I am terribly disappointed to read this but apparently the European Parliament was not able to ban meat & dairy from descendants from cloned animals. It did not even achieve mandatory labelling for these products. So the European consumers can not tell when they happen to buy meat or dairy products from descendants of cloned animals! Germany was one of the countries against these regulations - booo, booo, booo!
Cloning is allowed in the European Union but the trading of meat & dairy from cloned animals is not. There is no food production whatsoever from cloned animals in the EU. The reason why regulations for products from descendants of cloned animals failed is that some European countries anticipated another trade dispute with the USA. But the EU uses bull sperm from the USA and Latin America for raising animals whose products end up on supermarket shelves. Cloning and food products from cloned animals are allowed in the US.
Needless to mention I am against cloning. Nature has survived for millions of years through evolution and now comes along the human species and thinks they can mess around and reproduce their own chosen super-animals. And it will not stop there. I'm sure the clone person will come with all its consequences. Oh no. Time to send some crazy scientists to the moon.
http://www.tagesschau.de/ausland/klonfleisch118.html
Tuesday, April 5, 2011
Tapped
is a US American documentary from 2009 about bottled water and you can find out more at: www.tappedthemovie.com
The film is split into the issue of where the water comes from and then the bottles. Communities in water-rich states of the US are rallying against Nestle (a Swiss corporation), Pepsi & CocaCola who steal their drinking water. In some states, according to the legislation, water is practically free for anyone and so these companies come and pump as much as they can to later sell it at a huge profit. These companies even kept operating the year (2007?) that over 30 states were facing dorught conditions and municipalities restriced water usage. I understood their rage but I also kept thinking: don't buy bottled water! It's such a logical consequence that will put the corporations out of that business! It still leaves them in the need for water to produce coke and other pop drinks/ sodas but it would help a lot.
Don't buy bottled water.
Why is bottled water so big? - In 1989 it became possible to put water into lightweight, cheap, clear PET bottles. Bottled water became a huge commodity and private corporations have not stopped making their profit of it.
Don't buy bottled water.
One of my favourite quotes in the film goes something like this: We have all become like big toddlers .. that need to know constantly that there's something there; we want it individualized, personalized, we don't want to have take care of it, just throw it away. We want it immediately available and convenient otherwise we'll have a fit. -- It explains why most of us do not reuse a (BPA-free!) bottle that can be simply refilled from the tap. I do of course.
Don't buy bottled water.
Advertisement makes us believe that bottled water is purer & healthier than tap water. 40% of all bottled water in the US is simply filtered tap water and due to "processing" and packaging not better than tap water. Different tests have found bacterial contaminants, arsenic, benzene, vinyl chloride, styrene, phthalate, and other carcinogenic substances. Why is this? Municipalities have to test their water several times per day to insure its safety - Pepsi & Co. don't have to do this. Even when these companies do their own tests on water sources and products they don't have to make them public. The government does not help either. In all of the Food & Drug Administration (FDA) there's only one person looking after bottled water regulations, and she has other responsibilities too. The FDA only regulates products that move between states, so if water is bottled and sold in the same state the FDA does not care about it. Unfortunately consumers have too much faith in a self-regulated industry!
Don't buy bottled water.
Now the bottles are usually made of PET or PETE which requires a substances that derives from the refining process of crude oil which tends to come with cancer-causing "by-products". The production of plastic bottles contaminates water!!! & air. Big sturdy bottles often contain Bisphenol A (BPA). The review of 700 studies concluded though that BPA is related to diabetes, breast & prostate cancers, obesity, liver diseases, diseases of the uterus, brain disorders (hyperactivity), low sperm count and more.
Don't buy bottled water.
Once the bottle's been used it needs to go somewhere preferably into recycling. While worldwide 50% of all beverage containers get recycled it's only 20% in the US. And who pays for it? Often the municipality that provides safe tap water. In some states there's a deposit. It's proven that deposits ensure bottles are returned for recycling. The bottled water industry prefers curbside recycling though and ignores the fact that 50% of Americans don't have access to curb side recycling. Consequently millions of bottles each year are incinerated releasing dioxin, or end up in landfills and in the ocean! Another great quote: The beach of the future does not have shells, corals and sand - it has a plastic cover!
In the Pacific two garbage patches have been located, one in the East, one in the West. That's where due to currents plastics have accumulated from Asia and America. The same applies to other oceans! In 2008 researchers found 48 times as much plastics as planktons in these garbage patches. A researcher resumed: Bottled water might be good in disaster relief but is a disaster in every day use.
