Articles by Grist staff

Gates Foundation wants to boost local agriculture in developing nations

Local agriculture in developing nations will get a boost under an initiative unveiled Wednesday by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and United Nations World Food Program. Under the Purchase for Progress initiative, the WFP will supplement food aid with surplus crops bought at competitive prices from poor farmers. WFP currently purchases 80 percent of […]

Wal-Mart will slice use of plastic bags

Wal-Mart aims to cut plastic-bag waste in its global operations by an average 33 percent over the next five years, the retail behemoth announced Thursday at the annual meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative. And if you ever doubted that Wal-Mart is big, consider this: The move is expected to eliminate some 9 billion plastic […]

E.U. will no longer export mercury

Hold on to your thermometers: The European Union will ban exports of mercury as of March 2011. The 27-nation bloc stopped mining mercury in 2001, but its exports of the metal account for up to a quarter of global supply. The export ban will require mercury that’s no longer of service to be put into […]

Swimming in chlorinated pools linked to childhood asthma, study says

Kids who swim regularly in outdoor chlorinated pools are up to five times more likely to develop asthma than youngsters who have never been in a chlorinated pool, according to a new study by Belgian researchers in the European Respiratory Journal. The same research team found a few years ago that kids who swim regularly […]