Green Article

What is the Green Festival and why you should attend!

Green Festival events were started 10 years ago in San Francisco and have branched off to include more than a dozen locations including Chicago, Washington DC, Seattle, Denver, New York, and Los Angeles. Visitors are exposed to over 300 green and eco-friendly exhibitors profiling and selling their products including organic and all-natural food and drinks, clothing, home and office products, beauty care products, sustainable building solutions, and sustainable services such as yoga, holistic medicine, and vitamins and herbs.

Check out upcoming Green Festival events around the country at GreenFestivals.org

BPA Update: What You Need to Know from ConsumerChoices.org

Bisphenol A (BPA), which has been used for years in clear plastic bottles and food-can liners, has been restricted in Canada and some U.S. states and municipalities because of potential health effects to babies and infants. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has not yet decided what it considers a safe level of exposure to BPA, which some studies have linked to reproductive abnormalities and a heightened risk of breast and prostate cancers, diabetes, and heart disease.

FDA Does Nothing on BPA

Consumers Union has repeatedly called on the FDA to ban BPA in children’s products and food and beverage containers. While the agency announced in January 2010 that it believes there is cause for concern over BPA's potential effect on children, and supports efforts to produce BPA-free baby bottles and find alternatives to BPA for can linings, it fell short of calling for a ban of the chemical in food contact substances.

Consumers Union remains in favor of a ban as are other consumer and environmental groups. (See "FDA acknowledges BPA risks—but falls short 2/10")

For example, after waiting twenty-months for the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to rule on its petition to prohibit the use of Bisphenol A (BPA) in food packaging, the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), took legal action in late June, 2010, asking the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia to intervene and order an enforceable deadline by which the FDA must take action, with either a denial or responsive rulemaking. Consumers Union welcomes this action.

Read the entire GreenConsumer.org article and find out what you can do

Conscious Planet Media speaks with Hunter Lovins from Natural Capitalism Solutions

Bianca Alexander of Conscious Planet Media speaks with Hunter Lovins from Natural Capitalism Solutions in this exclusive interview at Chicago Green Festival. Hunter is a professor, speaker and author on changing the conversation around business to include sustainability. She is a co-developer of America's first accredited MBA Sustainable Management program and a Professor of Business at Presidio School of Management.

Win a Green Grant from Green America

Apply for a green grant and Green America will give you another kind of green – a cash prize.

Green America needs your help to find the most noteworthy green projects around the country that could use a financial boost to help them meet their green goals.

Tell Green America about an inspiring local-community project that brings together both the people and planet aspects of being green, and the organizing group could win one of four green grants for their project – one top prize of $2,500, and three second prizes of $1,000.

Does the project you have in mind fit the green grants contest?  Ask yourself, can I clearly describe how this project features both halves of the green equation?   If the answer is yes, please fill out our nomination form.

Nominations will be allowed until May 31.  Of the nominations, Green America will select 10 projects to vote on in a second round.  They will also list and provide the links to all that are nominated as an honor roll of great green projects.. 

Nominate a local green business today

Hershey Brand Jamming Contest Winners

The “Raise the Bar, Hershey” campaign organized a “brand jamming” contest which invited campaign supporters to create mock tag lines, print advertisements and commercial videos that reveal the reality behind Hershey chocolate products

While Hershey’s commercials, print advertisements and brand slogans emphasize joy and happiness, farmers in West Africa who produce the majority of the world’s cocoa continue to live in poverty. The cocoa industry has been plagued for years by abusive child labor, forced labor and trafficking. Currently, Hershey lags behind its competitors in sourcing cocoa that has been certified by independent, third parties to meet international labor rights standards.

OVERALL CONTEST WINNER
“Hershey’s Brand Jam” by Jason Pearson



VIDEO COMMERCIAL WINNER
“Behind the Smiles” by Aaron Thurman

PRINT ADVERTISEMENT WINNER
“Children Behind Bars” by Jason Pearson


 

Interview with Ella Vickers of the Recycled Sailcloth Collection

In 1989, Ella Vickers was crewing as first mate out of Newport, Rhode Island on a 12-meter America's Cup yacht named the Columbia.
When it came time to replace the boat's sails, she couldn't stand to see them just be trashed, so due to her own commitment to "going zero," Ella Vickers claimed the discarded sails for herself, took to her sewing machine, and stitched together a new pair of bags.

"The next regatta we did after that was the Edgartown Martha's Vineyard 12-meter regatta, and a couple bought the bags right off my arms!" says Ella. "I had to take out all my personal belongings in order to sell them the bags."

And so a green business was born. The Ella Vickers Company now makes a range of products from recycled sailcloth – duffel bags and shower curtains, dog beds and director's chairs – all produced right here in the United States.

