You might have heard about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. That almost continental sized accumulation of plastic debris situated in remote waters between California and Hawaii. Now, you can hop over and see its cousin – on the Atlantic Ocean. The growing garbage patch on the Atlantic has been ignored till now.

Though, the Atlantic patch still hasn’t reserved a moniker, it won’t be long before it catches the eye with its 520,000 bits of trash per square mile. The Pacific garbage Patch has nearly 1.9 million bits per square mile. This new patch is located hundreds of miles off the North American coast. The patch covers a region between 22 and 38 degrees north latitude—approximately the distance from Cuba to Virginia.

Similar to its Pacific brethren, the patch is an environmental risk for fish, seabirds, and other marine animals that accidentally feed on the wish-wash. And it’s a tremendous eye-sore if you are trawling by.
Where is all the rubbish floating out from?

[Read more →]

I bet you wouldn’t normally eat food that has been grown in body waste (read – excreta). But that’s just the solution, a Swedish entrepreneur has developed. It’s a biodegradable plastic bag that’s a single use pouch for your nature’s calls. Thanks to some simple chemistry gets its second life as fertilizer for crops.

It seems just the solution for under-developed countries of Asia and Africa. Especially when you consider that 40% of the global population does not have access to proper toilets, mostly in Asia and Africa.
Disposable of human waste is a hygienic as well as a space worry for poorer countries which lack the infrastructure. Could this be the ‘bag of wonder’?

Anders Wilhelmson, an architect and professor in Stockholm, is the guy behind the bag dubbed Peepoo. No marks for guessing where the name comes from! The technology is as simple as it is novel.

[Read more →]

Intercontinental Rejection: Just after GM’s Hummer brand was discontinued in the U.S., China also spurned the gas-guzzler for environmental reasons. The powerhouse Asian nation aims to derive 15 percent of its electricity from renewable sources by 2020. ABC and Los Angeles Times

Whale of a Solution: Stopping the whale hunt could sequester some 9 million tons of carbon, a fact that has some experts proposing that whale conservation should count for carbon credits. Nature

Dirty Money: BP and Shell shareholders, especially green-oriented institutional investors, are demanding that those companies come clean about their probable involvement in extracting oil from Canada’s tar sands. Ecologist

Reptilian Repast: A new fossil discovery in India proves that 67 million years ago, snakes ate dinosaurs. National Geographic and Nature

Moon Skating, Anyone? A NASA probe found at least 600 millions ton of frozen water on the moon’s north pole. Wired

–Avital Binshtock
We’re sure the Sierra Club would love for you to hop on over and read some more great articles like this one!

by David Roberts

Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.) is fiscally responsible, a “deficit hawk” as they say in the biz, and like most people who self-identify with that label in Washington, he’s very keen for everyone to know it.  Back in September 2009, he urged President Obama to focus on reducing the deficit—indeed, said it should be the Dems’ top priority:

The budget deficits are unsustainable, and the top priority for the President and the Congress must be to develop a strategy that will step us back from the increased federal debt that could undermine our economic future.

Top priority. Got it.

[Read more →]

When living an eco-friendly lifestyle, there are several tips and tricks to reduce your carbon footprint such as using natural cleaning products and carpooling. One of the most common suggestions is to eat locally grown produce. But which is best for the environment: becoming a locavore or a vegan?

A locavore is a person who purchases local products such as vegetables and fruits from farmers within his/her community. While this method is beneficial for reducing your carbon footprint because of fewer food miles, going vegan has an even greater positive impact.

If you’re not interested in becoming vegan, being a locavore is the next best way to help the planet. Not only are you supporting your community, but you are also reducing the mileage and gas for food transportation.

On the flip side, by becoming vegan you reduce the demand for factory farms, which emit harmful gases such as methane and carbon dioxide. According to a 2008 research study by Christopher Weber and H. Scott Matthews published in Environmental Science & Technology, “We find that although food is transported long distances in general (1640 km delivery and 6760 km life-cycle supply chain on average) the GHG [greenhouse gas] emissions associated with food are dominated by the production phase, contributing 83% of the average U.S. household’s 8.1 t CO2e/yr footprint for food consumption.”

