Articles by Grist staff

Green un-building catching on in the U.S.

What’s the opposite of green building? Green un-building (aka, deconstruction)! And it’s catching on in the United States in that if-you-have-the-time-and-money-and-inclination kind of way. About 245,000 houses are torn town in the U.S. each year and roughly 1,000 of them are carefully deconstructed with up to 85 percent of their parts going to other projects […]

Ann Arbor, Mich., declares itself first U.S. city to use LEDs in all its streetlights

Ann Arbor, Mich., home to the main campus of the University of Michigan, announced that it intends to become the first U.S. city to convert all of its downtown streetlights to LEDs (light-emitting diodes). The energy-saving lights use half the energy and are expected to last five times as long. In two years, when the […]

New anti-junk-mail service stops unwanted catalogs for free

A new service set up by the Natural Resources Defense Council, National Wildlife Federation, and the Ecology Center called Catalog Choice can put a stop to all those unwanted catalogs clogging your mailbox. Since its debut last week, some 20,000 people have signed up for the service, already halting over 50,000 unwanted catalogs. That’s a […]

Britain wades into battle for sea-floor mineral rights in Southern Ocean

The World Wildlife Fund has been trying to gather support to establish a network of marine protected areas in the Southern Ocean in an attempt to mitigate increasing ecological pressures in the area from climate change, invasive species, and commercial fishing. The plight of Antarctica and the Southern Ocean has often been overlooked compared to […]