Articles by Grist staff

Compost-a-Roni, the San Francisco Treat

San Francisco this year is becoming the first major U.S. city to offer curbside recycling for food waste, one sign of a growing nationwide trend toward composting. Communities across the U.S. are finding it difficult to meet the recycling goals they set in the early 1990s, and some are now pushing composting as a way […]

Ashes, Ashes, the Forests Fall Down

Indonesia’s forests are disappearing even faster than expected, according to the Indonesian Ministry of Forestry and Estate Crops, which used satellite imagery to produce new forest cover maps. The Ministry now estimates that the deforestation rate is 1.5 million hectares per year, nearly twice what the World Bank estimated in 1994. Since 1985, at least […]

Desperate Times Call for Giant Styrofoam Islands

Desperate to find a way to combat climate change, some scientists are proposing off-the-wall fixes, like making a Styrofoam continent about the size of North America that would float in the South Pacific and counteract global warming by reflecting sunlight into space. The idea is ludicrous, of course, says Michael MacCracken of the U.S. Global […]

Poached Aches

Poachers are pushing tigers in India toward extinction, feeding a growing demand at pharmacies and fur shops in China and Japan for illicit products derived from endangered animals. A few weeks ago, park rangers in India’s Madhya Pradesh state recovered a carcass tentatively identified as Sita, a famous tiger that had been featured on the […]