[Read more →]

Wal-Mart is the world’s largest retailer and therefore contributes a great deal to the greenhouse gas emissions each year. Not only does the company Wal-Mart itself emit massive amounts of emissions, all of their suppliers do as well. In order to continue being competitive in the market and to reduce operation costs, Wal-Mart is looking to reduce their overall emissions through suppliers.

Wal-Mart has already began developing a system for rating their products by their level of eco-friendliness. In addition, Wal-Mart has pursued having more energy efficient stores, which are throughout the world. Wal-Mart has also looked into using alternative fuel for their many tractor trailers and other vehicles. However, Wal-Mart is now pressuring their suppliers to reduce emissions as well.

Due to the massiveness of the company, many believe Wal-Mart may be able to influence major suppliers into reducing their overall emissions. Not only would this reduce emissions but it would be likely to reduce overall costs for consumers and lead to more environmentally friendly products in stores.

Wal-Mart in total has over 100,000 suppliers. They have already pushed suppliers to reduce packaging and are now hoping for an overall reduction in emissions by suppliers of 20 million metric tons. Wal-Mart is pushing them to reduce this amount of emissions by the year 2015. However, Wal-Mart will not be forcing suppliers to make the alterations.

[Read more →]

by Eric Burkett

Meanwhile the eleven disciples set out for Galilee, to the mountain where Jesus had arranged to meet them. When they saw him they fell down before him, though some hesitated. Jesus came up and spoke to them. He said, ‘All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go, therefore, make disciples of all nations; baptize them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teach them to observe all the commands I gave you. And look, I am with you always; yes, to the end of time.’

Christians among readers of Grist will recognize the preceding passage as the Great Commission (Matthew 28:16-20), Jesus’s call to spread his message to the world. Religion, of course, takes many forms, but its most interesting form to date is food. Many folks, it seems, have embraced food, or food activism, as a new religion.

I don’t toss this out lightly: I’m religious myself—I’m involved in a ministerial training program at the Buddhist temple of which I am a member—and having converted from one faith to another, I think I’m fairly adept at recognizing others who share my affliction. Zealotry, passion, conviction, and a touch of self-righteousness in many cases, are all markers of religious faith.

None of this is surprising, really. How many among us are chasing after miracle foods, downing gallons of pomegranate juice, or wolfing down goji or açaí berries, convinced they’ll somehow give us health and happiness and, perhaps, make us sexier to boot? I remember a smirking Twitter posting I saw months ago: “I’m having goji berries and green tea.” Had the poster been in reach, I might have given him a wedgie…just because.

[Read more →]

Phish Tales: The Twitter account of the British secretary for energy and climate change was hacked during a recent wave of phishing attacks.  Sophos

Downgraded: The former lead singer of the band Midnight Oil, Peter Garrett, was demoted from his position as Australia’s environment minister because of his involvement in a home insulation program that has been linked to four deaths and more than 90 fires. BBC

Comeback Kid: Environmental activist and former White House green czar Van Jones was awarded the NAACP President’s Award. Sierra Club and Washington Post

Applause: The AUG/Living Goods App, which helps shoppers access product information, won this year’s annual Greener Gadgets design competition. Treehugger and Inhabitat

Sun for Sale: California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed into law a bill that raises the amount of electricity utilities are required to buy from the solar-panel owners. Los Angeles Times and Sunpluggers

–Della Watson

I got a wonderful email this week from Shelly Yarbrough, member of the Val Verde Unified School District in Riverside County, California. Shelly wrote to me about a huge solar project that the Irvine Unified School District are just about to approve. On Tuesday, they are scheduled to approve a plan to install solar energy on each of its 21 campuses!! This is the most comprehensive solar program rollout for a school district in the country, and will be one of the largest solar installations of any school system in the country.

The system will be built at no cost to the taxpayers, and will reduce Irvine’s power bill for its school by 20 percent right away — a savings of $17 million over 20 years.

[Read more →]

Here’s a spooky Halloween fact: Consumers spent $1.4 billion on Halloween decorations in 2007, including everything from plastic ornaments to throw-away utensils.

