The National Audubon Society has honored six women with the 2009 Rachel Carson Award for their outstanding conservation efforts.

• Dr. Sylvia Earle, an oceanographer, author, lecturer and National Geographic Explorer in Residence whose work has expanded awareness and conservation of the fragile marine environment. Former chief scientist of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Dr. Earle is president and founder of Deep Search International. She has led more than 60 expeditions, including the first team of women aquanauts during the Tektite Project in 1970. She also set a record for solo diving to a depth of 3,300 feet. Her research focuses on marine ecosystems in the deep sea and other remote environments.

• Sally Jewell, president and CEO of Recreational Equipment, Inc. (REI), a national outdoor gear and apparel retailer dedicated to inspiring, educating and outfitting for a lifetime of outdoor adventure and stewardship. Additionally, Jewell sits on the boards of the National Parks Conservation Association, Mountains to Sound Greenway Trust, Initiative for Global Development and the University of Washington. She also serves on The National Forum on Children and Nature Advisory Board and the National Parks Second Century Commission.

• Elizabeth C. Titus Putnam, the president and founder of the Student Conservation Association, the nation’s largest youth conservation leadership organization. While studying at Vassar College in the mid-1950’s, she envisioned a contemporary conservation core that would utilize her strength and the energy of students to respond to the threats facing America’s national parks. Through her hard work, vision and determination, she established and nurtured the SCA which enlists nearly 4,000 students, who contribute over two million hours of service each year to protecting and restoring America’s parks, forests, refuges, seashores and communities.

• Elizabeth Colleton, Jane Evans and Susan Haspel – NBC Universal’s “Green is Universal” Initiative: Launched in May 2007, Green is Universal is NBC Universal’s ongoing effort to promote environmental awareness and action, and to green the company’s own operations. Spanning numerous business units, Green is Universal provides hundreds of hours of green-themed content and activities, especially during dedicated “Green Weeks.”

The women received their awards at the sixth annual Women in Conservation Luncheon held at the Plaza Hotel in New York City earlier this month.

Carol Browner, head of the White House Office of Energy and Climate Change and past Chair of the Audubon Society; Alison Rockefeller, Founding Chair of the Rachel Carson Awards Council and Gloria Reuben, Golden Globe nominee and star of “Raising the Bar” and “ER,” also attended the ceremony on May 19.

The award commemorates the late Rachel Carson, whose landmark book Silent Spring made the world aware of the damage caused by pesticides in the early 1960s. Audubon established the award in 2004 to honor similar visionary women. Past honorees include Bette Midler, founder of the New York Restoration Project; Teresa Heinz Kerry, chair of the Heinz Endowments and the Heinz Family Philanthropies; Majora Carter, founder and executive director of Susainable South Bronx and Laurie David, producer of An Inconvenient Truth.

It’s possible that idealistic environmentalists had other things on their minds January 20, but that was the day REI decided to announce its latest green initiative — this one aimed at bolstering the environmental credentials of the clothing for sale in all those Earth-friendly stores the company plans to build.

The company is set to begin using the bluesign standard to evaluate the sustainability and safety of materials, such as yarn, fabric and dye, that it uses for the REI-branded clothing and cycling gear — all of which is designed in-house.

The capitalization-challenged bluesign, headquartered in Switzerland, is a global network that, while independent, has an advisory board made up of “leading representatives from the scientific and political communities, trade and industry, and consumer and environmental organisations.”

In the eyes of REI, it is “the strongest global solution available to proactively address textile environmental, health and safety strategy.”

Bluesign monitors all aspects of the textile industry, and markets itself to apparel makers and sellers as a kind of eco-insurance policy, assuring partners that they have as much information as possible about the material going into their products and the processes used to supply it.

Copyright © 2009 Green Right Now | Distributed by Noofangle Media

Unless you avoided the conventional gift-buying routine entirely this holiday season, odds are good that you spent much of December in some retail environments whose construction and operation involved a lamentable level of waste.

Outdoor-gear merchant R.E.I. is a few years into an effort to chip away at waste in its stores. This September the chain opened a store in Round Rock, Texas (just north of Austin) that is phase two in its development of a long-term eco-friendly model. Most of its innovations have been tested for over a year in a Boulder, Colorado location, but that store, which opened in October 2007, was a renovation of an existing space. This one, situated in a cluster of stores whose heavy traffic is generated by the area’s only IKEA, was built from scratch to accommodate its green agenda.

I took a tour in early December with store manager Todd Callaway and Daniel Grillo, an “outreach specialist” who coordinates the store’s group workshops and is particularly enthusiastic about convincing locals they can use their bikes to commute, even in Texas heat. If there have been any hitches in the location’s start up, you wouldn’t guess it to speak with these two enthusiastic men, who are clearly smitten with little earth-friendly details a casual shopper would never notice; they took pride in the belief that the store’s physical design was every bit as sales-friendly as any other retailer’s but has a far smaller impact on the environment.

“We’ve redesigned about 85% of the fixtures,” Callaway said as he gave me the first of many breakdowns on the novel components and impressive stats behind the shop’s counters, racks and displays. At the moment, he was standing beside a shelf system made of steel and Plyboo, a plywood-like product whose attractive outer layers are made of fast-growing bamboo.

“The point of this fixture is that when we go to dispose of it later on, it’s fully recyclable. Everything on it can be recycled really easily.” (When the store was under construction, representatives say that 75% of the building waste was recycled or reused in some way.)

Callaway and Grillo were well versed in the levels of post-consumer/post-industrial waste that had been recycled into surfaces all around — from the steel shavings that offered visual appeal in a bathroom vanity and the footwear department’s wall made of sunflower seed husks to the counter made of waste sorghum and Grenite that is “85% post-industrial waste ceramic plus soy.”

Beneath our feet was one way in which the Round Rock venture learned lessons from Boulder. While the upstairs level used a lot of waste-reducing, no-glue carpet tiles from the ultra-green company Interface, the downstairs featured a yielding rubber material whose confetti-like look came from its being composed of recycled car tires and tennis-shoe soles.