is slaughtered by four companies, 75 percent of the precut salads are processed by two and 30 percent of the milk by just one company. Keeping local food economies healthy—and at the moment they are thriving—is a matter not of sentiment but of critical importance to the national security and the public health, as well as to reducing our dependence on foreign sources of energy.

(Emphasis is mine)

The Food Network’s Alton Brown also fingers our not eating local for the whole spinach fiasco. [via Slowly She Turned] “21 states affected by spinach grown not only in one state but in one region of one state. Had the spinach stayed near home odds are good this would have been caught sooner,” he blasts in his blog. He continues:

Had the big chain grocers and restaurant suppliers purchased locally grown produce, this wouldn’t have happened. But don’t blame them. Nope. Blame us. By demanding fresh spinach year round (or anything else for that matter) we create the monster. It’s like Dan Akroyd thinking of the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man in Ghost Busters. Our own unnatural desires and our refusal to consume locally grown foods have brought us to this sorry state.

(Emphasis is mine.)

Brown ends his post with a ominous warning. “Until we diversify and decentralize our food growing system and learn to eat locally and seasonally,” he says, “we only open up ourselves for more of the same. And let that be a lesson to us all.”

DUM DUM DUUUUUMMM …

Photo by Claudia Rehm/Getty Images

From the Los Angeles Times: “Chemical-laden goods outlawed in Europe and Japan are permitted in the American market.”

As the European Union and other nations have tightened their environmental standards, mostly in the last two years, manufacturers—here and around the world—are selling goods to American consumers that fail to meet other nations’ stringent laws for toxic chemicals.

Wood, toys, electronics, pesticides and cosmetics are among U.S. products that contain substances that are banned or restricted elsewhere, particularly in Europe and Japan, because they may raise the risk of cancer, alter hormones or cause reproductive or neurological damage.

Michael Wilson, a professor at UC Berkeley’s Center for Occupational and Environmental Health, said the United States is becoming a “dumping ground” for consumer goods that are unwanted and illegal in much of the world. Wilson warned earlier this year in a report commissioned by the California Legislature that “the United States has fallen behind globally in the move toward cleaner technologies.” …

One birch plank from China, bought at a Home Depot store in Portland, gave off 100 times more formaldehyde than legal in Japan and 30 times more than allowed in Europe and China, according to July tests conducted by a lab hired by an Oregon-based wood products manufacturer. Formaldehyde exposure has been shown in human studies to cause nose and throat cancer and possibly leukemia, as well as allergic reactions, asthma attacks, headaches and sore throats.

With no government standards, monitoring or labeling, U.S. consumers cannot easily identify chemical-free products. …

California may step in. The Air Resources Board is considering standards roughly equivalent to Europe’s for 2008 and Japan’s for 2010 through 2012.

The air board estimates that one of every 10,000 Californians is at risk of contracting cancer from breathing average formaldehyde levels found in homes and offices.

(Emphases are mine.)

Related articles:
1. The Poison Plastic
2. Mail Call: Toxic Wood
3. Color Me Bad

Graphic by Global Exchange

It’ll probably come as little surprise to know that October is this witch’s favoritest month of the year. Now doubly so because it’s also Fair Trade Month. (I even registered this domain on Halloween without consciously making the connection. Spooky!)

As I mentioned in my Valentine’s Day post, almost half of the chocolate consumed in this country, including those by Nestlé, Hershey’s, and M&M/Mars, is made from cocoa beans imported from Africa’s Ivory Coast, and largely harvested by child slaves as young as 9. (Learn more about the dark side of chocolate here.)

This All Hallow’s Eve, choose some quality fair-trade quality for your little ghouls and ghosties. Fair trade ensures that farmers and artisans are paid what their countries of origin consider a living wage, and that the products they produce are sweatshop- and child-labor-free.

How do you tell if something is fair trade? Look for this label of certification on the packaging, which means that the product complies with the economic, social, and environmental criteria as laid out by Transfair USA.

As Green LA Girl points out, however, the certification covers only the product itself, not the entire company. For example, is Starbucks’ Cafe Estima blend fair trade? Yes, it is, indeedy. Is the rest of Starbucks’ coffee fair trade, as well? Not on your life.

To help you get in the spirit, as it were, and turn up some ol’ black magic without the fog machine, Global Exchange has put together a screamingly delicious fair-trade action kit, comprising Equal Exchange’s fair-trade (and organic, natch) chocolate candy in a biodegradable bag, a poster identifying your family as a fair-trade haunt, postcards to hand out, a recycled trick-or-treat bag, and traditional Papel Picado Mexican party streamers for only $15. (Use the coupon code “ftm2006″ on orders more than $20 for a 10 percent discount.) And while you’re at it, print up a postcard or two to let Nestlé U.S.A. know how you feel about their frightful purchasing choices.