As the 2nd biggest holiday for decorating after Christmas, Halloween negatively impacts the environment by generating a lot of waste. 17 year old Ally Maize, LA’s resident “green” teen and founder of local nonprofit, the Green Youth Movement, is urging communities to reduce their environmental impact this Halloween with some simple, easy-to-do tips. Here are a few things that Ally, along with the help of GreenHalloween.org, is doing to ensure every step of her Halloween  preparations are “eek-o” friendly:

[Read more →]

Have you ever tossed items like cleaning or disinfecting wipes, moist towelettes or personal hygiene wipes into the loo? I’m sure you have. I know I have at one time or another. Well, even items labeled as disposal are, in fact, NOT and cause all sorts of issues at your local processing plants. Even dental floss, which you may think is harmless, is incredibly strong and durable and gets tangled up in the pumps and equipment and binds all the other ickies together into large clogging clumpy masses.

[Read more →]

This post is a collaboration between Mashable’s Summer of Social Good charitable fundraiser and Max Gladwell’s “10 Ways” series. The post is being simultaneously published across more than 100 blogs.

	Social media is about connecting people and providing the tools necessary to have a conversation. That global conversation is an extremely powerful platform for spreading information and awareness about social causes and issues.
That’s one of the reasons charities can benefit so greatly from being active on social media channels. But you can also do a lot to help your favorite charity or causes you are passionate about through social media. Below is a list of 10 ways you can use social media to show your support for issues that are important to you. If you can think of any other ways to help charities via social web tools, please add them in the comments. If you’d like to retweet this post or take the conversation to Twitter or FriendFeed, please use the hashtag #10Ways. 1. Write a Blog Post Blogging is one of the easiest ways you can help a charity or cause you feel passionate about. Almost everyone has an outlet for blogging these days — whether that means a site running WordPress, an account at LiveJournal, or a blog on MySpace or Facebook. By writing about issues you’re passionate about, you’re helping to spread awareness among your social circle. Because your friends or readers already trust you, what you say is influential. Recently, a group of green bloggers banded together to raise individual $1 donations from their readers. The beneficiaries included Sustainable Harvest, Kiva, Healthy Child, Healthy World, Environmental Working Group, and Water for People. The blog-driven campaign included voting to determine how the funds would be distributed between the charities. You can read about the results here. You should also consider taking part in Blog Action Day, a once a year event in which thousands of blogs pledge to write at least one post about a specific social cause (last year it was fighting poverty). Blog Action Day will be on October 15 this year.
2. Share Stories With Friends
	Another way to spread awareness among your social graph is to share links to blog posts and news articles via sites like Twitter, Facebook, Delicious, Digg, and even through email. Your network of friends is likely interested in what you have to say, so you have influence wherever you’ve gathered a social network. You’ll be doing charities you support a great service when you share links to their campaigns, or to articles about causes you care about.
3. Follow Charities on Social Networks In addition to sharing links to articles about issues you come across, you should also follow charities you support on the social networks where they are active. By increasing the size of their social graph, you’re increasing the size of their reach. When your charities tweet or post information about a campaign or a cause, statistics or a link to a good article, consider retweeting that post on Twitter, liking it on Facebook, or blogging about it. Following charities on social media sites is a great way to keep in the loop and get updates, and it’s a great way to help the charity increase its reach by spreading information to your friends and followers. You can follow the Summer of Social Good Charities: Oxfam America (Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, YouTube) The Humane Society (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, MySpace, Flickr) LIVESTRONG (Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Flickr) WWF (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr)
4. Support Causes on Awareness Hubs
Another way you can show your support for the charities you care about is to rally around them on awareness hubs like Change.org, Care2, or the Facebook Causes application. These are social networks or applications specifically built with non-profits in mind. They offer special tools and opportunities for charities to spread awareness of issues, take action, and raise money. It’s important to follow and support organizations on these sites because they’re another point of access for you to gather information about a charity or cause, and because by supporting your charity you’ll be increasing their overall reach. The more people they have following them and receiving their updates, the greater the chance that information they put out will spread virally.
5. Find Volunteer Opportunities Using social media online can help connect you with volunteer opportunities offline, and according to web analytics firm Compete, traffic to volunteering sites is actually up sharply in 2009. Two of the biggest sites for locating volunteer opportunities are VolunteerMatch, which has almost 60,000 opportunities listed, and Idealist.org, which also lists paying jobs in the non-profit sector, in addition to maintaining databases of both volunteer jobs and willing volunteers. For those who are interested in helping out when volunteers are urgently needed in crisis situations, check out HelpInDisaster.org, a site which helps register and educate those who want to help during disasters so that local resources are not tied up directing the calls of eager volunteers. Teenagers, meanwhile, should check out DoSomething.org, a site targeted at young adults seeking volunteer opportunities in their communities.