Read More about The Ella Vickers Company
Website: EllaVickers.com
Coupon Code: Save 15% with discount code EVSC09

Tell Airlines to Increase their Recycling Programs

Airlines are only recycling a fraction of the waste generated on flights, resulting in hundreds of millions of pounds of waste going to landfills. Join us in encouraging 11 major airlines to reduce their waste and recycle more of it.

What airlines claim their recycling policies are and what actually happens onboard don't always align. In researching the industry, several staff members who asked about recycling on flights they took found out that what the airlines actually recycled did not always match what they claimed to recycle.

So, to hold airlines accountable in enforcing their recycling and to push them to do better, over the next year, we are encouraging the public to provide information on flights from any airlines in an attempt to track the reality of what is being recycled. If you are flying over the next year, whether domestically or internationally, please ask your flight attendant or check-in personnel about what will actually get recycled from the flight.

Sign this Improve your Recycling petition and we will send it to the executives at the following airlines: AirTran, American Airlines, British Airways, Continental Airlines, Delta Airlines, Jet Blue, Southwest Airlines, United Airlines, US Airways, Virgin America, Virgin Atlantic.

Tell Southern Company and Dominion - No More Nuclear Power!

Despite the ongoing disaster in Japan, two of the largest utilities in the United States are planning to move ahead with new nuclear reactors, adding to those they already have in service. While nuclear may be a low carbon energy source, it most definitely is not clean, yet Southern Company and Dominion are still moving ahead with plans for new nuclear plants:

* Southern Company plans to add two new reactors at Plant Vogtle, where there are already two nuclear plants in operation. The design of the proposed reactors has been criticized because the shield building may not be able to survive an earthquake or plane crash, which could result in a catastrophic meltdown.

* Dominion is planning to build a new reactor at its Lake Anna complex in Virginia. The new plant was recently delayed for 18 months so that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission could re-do seismic analysis of the reactor. Virginians are also concerned about the impact on Lake Anna of additional discharges of heated water.

Sign the petition to stop more nuclear power plants at Green America

A "Grandiose" Idea: GrandyOats - Interview with Nat Pierce

Since its founding more than three decades ago, popular Maine granola-maker GrandyOats' most popular product “is and has always been 'Classic Granola',” says president and head-honcho Nat Peirce.

But since then, GrandyOat's product line has greatly expanded, including new granola flavors like honey-apple crisp, goji-agave, chocolate-almond crisp, and low-fat cranberry chew. That's in addition to the trail mixes and organic roasted nuts like tamari almonds, curry cashews, maple cashews, and much more. We asked Nat to tell us more about what makes GrandyOats green, and their plans for the future...

What does your business do?

Nat Peirce: GrandyOats is a 100-percent certified organic producer of granolas, trail mixes, and roasted nuts located in the foothills of the White Mountains in Brownfield, Maine. We’re housed in a hundred-year-old barn that was once the largest in Maine. You can order products from us in bulk online, or use our locator to find stores near you.

Read the entire GrandyOats article

Donate to the Climate Ride from New York to Washington DC - May 13 - 17

The Climate Ride is the bike-ride of a lifetime, from NYC to DC, raising money for climate-focused organizations, and sending a message to Congress to up the ante on climate legislation.

Donate and Read more about the climate ride

What is a sweatshop and how bad is the problem?

A. The US Department of Labor defines a sweatshop as any factory that violates two or more labor laws, such as those pertaining to wages and benefits, working hours, and child labor. Anti-sweatshop advocates go further to say that beyond following the letter of the law (which can be very weak in many countries that attract sweatshops), a factory pay a living wage in safe working conditions, enforce reasonable work hours, provide for sick leave and maternity leave, and allow workers to organize to avoid being labeled a sweatshop.

Because no single definition exists (and because sweatshops don’t want to be uncovered), it’s difficult to assess the worldwide scope of the problem. Compounding this difficulty is the “race to the bottom,” which means that companies don’t always let their sweatshop factories stay in one place, if they can shift their manufacturing to ever-cheaper and less-regulated locations. For example, the number of sweatshops in Mexico soared in the 1990s after NAFTA enticed companies to close their US operations and move south. As global manufacturing costs continued to shift, many companies then moved their operations from Mexico to even more attractive Asian countries. And more recently still, after the US-Jordan Free Trade agreement went into effect in 2000, the number of sweatshops in that country exploded as well. Between 2000 and 2005, apparel exports from Jordan to the US soared 2000 percent, often due to the round-the-clock labor of guest workers from poor Asian countries who were following the jobs as they moved.

Read More about Sweatshops