Corey and I went to Food Inc. with a friend last week down at Filmstreams. The theater was packed, which says a lot about the level of concern people have about our food system.

We’ve been aware of the problems with the industrial food system for a number of years. We’ve watched documentaries and read books about nutrition, the food industry, and corporate power in the fundamentals of life. This film pulled together the three elements in a way that hopefully makes an impact with people who are just opening their eyes to the problem.

When we leave a theater our conversation usually starts with, “what was your favorite part?” I was at a loss on this one. There were so many enlightening, fun, confusing, or disturbing elements.

Enlightening:
The segment on how Monsanto is enforces their patents on seeds in the courts. There was a feature on a professional seed cleaner who is paid by local farmers to process their harvest for planting the next season. This process is apparently illegal if the seed (or possibly seed from adjacent farms) is a patented Monsanto product. This poor guy was blacklisted, his friends and clients turned against him, and he was run out of business because of the extent of his legal expenses. What is wrong with our world?

Fun:
An small-scale organic farmer Joel Salatin of Polyface Farms provided thoughtful, whimsical, and grounded insight into his life and methods. I was quick to underestimate him when he first came on camera. But it didn’t take me long to figure out that I had a lot to learn from him.

Confusing:
I don’t know how I feel about the segments featuring Stoneybrook Farms and Walmart. Obviously I make my living by helping businesses play a role in driving sustainability. But it was still difficult to reconcile the massive scale and profit driven business models discussed in the film. The camera also took a stroll through a natural foods trade show and highlighted that many of the natural and organic brands that line the shelves of Whole Foods are now wholly owned by conventional corporate giants.

Disturbing:
The segment on industrial chicken producers. These massive and inhumane operations grow chickens in something like 45 days. These are like pathetically malproportioned and unhealthy versions of real birds. So sad. There were also disturbing images of cattle and hog operations that will make you want to forsake fast food.

This documentary is a must see for anyone interested in learning more about our food supply. Like my favorite farmer said, “People would feel differently about the food they eat if the meat processing facilities had glass walls.” (approximation) This film gives you a look inside.

.

When Patagonia finalized its Common Threads Garment Recycling Program in fall 2005, is set out to make all its products recyclable by late 2010. With one and half years until it reaches that deadline, Patagonia has compiled a lengthy look at the Common Threads program.

In short, the company has learned a whole lot about what it takes to make clothing and other outdoor gear recyclable, but it’s unlikely Patagonia’s entire catalog will be recyclable by fall 2010. However, it just might make all its apparel recyclable by then.

The Common Threads program collects only certain Patagonia products or types of clothing; the company takes back only what it knows it can recycle.

It All Started With Underwear

The first product collected and recycled through Common Threads was Patagonia’s polyester-spandex Capilene underwear, chosen because underwear is simple, has no buttons or zippers and isn’t typically handed down.

Teijin, a Japanese textile company, developed a garment-to-garment recycling process for the underwear, and Patagonia found out that using Capilene underwear as a raw material instead of petroleum uses 76 percent less energy and emits 42 percent less carbon dioxide.

The Common Threads program grew in spring 2007 when other Capilene apparel was included, along with 100 percent cotton T-shirts, Patagonia fleece and Polartec fleece jackets from any clothing brand. A year later Patagonia started labeling clothes that were accepted through Common Threads with instructions on what to do with them at the end of their lives. The collection program also expanded to include some board shorts, polyester jackets and nylon items, and later that year Patagonia unveiled the first recyclable nylon waterproof and breathable shell. Around that time Patagonia also started working with another company, Toray, which developed a recycling program for items made of nylon 6.

Results, Tempered by Challenges

Since the start of Common Threads, Patagonia has recycled more than 13,200 pounds of garments, and collected much more. But that is still nowhere close to the amount of items Patagonia sells or that get tossed in the trash.

The amount of recyclable items in Patagonia’s spring collection has gone from 28 percent last year to 38 percent this year. And for it’s fall collection, the amount is expected to increase from 45 percent last year to 65 percent this fall. Patagonia is not confident, though, that it will increase both of those to 100 percent by fall 2010. But it has a much better chance to make all of its apparel recyclable, since 80 percent of the clothing in its fall 2009 collection will be recyclable.

Along the way, Patagonia faced a host of challenges. Some of the recyclers it works with use chemical recycling, which dissolves products into chemicals. Another uses mechanical recycling, which physically, not chemically, rips apart fabric and spins it into yarn.