6. Embed a Widget on Your Site Many charities offer embeddable widgets or badges that you can use on your social networking profiles or blogs to show your support. These badges generally serve one of two purposes (or both). They raise awareness of an issue and offer up a link or links to additional information. And very often they are used to raise money. Mashable’s Summer of Social Good campaign, for example, has a widget that does both. The embeddable widget, which was custom built using Sprout (the creators of ChipIn), can both collect funds and offer information about the four charities the campaign supports.
7. Organize a Tweetup You can use online social media tools to organize offline events, which are a great way to gather together like-minded people to raise awareness, raise money, or just discuss an issue that’s important to you. Getting people together offline to learn about an important issue can really kick start the conversation and make supporting the cause seem more real.Be sure to check out Mashable’s guide to organizing a tweetup to make sure yours goes off without a hitch, or check to see if there are any tweetups in your area to attend that are already organized. 8. Express Yourself Using Video As mentioned, blog posts are great, but a picture really says a thousand words. The web has become a lot more visual in recent years and there are now a large number of social tools to help you express yourself using video. When you record a video plea or call to action about your issue or charity, you can make your message sound more authentic and real. You can use sites like 12seconds.tv, Vimeo, and YouTube to easily record and spread your video message. Last week, the Summer of Social Good campaign encouraged people to use video to show support for charity. The #12forGood campaign challenged people to submit a 12 second video of themselves doing something for the Summer of Social Good. That could be anything, from singing a song to reciting a poem to just dancing around like a maniac — the idea was to use the power of video to spread awareness about the campaign and the charities it supports. If you’re more into watching videos than recording them, Givzy.com enables you to raise funds for charities like Unicef and St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital by sharing viral videos by e-mail.
9. Sign or Start a Petition There aren’t many more powerful ways to support a cause than to sign your name to a petition. Petitions spread awareness and, when successfully carried out, can demonstrate massive support for an issue. By making petitions viral, the social web has arguably made them even more powerful tools for social change. There are a large number of petition creation and hosting web sites out there. One of the biggest is The Petition Site, which is operated by the social awareness network Care2, or PetitionOnline.com, which has collected more than 79 million signatures over the years. Petitions are extremely powerful, because they can strike a chord, spread virally, and serve as a visual demonstration of the support that an issue has gathered. Social media fans will want to check out a fairly new option for creating and spreading petitions: Twitition, an application that allows people to create, spread, and sign petitions via Twitter.
10. Organize an Online Event Social media is a great way to organize offline, but you can also use online tools to organize effective online events. That can mean free form fund raising drives, like the Twitter-and-blog-powered campaign to raise money for a crisis center in Illinois last month that took in over $130,000 in just two weeks. Or it could mean an organized “tweet-a-thon” like the ones run by the 12for12k group, which aims to raise $12,000 each month for a different charity. In March, 12for12k ran a 12-hour tweet-a-thon, in which any donation of at least $12 over a 12 hour period gained the person donating an entry into a drawing for prizes like an iPod Touch or a Nintendo Wii Fit. Last month, 12for12k took a different approach to an online event by holding a more ambitious 24-hour live video-a-thon, which included video interviews, music and sketch comedy performances, call-ins, and drawings for a large number of prizes given out to anyone who donated $12 or more.
Bonus: Think Outside the Box
	Social media provides almost limitless opportunity for being creative. You can think outside the box to come up with all sorts of innovative ways to raise money or awareness for a charity or cause. When Drew Olanoff was diagnosed with cancer, for example, he created Blame Drew’s Cancer, a campaign that encourages people to blow off steam by blaming his cancer for bad things in their lives using the Twitter hashtag #BlameDrewsCancer.
Over 16,000 things have been blamed on Drew’s cancer, and he intends to find sponsors to turn those tweets into donations to LIVESTRONG once he beats the disease. Or check out Nathan Winters, who is biking across the United States and documenting the entire trip using social media tools, in order to raise money and awareness for The Nature Conservancy. The number of innovative things you can do using social media to support a charity or spread information about an issue is nearly endless. Can you think of any others? Please share them in the comments.
Special thanks to VPS.net
	A special thanks to VPS.net, who are donating $100 to the Summer of Social Good for every signup they receive this week. Sign up at VPS.net and use the coupon code “SOSG”to receive 3 Months of FREE hosting on top of your purchased term. VPS.net honors a 30 day no questions asked money back guarantee so there’s no risk.
About the “10 Ways” Series
The “10 Ways” Series was originated by Max Gladwell. This is the second simultaneous blog post in the series. The first ran on more than 80 blogs, including Mashable. Among other things, it is a social media experiment and the exploration of a new content distribution model. You can follow Max Gladwell on Twitter. This content was originally written by Mashable’s Josh Catone.