You can also stave away little ravenous monsters with Endangered Species’ ethically traded Halloween bite-size treats (reviewed on the CandyBlog). Canadian readers also have the option of Chocoland’s fair-trade-certified, organic delectables.

[via Green LA Girl]

To stretch out the theme of kids helping out other kids this October 31st, ask them if they’d like to Trick-or-Treat for UNICEF, and collect change while they’re making their toothsome rounds. (Kits are free.)

You’ll also find more spine-chilling yet green Halloween tips and tricks at Care2.com and Environmental Defense, so you can wait for the Great Pumpkin to rise out of the pumpkin patch with eco-finesse.

Image from Anthropologie

I will be the first to admit that I truly love Anthropologie’s sense of Old World sophistication—from its bright hand-embroidered napkins and burnished vintage-inspired drawer pulls to its wispy, lace-edged blouses and billowy Mediterranean skirts. Not that I could ever afford anything there or find anything worth affording, even before I fell into the steady gait of a life lived in voluntary simplicity. My husband could regale you with tales, however, of a time when he used to have to hoist my limp, quietly sobbing form from the store and drag me down West Broadway, sighing as I occasionally punctuated the air with gasps of “so … pretty…”

I even like Anthropologie’s boho kid sister, Urban Outfitters, and, on more than one occasion, have briefly entertained the notion of spray-painting all my furniture white and psychedelic pink, and then hanging a kicky little chandelier above my postmodern tableau. (Don’t worry, I don’t subscribe to Country Living for nothing.)

So it’s a pity that, despite the fact I never actually shop at either of the stores (preferring instead to soak up the eye candy vicariously), I’ll have to actively girlcott the two places. (Besides using sweatshops in Turkey, India, or Sri Lanka, Urban Outfitters has also been accused of “borrowing heavily” from indie designers.)

Manhattan User’s Guide points out, in its Oct. 4 e-mail, that both stores are owned by Richard Hayne, who according to the Star Tribune, “contributed more than $13,000 to Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., most recently noted for comments comparing homosexuality to bestiality.”

The writer continues to say:

This incongruity represents a common, troubling phenomenon in retail. It seems that it’s getting harder and harder to shop our values with each passing year.

Never doubt that we vote for the kind of future we want with our dollars, which is why it’s more important than ever to support green and fair-trade businesses. Visit ResponsibleShopper.org to educate yourself about the real values some of our biggest brands represent, and ask yourself whether they’re yours, too.

Screenshot from Think Before You Pink

It’s October, which means it’s time for the Corporate Group Wank for the Cure, brought to you in several selfless—but ever so sassy—shades of Pepto pink.

Says I Blame the Patriarchy:

If you were to ask any space alien—who happened to be dropping by on its way to the Delta Quadrant—about breast cancer, it would undoubtedly tell you that, according to its personal observations, the primary symptom of the disease is a dramatically increased propensity to sprout pink teddy bears, pink visors, and pink rhinestone jewelry. Of course you and I know that infantilizing misogynist teddybear rhinestone pinkness, cancer-o-normative though it may seem, is actually just one of the most successful campaigns in the history of marketing gimmicks. Thanks to unprecedented support in terms of cash and selfless volunterrorism, breast cancer is currently the most popular disease in America. …

But where’s the activism? The ostensible focus of all this pseudo-philanthropic pink jockeying is a kind of nebulous breast cancer ‘awareness’, rather than any serious effort at prevention or investigation into what actually causes breast cancer in the first place. Furthermore, once all this ‘awareness’ has produced, via mammography outreach programs or self-exam propaganda (both masquerading as ‘prevention’), a positive diagnosis, there’s not any great push to secure treatment for underserved women.

In other words, when you think of a breast cancer ‘survivor’, you don’t picture a poor black grandmother living in squalor without health insurance (and you certainly don’t imagine a woman who, because of sensible research efforts, never got cancer in the first place.) The Breast Cancer Brand woman is a pro-patriarchy white chick: middle-class, straight, virtuous, concerned with maintaining her femininity, and married with two above-average kids. Ordinarily she’d be content with her life as the unassuming, unpaid family caregiver, but she’s forced by circumstances to be plucky, brave, and heroic.

