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If you are like us, you are really looking forward to the summer Olympics! The Tokyo games are going to be the greenest ever — and that goes even for the beds that the athletes will sleep in. According to the Associated Press, the athletes’ bed frames will be made of super-strong cardboard that is […]
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With fall around the corner and campuses across the country bustling again, it is time for college football season and that means one fun thing — tailgates! The plastic cup has long been a staple of pre-game parties and post-game celebrations, but Ball Corporation is hoping to change that and make all the fun much […]
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CNN Business reported last week that by 2021, InterContinental Group hotel — which includes Holiday Inns, Crowne Plaza and Kimpton Hotels, will end the use of small-sized toiletries plastic bottles and stock its rooms with bulk-sized instead.
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Wimbledon crowned its new champions over the weekend (congrats to all the winners), but the biggest winner overall was conservation. This year, the tournament went all in on sustainability — from donating all the 53,000 used tennis balls to schools and selling them with player signatures rather than throwing them away, to strongly encouraging the […]
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The government of Canada announced this week that it will ban many single-use plastic items by 2021 and also plans to make companies that manufacture or sell plastic products take responsibility for recycling their plastic waste. According to CBC News, the government is likely to follow the European Union, which voted last March to ban plastic items for which market alternatives exist — such as single-use plastic cutlery and plates — and items made of oxo-degradable plastics, such as bags.
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The Coca-Cola Company, in an effort to be more transparent and decrease its environmental footprint, reported that it produced more than 3 million tons of plastic packaging in 2017, and also announced that it will donate $5.4 million to a number of environmental organizations aimed at reducing plastic waste.
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What’s Mardi Gras without the beads? They are the symbol of the event — a “must have” if you are there for the celebration. Last year, Huffington Post reports that almost 1,200 tons of trash were collected after the Mardi Gras parade — and much of it was in the form of plastic beads — indeed, in 2017 workers cleaned out 93,000 pounds of beads from storm drains in historic downtown New Orleans.
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Some of the world’s biggest consumer product brands — Pepsi, Nestlé, Unilever, and Proctor & Gamble — announced yesterday at the World Economic Forum that they have teamed with N.J. based company, TerraCycle, to deliver sustainability the old fashioned way, in re-usable containers. The company will bring back the “milkman model,” where the company owns the package and delivers it to consumers at the same time it picks up empty containers, and then those containers will be washed, refilled and restocked for delivery to another customer.
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On Tuesday, the City of San Diego became the latest U.S. city to ban the use of styrofoam within city limits. The ban covers the use and distribution some very common products like egg cartons, food containers, coolers, ice chests, pool or beach toys, mooring buoys and navigation markers made fully or partially of polystyrene foam, commonly known as styrofoam. Other major cities like New York, San Francisco, Seattle, Minneapolis and Washington, D.C. also now have styrofoam bans in effect.
Why This Matters: Styrofoam needs to go. The new replacements are better for the planet and completely recyclable. For example, TemperPack’s “ClimaCell” packaging produces 97% less carbon emissions in the manufacturing process than styrofoam and will replace tens of millions of pounds of plastic foam that would otherwise be dumped in landfills and never biodegrade. Good for the economy and good for mother earth. Good for these cities for taking this bold action.
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The FAO has also stated that food waste is a huge driver of climate change as 30 as all the global loss contributes to 8 % of total global greenhouse gas emissions. The Washington Post noted that, if food waste were a country, it would come in third after the United States and China in terms of impact on global warming. While we still have a long way to go to ensure that we waste less, some innovators are finding ways to get creative and reuse bits of food and animal products that typically get discarded.
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