Don't buy bottled water.
The film is split into the issue of where the water comes from and then the bottles. Communities in water-rich states of the US are rallying against Nestle (a Swiss corporation), Pepsi & CocaCola who steal their drinking water. In some states, according to the legislation, water is practically free for anyone and so these companies come and pump as much as they can to later sell it at a huge profit. These companies even kept operating the year (2007?) that over 30 states were facing dorught conditions and municipalities restriced water usage. I understood their rage but I also kept thinking: don't buy bottled water! It's such a logical consequence that will put the corporations out of that business! It still leaves them in the need for water to produce coke and other pop drinks/ sodas but it would help a lot.
Don't buy bottled water.
Why is bottled water so big? - In 1989 it became possible to put water into lightweight, cheap, clear PET bottles. Bottled water became a huge commodity and private corporations have not stopped making their profit of it.
Don't buy bottled water.
One of my favourite quotes in the film goes something like this: We have all become like big toddlers .. that need to know constantly that there's something there; we want it individualized, personalized, we don't want to have take care of it, just throw it away. We want it immediately available and convenient otherwise we'll have a fit. -- It explains why most of us do not reuse a (BPA-free!) bottle that can be simply refilled from the tap. I do of course.
Don't buy bottled water.
Advertisement makes us believe that bottled water is purer & healthier than tap water. 40% of all bottled water in the US is simply filtered tap water and due to "processing" and packaging not better than tap water. Different tests have found bacterial contaminants, arsenic, benzene, vinyl chloride, styrene, phthalate, and other carcinogenic substances. Why is this? Municipalities have to test their water several times per day to insure its safety - Pepsi & Co. don't have to do this. Even when these companies do their own tests on water sources and products they don't have to make them public. The government does not help either. In all of the Food & Drug Administration (FDA) there's only one person looking after bottled water regulations, and she has other responsibilities too. The FDA only regulates products that move between states, so if water is bottled and sold in the same state the FDA does not care about it. Unfortunately consumers have too much faith in a self-regulated industry!
Don't buy bottled water.
Now the bottles are usually made of PET or PETE which requires a substances that derives from the refining process of crude oil which tends to come with cancer-causing "by-products". The production of plastic bottles contaminates water!!! & air. Big sturdy bottles often contain Bisphenol A (BPA). The review of 700 studies concluded though that BPA is related to diabetes, breast & prostate cancers, obesity, liver diseases, diseases of the uterus, brain disorders (hyperactivity), low sperm count and more.
Don't buy bottled water.
Once the bottle's been used it needs to go somewhere preferably into recycling. While worldwide 50% of all beverage containers get recycled it's only 20% in the US. And who pays for it? Often the municipality that provides safe tap water. In some states there's a deposit. It's proven that deposits ensure bottles are returned for recycling. The bottled water industry prefers curbside recycling though and ignores the fact that 50% of Americans don't have access to curb side recycling. Consequently millions of bottles each year are incinerated releasing dioxin, or end up in landfills and in the ocean! Another great quote: The beach of the future does not have shells, corals and sand - it has a plastic cover!
In the Pacific two garbage patches have been located, one in the East, one in the West. That's where due to currents plastics have accumulated from Asia and America. The same applies to other oceans! In 2008 researchers found 48 times as much plastics as planktons in these garbage patches. A researcher resumed: Bottled water might be good in disaster relief but is a disaster in every day use.
Don't buy bottled water.
Monday, April 4, 2011
Lost in the suburbs
is another episode of The Nature of Things from 2008. It visits Los Angeles, Vancouver, Toronto, Mexico City and hey, Portland, Oregon!
In order to facilitate Toronto's expansion some of the most fertile soil in North America had been covered with concrete and asphalt. Suburban residents cover 4 times more space than those living in the city.
L.A. is the "ultimate suburban wasteland" according to David Suzuki. The Fresno valley nearby that's threatened to be built up too provides more than 200 commodity crops and is one of the biggest food providers in the U.S. Farmers start to become the minority though and the urban population does not understand their lifestyle. Farmers work earlier, they also work later, and some of their duties are noisy and dusty. Although the soil and the climate are great the water for irrigation comes via pipeline from far away and required a huge financially investment by the federal government. Unfortunately, the municipalities decide what to do with the land and sacrifices it for construction that creates jobs. In one place in California "extravagant" people can even live in a suburb made for small air planes! The garage, the street, the parking in the front of the house are all designed to accommodate the wing span.
