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I love this article because it gives 100 bits of advice on how to reduce plastic in your life.  The author started this project in 2007 and based on some of her suggestions I don’t think she ever imagined a world we live in now.  For example, although the idea of bringing your own re-useable containers for take-out and leftovers is a good one, and something I used to do, this practice is taboo at the moment.  I don’t think I ever carried around re-useable utensils and drinking straws.  Something to aspire to in the future though.  What would be another solution?  Perhaps eat everything that you ordered (for me, no problem!) or request take-out in paper containers, which most restaurants are moving towards anyway.  Another piece of advice is ordering ice-cream on a cone.  That was a no-brainer for me.  Navigating ice-cream on a cone allows you to practice your strategic skills – you need to get to the melty parts before it dribbles down your hand.  I think of it as a sticky Jenga.

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Living in one of the best climates in the country, gardening is a fun hobby to start.  I had no idea how satisfying it was to grow your own food and harvest it.  Over the years I have spent a lot of money buying fertilizers and plant foods for my fruit trees and vegetable plants.  A 50lb bag of organic citrus fertilizer is $60 and a 6lb bag of worm castings is $10.  I buy many bags a season so it tends to add up.  One day I ran into a neighbor in her driveway.  She was struggling to lift what looked like to be a bag of dirt out of her trunk.  I thought it was odd considering it was in a clear plastic waste bag.  I offered my help and carried the bag to her backyard.  I asked her what was in the bag and she said it was coffee grounds from the local coffee shops.  She was putting it in her worm composter to feed her worms.  I had never heard of worm composting before and did a bit of digging.  What I love about this article is that it is very comprehensive to novices like me and covers A-Z on vermicomposting.  It talks about how to get started and the dangers of doing it wrong, ie. fly infestation.  It was interesting to learn that worms are very delicate and require specific living conditions.  They are also finicky eaters and won’t eat just any garbage.  I loved the video of the build-it-yourself composter from a local here in San Diego.  It has inspired me to get my Bob Vila on.  My only challenge now is to get over my fear of worms.

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I look outside my window and see the trees rustling and hear my wind chime singing as the free wind energy moves them.  I go to Ocean Beach and watch the surfers ride the waves compliments of the water via the wind.  Chi is free and is all around us.  Harnessing energy the environment provides seems the most obvious source of free power.  Solar power is already doing this by transforming the sun's energy into electrical energy.  Although the price and technology has improved over the years, the large amount of land space required for the panels has not changed.  A solution to this may be found in floating solar arrangements – solar panels that float on lakes.  This appears to be a viable solution to the problem of increasing water temperatures that contribute to destructive blooms of blue green algae.  These blooms produce toxins that can kill animals that come in contact with them.  The floating solar panels can cool water temperatures by shading the water from the sun.  It can also decrease the amount of evaporation, conserving water in many areas.  Much research still needs to be done to make sure that these floating solar panels and their shading characteristics do not harm the water and its inhabitants.

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We know that there is only 1% of water on Earth is drinkable water, accessible which humans and animal could use to survive. Hence, we should not misuse water.
Here is some of the habits that you could do at home to save water.
1. Cut a couple of minutes off your shower helping save 150 gallons per month.
2. Only run the dishwasher and clothes washer with full loads. Doing this habit could save 1000 gallons a month.
3. Turn off the water while brushing your teeth could save 25 gallons a month.
Let's start doing small things today to save our next generations.

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Floating Solar Farms Could Help Protect Lakes and Reservoirs From Harmful Effects of Climate Change

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Floating Solar Farms Could Help Protect Lakes and Reservoirs From Harmful Effects of Climate Change

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Scientists from Lancaster University and the University of Stirling have completed the first detailed modeling of the environmental effects of floating solar installations on bodies of water.
Floating solar farms could help to protect lakes and reservoirs from some of the harms of climate change, a new study suggests.

However, given the complex nature of water bodies and differing designs of solar technologies, there could also be detrimental ecosystem impacts of deploying floating solar arrays.

Conventional solar farms are controversial due to the amount of land they take up. This is leading to increasing interest in floating solar farms - making use of the additional space that bodies of water provide.

So far, there are three commercial-size floating solar arrays in the UK, and hundreds more across the world. The number of installations is likely to grow significantly in coming decades as demand rises for renewable energy sources with more countries committing to net zero carbon targets.

However, little is known about the impacts - both positive and negative - these floating solar farms are having on the lakes and reservoirs they are installed on - until now.

Scientists from Lancaster University and the University of Stirling have completed the first detailed modeling of the environmental effects of floating solar installations on bodies of water.

"As demand for land increases, water bodies are increasingly being targeted for renewable energy. Deployment of solar on water increases electricity production, but it is critical to know if there will be any positive or negative environmental consequences," said Mr. Giles Exley, PhD researcher and lead author from Lancaster University.

"Given the relative immaturity of floating solar farms, it is important to further scientific evidence of the impacts. Our results provide initial insight of the key effects that will help inform water body manager and policymaker decisions."

The research team undertook computer modeling using the MyLake simulation program and data collected by the UK's Centre for Ecology and Hydrology from England's largest lake, Windermere. Although the researchers believe it is unlikely floating solar farms will be deployed on Windermere, it presents a rich data-set as it is one of the most comprehensively studied lakes in the world.

Their results show that floating solar arrays can cool water temperatures by shading the water from the sun. At scale, this could help to mitigate against harmful effects caused by global warming, such as blooms of toxic blue green algae, and increased water evaporation, which could threaten water supply in some regions.

The scientists found that floating solar installations also reduce the duration of 'stratification' - this is where the sun heats the water, forming distinct layers of water at different temperatures. This tends to happen more in the warmer summer months and can result in the bottom layer of water becoming deoxygenated, which deteriorates water quality - an obvious issue for supplies of drinking water. However, the picture is complex and there are also conditions under which stratification, and therefore detrimental water quality impacts, could increase if floating solar farms are deployed.

Mr. Exley said: "The effects of floating solar on the temperature of the water body and stratification, both of which are major drivers of biological and chemical processes, could be comparable in magnitude to the changes lakes will experience with climate change. Floating solar could help to mitigate against the negative effects global warming will have on these bodies of water."

"However, there are also real risks of detrimental impacts, such as deoxygenation causing undesirable increases in nutrient concentrations and killing fish. We need to do more research to understand the likelihood of both positive and negative impacts."

The effects on water temperature increased the larger the solar installation, with small arrays of less than ten percent of the lake surface generally having minimal impacts. However, this model concentrated on one lake. Further studies will be needed to determine the optimum size array, and design, and their effects for individual lakes and reservoirs - all of which have unique characteristics. Different designs of solar installations also have different shading and sheltering effects for the sun and wind.

Arrays covering more than 90 percent of a lake could increase the chances of the lake freezing over in winter, the study found - though these effects would also be specific to the body of water and design of the installation and require further studying.

Field studies and further modeling work to build on these initial findings is ongoing.

Reference: "Floating photovoltaics could mitigate climate change impacts on water body temperature and stratification" by Giles Exley, Alona Armstrong, Trevor Page and Ian D. Jones, 4 March 2021, Solar Energy.

The paper's authors are Giles Exley, Alona Armstrong and Trevor Page from Lancaster University, and Ian Jones from the University of Stirling.

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Floating Solar Farms Could Help Protect Lakes and Reservoirs From Harmful Effects of Climate Change

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Scientists from Lancaster University and the University of Stirling have completed the first detailed modeling of the environmental effects of floating solar installations on bodies of water. Floating solar farms could help to protect lakes and reservoirs from some of the harms of climate change,

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Use nature's digesters to help eliminate food waste and produce nutrient-rich compost for your garden or house plants.

The lowly worm gets almost no respect and is synonymous with an insult. This humble creature toils tirelessly eating the garbage of life and bulldozes its way through the dirt almost blindly, with no eyes or ears to guide it.

But, as you might guess, worms have an important place in every ecosystem. These legions of tiny diggers include over 5,000 species and, according to Charles Darwin, humans wouldn't exist without them: "It may be doubted whether there are many other animals which have played so important a part in the history of the world, as have these lowly organized creatures," he once wrote.

Why compost with worms?

The good news is that you can harness this incredibly efficient composting power for yourself and change the way your family disposes of waste, with very little investment of time and money. A homemade worm composter costs about $30 and a luxurious store-bought worm hotel usually won't cost more than $150. If you consider the cost of purchased organic fertilizer for your garden, even the most expensive composter could pay for itself in one growing season.

Worm composting, also known as vermicomposting or vermiculture, produces natural, odor-free compost that takes about 30 minutes per week to maintain. The biggest time investment is harvesting your worm castings (the precious poop/garden fertilizer), and that happens about every 3-6 months.

Can worms truly be the panacea of stink-free composting that many people claim? Yes, if you do things the right way. The proof is in how many municipalities promote vermicomposting as a way of diverting food waste away from landfills. Worm composting is now also used widely by large commercial dairy farms as one of the most efficient ways of processing manure.

Setting up your worm composting bin

A worm composter is, at its simplest, a bin with holes for ventilation and moisture. It's almost always made with plastic and raised off the ground to allow water to drain out the bottom.

For indoor worm bins, this is done with a plastic storage bin or tote with a lid. Simply drill a series of holes in the sides and bottom a few inches apart, not including the lid. Worms don't need light, and even though there shouldn't be much moisture coming out the bottom, the holes are there in case it needs to drain. The side wall holes are for better air flow.

If you decide you want your worm bin outside, many people have been successful using a simple wood box with gaps between the planks (like a pallet). This is lined with a heavy-duty plastic, such as greenhouse plastic, which is punctured with holes for drainage and airflow.
Related: How to Speed Up Worm Composting
Both types of bins need to be raised up. A plastic bin can be set inside a slightly larger second bin, and many people recommend a large tote that will completely envelope the first bin. In fact, this design often leaves out the lid on the first, inner bin and uses the large lid of the second bin for protection. In my experience, however, I have found that this closed-up environment completely counteracts the ventilation holes and makes the bin retain too much moisture.

Instead, the Environmental Protection Agency has recommended a great bin design with a short bin acting as a tray to catch any drippings from the larger bin. The one thing this design doesn't include is elevation, which can be achieved by gluing a few small plastic food containers (such as for cream cheese or sour cream) upside down on the bottom.

The pallet bin should simply have one pallet on the bottom as the floor. With any worm bin design, the goal is good ventilation, darkness, and drainage.

