One of the top things that you can do to reduce your carbon footprint is to switch to a renewable electricity provider. In the East Bay (the cities across the bay from San Francisco, including Berkeley and Oakland) this has now become a lot easier! In fact, by default, electricity is now being provided by East Bay Community Energy (EBCE). PG&E electricity sources: mainly conventional … Continue reading Renewable Energy comes to the East Bay
Hi folks! I’m going to take a look at the social and environmental impact of cat litter, which provides a good example of why we need user-generated reviews. I think that most people want to make ethical choices, but researching the sustainability of something like kitty litter never quite becomes a priority. Green stars reviews on public sites make information that a few people have … Continue reading Daily Footprint, #30 – Sustainable and Ethical Cat Litter
Even though we might be vaguely aware that slavery still exists, many of us think of it as a thing of the past, or a thing that is separate from us. When we pick up a mainstream chocolate bar, it may not occur to us that the cacao was harvested by children who were sold (or tricked) into slavery, shipped to a foreign land and … Continue reading Ethical Consumerism Part 8 – Slavery in the Chocolate Industry
Project Drawdown brought together experts in several fields to come up with a ranked list of solutions to climate change and, somewhat surprisingly, refrigerant management was #1 on that list. This applies mostly to air conditioning (AC) units and any form of freezer/refrigerator. Starting in 1989, under the Montreal Protocol to reverse damage to the ozone layer, chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) were phased out as refrigerants and … Continue reading Daily Footprint, #29 – Refrigeration
Back in 2014, Fortune magazine wrote an article, Why Kind bars are suddenly everywhere, which opened with this paragraph: Kind Healthy Snacks’ founder Daniel Lubetzky had a modest ambition when he started the company in 2004. The son of a Holocaust survivor, Lubetzky says he wanted to bring more kindness to the world in the form of a healthy snack. Backstories are becoming increasingly prominent … Continue reading Are Kind bars socially responsible?
Hola, amigos! It has been more than a month since my last post; my longest blogging gap since I started the Daily Footprint posts almost two years ago. I wasn’t ignoring my blog (or yours!) – I decided to add categories to this site so that the posts will be somewhat organized. Since every post had to be edited to add it to a category, … Continue reading The Green Stars Project: now with categories!
Hi folks! In the previous post, I looked at how we can take actions as consumers to help curb population growth. This post is about actions we can take to sustain the human population without completely destroying our planet. Population growth fears are exploited by corporations One of the most common abuses of the population growth issue goes something like this: We must embrace GlobalCorp’s … Continue reading Ethical Consumerism, Part 7 – How to Sustain the Population in 2050.
In an early GSP post, Sociopathy and Kindness, Part 2, I somehow got onto the topic of population growth. It’s a topic that’s worth revisiting because the key questions of how to control population growth and how to sustain future populations are both closely tied to ethical consumerism. I believe that these issues have also been distorted and exploited in the past and that some … Continue reading Ethical Consumerism, Part 6: Population Growth
the EU has voted to ban neonics (neonicotinoids) in Europe, putting a more permanent stamp on the temporary ban that had been in place since 2013. Will the US follow suit? Continue reading The EU bans neonics. What will the US do?
I think it’s worth writing a post to explain why I took the direction of user-generated ratings with the Green Stars Project. There’s a pretty good chance that you take advantage of user-generated content on a regular basis. Perhaps you were just looking up the difference between herons and cranes on Wikipedia, and then went for a random encyclopedic walk so long that you forgot … Continue reading Ethical Consumerism, Part 5: Why we need User-Generated Ratings.
The Green Stars Project 