consumption
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Marie Kondo made us get rid of everything. Now she’s selling us crystals.
The point, apparently, was not to reduce, but to replace.
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This downer of a holiday keeps getting earlier every year
We just used up a year’s worth of natural resources.
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No, economic growth and climate stability do not go hand-in-hand
The carefully worded New Climate Economy report says that we can take climate action and grow the economy too. Avoiding catastrophic warming is a separate issue, apparently.
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Half of Americans drink at least one glass of soda every day
Gallup has discovered a great divide in American society: There are those of us who drink soda and those of us who do not, and the country’s split almost exactly down the middle. Soda drinkers make up 48 percent of the country’s population. These are the people who drink at least one glass of soda […]
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Bumper 2011 Grain Harvest Fails to Rebuild Global Stocks
This post is by Janet Larsen, Director of Research at the Earth Policy Institute. The world’s farmers produced more grain in 2011 than ever before. Estimates from the U.S. Department of Agriculture show the global grain harvest coming in at 2,295 million tons, up 53 million tons from the previous record in 2009. Consumption grew […]
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IKEA will ship disposable furniture on disposable pallets
IKEA knows from disposable. So when the company realized it could save money and shipping space by using cardboard shipping pallets, it tossed out its traditional wooden pallets like last year's BILLY bookshelf. The new pallets can support loads as heavy as the wooden pallets could, but they’re only a third as high and weigh […]
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Rising Meat Consumption Takes Big Bite out of Grain Harvest
World consumption of animal protein is everywhere on the rise. Meat consumption increased from 44 million tons in 1950 to 284 million tons in 2009, more than doubling annual consumption per person to over 90 pounds. The rise in consumption of milk and eggs is equally dramatic. Wherever incomes rise, so does meat consumption. As […]
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Stuffed to the gills: How crap took over my life — and how I intend to take it back
Photo: Peretz PartenskyIt’s hard to put a finger on the exact moment the crap took over Americans’ lives, but I know exactly when it happened to me. And as we head into a day of national gluttony followed by a collective, orgiastic display of shopping, I’ve resolved to do more than weather the onslaught. I […]
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Instead of buying kitchen gadgets, why not share?
If you’ve ever looked at a wedding registry, you might have a sense of how many uni-tasking kitchen appliances there are on the market. Most kitchens have more gadgets than they can hold, and most people aren't using their canning equipment/bread machine/cider press very often. So wouldn't it make more sense to share? In Portland, […]