Something Twisty didn’t bring up is the cost of the marketing blitzes behind these sudden fits of altruism. According to Think Before You Pink:

In a 2005 PR Week article, 3M touted that its 2004 breast cancer awareness effort, involving a 70-foot-tall ribbon made of Post-it Notes in Times Square, reached more than 3 million people and increased sales 80 percent over expectations. The article reports that 3M spent $500,000 on the marketing campaign (no actual numbers on profits were released), but only gave a little over half of that amount ($300,000) to the cause.

Well now.

The point I’m trying to make is, unless you’re buying something you would have purchased anyway (instead of being strong-armed by the nefarious Pink Juggernaut), forget about squirreling away those yogurt lids and make an online donation directly into the coffers of the breast-cancer organization or charity of your choice, instead. And, really, will flashing your poorly lit knockers on a cheap $19.95 Webcam do anything other than titillate, dehumanize, and objectify? Don’t wait up for me to get back to you on that one.

Another kvetch: Men get breast cancer, too. But I’m guessing the white male supremacists of the world aren’t ready for the celebration of full-on man boobage quite yet.

Wimps.

Photo by David Woodfall/Getty Images

This sewage sludge sitch is worse than I thought, which is just another reason to eat organic. For now at least, organic standards prohibit the use of sewage-sludge-based fertilizers for crops. (In 2000, facing a huge public backlash, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) abandoned plans to allow the use of sewage sludge in organic agriculture.)

Selling sewage sludge to farmers has been touted since the early ’90s as a favorable way of disposing of the unwanted byproducts from municipal wastewater-treatment plants, which collect waste from myriad sources, including homes, businesses, chemical industries, and hospitals. After physical, chemical, and biological contaminants are removed from the wastewater, all the disposed-of material—much of which is toxic, persistent, and bioaccumulative—concentrates into a thick, poisonous goop.

The sludge is heat-dried to form pellets, which are then hawked as commercial-use fertilizer by companies such as Synagro. In the mid-’90s, the waste-management industry lobbied to redub sewage sludge with the slicker moniker “biosolids,” citing the negative connotations the original term held in the hearts and minds of the public, regardless of how many times the sludge was treated and reprocessed. (Can you blame ‘em? Imagine the Gardener of Tomorrow: “Well Neighbor Bob, I’m feeding my prize genetically augmented spinach a healthy side of Class A biosolids, thanks to those hardworking scientists who are opening the doors to a better age! Wanna take a ride on my monorail?”)

From The Center for Food Safety:

The sludge being spread on our crop fields is a dangerous stew of heavy metals, industrial compounds, viruses, bacteria, drug residues, and radioactive material. In fact, hundreds of people have fallen ill after being exposed to sewage sludge fertilizer—suffering such symptoms as respiratory distress, headaches, nausea, rashes, reproductive complications, cysts, and tumors.

A common but controversial flame retardant, penta bromo diphenyl ether (pentaBDE), along with the industrial carcinogen polychlorinated biphenyl (PCB), asbestos, synthetic hormones, and some 60,000 toxic chemicals have also been identified in sewage sludge spread over agricultural land. Infectious pathogens such as Salmonella and increasingly drug-resistant strains of E. coli have also been detected.

In 2003, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) scientists David Gattie and David Lewis¹ questioned the efficacy of methods used to treat sewage sludge and determine their pathogen levels, and that chemical-pathogen interactions on land application sites could exacerbate infections and illnesses—even death. (At least 3 human deaths have been attributed to exposure to land-applied sewage sludge.) In June 2003, a Georgia Superior Court ruled that the deaths of 300 dairy cows on the Boyceland Dairy farm were caused by feeding on hay that had been grown on land where Class B sludge had been applied according to EPA directions.

According to the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences, approximately 60 percent of an estimated 5.6 million tons of dry sludge is used for land application. To give you an idea of how deficient existing sewage-sludge regulations are (which is to say, very): An industrial business is permitted to discharge up to 15 kilograms (or 33 pounds) of hazardous waste into sewers without reporting it each month.

Many major players in the agriculture and food industry have taken a stand against produce grown on land treated with sewage sludge, including Heinz, Dole, Del Monte, and Nestlé. J. M. Dryer, General Manager of Heinz’s Food & Technology Systems, wrote: “[The] risk of utilizing municipal sludge, which is known to be high in heavy metals, such as cadmium and lead, is not a health risk which we need to take. This is not a publicity statement since it is rigorously enforced and we have at times dropped suppliers who have used sludge on their crop land.”

And you know when a company like Nestlé goes all ethical on us like this, it’s like the Joker saying that Ra’s Al Ghul is just too evil for him.

For further details, check out the National Sludge Alliance’s extensive material on the subject.

¹ Lewis was later fired from the EPA, allegedly after continuing to criticize the agency in the journal Nature.