greenwashing
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America’s most bike-friendly cities and big green pledges
Bicycling Magazine released its annual list of America’s most bike-friendly cities today, and Grist’s hometown Seattle comes in at No. 4. Great, right? Well, sort of: The mag bases its praise on the city’s 10-year, $240-million bike master plan, which is intended to triple the number of journeys made by bike and add 450 miles […]
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Ask Umbra on eyewear, faux eco efforts, and Easter baskets
Send your question to Umbra! Q. Dear Umbra, I need to replace my eyewear—the lenses need updating and the frames are damaged—and I’m wondering what the most sustainable choice is. Frameless seems likely, but if I want to go with a frame (Coke bottle lenses, anyone?) then is metal the way to go? Blindly,Hope K.Providence, […]
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Don’t buy Obama’s greenwashing of nuclear power
On Feb. 16, while President Obama was in Maryland announcing an $8.3 billion taxpayer-backed loan guarantee for Southern Company to build two new nuclear reactors in Georgia, inspectors at the Vermont Yankee reactor were finding dangerously high levels of tritium, a radioactive cancer-causing chemical, in the groundwater near the plant. The next week, the Vermont […]
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When the big guys want to do the right thing
How green are those Cheerios? Well, no — you’re right — Cheerios shouldn’t be green, but I mean green green. Increasingly, restaurants and food service companies are weighing the need to green their operations and products but the results are often not what they anticipated. According to stories in this week’s issues of two food […]
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General Electric fights for change from the inside … of a coal industry front group!
All of us who want to see the world changed for the better struggle with whether it is better to fight for that change from the inside or the outside. But you can’t fight for change from inside an organization dedicated to stopping change, like, say, the scandal-ridden front group American Coalition for Clean Coal […]
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‘Localwashing’ in pictures — bogus marketing at its finest
Local food, local goods, local everything is in, as you’ve no doubt heard. Local is fresher. Local burns less shipping fuel. Local keeps the wealth nearby. Naturally, there’s money to be made off local, so big businesses are muscling into the game. The emerging term is localwashing—a variation on greenwashing wherein businesses claim to be […]
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Our addiction to cheap stuff has become very expensive, new book argues
American retail is riddled with cheap, fall-apart merchandise. We know this. Sales are a ploy to get a shopper to spend, as opposed to a boon for penny pinchers. Right. And how much mileage do we get from that old, overused adage, “You get what you pay for”? More than we’d like to admit. So […]
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A clear voice for science?
I really like Earth and Sky’s podcast, just not the part about it being a mouthpiece for Shell Oil lately. Sad but true. I’ve been listening to it for half a year on my device, and it seems like nearly once a week, this daily 2 minute podcast, which claims to be heard 100 million […]
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The eternal durability of greenwash
Not too long ago I was on a panel with GM’s VP of Environment, and I was reminded of how very old school most big corporations are when it comes to discussing their environmental programs. In GM’s case, listening to this VP, it was as if GM was God’s great gift to the environment, and […]