What type of bedding is best?

The next step is bedding for your worms. You can use:

leaves

straw

shredded paper

shredded cardboard

egg cartons

I recommend leaving out the leaves and straw if it's an indoor bin, because these materials can introduce insects and other outdoor creatures that you might not want reproducing inside your house.

Once you've prepared a nice bed, add a big scoop of garden soil. You can use a big juice pitcher filled with dirt, and then use the same pitcher to pour in some water. You want the moisture level to be the same as a wet sponge - not too wet, not too dry.

If you make the bedding too wet by accident, add more dry material and/or let it drip off. Don't get anxious and add the worms before the bedding is right. I made that mistake once, and it was very difficult to bring the moisture level down later because adding food waste raises the moisture level dramatically in the bin.

Where should you put your worm bin?

We've talked about both inside and outside worm bins above, but they both have their pros and cons in any climate. When your bin is outside, there are two big benefits: capacity and a lot less attention to detail. You can put your worms out there and not have to worry so much about getting it just right, because it won't matter if it smells a little more. But if you live anywhere other than very warm climates, your worms will either die in the winter or you'll have to bring them inside anyway.

With an inside bin you can keep worms even in an apartment, but your capacity will always be limited - you will only be able to have a certain amount of worms, which will eat only a certain amount of food, or it will get stinky and go wrong.

If you're interested in building a larger capacity outdoor system that works well for a larger home garden or urban farm, check out this design by Nature's Always Right, an urban farm located in Lemon Grove, California.

Buying your worms: getting what you pay for

The type of worm most commonly used for vermicomposting is the red wiggler. That's why this method of vermicomposting is also called red worm composting. The red wiggler species ( Eisenia fetida) loves living in rotting organic material and manure and is extremely efficient at breaking it down. Unlike your typical garden earthworm, they don't mind living in a small bin and won't try to burrow down deeper.

Red wigglers used to only be available at bait shops for fishing, but today they have become so popular, there are many companies that will ship them to you by the bag. A pound of worms will eat their half their body weight in waste every day, so if you collect your food waste and weigh it, you can see exactly how many worms you'll need.

A pound of worms includes about 1000 worms and should be more than two large handfuls. Here's a video of what one pound of worms should look like.

It's important to know how many worms you should be getting, because your worm bin could fail without this information. Twice my own worm bins had a fly infestation that compromised the bin. I couldn't figure out why. It turned out that two different companies severely shorted me on the quantity of worms, because I had no idea what a pound of worms should look like. The result was that I put in far too much food for the worms, and the waste rotted and bred flies.

What should you feed your worms?

Worms can eat almost any fruit or vegetable food waste. Don't give them anything that comes from an animal- no fats, bones, dairy, or meat. They also have a difficult time with some stems and the outer layers of onions, and they can't handle too much citrus. If you have a bunch of orange peels or other citrus, make sure it doesn't make up more than 1/5 of the total waste you are adding. Never give them dog or cat feces, or any carnivore feces. But you can add coffee grounds, filters, napkins, shredded paper towels, and non-plastic teabags.

To add food to your bin, dig a hole and bury it beneath the top layer of bedding. It helps if you break up the larger pieces. You should also add a handful of shredded paper and check if there's something left over that the worms are avoiding from previous feeds. Remove anything they won't eat.

As mentioned before, worms will eat half their body weight every day. However, when you first get them they will be a little slow to start. Begin with small amounts of food and check to see how long it takes them to eat it. Increase the amount until you are adding the equivalent to half their weight daily.

If they seem to be leaving a lot of waste, chop up the food you're adding into smaller pieces. You can realistically expect one pound of worms to eat at least three pounds a week and twelve pounds of waste per month.

Troubleshooting worm composting issues

Being a stickler about how much food you add to your bin will help prevent a lot of problems. Here's how to deal with common worm bin issues:

Your worm bin has fruit flies: If you've already saved compost on your kitchen counter, you know how easy it is to get a fruit fly infestation. Prevention is key. Make sure to cover the food waste well under the bedding, cut it up into little pieces, and don't let anything sit and rot in the bin.

Your composter stinks: If your compost starts to smell, dig through the bedding and remove any food waste that appears to be rotting. The worms should really be eating anything before it can get moldy, but they may let something sit to soften up. For example, they probably won't eat a whole fresh banana peel until it starts to break down and softens up. Cutting up larger pieces will help them process food faster. A bad smell can also signal a moisture problem. Too much rotting waste can create a lot of humidity, which will soak the bin and make it a little too damp for the worms. Add some dry cardboard and paper bedding to help balance things out and get the bedding back to a spongy moisture level.

Worms are crawling out of the bin: It's normal for a few worms to come out of the bin, but if you have a lot of escapees, you probably have an environmental problem. This will include moisture, temperature, and possibly even infestations. If the bin is too dry, add some water. If it's too wet, add more bedding. Check for insect larvae or other issues under the top layer of bedding.

There's an infestation: Sometimes other creates will love the moist, dark environment of the bin- even just to lay their eggs. If you notice insects, eggs, or even furry creatures, take the bin outside and harvest the castings. This is a good time to clean out the bin and remove any rotting food or old bedding. Start off fresh and put the worms back in their home. If you had a rodent invader, hold the lid down with bungee cords or rocks.

Helping your worm compost thrive: amendments

If troubleshooting fails to correct your problem, consider adjusting your worm bedding with one of the following amendments:

Material

Purpose

Coconut coir
Balances out nitrogen-rich materials like kitchen scraps and grass clippings, controls moisture, and improves quality of worm castings.

Glacial rock dust

Enhances the microbial population, increases nutrients, and improves water retention.

Pumice

Increases air circulation, prevents matting, and controls moisture.

Harvesting your finished compost: lure vs. dump methods

There are two main ways to harvest your worm compost: by dumping it out completely or by luring the worms away from the completed compost. In my experience, the dump method is easiest if you have a small homemade bin. The lure method works well if you invest in a stackable system like the Worm Factory 360 Composter.

Lure Method
Composters like the Worm Factory 360 allow you to harvest compost from your bin easily, without dumping out the worms. They also remove some of the risk of stink by having a better drainage system than a bin with holes in the bottom.

As the bins fill with compost, you add another stackable tray on top. The worms migrate upstairs to the new layer of organic waste, lured by the presence of fresh food. The finished compost is left behind in the lower trays: it's that simple.

The Worm Factory 360 also offers a refill kit that includes coconut coir, gravel rock dust and other materials that will help keep pH levels in balance and promote stink-free, aerobic composting.

Dump Method
To harvest compost from your homemade bin, the easiest method is to dump the contents upside down on a tarp in the sunshine or under a bright light. The worms will travel down to the bottom of the pile, which was your top layer of bedding (and the non-composted material). You are then free to scoop off the compost from the top of the pile and from around the worms.

This is a good time to clean out any unwanted bits using a worm composting sifter and add new, fresh bedding.

Where can I use worm compost?

Worm compost can be used like any high-nutrient fertilizer: sprinkle on the surface of the soil or mix in around plants, but be careful not to add too much because it can burn tender stems.

The liquid that drains from the bottom of the bin is a highly concentrated worm compost tea (or worm leachate). This tea should be diluted at a ratio of 1 part leachate to 10 parts water to prevent any burning.

If you really want to understand how vermicompost helps suppress plant diseases and provides nutrients to plants, check out this vermicomposting research from Cornell University.

Caring for your worms

If conditions are right in your composter, your red worms will breed when they are over two months old. That means your first batch should double their population within a few months. Don't worry about overpopulation, however. If there's not enough food, some will die and compost into the soil, keeping the bin in balance.

Worms can live four or five years, but they probably won't last that long inside your bin. That's why reproduction is an essential part of keeping your bin going. You may start to see baby worms right away. A Worm Factory 360 can hold over 10,000 worms, so it will probably take a while for you to get to the point that you'll need a second bin. This is another huge benefit of the Worm Factory: it can hold 10x as many worms in an 18" space.

Check out these other resources to get started on your worm composting adventure:

Composting With Worms from the Oregon State University Extension
Winter Worm Composting guide with an interesting bin design from Michigan State University Extension

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About the Author

Nicole Faires
Nicole Faires is an urban farmer and best-selling author of books on sustainable agriculture and food policy. Originally from Montana, she now lives with her family on the West Coast.

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Use nature's digesters to help eliminate food waste and produce nutrient-rich compost for your garden or house plants. The lowly worm gets almost no respect and is synonymous with an insult. This humble creature toils tirelessly eating the garbage of life and bulldozes its way through the dirt almost blindly, with no eyes or ears to guide it.

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FRIDAYS FOR FUTURE…

or FFF, is a global climate strike movement that started in August 2018, when 15-year-old Greta Thunberg began a school strike for climate. In the three weeks leading up to the Swedish election, she sat outside Swedish Parliament every school day, demanding urgent action on the climate crisis. She was tired of society’s unwillingness to see the climate crisis for what it is: a crisis.

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or FFF, is a youth-led and -organised global climate strike movement that started in August 2018, when 15-year-old Greta Thunberg began a school strike for climate. In the three weeks leading up to the Swedish election, she sat outside Swedish Parliament every school day, demanding urgent action on the climate crisis. She was tired of society's unwillingness to see the climate crisis for what it is: a crisis.

To begin with, she was alone, but she was soon joined by others. On the 8th of September, Greta and her fellow school strikers decided to continue their strike until the Swedish policies provided a safe pathway well under 2° C, i.e. in line with the Paris agreement. They created the hashtag #FridaysForFuture, and encouraged other young people all over the world to join them. This marked the beginning of the global school strike for climate.

Their call for action sparked an international awakening, with students and activists uniting around the globe to protest outside their local parliaments and city halls. Along with other groups across the world, Fridays for Future is part of a hopeful new wave of change, inspiring millions of people to take action on the climate crisis, and we want you to become one of us!

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Fridays for Future - How Greta started a global movement

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FFF is a fast-growing, youth-led and -organised, global movement striking from school to demand immediate climate action, across the world. YOU are welcome.

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This is for you: you students, you organizers, you voters. You who have always meant to read the Parables. You who wonder about our destiny. You searching for pragmatic ways to survive with your people. You Earthseed.

On Octavia E. Butler's birthday, this June 22nd, we are launching a podcast all about the Parables for this moment. One chapter a week, through the 2020 election and beyond. Join us.

Hosted by Toshi Reagon and adrienne maree brown.