While chemical recycling systems can be easily tainted if too many different materials are combined, mechanical recycling can take a greater variety of inputs, but that also limits the variety of products Patagonia can make with the resulting fiber. Patagonia’s products are expected to meet certain performance levels, and any alternation to the amount of certain fabrics in them can affect that.

Patagonia is also reaching the limit of how much material it can handle. The amount of items they collect now is about what they are able to recycle. Increasing the amount of recycled materials would force its recycling systems to expand, which would require capital investment, more employees and more expenses for shipping garments overseas.

And some of the garments it receives are so old or worn out, with missing tags or faded labels, that it takes some serious investigating to find out what material they’re made of. But that only means that a piece of clothing has lived a long, useful life. Patagonia sees Common Threads as a last resort for clothing, and will even donate to non-profits usable clothing that customers return through Common Threads.

“If, after a lifetime of use, a garment can be reused or handed-down no more, we provide Common Threads as a final destination, so that worn, used, and abused products can be recycled and made into new garments,” Patagonia says in the report on Common Threads.

-

Source:  Greenbiz.com

Icebreaker offers an awesome tool for building your connection with the products you buy.

With most of the things you buy, you’re told little or nothing about how they’re made. Icebreaker is different. Each product sold comew with an unique Baacode will let you see the living conditions of the high country sheep that produced the merino fibre in each Icebreaker garment, meet the farmers who are custodians of this astonishing landscape, and follow every step of the supply chain.

Out of the 120 sheep stations that provide wool for their clothing. Their site has a demo to show you how the system works, showing you how you can track each garment back to the source.

There are profiles of the different farms, including video, so you are able to connect in a meaningful way with the company.

Icebreaker also provides customers with detailed information on their environmental ethics policy, manufacturing ethics, and animal welfare.

As a whole, I’m impressed. The Baacode concept is great and the company has a unified and meaningful message that any sustainable business can learn from.

This post was originally published on Eco-Libris’ blog on February 26.

How green is your toilet paper? Not sure? Here’s the guide that will give you the answers: Greenpeace has just released on Monday its latest Recycled Tissue and Toilet Paper Guide.

The report is providing customers with important information about tissue products and toilet paper using 3 criteria: usage of 100% recycled paper, at least 50% post consumer recycled paper and bleached without toxic chlorine compounds.

Each category includes ranking of brands, where products that meet 3 criteria are recommended, products that meet 2 criteria are defined as “can do better” and products that meet only one or no criteria at all are “to be avoided”.

Let’s focus for a minute on toilet paper, the most popular product among the ones reviewed in this report. The brand in the first place is Green Forest, which uses 100 percent recycled and 90 percent post-consumer content, as well as chlorine-free manufacturing processes. Other brands that are also recommended are: 365, Natural Value and Seventh Generation.

And who’s to be avoided? Well, when it comes to toilet paper you will find there few familiar names: Scott, Target, Wal-Mart, Kleenex Cottonelle, Chramin, Quilted Northern and Angel Soft. According to the report they all use zero recycled paper (and of course zero post consumer content) and are bleached with chlorine compounds [just take into consideration the follwoing comment from Greenpeace: In the few cases where companies did not respond to our request for verification of recycled content percentages and whitening processes used, we assumed 0% overall recycled, 0% post-consumer recycled and ECF bleaching.]

The report is followed by a very interesting article in the New York Times (”Mr. Whipple Left It Out:  Soft Is Rough on Forests” by Leslie Kaufman), where I learned the astonishing fact that “tissue from 100 percent recycled fibers makes up less than 2 percent of sales for at-home use among conventional and premium brands.”

Why? Well, according the article the main reason that toilet paper made of recycled paper is not as soft as toilet paper that is made of trees. Actually the article explains “it is the fiber taken from standing trees that help give it that plush feel, and most large manufacturers rely on them.”

In other places around the globe the situation is in some way better and in Europe and Latin America, products with recycled content make up about on average 20 percent of the at-home market.

The price for the American’s love for softness is very high - the article brings another devastating fact:

25 percent to 50 percent of the pulp used to make toilet paper in this country comes from tree farms in South America and the United States. The rest, environmental groups say, comes mostly from old, second-growth forests that serve as important absorbers of carbon dioxide…In addition, some of the pulp comes from the last virgin North American forests, which are an irreplaceable habitat for a variety of endangered species, environmental groups say.

And it doesn’t end with trees - there are the water and energy required in the process of turning a tree into rolls of toilet paper, and there’s also the polluting chlorine-based bleach process used to achieve greater whiteness.

