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
Guerilla Filmmaking for a Cause
LA hosts more than its fair share of silver screen celebrations, but the Elevate Film Festival is truly something different. Wresting the city’s narcissistic gaze from its own navel, Elevate confronts participants with powerful, moving images about crucial social and cultural issues. The first festival of its kind, directors don’t know what lofty subject they’ll focus their lens upon until they pull the topic from a hat — only 48 hours before they have to complete an entire short film.
This year, the festival — hosted at the Kodak Theatre on September 15th by avant-cabaret cirque performance troupe Lucent Dossier — is bigger than ever. Elevate’s goal, explains festival-founder Mikki Willis, is “to empower everyone to realize that one person can make a massive difference… to awaken artists to the transformational potential of their medium… [and] to leave everyone inspired and choosing to take constructive action.”
Directors have traveled from all over the world to meet that challenge. While the themes they’ll receive are still top-secret, the five documentaries, five shorts and five music videos they’ll produce are sure to inspire cast, crew and audience alike.
A film festival as a catalyst for global empowerment? Now that’s some elevated thinking.
As a gift to the community it serves, the Elevate Film Festival is free and open to the public. For full info, visit elevatefilmfestival.com.
— Lucinda Michele Knapp
Schlock-Free Fundraising
Fed up with fundraisers that had their kids hawking junk food and so many earth-unfriendly goods, Jennifer and Don Caronna came up with a more socially responsible way to support local schools. This fall the Long Beach-based self-professed treehuggers will launch Fundraising Green (fundraisinggreen.com), an effort to make environmentally conscious consumption common practice throughout LA and Orange County.
Fundraising Green’s key element is the myGreenSpark Redemption Book, a collection of coupons for a slew of local eco-minded businesses. By purchasing the $36 book, fundraiser participants will get about 250 discounts on home goods, pet supplies, clothing, food, outdoor gear and other products at up to 150 nearby stores. Not only will the proceeds generate money for schools, Fundraising Green will also partner with nonprofit groups to host educational programs that show kids how to lessen their ecological footprint. What’s more, 10 percent of profits from the book — which is printed with soy ink on 100 percent recycled paper — will go toward environmental organizations.
“Our goal is to drive new consumers to these green businesses,” explains Don. “If people start out by buying two or three green alternatives to their usual products, maybe in five years or so they will have become a green family.”
— Elizabeth Barker
Uncorking Local Wine
Thanks to Miles and Jack from Sideways, the last time you were in Santa Barbara wine country you might have spent an evening dining at The Hitching Post. Well this fall harvest season, be sure to add an eco-oriented wine tour to your agenda. Sustainable Vine will pick you up in a Mercedes Sprinter van (which runs 25mpg on biodiesel) and take you over the hills and across the river on a five-hour tour of the Santa Ynez region’s organic and biodynamic vineyards, including Alma Rose, Presidio and Beckmen Vineyards, among others. Spend the afternoon sipping your way through pinots and chardonnays while enjoying a sustainable agriculture education, walking the grounds and listening to grape growers as they share the valley’s history and their farm’s environmental practices. The tour includes a lunch of sandwiches, salads and salsa made to order from New Frontier, a local marketplace. A percentage of tour fees are contributed to 1% For The Planet, and participants are given a $10 gift certificate towards wine purchases.
$115 per person. 805.698.3911. SustainableVine.com.
— Jenny Rough
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.
Who You Trying to Get Crazy With, Ese? Don’t You Know GoLoco?
Green-minded folks like the idea of carpooling — in theory. But when it comes to opening the door to a total stranger, those old warnings about hitchhikers make even the most eco-inclined person think twice.
Enter GoLoco. The service, created by Zipcar founder Robin Chase, pairs the efficiency of a digital ride board with the trust-building features of Facebook. Drivers and passengers anywhere in the country can use it to post and find rides, check out potential ride-mates, and even deal with gas and toll money transactions upfront.
Most GoLoco users join the service to do their part for global warming. According to Chase’s calculations, it takes a tree one month to absorb the emissions created by driving a single mile. Drive 24 miles? That tree will be huffing and puffing on your exhaust for the next two years. The more people sharing rides, the fewer cars there are on the roads — and the fewer emissions in the air.
Carpooling also makes financial sense. The U.S. Department of Transportation calculates that the average American spends 19 percent of their income on transportation. Each mile alone costs an average of 50 cents, once you add up gas and maintenance costs. GoLoco surfaces those costs and lets fellow riders use online payment systems to get potentially awkward money discussions out of the way before the ride begins.
But Chase hopes GoLoco changes the way we think about driving altogether, from wasted time to opportunities for low-key social occasions. GoLoco users can create different social circles in Facebook — of friends, of fellow surfers, of likeminded do-it-yourselfers — and use the service to shoot out emails about trips on which they’d enjoy some company. Using those features, Chase recently took a last-minute trip to a garden store with a friend she hadn’t seen in weeks. “We got to gossip and catch up,” Chase says. “It was an easy thing for us to do together, without turning it into a big heavy-planning, date-type event.”
With enough users, GoLoco could even become an on-demand ride service. Imagine getting out of a ballgame, tapping into GoLoco via your cell phone, and instantly finding another Giants fan who’s not only headed your way but will also be delighted to rehash the umpire’s lousy calls on the drive home. “We will transform people’s expectations about travel,” Chase says. “It will seem incredibly sad and lonely to be going someplace in your car by yourself.” — 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
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