From Green Right Now Reports
In 1995, The ULS (Use Less Stuff) Report developed a statistic that is frequently quoted to describe how much extra waste is generated between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day: 5 million tons. Use Less Stuff Day (the third Thursday of November) was created to educate people and help them reduce that waste.
Rather than declining, that number has grown by 20%, to 6 million tons. Obviously, Use Less Stuff Day hasn’t been a big enough event to get people into the conservation spirit. Starting this year, ULS is proclaiming the entire week before Thanksgiving (Nov. 19-25, 2009) to be Use Less Stuff Week.
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November 4th, 2009
By Harriet Blake
Fact: America has an abundance of food.
Question: So why does anyone go hungry in this country?
[caption id="attachment_6342" align="alignright" width="272" caption="A potato gleaning in Virginia (Photo: Society of St. Andrew)"]
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Armed with this simple thought, the Society of St. Andrew (SOSA) took up the cause of feeding the hungry in 1979 with the idea of gleaning fields for salvageable produce.
“We do this in two says,” says Carol Breitinger, communications director. “We use volunteers in the field for hands-on gleaning, or we send out trucks to pick up surplus crops that farmers can’t use and would just end up in the landfill.”
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Related Topics: · excess grocery store produce, food banks, food reclamation, food waste, gleaning, gleaning fields, North Carolina, North Texas Food Bank, public service, saving leftover food, Society of St. Andrew, surplus crops, Texas, USDA, Virginia
August 12th, 2009
By Melissa Segrest
Green Right Now
Shall we have an omelet with vegetables and cheese for breakfast?
Let’s order a Caesar salad for lunch, with some chicken noodle soup.
And dinner – Who’s up for meatloaf, with macaroni and cheese on the side and some chocolate chip cookies to top it off?
Oh, while you’re at it, stop for a second and ask yourself: What impact does this food have on the environment?
Here’s some food for thought: An entertaining interactive tool lets you add up your “carbon points” and see just how badly those three cups of coffee are hurting the world.
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Related Topics: · "fresh" seafood, Carbon Dioxide, Co2e, food system and greenhouse gases, food waste, Greenhouse Gases, low carbon diet calculator, processed food, regional food, seasonal food, Sierra Club, Sierra Club GreenHome
November 26th, 2008
By Paula Minahan
Green Right Now
Dumpster diving as the perfect solution to a sustainable lifestyle?
It could be, according to a report from The Daily Show. Seems forest-living, oil-spurning electrical engineer Tod Kershaw has perfected the art. “My favorite dumpster is Trader Joe’s. It’s just so wonderful; it’s the nirvana of dumpsters. There’s great food, a lot of it is organic and very rarely do you find maggots in there.”
If you say so, Tod.
But kidding aside – and Kershaw isn’t – the fact he can feed his family on discarded grocery items is telling. Telling us that food waste in America is out of control.
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Related Topics: · Feeding America, food waste, U.N. World Food Programme, U.S. Department of Agriculture, University of Arizona, Waste & Resources Action Programme