Vancouver has apparently an even higher car use than L.A. and an additional 30,000 cars enter the roads every year. But the city barely builds any new roads. Vancouver is so unaffordable for most people that they move into the suburbs which are designed for cars, or "extensions of highway intersections". "The sound of sprawl is the freeway roar," it was said but it has turned into ever growing congestion. Widening the roads and adding more highways has not and will not solve the problem. Maintaining 1 km of road costs $10,000 per year, and new roads cost more. This does not include the costs for police, accident services like health care, and air pollution. Presumably, there will be road tolls soon which will increase the cost of living in suburbs! Together with demographic changes the demand for large houses in distant suburbs will disappear over the next couple of decades.
Mexico City with more than 20 million people is an urban nightmare, sprawling tremendously. There's no more natural beauty & tranquillity, just cars & too much traffic, air and other pollution, and water shortage. The city is not human any more.
Portland Oregon has not stopped the sprawl but has made room for nature in the city. It started 25 years ago that the city tore up a freeway and put in a waterfront park, tore up a parking house and create a public space in the centre of the city, diverted money from road construction to public transport and built a light railway instead. City neighbourhoods revived and the growth was directed into more dense, already existing areas instead of adding on to the city boundary. A model suburb is denser, the houses closer to the sidewalk, a front porch faces the road instead of a garage, school and shops are in walking distance.In Portland people want to live there and don't feel forced to live there - that should be the goal of city planning. Some critics said that Portland's moves were a socialist conspiracy to get people out of their cars but in fact in was a conspiracy that brought people into cars in the first place.
Generally suburbs provide more affordable housing than the city centre, get you more space for less money. People think it is easier to start a family, it feels safer to raise children, suburbs have a perceived higher quality of living. But it's not actually that comfortable: commuting means sacrificing time and well-being, expose oneself to accidents, fuel & maintain the car, pay insurances. It's not affordable to the individual or the community.
Generally, cars have driven the sprawl. The deal has been that the private sector provides the vehicles -without any limits - and the government provides the pathways. But huge amounts of money (subsidies) go into supporting the car and even only a 10% of it would better be invested in public transit.
An initial problem is that wilderness and natural areas are often considered as land to be developed, as something that needs to change. Another problem is that the costs for infrastructure (water, sewage, roads, community services) are only partially accounted for in the price of suburban houses. The municipality that provides the infrastructure usually ends up with a debt that can't be recovered from taxes from the new residents. So they keep building hoping it pays off next time ... but it does not. Suburbs won't work forever.
In order to facilitate Toronto's expansion some of the most fertile soil in North America had been covered with concrete and asphalt. Suburban residents cover 4 times more space than those living in the city.
L.A. is the "ultimate suburban wasteland" according to David Suzuki. The Fresno valley nearby that's threatened to be built up too provides more than 200 commodity crops and is one of the biggest food providers in the U.S. Farmers start to become the minority though and the urban population does not understand their lifestyle. Farmers work earlier, they also work later, and some of their duties are noisy and dusty. Although the soil and the climate are great the water for irrigation comes via pipeline from far away and required a huge financially investment by the federal government. Unfortunately, the municipalities decide what to do with the land and sacrifices it for construction that creates jobs. In one place in California "extravagant" people can even live in a suburb made for small air planes! The garage, the street, the parking in the front of the house are all designed to accommodate the wing span.
Vancouver has apparently an even higher car use than L.A. and an additional 30,000 cars enter the roads every year. But the city barely builds any new roads. Vancouver is so unaffordable for most people that they move into the suburbs which are designed for cars, or "extensions of highway intersections". "The sound of sprawl is the freeway roar," it was said but it has turned into ever growing congestion. Widening the roads and adding more highways has not and will not solve the problem. Maintaining 1 km of road costs $10,000 per year, and new roads cost more. This does not include the costs for police, accident services like health care, and air pollution. Presumably, there will be road tolls soon which will increase the cost of living in suburbs! Together with demographic changes the demand for large houses in distant suburbs will disappear over the next couple of decades.
Mexico City with more than 20 million people is an urban nightmare, sprawling tremendously. There's no more natural beauty & tranquillity, just cars & too much traffic, air and other pollution, and water shortage. The city is not human any more.
