Andi McDaniel has a piece entitled Can We Create a World Without Waste? at Alternet. I think it’s an important piece to read as the earth grows smaller… the places on this planet which we use as dumping grounds are getting closer and closer to people as developed areas and populations expand.

One of the ways to curb the trash we throw out is to be smarter about buying - avoiding whatever we do not need, and perhaps avoiding what is covered in too much packaging. But some manufacturers and sellers still insist upon using the paperboard, styrofoam trays, and the cling wrap (I’m looking at you, Trader Joe’s!) and a growing movement of people are pressing companies to take more responsibility of their products - not just their quality, but also their packaging, and the products themselves (in the case of electronics) after the product’s life cycle with the consumer.

The article gives a great introduction to the “Zero Waste” movement and Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR). The one thing I would have added is a mention of Cradle to Cradle, William McDonough does a fine job arguing that producers need to plan for materials reuse as early as the product design stages.

Dozens of new links are being added to the Green Links section at BlueGreenPlanet, partcularly under the Sustainability section. Reducing carbon emissions, and education about carbon neutrality is becoming a more urgent issue under the threat of climate change, that this topic may get its own category very soon. In any case, I did want to highlight that these new links are being in such huge batches currently than they aren’t highlighted for very long on the main page.

Many thanks to light_of_summer on LiveJournal for providing these new links.

ThinkProgress bring this to our attention: Report: Global Warming Pollution Has Doubled in 28 States Since 1960

In the US, the increased dependance on cars and trucks accounts for 40% of the rise, and it doesn’t help either that fuel efficiency for vehicles in the US stagnated over that period, leaving thefuel efficiency of American vehicles way behind foreign counterparts.

The original report is here:The Carbon Boom: National and State Trends in Carbon Dioxide Emissions Since 1960

Its main page has been updated to include its blog and the latest links added to the site.

I don’t think there’s a way to start a new journal that doesn’t sound awkward, so let’s just jump straight to it.

The first journal post is going to be a technical post - I have to admit now I’m having trouble getting BlueGreenPlanet to display apostrophes and quotation marks correctly all the time. I’ve played with Unicode, and HTML code (currently using things like “& rsquo ;” to get an apostrophe to display) but what further complicates the code is that card text is being passed and saved through variables, and I suspect that somewhere in the passing is where sometimes the code gets screwed up. The ways around it are not very visitor-friendly, poring online gives me no new fixes. Maybe someone reading this can enlighten me.

Still currently on the site’s plate of upcoming additions/developments:
The Green Links Directory
The Astronomical Events Calendar (Just this March alone, we’ve got a lunar eclipse, solar eclipse, and of course, vernal equinox coming up.)

Constantly ongoing:
Looking for contributors
Developing the blog and finding websites and directories to submit BGP to.