Who’s to blame? well, Kimberly-Clark, which says it’s the American consumer who “like the softness and strength that virgin fibres provides”. I wounder if these consumers would make the same choice if they knew that for example 14 percent of the wood pulp used by Kimberly-Clark came from the Boreal forest in Canada.

The answer unfortunately is that in this case we cannot count on the consumer nor on the companies who make huge profits out of these soft papers (An article in the Guardian states that “paper manufacturers such as Kimberly-Clark have identified luxury brands such as three-ply tissues or tissues infused with hand lotion as the fastest-growing market share in a highly competitive industry.”).

Even if consumers in the U.S. will become more aware of their toilet paper’s footprint and choose to buy more recycled paper, my guestimation is that recycled paper usage will be no higher than in Europe (20%). And that’s the optimistic scenario.

So what’s the solution? In one word: regulation. We need global and local regulation that will ban first and foremost the use of ancient forests for manufacturing tissue products. We also need regulation that will put a price tag on the environmental damages made here, so when you buy toilet paper, you will pay their real price and not a price that ignores the environmental costs. Only this way a real change can be achieved. It’s the same with plastic bags and with many other bad habits we have. Voluntary steps just don’t do enough or do too little and we can’t afford too many years of this softness obsession to keep going on. We just can’t.

I’ll be happy to hear more ideas and thoughts how to end American’s obsession to soft toilet paper. Please add your comment!

Link to Greenpeace’s guide: http://www.greenpeace.org/raw/content/usa/press-center/reports4/tissueguid

I was sitting on my front porch earlier this morning, sipping on my first cup of coffee for the day. The birds weren’t out yet and the wind wasn’t blowing, it was quiet.

Then, from down the street, came the roar of an engine. I looked down the hill to see a pair of headlights racing up the street. As the dark SUV sped past, a hand reached out the window and tossed a plastic wrapped newspaper in the general direction of my neighbors house. Without hesitation, the engine roared again and the ‘paperboy‘ continued up the hill.

What happened? I never had a paper route. But I remember when I was in elementary school my best friend did. Whenever I spent the night, I would wake up early with him. We would grab the stack of flat papers from his front porch, pull out a bag of rubber bands, and wrap the papers up. Then he would strategically load his double sided bag and we would walk up and down the neighborhood streets, carefully tossing papers onto porches as we went.

I can’t remember the last time that I saw anyone walking a paper route. And I certainly haven’t seen any kids doing it.

So many things disturbed me about this morning’s experience (not the least of which that someone was speeding down my street…grrr). The fact that an SUV is apparently required for a paper route is ridiculous. As if this isn’t inefficient enough, the driver is racing around with totally inefficient driving habits. Then the fact that this guy cares so little about his work that he barely slows down to toss the paper with any sort of consideration for the customer. And of course, what happened to the rubber band? It wasn’t raining. Why the plastic bag?

I think that our society needs to take a long look at ourselves. We need to slow down, live in a way that is healthy for ourselves and our environment, we need to live in the moment, and we need to be considerate towards others.

So disturbing.

It’s the Fourth of July again, and after watching our neighborhood look like a war zone I’m compelled to do the unpatriotic thing by pointing out how bad fireworks are for the environment.

As Salon’s resident eco-expert Pablo Päster points out, all the fireworks purchased in the United States in 2006, would, if detonated, emit 60,340 tons of C02, the equivalent of what is produced by 12,000 cars running for a year. He also notes that the compounds used to create fireworks’ bright colors contain heavy metals that contaminate soil and water.

What’s more, most fireworks contain potassium perchlorate, a chemical thought to pose health risks to humans and wildlife. Last year the Environmental Protection Agency discovered a definitive link between fireworks and surface water perchlorate contamination. But perchlorate levels returned to normal after a month or two.

One way to solve this problem is to invent a greener pyrotechnic. That’s what the Walt Disney Company did in 2004, replacing black powder with compressed air.

In addition to the noise pollution and copious amounts of litter strewn from one end of the block to the other, fireworks do pose another significant environmental hazard in wildfires. As MSNBC reports, a number of cities and towns in California and other states have banned fireworks displays out of fear that they may spark brush fires. Polluting the environment is one thing, burning it to the ground is another matter altogether.

I don’t mind celebrating our fabulous nations birthday, I just wonder if shooting bombs into the air and hollering drunken cheers after the explosion is the best way to do that. But I’m just sayin’.

–

Much of the content contributed to Christian Science Monitor