Urban Schools Aim for Environmental Revolution

An environmental revolution in schools is beginning to take rise across the United States. Schools have begun using lunch plates, made from sugar cane, that can be thrown away and turned into a product prized by gardeners and farmers everywhere: compost. If all goes as planned, compostable plates will replace plastic foam lunch trays by September not just for the 345,000 students in the Miami-Dade County school system, but also for more than 2.6 million others nationwide. That would be some 271 million plates a year, replacing enough foam trays to create a stack of plastic several hundred miles tall. Compostable plates are but the first initiative on the environmental checklist of the?Urban School Food Alliance, a pioneering attempt by six big-city school systems to create new markets for sustainable food and lunchroom supplies. The alliance members ? the public school systems in Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, Miami, New York and Orlando, Fla. ? are betting that by combining their purchasing power, they can persuade suppliers to create and sell healthier and more environment-friendly products at prices no system could negotiate alone. The alliance?s next target is healthier food. It is already looking at potential suppliers of antibiotic-free chicken. School officials say possible future initiatives include sustainable tableware, pesticide-free fruit and goods with less packaging waste. If the alliance succeeds, it could help change nutrition and sustainability policies across the nation.

Obama OKs Pipeline That Will Increase Canada?s Tar-Sands Industry

The week before Thanksgiving, the Obama administration quietly?approved a pipeline project?that will cross the U.S.-Canada border and benefit the tar-sands industry.?This 1,900-mile pipeline will carry gas condensate or ultra-light oil from an Illinois terminal northwest to Alberta, where it will be used to thin tar-sands oil so it can travel through pipelines. Without this kind of diluent, tar-sands oil is too thick and sludgy to transport. ?Increased demand for diluent among Alberta?s tar sands producers has created a?growing market for U.S. producers of natural gas liquids, particularly for fracked gas producers,? reports?DeSmogBlog.?Houston-based Kinder Morgan is the company behind the $260 million?Cochin Reversal Project, which will reverse and expand an existing pipeline. The pipeline will be fed by fracking operations in the Eagle Ford Shale area in Texas. Yes,?you heard right, ?fracking and dirty oil will work together in this environmental disaster.

Humans Growing More Carnivorous, Global Food Study Shows

While it seems that reduced meat consumption is becoming a popular trend in America, the fast-growing economies of China and India are driving a global increase in meat consumption, cancelling out decreases elsewhere, according to a comprehensive study of global food consumption.?The work, published today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, takes a detailed look at what people eat, as well as trends from one country to the next. It is also the first time that researchers have calculated humanity’s trophic level, a metric used in ecology to position species in the food chain. Over 50 years, an increase in fat and meat consumption has moved us further up the food web. Countries such as China and India, where hundreds of millions of people have lifted themselves out of poverty ? and often out of diets that involved little more than rice ? have shown marked increases in their trophic level. However, places such as Iceland, Mongolia and Mauritania, where traditional diets are mostly based on meat, fish or dairy, have seen their trophic levels decline as they diversified their daily fare. Calculating human trophic levels reveals our place in the ecosystem and can help scientists to understand human impact on energy consumption and resource strength. Calorie for calorie, the environmental impact of producing meat ? in terms of everything from carbon emissions to water use ? is typically many times larger than that of producing vegetable foods. Furthermore, a 2006 FAO study found that the livestock industry is directly or indirectly responsible for 18% of global greenhouse-gas emissions ? a larger share than all modes of transport combined. ?If we all increase our trophic level, we?ll start to have a bigger impact on ecosystems,? says Bonhommeau.

The River Fund NY Speaks About the Hunger Crisis on MSNBC

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