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A podcast diving into Octavia E Butler's Parable of the Sower/Talents, hosted by
Toshi Reagon and adrienne maree brown. Produced by Kat Aaron.

A podcast diving into Octavia E Butler's Parable of the Sower/Talents, hosted by
Toshi Reagon and adrienne maree brown. Produced by Kat Aaron.

Real hearts talking clearly

I'm deeply grateful to have found Octavia with this guidance. Yoshi was already a powerful presence at 16 when Sweet Honey introduced her at Michigan Womyns Music Fest.
Ca me across this podcast to see what Toshi up to now. 1 episode and I immediately read Parables. Allergic to violence and science fiction. But Octavia was describing actual current reality so I took the wounds because Lauren's empathy took mine right to the cross. So I had to bear the dystopia and get some skills. Thank you for the music!

Planting Seeds

This podcast is such a gift! I'm in Northern California surviving wildfires, reading the Parables, listening to this Podcast, teaching throughout a pandemic, thinking deeply about the teachings of EARTHSEED, and planting my garden. Also, it was deeply moving to hear the commentary about folks experiencing wildfires in CA and the need for teachers to hold space for student's to grieve in Ch. 13.

Powerful, Raw, Vitall

I look forward to each chapter and learn so much from their review and reflections of the Parables. Their conversation is genuine, thoughtful, and nurturing to the listener. The music is phenomenal.

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A podcast diving into Octavia E Butler's Parable of the Sower/Talents, hosted by Toshi Reagon and adrienne maree brown. Produced by Kat Aaron. A podcast diving into Octavia E Butler's Parable of the Sower/Talents, hosted by Toshi Reagon and adrienne maree brown. Produced by Kat Aaron.

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This could actually save us. Potential STEM career path for students.
- Carter

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Solar panels, wind turbines and electric cars will go far in helping California and the Biden administration meet their aggressive climate goals - but not far enough. As time runs short, scientists and government officials say the moment to break out the giant vacuums has arrived.

The art of industrial-scale carbon removal - sucking emissions from the atmosphere and storing them underground - has long been an afterthought in climate-action circles: too expensive, too controversial, too unproven.

But as the deadline to avert climate catastrophe barrels nearer, the Biden administration is making the technologies prominent in its plans, and California is scrambling to figure out how to put them to use.

It is no small undertaking. Installing sci-fi-type machinery to pull carbon from the air - or divert it from refineries, power plants and industrial operations - and bottle it up deep underground is a monumentally expensive and logistically daunting challenge. It is one climate leaders now have no choice but to try to meet as they race to keep global temperatures from rising more than 1.5 degrees Celsius, the central commitment of the Paris Agreement on Climate Change, which aims to avert cataclysmic effects.

"To have any chance of holding warming below that level, you can't do it simply by limiting emissions," said Ken Alex, a senior policy advisor to former California Gov. Jerry Brown who now directs Project Climate at the UC Berkeley School of Law. "You have to sequester significant amounts of carbon."

The recognition has pushed state regulators to start drafting blueprints for what could be one of the larger infrastructure undertakings in California history. Millions of tons of carbon dioxide would need to be captured and compressed into liquid form, at which point it would be either buried throughout the state or converted into materials for industrial uses such as manufacturing plastic and cement.

The state is essentially starting from zero. There are no large-scale carbon-removal projects operating in California.

Pipelines need to be built, vast geological reservoirs deep underground need to be fashioned into carbon dioxide storage facilities, costly new technologies for vacuuming carbon from the air and factories need to be brought up to scale.

"We need to see some pilot projects and test them out as soon as possible," said Rajinder Sahota, deputy executive officer for Climate Change and Research at the California Air Resources Board. "All of the modeling we have says if we don't start investing in a significant amount of this in this decade, we will not be set up to reach California's goal of carbon neutrality by mid-century."

The acknowledgement has sparked a surge of interest from investors and energy startups trying to scale up technologies that only recently were considered a money sink. Among the most ambitious are the backers of a process known as direct air capture, through which giant fans suck carbon from the atmosphere.

The technology has been deployed in modest demonstration projects - including one in Menlo Park - for years but never at a scale large enough to make a meaningful dent in emissions. With the cost of running the machines on the decline and the willingness to consider increasingly outside-the-box solutions on the rise, as well as a new administration in Washington promising an infusion of federal subsidies, the vacuum approach is suddenly getting a lot of attention.

"The question had always been, could we fund a multi-hundred-million-dollar plant, find a site and get it built?" said Steve Oldham, CEO of Carbon Engineering, a direct-air-capture company based in British Columbia. "The answer now is, fantastically, yes."

California regulators are closely watching the progress of the hulking direct-air-capture facility the company is building with Occidental Petroleum in the Permian Basin of Texas. The 100-acre operation aims to capture up to 1 million metric tons of carbon dioxide each year.

Even if the Texas plant meets its goals, the carbon dioxide removed by it would reflect less than 1% of the emissions California needs to pull from the atmosphere to hit its climate targets, according to estimates by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

"The models are telling us these approaches are essential, but we don't yet know if they will be successful," said Simon Nicholson, co-director of the Institute for Carbon Removal Law and Policy at American University in Washington. "There is lots of promise, lots of potential, but not yet lots of proof."

There is also lots of consternation. The Carbon Engineering Texas project is a topic of hot debate among climate activists. To make the project pencil out financially, the carbon dioxide pulled from the air will be injected into the ground in a way that helps Occidental extract oil that can then be sold on the market.

Critics have long warned that fossil energy firms are looking to the technologies to delay the transition to more sustainable fuels. The oil generated at the Texas facility will likely qualify as an environmentally friendly fuel in California under the state's Low Carbon Fuel Standard.

Carbon Engineering is promising that oil extraction is not in its long-term future. The oil revenues, the company says, make it possible to get early plants built. The hope is the costs of the plants will get much cheaper as the technology is put to widespread use, making it economical to just bury the carbon dioxide in the ground.

The European company Climeworks has taken a different route, using modular units to build smaller operations across the continent. Its biggest, in Iceland, will go online soon, collecting 4,000 tons of carbon dioxide annually. That would be dwarfed by what Carbon Engineering is projecting in Texas. But there is no fossil fuel component to the Climeworks projects.

"This is scalable," said Christoph Beuttler, a manager at Climeworks. "We can get the costs down. Just imagine we were talking about solar panels in the 1990s and how far the prices have dropped. We think the same thing can be achieved here. "

California officials say direct-air-capture developers are eyeing where in the state they can build. Some are looking toward remote areas in Northern California where they could tap into geothermal energy, as Climeworks will do to power its Icelandic plant. Others are more focused on the deep underground basins of the Central Valley, suitable for storing billions of tons of carbon dioxide.

The vacuums are just one of many technologies California and other states are investigating in their sprint toward carbon removal. Back in Washington, there is a bipartisan push to allocate billions of dollars to the construction of pipelines and storage facilities for all the carbon dioxide lawmakers envision will be diverted underground in the coming years.

One of the first projects moving forward in California targets agriculture and wood waste that would otherwise be burned, resulting in greenhouse gas emissions. It aims to convert the waste into zero emissions power using a pioneering gasification process. The emissions created during production would be trapped and buried underground.

Other efforts are focused on the potential to trap greenhouse gases at factories for such things as cement and steel. Their production is emissions intensive due to the high heat temperatures needed and chemical reactions involved, and the only option for canceling out those emissions is diverting and burying the carbon dioxide.

"Some of these facilities cannot or will not be shut down, replaced or switched to carbon-free fuels quickly enough ... to contain climate change at manageable levels," said a recent report from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory urging California to become a carbon removal leader.

The race to bring carbon removal technologies to market is getting a boost from billionaire Elon Musk. On Thursday, Earth Day, his XPrize will launch a $100-million contest aimed at inspiring teams of innovators to develop carbon removal projects capable of being scaled "massively to gigaton levels, locking away CO2 permanently in an environmentally benign way."

Groups of scientists have meanwhile been drafting blueprints for California's transition into the new technologies. An exhaustive study by Stanford and the Energy Futures Initiative identified 76 existing factories, power plants and other facilities in the state where carbon capture technology could be used to remove 59 million metric tons of greenhouse gas annually by 2030.

The report also noted the state's landscape left it with adequate space to store more trapped carbon dioxide than most places in the country, with room to stow away 70 billion tons of it, mostly in the Central Valley. It could go into underground basins that extend for many miles across large swaths of the state, the report says.

California is getting to the party late. Other states began experimenting with carbon removal years ago, with most early pilot projects aimed at boosting the viability of fossil fuels - fitting facilities such as coal plants with carbon capture mechanisms. But California hedged, more focused on moving away from fossil fuels altogether.

The one big carbon capture project the state tried was a flop. The effort in Kern County aimed to revive coal at a time the fuel was already long out of fashion in the state.

"Bringing coal into California and then trying to clean it up was not a good start," said Robert Weisenmiller, a former chair of the California Energy Commission. "It just got weirder and weirder. The costs kept going up, and it spiraled out." The plug was pulled in 2016, before the plant went online.

Now, California is taking another crack at the carbon removal puzzle as it consolidates its position as the nation's leader on climate.

"The state's goal is to get to zero net carbon," Weisenmiller said. "It is not enough just to reduce the emissions we put into the atmosphere. At the end of the day, you have to pull some out."

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.

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Clock's running out on climate change. California says it's time for giant carbon vacuums

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Solar panels, wind turbines and electric cars will go far in helping California and the Biden administration meet their aggressive climate goals - but not far enough. As time runs short, scientists and government officials say the moment to break out the giant vacuums has arrived.

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100 Steps to a Plastic-Free Life " My Plastic-free Life

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Living Life with Less Plastic since 2007.

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NASA.gov brings you the latest images, videos and news from America's space agency. Get the latest updates on NASA missions, watch NASA TV live, and learn about our quest to reveal the unknown and benefit all humankind.

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Microplastics and washing your clothes...

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Microplastics and washing your clothes...

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This bag collects micro-plastics from your synthetic fabrics in the wash, so that they don't end up in the water waste.

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Microplastic released from washing harms the environment.

With each wash, countless microfibres from synthetic textiles make their way from washing machines into rivers, lakes, and oceans. Once in the environment, the microfibres concentrate pervasive bacteria and pollutants. They are consumed by aquatic organisms, which can result in gastrointestinal infections and blockages, reproductive problems, and starvation. Serious consequences are not limited to animals and nature.