Portland Oregon has not stopped the sprawl but has made room for nature in the city. It started 25 years ago that the city tore up a freeway and put in a waterfront park, tore up a parking house and create a public space in the centre of the city, diverted money from road construction to public transport and built a light railway instead. City neighbourhoods revived and the growth was directed into more dense, already existing areas instead of adding on to the city boundary. A model suburb is denser, the houses closer to the sidewalk, a front porch faces the road instead of a garage, school and shops are in walking distance.In Portland people want to live there and don't feel forced to live there - that should be the goal of city planning. Some critics said that Portland's moves were a socialist conspiracy to get people out of their cars but in fact in was a conspiracy that brought people into cars in the first place.
Generally suburbs provide more affordable housing than the city centre, get you more space for less money. People think it is easier to start a family, it feels safer to raise children, suburbs have a perceived higher quality of living. But it's not actually that comfortable: commuting means sacrificing time and well-being, expose oneself to accidents, fuel & maintain the car, pay insurances. It's not affordable to the individual or the community.
Generally, cars have driven the sprawl. The deal has been that the private sector provides the vehicles -without any limits - and the government provides the pathways. But huge amounts of money (subsidies) go into supporting the car and even only a 10% of it would better be invested in public transit.
An initial problem is that wilderness and natural areas are often considered as land to be developed, as something that needs to change. Another problem is that the costs for infrastructure (water, sewage, roads, community services) are only partially accounted for in the price of suburban houses. The municipality that provides the infrastructure usually ends up with a debt that can't be recovered from taxes from the new residents. So they keep building hoping it pays off next time ... but it does not. Suburbs won't work forever.
Remember the Gulf oil spill?
Of course, you do, everyone does. It only happened last year and the consequences are still coming up and will keep coming up for years to come but a few people seem to have forgotten all about it - those in charge. Despite Gulf oil spill, rig owner executives get big bonuses is an article from today on how Transocean celebrates "the best year in safety performance in our company's history". Every sane person will shake her/ his head now in disbelief but yes it's true. At Transocean the top people think they deserve a lot of extra cash for their great performance in 2010. Maybe, losing 9 workers in one oil rig explosion and being involved in the worst oil spills ever is not a big deal after all. I don't think these people should be running this type of company, if any at all.
Sunday, April 3, 2011
Alternative Agriculture
is the title of an episode of The Nature or Things that I watched on DVD from the library. I don't know how old it is and again it was not all new to me but it was very very wonderful to see green, trees, fields, and animals roaming freely in the foothills of the Rockies. Yes, I am feeling very deprived of nature at the moment, especially hearing about daffodils and cherry blossom from Europe. I am currently pressuring my husband into moving somewhere greener where we are not buried under snow and ice for six months and then wade through deep puddles for another month, before finally by mid- or end of May the first bits of green spring up. Sorry, I can't handle this!
Back to the film. First of all, all the good examples of agriculture came from Alberta. There was the farmer with rare breed cattle & pigs, the farmer with organic pigs & chickens, and the farmer way in the Southwest of AB who raises organic cattle in the foothills. He belongs to a Co-op of 5 or 6 farmers that all got certified organic. It's better for the land, the livestock, the people, not only the farmer but also the consumer. This last farmer made the statement that some people make donations to organisations whose goal is to conserve and protect nature but when they go shopping they roll their eyes at the high organic meat prices and buy the cheap (bad) stuff instead. I agree. I do it although not often because we eat meat only once per week. At this point I should buy organic because it's not going to ruin us financially. Leaves me with the problem to get to where the organic meat is ... If you eat lots of meat though I guess buying it organic will leave way bigger holes in your pocket than the occasional donation. At least we don't donate money on a weekly basis, more like every couple of months. But his point is right: With what we buy we make a big statement about what we want and what we will not accept and supply follows demand, right?!
Second, the bad example came again from the US, North Carolina to be exact. Apparently it's THE pig country of the USA and of course the pigs are raised in crowded, feed lot conditions. The sewage generated by the pigs sits in ponds, smelling horrendeously, until it gets sprayed onto fields. The fields receive way more sewage though than they can cope with and the sewage seeps right down into the ground water and waterways. Consequently fishes die and the waterways sooner or later collapse. What's being done about it? Not much because the hog industry denies all accusations and surely being such a big industry they will have politicians "under control". Here's a great article from back in the 1990s: Watch out for killer algae: years of dumping hog wastes into North Carolina rivers has created a monster
Also in the US, around 90% of all antibiotics are fed preventatively to healthy livestock, and more than 3/4 of the grains grown in the US is fed to livestock as well.