Citizen journalism, open government, status updates, community building, information sharing, crowdsourcing, and the election of a President.

Editor’s note: This is first guest post from Max Gladwell.

Our children will inherit a world profoundly changed by the combination of technology and humanity that is social media. They’ll take for granted that their voices can be heard and that a social movement can be launched from their laptop. They’ll take for granted that they are connected and interconnected with hundreds of millions of people at any given moment. And they’ll take for granted that a black man is or was President of the United States.

What’s most profound is that these represent parts of a greater whole. They represent a shift in power from centralized institutions and organizations to the People they represent. It is the evolution of democracy by way of technology, and we are all better for it. For most of us, social media has changed our lives in some meaningful way. Collectively it is changing the world for good. Given the pace of innovation and adoption, change has become a constant. Every so often we find the need to stop and reflect on its most recent and noteworthy developments, hence the following list. Please note this is not a top-10 list, nor are these listed in any particular order. It’s also incomplete. So we ask that you add to this conversation in the comments. If you’d like to Retweet this post or take the conversation to Twitter or FriendFeed, please use the hashtag #10Ways.

[Read more →]

No sooner had I received word this morning that Greenpeace were taking action to urge government ministers from the world’s 17 biggest greenhouse polluters to “Stop Global Warming” and “Rescue the Planet” from the devastating effects of climate change that I then get confirmation that Phil Radford, Greenpeace USA’s new and shiny executive director, gets arrested for the sentiment!

Well, all I can say to Greenpeace is what a find! I for one think this new hire sure puts his money where his mouth is. After all, how many of us can say that we’ve been arrested the first day on the job and for such a heinous crime to boot? He and six other climbers were arrested after apparently unfurling a massive banner from a construction crane near the State Department with a message for environment ministers from the world’s largest economies: “Stop Global Warming. Rescue the Planet.”

See what I mean….absolutely heinous…..

[Read more →]

How great would it be to have nature tell you if the ground you walk on is safe?

Obviously this is not anything we have to worry about here in Western society (click here to see the video of what it could be like). However,  it’s a very different story for millions of other people around the globe.

Estimates say that there are more than 110 million active land-mines scattered throughout 68 countries, many of them leaking toxic chemicals into the earth as they decay. In fact, so common are mines in Cambodia that they are now used for fishing, to protect private property and even to settle private disputes. Once laid, a mine may remain active for up to 50 years.

[Read more →]

presented by Aerin, our resident garden muse (when next in Berkeley, don’t forget to visit the Magic Gardens Nursery. If you mention MuseGreen you’ll receive a 10% discount off your nursery purchase!)

We thought we’d share with you a wonderful article on tomatoes written by a great friend of Magic Gardens, Fred Hempel of Baia Nicchia.

[Read more →]