The tiny plastic fragments threaten our own health: They enter our food and our bodies through the food chain.

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GUPPYFRIEND Washing Bag Online Shop | STOP! Micro Waste

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Microplastic released from washing harms the environment. With each wash, countless microfibres from synthetic textiles make their way from washing machines into rivers, lakes, and oceans. Once in the environment, the microfibres concentrate pervasive bacteria and pollutants. They are consumed by aquatic organisms, which can result in gastrointestinal infections and blockages, reproductive problems, and starvation.

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Fake trees absorb lots of CO2!

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Physicist and engineer Klaus Lackner makes artificial trees - but not the kind that decorate living rooms and lobbies. His artificial trees can capture carbon dioxide directly out of the air-and they're 1,000 times more efficient than nature's trees in doing so.

Millions of the trees could eventually generate "negative carbon emissions," meaning they could take more carbon dioxide out of the air than we put in from fossil fuel emissions. That is what we need to reverse the course of climate change, he said. People on Earth generate 36 billion metric tons of CO2 each year and CO2 is a greenhouse gas that holds heat in the atmosphere.

Because of the way CO2 accumulates, or "piles up" in the air, even if the world were to drastically cut carbon emissions today, it would take a very long time to return to a safe range, said Lackner, the director of the Center for Negative Carbon Emissions at Arizona State University.

Lackner developed the artificial trees to offset the already-high global carbon dioxide levels. These trees don't look like natural trees - they don't have leaves or branches. But they function in a similar way by absorbing carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. Existing technology could recycle the captured carbon dioxide and use it to as a resource to make fuel, "closing the loop" of carbon emissions, he said.

"We can argue where to stop [carbon emissions], but that we will have to stop is unavoidable. The world cannot run 'business-as-usual' in energy, it has to figure out a better way. And at the same time, it's not likely that it can do that overnight, so you do need to balance the carbon budget," Lackner said.

Lackner's trees are made from a special resin - a unique plastic that sponges up CO2 from the air in a chemical reaction. When the resin is dry, it "has an exceedingly high affinity to carbon dioxide" -in other words, it absorbs the C02. And when the resin is submerged in water, it releases the carbon dioxide, Lackner said.

"People say, 'Why not just grow normal trees, natural trees, rather than those artificial trees?' But I argue that's like pulling a plow over using a tractor. You certainly can do it with a horse, but it's not as efficient," Lackner said. "Our trees are specialists for carbon dioxide collection, and they're about 1,000 times faster [than natural trees]."

The first outdoor prototype has been on the roof at Arizona State University for about a year, Lackner told climate scientists at this fall's annual Comer Abrupt Climate Change Conference in Wisconsin.

"It's running essentially automatically, with a little bit of graduate student supervision," he said.

One hundred million of Lackner's units, each built to remove one metric ton {2,204 pounds} of C02 a day, would be needed to match the amount of carbon dioxide the world currently emits each year, Lackner said. Adding more units would begin to lower the 400 parts-per-million (ppm) of carbon dioxide already in the atmosphere, a level that is on the rise.

"If we had another 100 million [units], you could bring [carbon dioxide levels] down another 2 ppm, per year," said Wallace Broecker, one of the world's pioneering climate scientists. "If we just did that, we'd now have 200 million, one [million] matching what we're producing, and another [million] taking some out. Then to go back to 350 ppm, it would take 50 years."

Scientists consider 350 ppm of C02 a ceiling to keep climate change under control, according to many experts. Levels of the greenhouse gas started to rise above 300 ppm with the Industrial Revolution.

Lackner's device demonstrates that carbon dioxide can be effectively captured from the atmosphere. But technology exists that could also turn that captured carbon dioxide back into liquid fuels, essentially reusing carbon emissions to generate new energy, Lackner said.

The concept is based on a process that was used in South Africa during the apartheid years. While under an embargo, South Africa "had no access to oil, and they showed that you can convert coal to liquid fuels, gasoline and diesel," he said.

In this process, steam and coal are converted into carbon monoxide and hydrogen. Carbon monoxide and hydrogen can then be reacted to form any type of fuel - gasoline, diesel, methanol, dimethyl ether or alcohol, he said.

But instead of starting with coal, Lackner said, renewable electricity from wind or solar can be combined with captured carbon dioxide emissions and water to create carbon monoxide and hydrogen.

"Then we are right at the same spot they are to make fuels again," he said. "The technologies exist. They're not all that well developed, because nobody ever had good reason to do it, but certainly they exist, it's not something we don't know how to do," he said.

Energy from solar or wind could drive the conversion, creating a way to store renewable energy from solar or wind power as gasoline for use in months with less sunshine or wind, Lackner said. This would "make it possible for the renewable energy to truly penetrate into the system," he said.

In order for that to happen, Lackner believes volunteers must first commit to capturing carbon dioxide waste. Then eventually, more people will see the benefits, get on board, and regulations could be established.

"The problem is, [carbon dioxide] doesn't hurt right away, it doesn't smell, it's invisible, and so it's hard to convince people. People don't realize that they put out 20 pounds of carbon dioxide every time they burn a gallon of gasoline, because it's invisible," he said.

"I think we're playing with something we don't understand and the easy way out is to not let [excess carbon emissions] happen," Lackner said.
Photo at top: An illustration of Klaus Lackner's carbon capture devices, which might be needed to reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide to a safe level. Image courtesy of Klaus Lackner.

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ARTIFICIAL TREES COULD OFFSET CARBON DIOXIDE EMISSIONS

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Physicist and engineer Klaus Lackner makes artificial trees - but not the kind that decorate living rooms and lobbies. His artificial trees can capture carbon dioxide directly out of the air-and they're 1,000 times more efficient than nature's trees in doing so.

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The most talked about aspects of climate change (rising sea levels, changes in weather patterns, increases in temperature) grab all the big headlines; and for good reason they have huge implications to life around the globe. However an often underpublicized problem threatens all life in the ocean and any chance of sustainable fishing in the future. As the concentration of CO2 in the air rises some is dissolved into the ocean. The resulting acid formed from this dissolution binds with a crucial chemical used in the formation of shells and bones of sea life. Without this chemical sea creatures shells and bones are more brittle, weaker, and support less overall life. Scientists have been studying this issue and have discovered growing all kinds of plants along shorelines can limit the effects of acidification.

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Oregon's picturesque Netarts Bay has long been known for its oysters. But Netarts, like the whole west coast of North America, is getting more acidic. And the oysters don't like it.

Since the Industrial Revolution, carbon dioxide in the air has seeped into ocean waters and boosted acidity by 30 percent. Globally, the oceans' pH has dropped from 8.2 to 8.1, and could drop another 0.4 units by the end of the century. The problem is worse off the west coast of North America, where acidic bottom-waters are brought up to the surface by onshore winds. Corrosive waters like those suck up the building blocks for shells, and can literally eat away at the skeletons of corals.

Last summer, Oregon State University marine ecologist George Waldbusser and his team boated around Netarts Bay planting baby oysters to see how they would fare. The only ones that thrived were those protected by beds of eelgrass, which seemed to swallow up enough carbon dioxide during the peak of each day to give the oysters a break from acid and a window of opportunity for growth.

"Basically nothing outside of those beds survived," says Waldbusser, who hasn't yet published the work. Meanwhile, the Whiskey Creek Shellfish Hatchery in Netarts Bay has started only pulling water into their tanks in the afternoon, when photosynthesis peaks and the water is less acidic.

Waldbusser is part of a small team of scientists now exploring the idea that seagrasses, kelps, and shell beds might be able to counteract the rising tide of ocean acidity in local hot spots, making life a little easier for struggling animals. He and other experts on the West Coast Ocean Acidification and Hypoxia Science Panel, which released its first report this April, recommended that scientists and managers push forward such strategies to suck CO2 out of the water.

The idea is a smaller, gentler cousin to grander schemes of geo-engineering. There have been proposals to soak up the ocean's excess acid by throwing iron, limestone, or olivine into the water, boosting plankton growth, adding the building blocks for shells, or chemically absorbing CO2. But the general response to such plans usually ranges from head-shaking disbelief that they might be feasible or effective, to widespread concern about the possible ecological side effects. The energy needed to mine and distribute rocks, and the unpredictable shift in food webs, have made these schemes unappealing on a global scale.

One study said seagrass meadows should give corals about an 18 percent boost in growth.

On the local scale, however, lower-cost, lower-risk ecological restoration might have the dual benefit of giving threatened sea creatures both a better place to live and a refuge from ocean acid.

Oysters would not be the only creatures to benefit. Derek Manzello manages a long-term ocean acidification monitoring site at Cheeca Rocks in the Florida Keys, as part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) National Coral Reef Monitoring Program. That particular patch of coral is one of the only reefs in the Florida Keys that is still growing; in other reefs, most corals have died from disease and bleaching since the early 1980s. This is odd because Cheeca Rocks, like other near-shore spots in Florida, sees high temperature swings and large amounts of soil and nutrients dumped into the water, which should limit coral growth. There are several possible explanations for Cheeca Rocks' resistance to these problematic conditions, including that the corals there might be genetically adapted to thrive in harsh conditions. But another possible explanation is that they are living in a low-acidity refuge created by nearby seagrass beds.

In 2012, Manzello showed that Florida's inshore waters, including where Cheeca Rocks sits, are packed with dissolved aragonite, the material that corals need to grow. Acids in the water decrease the aragonite saturation value; if it gets below 1, corals and shells start to dissolve. In pre-industrial times, these inshore waters typically had a saturation value of 4.6. Today, most reefs in Florida and the Caribbean have been eked down to 3.8. But Florida's inshore waters have a happy 4.7.

"This is a huge difference," says Manzello. The reason is the banks of seagrass growing in Florida's inshore waters, like turtle grass and manatee grass, that suck up CO2 as they photosynthesize - particularly in the spring.

Another study out that same year showed the same effect in the tropical Indo-Pacific. Seagrass meadows there have the potential to increase aragonite saturation by up to 2.9 units, and the pH by 0.38. That should give corals about an 18 percent boost in growth, making seagrass a potential tool for marine park managers, the authors write.

The potential is huge. Plants in the ocean, from seagrasses to plankton, add up to just 0.05 percent of the plant biomass on land, but are so pervasive and efficient at sucking up carbon that they cycle through roughly the same amount of carbon every day as all the land-based plants. Yet seagrass ecosystems are being wiped out, thanks to everything from pandemic disease to water pollution and coastal construction projects. The rate of loss has skyrocketed from less than 1 percent of global seagrass cover per year in the 1970s to 7 percent annually in the 2000s, making seagrasses one of the planet's most threatened ecosystems. Efforts to restore or farm such plants could have a host of benefits, including soaking up atmospheric carbon.