Last but not least, I don't like the title of the documentary. Organic farming, or farming in a way where the livestock is respected and kept humanely and eats grass instead of grain and antibiotics should be the only way of farming. Isn't it terrible that our agriculture has gone so far that the natural approach to farming as it had been done for a long time before the industrial revolution is now the "alternative"!?
Back to the film. First of all, all the good examples of agriculture came from Alberta. There was the farmer with rare breed cattle & pigs, the farmer with organic pigs & chickens, and the farmer way in the Southwest of AB who raises organic cattle in the foothills. He belongs to a Co-op of 5 or 6 farmers that all got certified organic. It's better for the land, the livestock, the people, not only the farmer but also the consumer. This last farmer made the statement that some people make donations to organisations whose goal is to conserve and protect nature but when they go shopping they roll their eyes at the high organic meat prices and buy the cheap (bad) stuff instead. I agree. I do it although not often because we eat meat only once per week. At this point I should buy organic because it's not going to ruin us financially. Leaves me with the problem to get to where the organic meat is ... If you eat lots of meat though I guess buying it organic will leave way bigger holes in your pocket than the occasional donation. At least we don't donate money on a weekly basis, more like every couple of months. But his point is right: With what we buy we make a big statement about what we want and what we will not accept and supply follows demand, right?!
Second, the bad example came again from the US, North Carolina to be exact. Apparently it's THE pig country of the USA and of course the pigs are raised in crowded, feed lot conditions. The sewage generated by the pigs sits in ponds, smelling horrendeously, until it gets sprayed onto fields. The fields receive way more sewage though than they can cope with and the sewage seeps right down into the ground water and waterways. Consequently fishes die and the waterways sooner or later collapse. What's being done about it? Not much because the hog industry denies all accusations and surely being such a big industry they will have politicians "under control". Here's a great article from back in the 1990s: Watch out for killer algae: years of dumping hog wastes into North Carolina rivers has created a monster
Also in the US, around 90% of all antibiotics are fed preventatively to healthy livestock, and more than 3/4 of the grains grown in the US is fed to livestock as well.
Last but not least, I don't like the title of the documentary. Organic farming, or farming in a way where the livestock is respected and kept humanely and eats grass instead of grain and antibiotics should be the only way of farming. Isn't it terrible that our agriculture has gone so far that the natural approach to farming as it had been done for a long time before the industrial revolution is now the "alternative"!?
Saturday, April 2, 2011
Waste harvest
I just watched a documentary from CBClearning called Harvesting the city. It's set in Toronto and portrays several companies that collect waste and sell it or use it as raw material for their products. Unsurprisingly, there were all these companies dealing with recycling: paper, cardboard, glass & metals, even contaminated water. It was not said what exactly happens to plastics from the recycling bins. One company collected food leftovers from Toronto's restaurants and distributed them to pig farmers. As well they were looking into extending to cattle farmers but cattle is a bit more fussy and the company does not know in advance what kind of scraps they'll receive.Another company collected scrap fabric and turned it into small clothing items such as hats. The most interesting company was the recycler of disposable diapers. In an "intensive process" the "materials" (the owner of the company does not like the word garbage because a lot of it is material that can be turned into something new) get cleaned and separated. The result is fibrous wood pulp whose quality is better than from trees and sells at higher prices. The shredded plastic is very absorbent and for example soaks up oil from water which makes it suitable for cleaning up oil spills. This diaper recycling company is the first of its kind and processes 40 tons of diapers each year. The question that did not get answered unfortunately was what "intensive process" means - according to the footage I would assume water & energy. Maybe even chemicals?
The documentary did not really show what happens with thrown-out materials that do not go into the recycling process. Recycling is surely better than no recycling but it's still not an invitation to throw things out thinking that somebody down the road will hopefully deal with it. And if it has to be disposable diapers then why not use biodegradable ones and compost them.
The documentary did not really show what happens with thrown-out materials that do not go into the recycling process. Recycling is surely better than no recycling but it's still not an invitation to throw things out thinking that somebody down the road will hopefully deal with it. And if it has to be disposable diapers then why not use biodegradable ones and compost them.
Friday, April 1, 2011
The Natural Step
I watched a documentation last night titles "A passion for sustainability". It's about a dozen businesses in Portland, Oregon, "the most sustainable city in the US". Ah! Already learned something new. As a matter of fact the footage of Portland was not bad, I almost want to go there but since it's in the US (security mania) I will not bother. The documentation introduced very different companies and how they turned their business practices into sustainable practices, considering the impact on planet Earth all along. At the same time these companies apparently increased their bottom line as well.
