Green (Living) Review

Green roofs could prevent sewage overflow in New York City

© Photo cred: Manon Verchot || Brooklyn Grange, one of the biggest rooftop farms in the U.S.

New York City’s sewage systems are old and can’t handle large amounts of snowmelt or stormwater. When large quantities of water flow into the combined sewer overflow systems, which make up 60 to 70 percent of the city’s sewers, they tend to spill over into New York City’s rivers.

It doesn’t help that the city is about 72 percent impervious, so water goes straight into drainage systems. Since May 2013, more than 45 incidents of sewage discharge have been reported. This past winter, untreated sewage overflowed into the Hudson and East Rivers on multiple occasions, sometimes for as long as seven hours.

But not all is lost. Rooftop gardens could be the solution, and New York City is working hard to help New Yorkers get their green on.

Brooklyn Grange, the largest rooftop farm and garden business in the US, is part of this initiative. The Brooklyn Grange itself spans 108,000 square feet, with locations in Queens and Brooklyn. The farms absorb 60,000 and 100,000 gallons of stormwater every rainfall.

“Over the course of the year, we’re keeping millions of gallons of water out of the sewer system,” Gwen Schantz, one of the founders and chief operating officer of the Brooklyn Grange, told TreeHugger.

New report calls for action on food loss and waste

A new report from the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) of the UN reiterates claims that one-third of the food produced for human consumption globally is lost or wasted along the food chain.

The report, Food losses and waste in the context of sustainable food systems, is being officially launched this afternoon (3 July) by the High Level Panel of Experts on Food Security and Nutrition (HLPE), and highlights the causes and potential solutions to the global levels of food loss and waste (FLW).

It suggests that action is ‘essential to improve food security and to reduce the environmental footprint of food systems’.

It also suggests that the large amount of existing conflicted data is ‘a huge barrier’ to understanding the causes of FLW and potential solutions. The report, therefore, strongly calls for the development of global protocols to measure FLW.

In the foreword to the report, Per Pinstrup-Anderson, Chair of the Steering Committee of HLPE, says: “The aim of this report, given the diversity of contexts, is to help all concerned actors to reduce food losses and waste by identifying the causes and potential solutions that may be implemented, alone or in a coordinated way, by the relevant actors in the food system”.

The report recommends that action should be taken throughout different sections of the food chain, from the public and private sectors, civil society, individual producers, wholesalers, retailers and consumers.

This is the eighth report that the HLPE has released to date, and was undertaken in response to a request from the Committee on World Food Security (CFS) in 2012.

Ethical product sales grow 12% in spite of 'recessionary pressures'

by Michael Smith (Veshengro)

Sales of ethical products grew by more than 12% in 2012 thus pushing the value of the ethical market to more than £54bn, according to recently released report.

The findings have been published in the latest Ethical Consumer Market Report, which analyzes sales data across a number of consumer sectors including food, travel and finance.

Breaking the sectors down, the report shows that ethical food and drink sales increased by 36% in 2012, to £10.16bn.

This was largely due to sales of Rainforest Alliance products, such as tea and coffee, increasing by 46%, and RSPCA's Freedom Foods label also increasing with total sales up by 37%.

However, there were small falls in some sectors where price issues are most challenging, such as organic food, which recorded a 4% fall in sales and ethical clothing, down by 1%.

Looking at green home products, including energy efficient white goods, sustainable timber and renewable energy installations, sales were up by 7% to £8.9bn and ethical food and drink sales increased by 36% in 2012, to £10.16bn

The report revealed that 'ethic travel and transport' increased by 46% to £4.5bn, largely due to an increase in the sale of electric , hybrid and tax band A efficient vehicles. Sales of these vehicles were up by 157% as a result of more models becoming available.

Seeing less activity was ethical personal products sales, which rose by just 3% to £1.8bn. This was despite a big rise in the purchase of second-hand clothing (up 31%). The report says that this fits with the "story of straightened budgets in recessionary times".

The ethical products market has shown significant growth each year since the onset of the recession and this clearly demonstrates that the trend towards ethical buying is not a luxury which consumers choose to drop when the going gets tough, but an important long-term change in the way people are making buying decisions

But, despite, to some extent it being a good thing that people chose ethical products we have, however, replaced one kind of consumerism with another and that is not good, especially not for the Planet. We still buy and consume too much which we then only toss out, even if it is into the recycling bin.