Waldbusser cautions that many scientists don't yet know about the effect of seagrasses on ocean chemistry. Some breeds, like the invasive Zostera japonica eelgrass in Oregon, tend to shed their leaves in the winter, and the degrading plant matter boosts carbon dioxide levels in the water rather than lowering them. And if the water is swift flowing, then any patches of water made less acidic by plants will likely be swept away before they have a chance to benefit local shellfish or corals.

Seagrasses aren't the only possible solution. Kelp is also well known for soaking up excess nutrients and making waters cleaner for shellfish. Most academic papers looking at the benefits of kelp don't even mention acidification. But it didn't take much for Nichole Price of the Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Science in Maine to put two and two together. "The biggest challenge in land-based kelp nurseries is keeping the pH low enough because they consume so much CO2," says Price, who wondered how those same photosynthetic algae were affecting ocean waters.

Price teamed up with Ocean Approved, North America's first commercial kelp farmer, to put instruments inside and outside of its kelp farms to see what was going on. In as-yet-unpublished work, they show that the aragonite saturation level is half a unit to a full unit higher within the kelp farm. "That's bigger than the change we expect from ocean acidification," she says. Next year they plan to map the extent of the impact, and test the effect of the kelp on a mussel farm around the corner. That farm, says Price, has already started growing kelp based on these preliminary results.

Researchers will soon start the first large-scale project to plant and grow kelp to suck up CO2.

The key, says Price, is to harvest the kelp so that the carbon it extracts gets removed from the ecosystem. It's hard to compete with Asian kelp suppliers, but local kelp could be dried and used as food or fertilizer, adding a layer of economic diversity to a struggling coastal economy. "There's a lot of potential for shellfish aquaculture, but people are really hesitant [because of acidification]," says Price, who now heads up Bigelow's Centers for Venture Research. Pairing up with seaweeds might be the trick to buy new businesses a bit of insurance against future conditions, she says.

This autumn, researchers will start the first large-scale project to intentionally plant and grow kelp to suck up carbon dioxide. The Puget Sound Restoration Fund, based in Bainbridge Island, Washington, won $1.5 million from the Paul G. Allen Ocean Challenge in April 2015 to investigate the potential for sugar kelp to reduce acidity in local waters, where the pH can hit 7.8. Plans call for starting farming an acre of kelp this October.

Ocean waters can be buffered against acids by non-living material, too. Instead of soaking up carbon dioxide, the strategy here is to add more carbonate to the water. That shifts the aragonite saturation point and, again, makes it easier for shells to grow.

Nearly every estuary that once had a thriving oyster industry hosts an effort to put old shells back into the water, says Waldbusser. Most, if not all, of these projects are focused on giving the oysters or other shellfish something to grow on - their babies prefer to sit on piles of old shells, rather than getting buried or choked by mud. The fact that these shells help to buffer water acidity is an added bonus.

The Chesapeake Bay, he notes, has seen the largest oyster reef restoration effort to date and also possibly the largest (and unintentional) ocean acidification buffering experiment. About 196 million bushels of dredged oyster shells were put back into Chesapeake Bay from 1960 until 2006, before the project coordinators ran low on shells. They're still about 100 million bushels short of where the Chesapeake's ecology would have been had oysters not been extracted for centuries, notes Waldbusser, and the effects on the bay's complex water chemistry have so far been hard to track. But that doesn't mean that shells can't shift pH significantly under different conditions.

In previous work off the coast of Maine, Waldbusser's team, led by Mark Green of Saint Joseph's College of Maine, mixed old ground-up shells with ocean sediments and replanted them. They then looked to see how that affected oysters. Three times as many oyster larvae settled in the shell-rich soils as in the non-shelled soils, they found. The reason, Waldbusser thinks, is because of a change in water acidity within the pores of the sediment.

"You have this incredibly hostile environment in the pore water, which is generally more acidic than the overlying water," says Waldbusser. "Mix shell in and it's a little less hostile."

Waldbusser is familiar with other proposed ways of shifting ocean pH. He wrote a proposal to use the waste CO2 emitted from a hatchery to dissolve calcium carbonate rocks and bubble the products back into the ocean, helping to buffer acidity in much the same way as is done in home aquariums. But it didn't get funded. "There are lots of technologies that exist and things you can do, but it comes back to scalability and unintended consequences," says Waldbusser. Using rocks to buffer ocean water, for example, involves using energy to treat the minerals beforehand so they dissolve, and then you have to worry about toxic levels of nickel or cadmium hitching a ride along with the rocks.

In the end, says Waldbusser, "I always come back to restoration." Replanting the seagrasses or shell banks that used to exist in an estuary is much safer, and often easier, than some industrial schemes. And, he adds, it probably comes with "built-in benefits that we don't even recognize."

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How Growing Sea Plants Can Help Slow Ocean Acidification

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Researchers are finding that kelp, eelgrass, and other vegetation can effectively absorb CO2 and reduce acidity in the ocean. Growing these plants in local waters, scientists say, could help mitigate the damaging impacts of acidification on marine life.

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NutritionFacts.org
How Not to Die
How Not to Diet

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Take a time-out from tech :)

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Arianna Gonzalez
How to save water when flushing the toilet. Something you may have heard before or seen someone do is hide things under the lid of the toilet basin. A common practice for saving water is to place a brick in the basin, therefore when it fills with water you use .25 gallons less! overtime this adds up to you saving money and conserving water. But bricks deteriorate over time. So instead try filling a large water bottle with sand and have it take up some space.

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In honor of of Womens history month in March Meatless Monday is celebrating some of the women who have made large positive changes to food and our food system. Many of these women contributed to groundbreaking work in relevant topics such as pesticide use, sustainable plant based diets, Nutrition studies, and more. The website includes a short biography for each of these women, it was an interesting read that introduced me to some of the female faces that helped revolutionize clean sustainable eating.

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In honor of Women's History Month, Meatless Monday is celebrating the many women who have helped make our food and food system more equitable, accessible, nutritious, entertaining, and delicious.

Although countless women have contributed to the cause, we're highlighting a diverse group that touches every corner of the food world, from food policy leaders to Michelin-starred chefs to plant-based eating advocates. And while their accomplishments vary, they all share one thing in common-a commitment to making food healthier and more enjoyable.
Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher
Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher (MFK for short), is one of the most accomplished and revered American food writers. Her whimsical and approachable writing style, mixed with a vast knowledge of gastronomy, made her writing dynamic, unique, and comprehensive. Although she passed away in 1992, her 27 published books are still lauded by food enthusiasts and culinarians around the world because they teach the reader how to truly appreciate-and love-food. If you're new to MFK Fisher's work, we recommend starting with An Alphabet for Gourmets or How to Cook a Wolf.
Rachel Carson
Born in 1907, Rachel Carson was a writer, scientists, and ecologist who was an important pioneer of the environmentalist movement. Although she originally focused her studies on marine life and oceans, Carson shifted her attention to the increased usage of pesticides and chemicals in American agricultural production. Her ground-breaking expose, Silent Spring, told the real-life story of how bird populations across the country were suffering as a result of the widespread application of the synthetic pesticide DDT (dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane), which was being used widely to control mosquitoes and others insects. The shocking revelations outlined in Silent Spring galvanized a new generation of environmentalists, inspiring them to protect the world and all its creatures.
Edna Lewis
When it comes to Southern cooking, Edna Lewis is larger than life. The granddaughter of formerly enslaved people, Lewis put Southern comfort food on the map when she opened her own New York City restaurant, Café Nicholson, in 1948. Lewis was one of the few black, female head chefs in the country, but her simple, yet delicious Southern food truly wowed her restaurant's high-profile clientele, which included Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, and Gloria Vanderbilt. In 1972, Edna Lewis authored, The Taste of Country Cooking, which focused on pure and fresh ingredients, annual Emancipation Day picnics, and the aromas of celebratory meals. The Taste of Country Cooking ushered in a new wave of cookbooks celebrating the diversity of southern cuisine.
Alice Waters
Known as the inventor of modern California cuisine, Alice Waters is an American culinary icon who popularized local, simple, and sustainable cookery. She opened her world-famous restaurant, Chez Panisse, in 1971, and her ingredient-forward style has been applauded by chefs, customers, and environmentalists alike. By showcasing seasonal produce grown by local farmers and artisans, Alice Waters was able to redefine what is considered fine dining, and in 2007, Chez Panisse was included on the list of, "The World's 50 Greatest Restaurants." Today, through her Edible Schoolyard Project, Alice Waters is dedicated to promoting food awareness and better eating habits in children and young adults.
Marion Nestle
Marion Nestle is Paulette Goddard Professor, of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health at New York University, which she chaired from 1988-2003 and from which she officially retired in September 2017. Over the course of her long and successful career, Marion Nestle has authored several books detailing the interplay between food, science, politics, and industry. Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health, remains a must-read for anyone interested in the modern history of the American food policy.
Dominique Crenn
Dominique Crenn is one of the most powerful female forces in the culinary world and is currently the only female chef in the United States to attain three Michelin stars for her restaurant, Atelier Crenn, in San Francisco, California. Crenn's culinary career has always involved challenging the typical gender roles that are pervasive in professional kitchens. In 1998, she became head chef at the Intercontinental Hotel in Jakarta, Indonesia, making her Indonesia's first ever female head chef. Dominique Crenn describes her cooking style as "poetic culinaria," and her kitchens are known for being professional and absent of screaming and condescension.
Padma Lakshmi
Cookbook author, writer, activist, and television host of the culinary competition, Top Chef, Padma Lakshmi knows a thing or two about food. As an Indian American, she is dedicated to bringing greater awareness to the rich, complex, and often-misunderstood nuances of Indian cooking. But Lakshmi is more than a food personality; she fights bravely for equality, women's rights, and immigration reform, and her work as an activist, philanthropist, and Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations Development Program has impacted the lives of millions.
Michelle Obama
Mother, lawyer, writer, and former First Lady, Michelle Obama remains a role model to women around the world, but her contribution to the fight against obesity and unhealthy eating remains one of her greatest accomplishments. While in the White House, she championed the Let's Move campaign, which was created to help curb the childhood obesity by providing healthier meals in schools, improving food nutrition labeling, and encouraging more physical activity. Michelle Obama also played an important role in the new MyPlate design, a visual graphic that would replace the outdated food pyramid by putting an emphasis on eating more fruits, vegetables, and whole grains.
Tabitha Brown
Informative, bubbly, and talented, Tabitha Brown has taken the food world by storm. Her recipes are simple, accessible, and comforting, but they're also primarily vegan. Tabitha Brown has emerged as an important cheerleader for plant-based cooking, and she shows via digital channels like YouTube, Instagram, and Tik Tok that eating fruits, vegetables, grains, and other whole foods can be fun and delicious. Her innovative dishes, like carrot bacon and okra grilled cheese, show her young audience that cooking can be a creative art, as well as way to eat better.

