Latest Articles

Umbra on post-consumer content

Dear Umbra, So I was sitting there at lunch, eating my crackers, when I spied a recycling symbol and was confused. What is “pre-consumer” content? I mean, if the label is true (“carton made from 100 percent recycled paperboard — minimum 35 percent post-consumer content”), what is the other 65 percent? And what is paperboard? […]

Umbra on the market for recycled material

Dear Umbra, In reference to your polystyrene response: The polystyrene I have seen recently appears with a No. 6 recycling triangle on the bottom. But I’ve heard there is no market for this stuff, even though our local recycling company claims to want us to collect all Nos. 1 through 7. How can this be? […]

A Thousand Points of Green

Enviro Movement Becoming Decentralized and Diversified Environmentalism is going grassroots. While two-thirds of Americans identify themselves as environmentalists, membership in big, mainstream enviro organizations stayed flat throughout the 1990s. IRS data explains why, at least in part: The number of environmental groups with an annual income of $1 million or more fell by nearly half […]

The Environment Is a Girl’s Best Friend

Renowned Jewelry Firm Speaks Out Against Mine Proposal Jewelry company Tiffany & Co. — of “Breakfast at” fame — shocked the mining industry and the Bush administration yesterday when it took out a full-page ad in The Washington Post opposing the proposed Rock Creek copper and silver mining project in Montana, which would involve tunneling […]

The Voluntary Duplicity Movement

California May Try Voluntary Fix for Dirty Diesel Engines Comedy? Tragedy? You decide. The story begins in 1998, when California regulators discovered that manufacturers of diesel engines for trucks, buses, and motor homes had been, in effect, cheating to get around clean-air rules, putting computer chips in their engines that made them behave differently when […]

You Big Baby!

Pesticide Ban Leads to Higher Baby Birth Weights A ban on two common household pesticides resulted in a striking decline in the number of underweight infants born in areas where the chemicals had been used regularly, found a study by researchers at Columbia University. In 2000, the U.S. EPA banned indoor applications of chlorpyrifos and […]

GOP pollster says voters want action on clean water

Some like it clean. Polling guru and GOP spinmeister Frank Luntz has uncovered a fact likely to rattle and bewilder some Republicans in Congress: Americans prefer clean water. An emphatic memo [PDF] sent out by the Luntz Research Companies in February spotlighted Americans’ intense feelings on the subject: Young and old, Democrat AND Republican, the […]

Dispatches from a U.N. population meeting in the Big Apple

Caron Whitaker manages the Population & Environment Program at the National Wildlife Federation. This week she is attending a U.N. meeting to mark the 10th anniversary of the International Conference on Population and Development. Wednesday, 24 Mar 2004 New York, N.Y. Government delegates from 41 countries are convening this week at the United Nations headquarters […]

Raising a Stink

Rural Residents Join Fight Against Factory Farms Environmental groups who oppose industrial-style concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) on the grounds that they pollute air and water are finding support from an unexpected source: rural residents. Fed up by lax federal and state regulations — a report last year from the General Accounting Office found that […]

Just In: Timber Take

Bush Plan Likely to Up Old-Growth Logging in Northwest The Bush administration is changing the Northwest Forest Plan to make it easier to log old-growth forests on public land in Washington, Oregon, and California. The rule changes — previously announced, finalized yesterday — scrap the survey-and-manage program that required the U.S. Forest Service and the […]