All too often reuse at home and in the office is ignored in favor of going out and buying a “green” product which could as easily have been 'created' by repurposing some item of waste such as a tin can for a pencil bin or a carton – such as a wine box – made into a magazine file.

We have now gone from 'ordinary' consumption over to greensumption without, it would appear, to consider that it is still consumption. The fact that products are now 'recyclable' also seems to have added to this and we seem to think recycling before ever considering reuse, repurposing and upsycling. It would appear that we have not at all advanced in all those years. Our grandparents and their parents had a much better attitude in that department.

10 reasons to go green starting NOW

You've probably noticed that green is everywhere these days--in the news, politics, fashion, and even technology. You can hardly escape it on the Internet, and now with the Planet Green TV network, you can even enjoy eco-friendly entertainment 24 hours a day. That's all great as far as we're concerned, but with a million messages and ideas coming at us from all sides, it can be easy to get caught up in the quotidian stuff--switching to organic foods, turning down the thermostat, recycling, say -- without thinking about the big picture of how your actions stack up. Worse, you could even be suffering from a little green "fatigue" -- that is, tuning out the green messages due to their ubiquity.

While it's easy to get overwhelmed, it's also simple to begin making a positive impact. Since it's helpful to understand the big picture when it comes to setting to smaller goals, we've adjusted our focus for this guide--a departure from out typical "how to go green" content, which typically tackles very specific topics such as kitchens, cars, orpets -- to take a broader look at the reasons behind why we should go green.

As globalization makes the world become smaller, it becomes increasingly easy to see how the lives of people (and plants and animals and ecosystems) everywhere are closely synced up with one another. So toys made in China can affect the quality of life in Europe, pesticides used in Argentina can affect the health of people in the U.S., and greenhouse gas emissions from Australia can affect a diminishing rainforest in Brazil.

The truth is that everything single thing we do every day has an impact on the planet -- good or bad. The good news is that as an individual you have the power to control most of your choices and, therefore, the impact you create: from where you live to what you buy, eat, and use to light your home to where and how you vacation, to how you shop or vote, you can have global impact. For example, did you know that 25 percent of Western pharmaceuticals are derived from flora that come from the Amazon rainforest? And that less that one percent of these tropical trees and plants have been tested by scientists? These numbers suggest that we all have a large (and growing) personal stake in the health and vitality of places far and near. In addition to protecting biodiversity (and inspiring medicine), rainforests are also excellent carbon sinks. Bottom line: It benefits everyone on the planet to help keep our wild spaces alive and growing.

But embracing a greener lifestyle isn't just about helping to preserve equatorial rain forests, it can also mean improving your health, padding your bank account, and, ultimately, improving your overall quality of life. All that and you can save furry animals, too? Why wouldn't anyone want to green? Keep reading for all the important, big-picture details.

Europe thinks it's time for 'best before' dates to expire

Too much food is thrown away just because it has reached the 'best before' date.

egg with expiry date ‘Best before’ does not mean ‘toxic after’. An estimated 15 million tons of food is wasted annually in the European Union, and 15 percent of that is caused by “the wrong interpretation of best before dates,” according to Sharon Dijksma, minister for agriculture in the Netherlands.

Currently the EU requires that all packaged foods have a best before date, but there isgrowing pressure to loosen up the rules and potentially ban best before dates on shelf-stable foods. Due to pressure from the Dutch and Swedish agriculture ministers, a working group has been created by the European Commission (EU executive body) to examine the issue of best before dates; a report on food sustainability is supposed to be published at the end of this month.

Shelf-stable foods, such as pasta, rice, flour, and coffee, do not go bad after a given date, but simply cease to be as fresh. ‘Best before’ really just means “not of ideal quality, but still edible.” The Commission, however, estimates that only 50 percent of Europeans correctly understand its meaning, and are further confused by all the other terms out there, like ‘use by,’ ‘sell by,’ and ‘freeze by.’ By banning best before dates on pantry staples, it is hoped that people will use foods longer before throwing them out.

These proposed regulations make me think of my frugal mother, who always said that if there’s mold on cheese, yogurt, or jam, you just cut out the moldy bit and keep eating. Moldy bread gets trimmed and pulverized into breadcrumbs. If there are weevils in the flour, you can sift them out. By contrast, I have a dear friend who threw out multiple jars of natural peanut butter because the oil separated and “it had gone bad.” I was speechless with horror when I heard that.

A City's Best Defense Against Climate Change? Its Trees, Wetlands, and Watersheds

Green infrastructure protects against extreme weather and cleans up urban environments.