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The Most Influential Women in Food - Meatless Monday

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In honor of Women's History Month, Meatless Monday is celebrating the many women who have helped make our food and food system more equitable, accessible, nutritious, entertaining, and delicious. Although countless women have contributed to the cause, we're highlighting a diverse group that touches every corner of the food world, from food policy leaders to Michelin-starred chefs to plant-based eating advocates.

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I always wondered whether or not smart lights make a difference in energy usage to save money or if they are even better for the Environment since they are technically "always on." However, as it turns out my they are significantly better in terms of efficiency, saving money, and the environment. They significantly reduce the amount of electricity used (which also means reduced electric bill). Even with them constantly on, what's known as Vampire Power, it is next to nothing on a monthly basis. However, you must take into account the initially higher price than regular incandescent bulbs or fluorescent bulbs. Though in the long run, the smart bulbs significantly win out for the environment not to mention you wallet.  -IZD

https://smarterhomeguide.com/do-smart-lights-use-electricity-when-theyre-turned-off/

https://www.fluxsmartlighting.com/blogs/news/how-smart-lighting-saves-the-environment#:~:text=The%20study%20took%20into%20account,any%20other%20bulb%20out%20there.

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Plant based meat Taste is There But what Else is?

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Plant based meat Taste is There But what Else is?

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I was very skeptical about the taste texture and overall health of these meats such as beyond meat. I decided to try it about a week ago and to my surprise it tasted and smelled just like real meat. The texture was also up to par as well. I just wonder if these meatless plant based meals provide more, less or about the same nutritional sustenance. Not to mention, I also wonder what they have added. Given that you typically have to chemically add carbs or Proteins or fat substitutes to food items to maintain texture and taste, what has been added and is it really healthier than actual meat. - IZD

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For Earth day someone can conserve energy and fossil fuels by not utilizing transport systems for a day and go to your recycling center by walking or riding a bike. Similar to having a type of climate sabbath if you want to do that and help with harms on Earth a bit and spread the word. Even certain actual sabbaths are being conducting sabbaths within sabbaths for both occasions as shown below.

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The United Church of Christ, as well as many other denominations, has long been on record supporting action on Climate Change. Green Faith links to many faiths and denominations and what they have to say and do about climate change.

Addressing climate change has great potential to strengthen our economy. Working to stop climate change can drive economic growth, while unchecked climate change is expected to have dire economic consequences. For example, Citibank estimates the costs of unchecked climate change at more than $40 trillion by 2060. Meanwhile, more than 4 million Americans now work in wind, solar, energy efficiency and other clean energy jobs - far more than the 160,000 who work in the coal industry - and experts estimate that investing in revitalizing water infrastructure in the U.S. could generate 1.3 million more jobs . 1 If we resolve global warming, we also create a new and green Third Industrial Revolution. In fact, the 2019 General Synod of the UCC passed a resolution endorsing the 'Green New Deal', a congressional proposal laying out a plan for tackling climate change through economic growth.

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The United Church of Christ, as well as many other denominations, has long been on record supporting action on Climate Change. Green Faith links to many faiths and denominations and what they have to say and do about climate change. Addressing climate change has great potential to strengthen our economy.

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I did not know much about this but certain companies such as beyond meat utilize plant based protein to make meat substitutes. I have not tried how this is but from photographs it looks very similar. This can be both a healthy and Earth friendly alternative.

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Vegan Burger Meat, Crumbles, & Sausages | Beyond Meat

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Beyond Meat is plant-based, vegan meat that’s tasty & better for you and for our planet. Find us in the meat aisle or subscribe for Beyond Meat delivery.

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Sails propped up by two poles typically used in high altitude areas with little access to water in order to catch the fog within the net and have the water flow into water storage tanks. This can save on water and help farming in many places not thought possible.

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Sails used in high altitude environments with little access to water using fog. The condensation is caught within the fabric of the sail and is then transferred through pipes into a large aggregate water tank.

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This is all about what we can do in San Diego, as well as tips we can in saving water.
1. When it comes to saving water, check for leaks one way to do it is to find and repair water leaks, this can help save water, an also money.
2. Laundry: when doing Laundry, never wash less than a full load. Invest in a high-efficiency washer if possible.
3. Kitchen: If you have a dishwasher, run it only when you have a full load. Hand wash dishes just once a day using the least amount of detergent possible and a dishpan instead of running water.

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California suffers from cyclical droughts and while San Diego is not currently in a drought it may be sooner than later. City and state year-round permanent mandatory restrictions have been put in place to help San Diegans make conservation a way of life. Still, many residents are asking how they can do more, above and beyond the permanent mandatory restrictions. This page contains simple tips to help you save water.

Check for Leaks

Outdoors

Set lawn mower blades one notch higher since longer grass reduces evaporation. Leave grass clippings on your grass, this cools the ground and holds in moisture.

Mulch, compost and wood chips are reliable, cost-effective products for water retention, erosion control and weed suppression. They're available at the City's Miramar Greenery.

Don't allow children to play with the hose or have water fights. Instead, visit one of the City's public pools or one of our many beaches.

If you have a pool, use a cover to cut down evaporation. This will also keep your pool cleaner and reduce the need to add chemicals.

Plant drought-tolerant landscaping. You can get great ideas at the Water Conservation Garden.

Laundry

When doing the laundry, never wash less than a full load.

Remove clothes from washer promptly, to avoid having to rinse or wash them a second time.

If possible, invest in a high-efficiency washer.

In the Bathroom

While waiting for hot water to come through the pipes, catch the cool, clean, water in a bucket or a watering can. You can use it later to water plants, run your garbage disposer or pour into the toilet bowl to flush.

Replace your regular showerheads with low-flow showerheads.

Keep your showers down to five minutes or less using a low-flow showerhead.

Turn the water off while lathering-up in the shower. Then turn the water back on to quickly rinse.

Take shallow baths, no more than 3 inches of water.

Replace your older model toilets with new ultra-low-flush models.

Check your toilets for leaks. Drop a dye tablet or a teaspoon of food coloring (avoid red) in the tank. If color appears in the bowl after 15 minutes, you probably need to replace the "flapper" valve.

Flush the toilet only when necessary. Never use the toilet as an ashtray or wastebasket.

Never let water run from the faucet while brushing your teeth or shaving.

In the Kitchen

Hand wash dishes just once a day using the least amount of detergent possible and a dishpan instead of running water. Use a sprayer or short blasts of water to rinse.

If you have a dishwasher, run it only when you have a full load.

Scrape food scraps off dishes into the garbage can, or rinse them off with very short blasts of water.

Never use hot, running water to defrost frozen foods. Plan ahead and place frozen items in the refrigerator overnight or use the microwave oven.

Rinse vegetables and fruits in a sink or a pan filled with water instead of under running water.

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California suffers from cyclical droughts and while San Diego is not currently in a drought it may be sooner than later. City and state year-round permanent mandatory restrictions have been put in place to help San Diegans make conservation a way of life.

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Two of my most highly recommended books. Fiber Fueled (Fixing your gut micro-biome). Mastering  diabetes (living with type 1/reversing type 2)

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Two of my most highly recommended books. Fiber Fueled (Fixing your gut micro-biome). Mastering  diabetes (living with type 1/reversing type 2)

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https://www.amazon.com/Fiber-Fueled-Plant-Based-Optimizing-Microbiome/dp/059308456X

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In Mastering Diabetes, Cyrus Khambatta, PhD and Robby Barbaro, MPH, explain why the current medical advice to eat a low-carbohydrate, high-fat diet improves short-term blood glucose control but increases the long-term risk for chronic diseases like cancer, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, chronic kidney disease, and fatty liver disease.

The creators of the popular Mastering Diabetes Method lay out a step-by-step plan proven to reverse insulin resistance-the root cause of blood glucose variability-in people with type 1 and 1.5 diabetes, type 2 diabetes, prediabetes, and gestational diabetes, while maximizing your life expectancy. Armed with more than 36 years of personal experience living with type 1 diabetes, the authors teach you how to eat carbohydrate-rich whole foods like mangoes, potatoes, and quinoa while decreasing your blood glucose and medication requirements.

With more than 30 delicious, filling, and nutrient-dense recipes and backed by cutting-edge nutritional science, Mastering Diabetes will help you maximize your insulin sensitivity, attain your ideal body weight, improve your digestive health, gain energy, live an active life, and feel amazing!

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mastering diabetes: the revolutionary method to reverse insulin resistance permanently in type 1

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health & fitness / diet & nutrition / nutrition

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health & fitness / diet & nutrition / nutrition

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health & fitness/diet & nutrition - nutrition

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Mastering Diabetes: The Revolutionary Method to Reverse Insulin Resistance Permanently in Type 1, Type 1.5, Type 2, Prediabetes, and Gestational Diabetes

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Mastering Diabetes: The Revolutionary Method to Reverse Insulin Resistance Permanently in Type 1, Type 1.5, Type 2, Prediabetes, and Gestational Diabetes: Khambatta, Cyrus, Barbaro, Robby: 9780525540038: Books - Amazon.ca

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Here are some screenshots from my instagram of my FAV meatless spots around SD

Parakeet Juicery

Copa Vida

LoLa55

Juice Kaboose

Alforno Mediterranean

Phatties food inc

Acai Carioca SD

Donna Jean

Red House Pizza

Trilogy Sanctuary

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My favorite all vegan recipe to make with pancakes:))) I highly recommend using Beyond Meat HOT Italian Sausage links in this recipe. For the eggs tofu or Just Eggs scramble.

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This delicious vegan breakfast skillet recipe is the perfect option for a filling and delicious skillet potatoes recipe. Whether you are going to a brunch or wanting a quick breakfast skillet at your house, this will be a hit!

