Everyone knows you can’t shop your way to green. A true greenie is always looking for ways to reduce and reuse. That line of thinking generally doesn’t propel you to the mall, at least not often.
BUT…you knew there was a but… eco-conscious consumers still have needs. Their motivations are just different. They look to buy lower impact, organic products from like-minded companies and retailers. They want fairly produced goods to create a less-toxic home environment, with healthful food, that supports sustainable practices.
Over the past two years, we’ve noticed that the market is bringing us more and more small, green stores that aim to be a nexus for this movement. Take it back. Some are large, like the home supply Green Depot in New York City. They sell lotsa stuff that can really help you dig in to cut your energy bills and remodel greenly.
POMPTON LAKES (WABC) — A New Jersey community is outraged and is looking for answers after a health report revealed an alarming number of cancer cases in the neighborhood.
The Pompton Lakes neighborhood sits above chemically contaminated groundwater, and hundreds attended a meeting Tuesday night to address the report. Now, they are calling for the federal government to take over cleanup the DuPont work site.
The New Jersey Department of Health on Friday released the report, which found that kidney cancer rates in women and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma rates among men are significantly elevated in the neighborhood.
Once, people pounded clothes with rocks to get them cleaned. Now we’ve come full circle, with dry cleaning headed back to those Earthy roots.
Many people are familiar with the use of hazardous chemicals in modern dry-cleaning solution. The primary cleaning solvent used in most dry-cleaners is perchloroethylene or “perc”. The Environmental Protection Agency classified this petroleum chemical as a Toxic Air Contaminant and a probable human carcinogen and many environmentalists believe that the residue on your clothes can’t be a healthything.
Now there is a better alternative and believe it or not, it is made essentially from liquefied sand.
This week, for the first time in the United States, an auction was held allowing power plants to bid against each other for the right to spew carbon dioxide into the air.
The goal, of course, is to reduce atmospheric carbon by finding the best way of putting a price tag on it for polluters. Ten Eastern states — Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island and Vermont — have formed the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (or RGGI, pronounced “Reggie”) to coordinate their efforts by placing mandatory overall caps on emissions levels, then auctioning off allowances for CO2 emissions that can be traded between companies. As a result, companies will have a financial incentive to clean up their own act as quickly as possible.
By Bill King, Eyewitness News