Forced with aging infrastructure and extreme weather, mayors of American cities are moving to reconnect urban areas with nature to protect drinking water, coastlines, and air quality as climate change accelerates.

When a city incorporates natural infrastructure into its planning, it turns to living assets such as urban trees, wetlands, and watersheds to reduce pollutants and provide protection from storms and hurricanes. So effective is the strategy that the United States Conference of Mayors on Monday approved a resolution that encourages its 1,400 members to start building green bulwarks against climate change.

Philadelphia, for instance, already is using green infrastructure to manage its storm water challenges. Runoff from the city’s streets, parking lots, roofs, and playgrounds once triggered sewer overflows that inundated waterways with pathogens, debris, and other pollutants, and made rivers unsafe for swimming and boating after storms. The storm water also eroded riverbanks, uprooting vegetation and sending sediment into pools and to the bottom of streams, upsetting the habitat for fish and bugs.

The city has designed and constructed several blocks of porous streets and basketball courts made of permeable paving material that lets water pass through the surface to an underground stone reservoir before entering the soil—never becoming runoff. It also has trenches, planters, street bump-outs, rain gardens, and other natural features that have land acting like a sponge to slow down the flow of rainwater into the waterways and keep storm water out of the sewers.

Gardening Provides Many Health Benefits, Including Moderate to High Intensity Exercise

Gardening Vegetable, herb, and seed sales are booming, courtesy of a new wave of consumers who are not only concerned about the quality of their food, but who also recognize the physical, mental, and even spiritual benefits of connecting with nature.

Modern living has driven a concrete wedge between us and the natural world, and many are starting to connect the dots, recognizing that a connection with the land is important for health, fitness, happiness, and overall wellbeing.

A previous CNN Health¹ article lists a number of the health benefits associated with gardening, spanning from stress relief to improved brain health, better nutrition and, of course, exercise.

The Fitness Benefits of Gardening

As you’ll see, there are numerous reasons why gardening is good for you. One is related to the fact that your body needs perpetual motion to function optimally, and gardening is one way to stay active at times when you might otherwise be sitting still.

Research published in 2012^2, ³ also found that those who engage in community gardening projects have considerably lower body mass index (BMI) than non-gardeners, suggesting an active lifestyle indeed translates into improved weight management.

Male and female community gardeners were 62 percent and 46 percent less likely to be overweight or obese respectively than their non-gardening neighbors.

Fitness researchers have also found that when you exercise outdoors, you exercise harder but perceive it as being easier than when exercising indoors, which can have significant health benefits as it will encourage you to work out harder than you might otherwise.

National Recycle Week

by Michael Smith (Veshengro)

June 16 to June 22, 2014 saw another National Recycle Week in the UK. Not that the majority of the population would have known about it, however, as most of the media did not even rate it a single column, nay, not even a single paragraph.

While the idea of a National Recycle Week is a good one for sure to some extent our focus, however, seems to be far too much preoccupied with just recycling rather than any of the other two components that make up the “Three Rs” of waste management. Thus the message being drummed out relentlessly all the time appears to be “recycle, recycle more and then recycle more still”. Reduce is almost not mentioned anymore – bar as to food waste – and reuse has become a stepchild not to be spoken of at all.

Recycling, however, is when we have lost and have failed in our efforts of managing our waste effectively and is not, cannot, and must not be, the first step and thought. Recycle is the last thing.

Reduce is the first step but reduction of the main culprit, namely packaging waste, is not something that we, as ordinary folks, can do much about except for demanding that industry reduce the amount of packaging and when shopping for some stuff we choose to go unpackaged.

Reuse, however, is something that we all can do but it first and foremost requires the acquisition of the right kind of mindset and of seeing the reuse potential in this or that item of waste.

The reason that reduce and reuse have almost been obliterated from the message is, and we must be very clear about this, and why especially reuse is not promoted, that local authorities and governments in general cannot make money out of reduce and reuse. Recyclables, on the other hand, bring in revenue.

Reuse, repurposing and upcycling, however, are good for us, financially, and for the Planet on a different level, and that really is what counts, and therefore reuse has to come well before recycling. Recycling still uses a great deal of energy though it is better than to make things from new materials.

The problem, though, as far as glass, as an example, is concerned is that in most cases it is not recycled into new glass bottles, jars, etc., but into a kind of building sand and that, in my opinion, rather defeats the object.