One of the best things about this vegan breakfast skillet recipe is that it's all made in just one pan.

This one can even be made a day ahead of time so you have plenty of time to do all the other tasks that you need to get done with breakfast ready and out of the way.

Whether you are looking for a skillet potatoes recipe for the holidays or just a weekend breakfast option, this is the perfect solution for you.

This particular breakfast skillet recipe is vegan sausage, peppers, onions, and potatoes skillet recipe. It uses mostly plant based ingredients and because of that is:

There are also a ton of tips below that can help you make this in a way that can really help your specific dietary needs.

This vegan breakfast skillet is completely customizable.
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What ingredients do I need to make this breakfast skillet recipe?

One of the great things about making a vegan breakfast skillet is that the possibilities are endless.

This particular breakfast skillet can be made to suit a variety of dietary lifestyles, but simple swaps can also be made if you don't have that particular needs. For this skillet potatoes recipe, you need:

Potatoes (I like yukon gold or russet, but red could also work)

Vegan breakfast sausage

Green, Red, Yellow, and Orange peppers
we love the color that a variety gives the dish, but there's no reason you can't use just one or two colors also

Onions

Mushrooms

Spinach

Maple Syrup

Garlic Powder

Italian Seasoning

Salt and Pepper

Optional: Cheese
We don't show it in the picture because we think it tastes great with or without, but feel free to top with your favorite vegan cheese

Optional: Eggs

Tips for Making a Vegan Breakfast Skillet Recipe Perfectly

One skillet meals are some of the best for easy clean up purposes, but this skillet potatoes recipe is absolutely amazing and simple.

Still, there are some steps that you really need to follow in order to perfect it.

For starters, you need to try to get all the potatoes to be an equal size of each other (roughly). Peppers and onions also benefit from this.

The reason you want all the potatoes to be the same size is because it will ensure even cooking throughout your dish. Otherwise, you are going to have some potatoes overcooked (mushy or burnt) and some undone (crunchy). You want the perfect balance and do that that you need equal sizes.

After you have your potatoes chopped, you are going to soak them in water.

Soaking potatoes releases some of the starch and helps the potatoes not to stick in this sausage and potatoes skillet meal.

Soak for 30 minutes then fully pat dry off with a towel.

How do you make a Vegan Breakfast Sausage and Potatoes Skillet?

Melt coconut oil in a skillet and add the potatoes in a single layer.

Depending on the size of your skillet you may need to do this in batches.

No matter what, DO NOT overcrowd the potatoes or they will stick. Your heat should be on medium high. The goal is to quickly cook the edges at a high heat to prevent sticking.

Cook for 2 minutes without touching, then flip and cook other side for 2 minutes. Then, cook for another 2 minutes, stirring occasionally.

Reduce heat. Add in your peppers and onions.

If you are adding vegan sausage, do it at this point. Break off small pieces and add it in. Cook for 4 minutes.

Add in all your seasonings (salt, pepper, Italian seasoning and garlic powder) and stir to combine.

If you are adding Just Egg or similar vegan egg product, do it here. Move mixture to one side and scramble, then combine two sides together.

Finally add in the spinach and mushrooms and cook for a bit longer. Drizzle maple syrup and cook until spinach has wilted. Top with vegan cheese if desired.

Customizable Options:

This vegan breakfast sausage and potatoes skillet is completely customizable.

Don't like mushrooms? Don't add them.

The same goes for any the vegan sausage, vegan eggs, vegan cheese and spinach. We recommend leaving all other ingredients; however, these 5 ingredients can be optional.

*If you want sausage patties instead of crumbled, you can remove the skillet potatoes recipe from the skillet and place on a serving dish. Add the sausage patties to the skillet and cook according to directions.

Serve with a side of sliced or mashed avocado. Top with cilantro or a side of salsa if desired. Or even just top with ketchup!

Can this vegan breakfast skillet be prepped ahead?

Yes! You can fully make these and then heat up the next day. It definitely tastes better right out of the skillet as soon as it's made, but great heated up too!

Can this be Top 8 Allergen Free?

This recipe is pretty allergen friendly as written. Depending on your allergens, you may need to swap the vegan egg product for one that is safe for you (such as a chickpea flour scramble).

Swap the coconut oil for any neutral flavored oil or soy free vegan butter.

Lastly, we've not see a vegan sausage that is gluten free, so if you have allergies to gluten, we'd recommend skipping that.

What other vegan breakfast ideas could I make?

Once you try this delicious vegan breakfast skillet, you may be looking for other amazing vegan breakfast ideas that you should try. We are sharing both sweet and savory dairy free breakfast ideas.

Are you following us on social media? Be the first to see what we're doing and finding, behind the scenes, and other get recipes are resources we've finding by following along.
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Vegan Breakfast Skillet
This post was originally published on 12/21/18 and updated on 11/20/19. Updated again on 6/11/2020 to include video.
Pin this Dairy Free Breakfast Skillet:

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Vegan Breakfast Skillet Recipe (Dairy Free/Egg Free/ Meatless)

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This delicious vegan breakfast skillet recipe is the perfect option for a filling and delicious skillet potatoes recipe. Whether you are going to a brunch or wanting a quick breakfast skillet at your house, this will be a hit! One of the best things about this vegan breakfast skillet recipe is that it's all made in just one pan.

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  SAVE WATER the world is in your hands. Nothing will be left here without water. A slogan on Water is a slogan on life.  never waste water. one of the best methods of conservation of water that you can do right at home, right now, is cutting-down long showers It is one of the easiest ways to save water at home. Also, depending on the efficiency of your shower-head, you could be typically using 5 gallons (18 litres) of water per minute. To conserve water, it is ideal to take a shower of 5 minutes or less and this simple change in your daily routine can help save up to 70 liters of water per shower. Plus, you can also replace your shower-head with a low-flow shower-head to save water.

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  SAVE WATER the world is in your hands. Nothing will be left here without water. A slogan on Water is a slogan on life.  never waste water. one of the best methods of conservation of water that you can do right at home, right now, is cutting-down long showers It is one of the easiest ways to save water at home. Also, depending on the efficiency of your shower-head, you could be typically using 5 gallons (18 litres) of water per minute. To conserve water, it is ideal to take a shower of 5 minutes or less and this simple change in your daily routine can help save up to 70 liters of water per shower. Plus, you can also replace your shower-head with a low-flow shower-head to save water.

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There are various ways to celebrate Earth Day not only on April 22 but every day of the year.  In fact "Earth Day is Everyday". This day  is something the entire family can celebrate together in a variety of ways at home and in the community. They can Plant a tree  because this is a great way to teach  children about the importance of trees or Take a trip to a local park and teach children how to pick up trash. Keeping the park clean is great for the environment and it makes the park more enjoyable for kids to play in. Keeping the environment clean, safe and enjoyable for all of its inhabitants is a full-time job that anyone can participate in.

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Persian veggie food  :    KOKO

Ingredients:
Yield: 14 potato patties

5 large potatoes
2 large eggs
1 small yellow onion, grated, discard the juice

2-3 tablespoons bread crumbs
1/2 teaspoon turmeric
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon pepper
1/4 cup vegetable oil for frying

Method:

1. Place potatoes in a large pot, add water to cover by a couple of inches, boil on medium-high heat until fork-tender. Drain and set aside to cool.

2. Peel the potatoes and grate them.

3. Beat the eggs in a large mixing bowl, add the potatoes, onions, turmeric, bread crumbs, salt and pepper. Stir well to combine and refrigerate the mixture for an hour.

4. Make small patties, flatten them in an oval or round shape. You can also spoon the potato mixture into the oil.

5. Heat the oil in a large nonstick frying pan over medium-high heat. Fry potato patties on both sides until light brown. Drain on paper towels.

Serve warm or at room temperature with fresh herbs, pickles, olives, yogurt, and warm bread.

*Note: Add a handful of chopped parsley or a teaspoon of dried dill to the mixture if you like.

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Here is a link to my favorite spring roll recipe, no meat and  can be made vegan by substituting maple syrup for honey!
https://cookieandkate.com/fresh-spring-rolls-recipe/
- Alivia Shaw

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Ariana Avelar

Did you know that methane gas production is one of the larger sources of greenhouse gas emissions? Some of the leading contributors to methane gas production are the burning of fossil fuels and landfills. Composting is an environmentally conscious alternative, using organic materials to garden and farm which help to reduce the production of methane gas. Landfills produce large amounts of methane gas because piles of organic matter are decomposing in anaerobic conditions, which means the organic matter is being decomposed in the presence of microbes absent of oxygen, therefore producing harmful methane. Composting, on the other hand, uses an aerobic process in which microbes like, bacteria and fungi, thrives in the presence of oxygen and water. These thriving microbes use the carbon produced for energy and decomposing the organic matter within the compost soil. The remainder of carbon, or stable humus, in the soil is safe and the soil can be used agricultural and gardening uses. Composting is actually an easy process to begin. Start with nutrient rich soil in a designated composting bin or container, add some kitchen and garden waste and maybe some biosolids, give great access to oxygen, regulate watering periods, and there you go! You've started the process of composting! You can sit back and watch the growth within in your compost container.
I have recently begun composting and it has been an amazing process. A great alternative to waste management and it is very beneficial when it comes to gardening.

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Upcycle fabric scraps, plastic bags, clothing, and more into lightweight bedroll mattresses that can be donated to shelters for people or pets in need!

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It takes 1.39 liters of water to produce a 1 liter single-use bottle of water? (IBWA, 2013) Make the switch to a more sustainable, refillable water bottle today!

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The Best Water Bottles on Amazon, According to Hyperenthusiastic Reviewers

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The best water bottles on Amazon include vacuum-insulated stainless steel water bottles, wide-mouth and narrow-mouth Nalgenes, a gallon-size water bottle, and a filtered water bottle from brands like Brtita, Contigo, S'well, and Corkcicle.

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The San Diego Natural History Museum (The Nat) hosts free and low cost events for the public every month!

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There's always something new to discover at The Nat, from family activities to evening events to new films and exhibitions. You'll find a new experience every time you visit. Please note that all events are offered in local time (PST/PDT).

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Located in beautiful Balboa Park, The Nat features the natural history and unique biodiversity of Southern California and Baja California. No two visits are alike-there's always something new to discover. Check out our daily schedule of activities, programs, films, and events.

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'Blueprint for a Climate Breakthrough' - series from Fortune.