There was a fashion designer (Anna Cohen) who designs clothing from soya, seaweed, hemp, and organic cotton fabrics; the pizza shop (Hotlips) that sources the ingredients locally, some even grown within city limits; an auto repair shop (Hawthorne Auto), a builder (Neil Kelly) that constructs attractive energy and material efficient house; a city developer; a water provider (Tualatin Valley Water District); a wood company (The Collins Companies) that manages its own forests, sawmills, produces particle boards etc; an architecture's office that designed an affordable housing project; a cleaning company (Terra Clean) that runs its trucks and vacuum cleaners on used kitchen oils that they collect from local restaurants; an organic winery; a carpentry that produced high end furniture, and an engineering consultant (PAE). Last but not least it included NIKE that has a large, posh "campus" in Portland. I suppose that's the headquarters and where the designers sit, it's certainly not where the gear is produced which put me off a little.
These, and more, companies follow the principles of The Natural Step, a NGO found about 20 years ago by Swedish Dr Karl-Henrik Robert. Although it was interesting to watch at the end the documentation became a kind of advertisement for The Natural Step. They way these business owners talked about it was a bit too "up-scale" for me though. I also could not follow the interview with Dr. Robert. Maybe, doctors and business owners are so terribly smart, educated, experienced, ... that they have to sound so sophisticated but hey when it comes to the environment, aka our planet, we are all in the same boat so keep it simple please. My hubby said it sounds like a "cult" they are talking about. But yes, I'm glad they do something. These businesses are leaders in what they do and hopefully pass on the bug to others. No, I would not shop at these businesses because they serve people with considerably higher incomes. (Considering we statistically belong to low-income-families in Canada I assume there's plenty of people out there who can afford the services or products of these businesses.)
Products that are manufactured sustainably do not fall into the category of "affordable for everyone" something that I am not sure about will ever change. To a certain degree I don't think it can or should be changed. After all, what would be mass-produced, single-use/ throw-away items that are sustainable? Sounds like an antithesis to me.
But organisations like The Natural Step bring us one step closer to a better future.
http://www.thenaturalstep.org/en/canada
http://www.naturalstepusa.org/
There was a fashion designer (Anna Cohen) who designs clothing from soya, seaweed, hemp, and organic cotton fabrics; the pizza shop (Hotlips) that sources the ingredients locally, some even grown within city limits; an auto repair shop (Hawthorne Auto), a builder (Neil Kelly) that constructs attractive energy and material efficient house; a city developer; a water provider (Tualatin Valley Water District); a wood company (The Collins Companies) that manages its own forests, sawmills, produces particle boards etc; an architecture's office that designed an affordable housing project; a cleaning company (Terra Clean) that runs its trucks and vacuum cleaners on used kitchen oils that they collect from local restaurants; an organic winery; a carpentry that produced high end furniture, and an engineering consultant (PAE). Last but not least it included NIKE that has a large, posh "campus" in Portland. I suppose that's the headquarters and where the designers sit, it's certainly not where the gear is produced which put me off a little.
These, and more, companies follow the principles of The Natural Step, a NGO found about 20 years ago by Swedish Dr Karl-Henrik Robert. Although it was interesting to watch at the end the documentation became a kind of advertisement for The Natural Step. They way these business owners talked about it was a bit too "up-scale" for me though. I also could not follow the interview with Dr. Robert. Maybe, doctors and business owners are so terribly smart, educated, experienced, ... that they have to sound so sophisticated but hey when it comes to the environment, aka our planet, we are all in the same boat so keep it simple please. My hubby said it sounds like a "cult" they are talking about. But yes, I'm glad they do something. These businesses are leaders in what they do and hopefully pass on the bug to others. No, I would not shop at these businesses because they serve people with considerably higher incomes. (Considering we statistically belong to low-income-families in Canada I assume there's plenty of people out there who can afford the services or products of these businesses.)
Products that are manufactured sustainably do not fall into the category of "affordable for everyone" something that I am not sure about will ever change. To a certain degree I don't think it can or should be changed. After all, what would be mass-produced, single-use/ throw-away items that are sustainable? Sounds like an antithesis to me.
But organisations like The Natural Step bring us one step closer to a better future.
http://www.thenaturalstep.org/en/canada
http://www.naturalstepusa.org/
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