As far as glass bottles, and glass jars even, are concerned they do not belong into the recycling bin as long as they are not broken or damaged. They should go back to the bottling plants to be refilled, as it used to be, and a deposit, as use to be the case with bottles not even that long ago in Britain and elsewhere (in Europe), should be levied. Glass jars too, during World War Two were treated in about the same way and no one can tell me that we could not do that again. We also do not need, as some politicians have claimed, first some pilot projects and studies to see whether it would work. It does work and it did until not so long ago. And if there is a refundable deposit on every bottle (and jar) then those will be returned to the stores. If not by the person who initially has bought it – if they are too lazy – then certainly by someone else. That was the way us children made much of our pocket money in days gone by.

In the meantime, until we get some reuse back into industry and governments, we have to do the best that we can by rediscovering the reuse ways of our grandparents and their parents. If it could just remotely be reused it was not tossed out and we all should get to that stage again. And if we can't immediately and directly use it someone else more than likely can. We are not talking rocket science here or brain surgery though looking at what is going on all around us we could be forgiven to believe that we are talking about those sciences.

Therefore, as recycling is not and must not be number one on the agenda I propose a National and even International Reuse Week.

Farm stands turn your backyard kale into cold, hard cash

Becky Warner

One Saturday morning a few weeks ago, my friend Caitlin texted me an odd message. “My neighbors are having a really weird yard sale,” she wrote. “You should come check this out.” She’d walked out her front door one weekend morning in the Seattle neighborhood of Wallingford and found a table full of beets and chard set up in her neighbors’ front yard. It was much like a roadside produce stand one finds in rural America — except it was smack in the middle of a 3.3-million-strong metropolis. Turns out it happens every Saturday from May until Thanksgiving: Her neighbors are running a farm stand out of their front yard.

There are peas growing along the sidewalk, compost bins stacked along the side of the house, and raised beds in the back. On a table in the front yard lie bunches of spinach and fat radishes. Becky Warner, one of the farmers, stands on the sidewalk in muck boots and flannel. A guy walks up with a chubby Scottish terrier to pick up his CSA share. “Hank the tank!” Warner greets them. When a farm is this local, apparently you know your farmer and they know your dog.

Warner and four other urban farmers grow food in five backyards in north Seattle. Since 2011 they’ve been selling it at their front yard farm stands and through a CSA. They call their dispersed urban farm City Grown, and it’s exactly that: Food both grown and sold in the city.

But not everyone with a backyard full of extra kale can sell it like summer lemonade. Seattle remains largely ahead of the curve: City Grown can sell food because in 2008, the city council passed a citywide food action plan, Resolution 31019, to encourage urban agriculture. In 2010, they updated it to allow urban farmers to sell their products onsite, even if those sites weren’t zoned for commercial use, which made operations like City Grown viable. “If it’s not following the exactly letter of the law, it’s pretty close,” Warner says.

Over-supply means 70 tonnes of strawberries went straight to landfill in Fife

Seventy tonnes of locally-grown berries had to be sent to waste because a mild summer has led to an over-supply.

Hundreds of thousands of pounds could be lost to the multi-million-pound fruit industry.

Farmers in Angus and Fife have told The Courier the ripening of fruit crops all at the same time has led to oversupply issues.

However, it is hoped the market can recover over the next fortnight, with Wimbledon increasing demand for traditional strawberries and cream.

The issue was spotlighted in Fife this week when it emerged 70 tonnes of strawberries were dumped at Fife Council’s Lower Melville Wood landfill site near Ladybank.

Fife Council has confirmed the fruits, which were already packaged, arrived to be processed as commercial waste.

It said the fruits could not go into the dump’s anaerobic congester because they were already packaged. They had to be sent straight to landfill.

The Courier understands the strawberries came from Angus and were surplus to requirements after a big glut arrived last week.

This is thanks to the Scottish crop ripening too quickly while the English crop was still at its peak.

None of the companies spoken to by The Courier were aware of the dumping.

However, several businesses gave their take on the state of the market this summer.

Angus Soft Fruits produces 10,000 tons of berries each year, representing 20 growers.

The fruit is worth about £35m and ensures employment in the area.

Angus Soft Fruits commercial director John Gray said better weather had brought on fruit crops early.

He said markets had been oversupplied the last few weeks but the situation was easing this week with Wimbledon the peak for strawberries in the UK.

http://www.thecourier.co.uk/

Too much food is thrown away just because it has reached the 'best before' date.

Green infrastructure protects against extreme weather and cleans up urban environments.

The Fitness Benefits of Gardening

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