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Why we asked Bill Gates to be Fortune's guest editor today

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"Bill Gates' new book is the closest thing I've seen to a how-to guide for addressing the climate crisis-and Fortune is spending a day getting out that message."

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Ingredients:

14 oz. Extra firm or firm tofu

Mixed green, red and yellow bell peppers, chopped

1/4 jalapeno, chopped

4 garlic cloves, chopped

Olive oil

1-2 tsp salt

Pinch (or more) of turmeric

Pinch (or more) of cumin

Salsa (optional)

Scallions or onion (optional)

Instructions:

1. Crumble tofu

2. Heat oil in sauce pan

3. Add garlic and spices to oil and saute

4. Add tofu and stir for 10-15 minutes

5. Add bell peppers and mix/stir for another 10 minutes, until the bell peppers soften and tofu absorbs liquid

6. You can add onions, salsa, cilantro, beans or other for more flavor

7. Serve by itself or in a breakfast burrito/taco, or with toast

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Ariana Avelar
Did you know that instead of just throwing away non-recyclables such as candy wrappers, juice pouches, tape, and more can actually be terracycled? Terracycling is an alternative method to throwing trash. TerraCycle is green company that uses non-recyclable items to make new items. What the average person might think of as just trash can actually be turned into useful everyday items! TerraCycle works the goal of eliminating waste. Many of your typical trash items can be sent to TerraCycle and they will convert into sustainable reusable item like backpacks, park benches, wallets, clothing, and so much more! You can even recycle fluorescent lamps, ballasts and batteries.
Go to Terracycle.com to learn about their recycling programs and how you can contribute to a greener lifestyle.

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Avoid Wish Cycling!
Basically, wish cycling is when you’re staring at an item in your hand, then you look at the recycling bin, then back to the item in your hand, and you’re questioning whether or not said item is recyclable. Then, out of sheer hope, you toss it in the recycling because you figure might as well try, right?

WRONG!

So what is so wrong with it? Having non-recyclable items in with recyclable items can:

1. Produce more waste: Why is this? Because some recycling facilities have limited resources not allowing them to physically sort through recycling. If there are lots of non-recyclable items mixed with recyclable items, the whole batch, bag, or container could get tossed. Ouch.

2. Waste time and money: If a recycling facility is using a machine to sort out recycling, a non-recyclable item can get caught in the machine and cause the machine to malfunction or break. This costs time and resources to fix.

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10 Easy Tips For Saving Water in the Bathroom
TIP #4. Lower Shower Time
One of the best places to make a difference is in the shower. This is the place where many people waste water for personal use more than anywhere else. Every minute less of shower time means 150 gallons less water wasted per month. For homeowners, this also leads to a dramatic reduction in the water bill.

Why not try a...5-Minute Shower!

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Challenge

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Tip #5: Don’t Leave The Shower Running

Instead of letting the shower run, turn it off while lathering up and washing hair. If it’s annoying to have to constantly readjust the temperature, look for shower heads with quick shut off valves.

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Tips to save water while maintaining your lawn/garden!

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Tips to save water while maintaining your lawn/garden!

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1. Water your lawn in the morning to avoid evaporation
2. Don't water in the rain
3. Ensure proper coverage to assure you wont over water some areas and miss others!

-Alivia Shaw

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The booming skincare industry has many of us reaching for a new bottle of toner or moisturizer. But before you make your purchases, check out these zero-waste brands.

LOLI, founded by Tina Hedges, is a line of beauty that sources organic, food grade, and earth friendly ingredients. All of their products are packaged in glass and shipped in compostable bags and recycled materials.

Lesse is an organic skincare brand. They work together with a California-owned company that hand prints every glass bottle. All of their products are made from natural ingredients and are packaged in boxes made of recycled paper.

Kindred Black takes zero waste to the next level. Their apothecary line is packed in plastic-free, hand-blown bottles from Oaxaca, Mexico, whose studio is run by vegetable oil from local restaurants. All of their products are shipped to you using recycled boxes, recycled tissue paper, and water-activated tape.

So the next time you find yourself in need of a cleanser or a face mask, look to these zero waste brands to reduce your use of plastic, all while making your skin happy!

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It's Eco Week at Byrdie, which means we're digging into the best in sustainable beauty, from our fourth annual Eco Beauty Awards to what it really means to follow a zero-waste beauty routine. Consider this week your education on how to be a more eco-aware, knowledgable beauty consumer.

Let me start by saying I am not zero waste, but throughout the last few years I have made many changes in my habits to reduce my waste to align more closely with a zero waste and eco-friendly mentality. If you, like many of us (especially during the time of stay at home orders), have become increasingly aware of how much waste you create on the regular and hoping to make a change, know that you are not alone.

There are a lot of small changes we can do to minimize waste in our daily lives. You can start out slow, and do small things that can make a big difference in the long term, like choosing a reusable water bottle or coffee mug instead of going through single-use plastic bottles; or, if you always forget your reusable coffee mug at home, just avoid plastic coffee lids. It's definitely not about being perfect, and feeling guilty isn't conducive to positive change-it's about just starting and doing the best you can and feeling good about those small changes.&nbsp;I am not strict on a lot of things and I can certainly do better, but I live with this mentality and try my best to do small things, while allowing myself room for mistakes.

Anne-Marie Bonneau, also known as Zero Waste Chef, recently said, " We don't need a handful of people doing zero waste perfectly. We need millions of people doing it imperfectly. " I come back to that often. We can all do a little, we can all start with one thing, and when it doesn't feel scary or hard anymore, we can take on another small thing, and so on. Before you know it, you're changing daily lifelong habits that make a big impact on the environment on the long term and perhaps inspiring others around you to do the same, just from leading by example.

For me, it all started with one small change: minimizing plastic in my beauty routine. I started making a conscious effort to support brands that go the extra mile to source sustainable ingredients and create responsible packaging with the planet in mind. Here are some of my favorite brands for leading by example.

Created, hand-mixed and -poured by Stevie Van Horn in a completely zero waste production, Yay for Earth has one product, and that's all you need: a "sensitive skin lotion" that I would describe more as a multi-use balm for all skin types. I buy this on the regular in the biggest and smallest size, keep one on my bedside table and another in my purse. With how much I've been washing my hands recently, my eczema has started to surface in the folds between my fingers and this has been the best remedy to keep it under control. She sources the highest quality, fair trade and sustainably sourced ingredients, uses only glass and aluminum for product packaging, and ships with all recycled, post-consumer materials-sometimes she even uses 100% dissolvable corn starch-based packing peanuts (which are very fun to watch dissolve in water).

Not only is the actual product absolutely amazing and full of high-quality healing ingredients, but Stevie herself is inspiring to follow if you're interested in a zero waste lifestyle or just an eco-friendlier life. I can directly attribute many of the changes I've made in my life to Stevie's Instagram; she makes it look approachable, doable, and not so difficult after all.

Tina Hedges, founder of LOLI, believes that skincare begins with superfood-just like it has been through history. Her philosophy is that what nurtures us inside should also nurture us on the outside. Her company is truly the leader in zero waste beauty, sourcing organic, food grade, earth friendly ingredients that are always packaged in glass. All ingredients are water free-she strongly believes powerful ingredients should not be diluted, which not only makes her products more potent, but saves a lot of water usage in the process (water is the most used ingredient in the beauty industry and simultaneously a growing commodity). All LOLI products are of course shipped in compostable bags and post consumer-recycled and recyclable materials.

Some of the products even feature main ingredients that are upcycled from food waste. For example, the brand sources oil from the kernel of the French Ente Plum directly from a farm that would otherwise discard them. This ends up being the hero ingredient of one of my favorite products in the line, the LOLI Plum Elixir (also a winner of the 2019 Byrdie Eco Awards).

Lesse's philosophy is "less is more." This ethos translates into three essential products that make up your entire ritual: a serum, an exfoliating cleanser, and a mask. Simply put, it's organic skincare refined to essentials, using powerful antioxidants for a healthy approach to skin-and they work like a charm. The brand recently launched their refining cleanser and it has quickly become a staple in my nighttime ritual with its gentle, yet effective exfoliating granules.

Led by a founder who is very politically outspoken and rightfully concerned with our current climate issues, Lesse is the perfect example of a brand that is doing their absolute best to provide effective, hard-working, and shelf stable products made from natural ingredients in sustainable packaging. Not only are all products homed in glass or recyclable aluminum tubes, they also omit all labels to minimize waste and instead choose to work with a family owned company in California that hand prints every glass bottle. Needless to say, all product boxes and packaging is made from recycled paper and they are even working with their factory to become net zero within the next three years.

Born out of necessity for clean, cute and sustainably-packaged nail polish, Habit has always had sustainability at its forefront. From creation, to packaging to mailing, they commit to using the most sustainable options without compromising on beautiful, clean, high performance cosmetics. Their Ultimate Organic Multi Use colors are a true staple in my makeup looks because I love the soft, creamy textures and the colors are highly-pigmented and flattering on all skin tones. The cute zero-waste glass and aluminum packaging makes me think of a space age sculpture and every single time I wear my favorite shade, I get so many compliments and questions about the color. (For the record, it's called Mod Squad.)

Kindred Black saw a challenge in creating zero waste products and they decided to tackle it. Their 'slow skincare' is an apothecary line inspired by a slower way of living, packaged in fully plastic-free, hand-blown bottles and vials that are sealed with waxed corks. The beautiful bottles and hardworking products are the perfect proof that you can be zero waste and luxurious without sacrificing product efficiency or aesthetic.

Their commitment to zero waste goes from conception to packaging: the hand-blown bottles come directly from a studio in Oaxaca, Mexico, where the artisans produce their own fuel with used vegetable oil from local restaurants, and the glass is created from recycled bottles. After being filled with colorful oils that are sourced around the world from the highest quality, most ethical and sustainable sources, they are closed with biodegradable cork and sealed for shipping with natural wax. And of course, everything is delivered to you in recycled boxes, with recycled tissue paper or recycled craft paper and water-activated paper tape. They are proud to be part of the 1% for the Planet Foundation (started by outerwear brand Patagonia's founder) that commits companies to donating 1% of their yearly sales to environmental groups.

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5 Sustainable Beauty Brands That Make a Zero-Waste Routine Actually Doable

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It's Eco Week at Byrdie, which means we're digging into the best in sustainable beauty, from our fourth annual Eco Beauty Awards to what it really means to follow a zero-waste beauty routine. Consider this week your education on how to be a more eco-aware, knowledgable beauty consumer.