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With the United Nations conference on climate change (aka COP21) kicking off next week in Paris, OpenIDEO has just the thing for those of us who want to participate but can’t be there in person. It’s the organization's new Accelerate initiative, a global effort to support innovators, spark action and use design thinking to tackle our biggest environmental challenges.

Jason Rissman, managing director at OpenIDEO, presented the program on a panel at the Social Innovation Summit in Silicon Valley (Nov. 17–18) and extended a special invitation to storytellers and climate change solution innovators: participate in OpenIDEO’s Climate Innovator Stories Challenge. The organization is accepting contributions until Dec. 11. I sat down with Rissman to find out more.

Julie Noblitt for TriplePundit (3p): What will OpenIDEO be doing at COP21?

Jason Rissman: One of our team members is going to Paris for an event called Place to B, a hub of storytellers and journalists to connect with other storytellers as part of our Climate Innovator Stories Challenge, which was one of the first initiatives we launched with our Accelerate program. We want to elevate stories of inspiring climate innovations and also start connecting with more storytellers, because their talents and skills are so needed for translating great innovations happening in the climate space and sharing them with more people.

We’ve called upon our community, friends and partners to organize events under the hashtag #COPisHere with the idea of celebrating local climate innovation and getting together to brainstorm ideas of how to better support climate innovation. We've truly been blown away by the response that we've seen.

Within just a couple of days, we've heard from about 100 people from over 35 countries ranging from the Democratic Republic of Congo, to Fiji, to Pakistan, to Zimbabwe, to Australia, to Spain, and all over who want to get together in their community and be part of the conversation that's happening in Paris. We feel that everyone has a role to play, and not just in terms of speaking out or protesting or marching in the streets, but also with their creativity. We feel there is a great opportunity to activate the world to creativity to support innovation to help address climate change.

3p: You said during the Social Innovation Summit panel that #COPisHere is for celebrating local climate innovations. Are you hoping to highlight larger numbers of smaller stories?

JR: Yes, absolutely. And part of the reason is that we see Accelerate, our new program to celebrate climate innovation, as being a program that's intended to be co-created with our community. And, the best way to learn about how to support climate innovators is to get to know them.

This is part of a Human-Centered Design process where we start with identifying and understanding our users and those that we're designing for. We want to get to know innovators and learn more about ways we can support their work. We've been encouraging our community and our friends to organize events in their areas and to likewise get to know people who are working on climate innovations.

3p: I was looking at some of your featured innovators, for instance Rob Han, who created the Refuture app. Would he be an example of somebody who has gone through your process and benefitted from your materials and sponsorship? 

JR: We see this happen somewhat frequently. Someone gets inspired enough by the [human-centered design] process that they actually want to start convening people in their own community to teach it, and that's definitely part of Rob's story. Rob was encouraged through participation in our challenge to follow his dreams. He was in a job that was leaving him feeling the emptiness that a lot of people can feel when they are not in a job that's inspiring or allowing them to tap into their interest in having social impact. Eventually he quit his job and when he did he wrote our team and said, "Thank you. I just quit my job and it's because of you." Which made us all very nervous! But he was off to the races as an entrepreneur, and a social entrepreneur. We've been inspired by his story.

3p: I heard you say, “We're not trying to do ‘IDEO Green' – we want people to take this and make it their own.”

JR: Yes. We were inspired by companies and organizations that have partnered together for impact – for example a current project that IDEO has partnered on called The Powerful Now, a platform on aging and the opportunity to rethink what aging means. We are different from other challenge or competition platforms in that people form teams, they work together, they form community, and collaboration is really at the center of it. That's true to the DNA of IDEO - we see great innovation coming from diverse perspectives working together, because that is where creativity really is sparked. We don't know exactly what that looks like yet, but we'd really like to hear from organizations that would like to be part of the program and we can think about it together.

3p: Let's say it's five years from now and Accelerate has exceeded your wildest dreams for what it can achieve. What would you like to see come out of this?

JP: Part of the center of the program is technology and it's hard to imagine where the technology will be five years from now. But, the greatest latent energy source in the world is the creative energy of people around the world who are interested in helping address environmental and social issues. We want to help tap that energy source and provide a way for people who are creative, energized, engaged, and passionate about working on the planet's future, to be able to find a project where they can have the most impact. If Accelerate is wildly successful, it's really about helping connect anyone who is interested in making a difference to projects where their skills are needed and wanted.

3p: Is there anything else you would like for Triple Pundit readers to know or do - a call to action for them?

JR: Yes, three things. If you are a storyteller or innovator related to climate change, please participate in our Climate Innovator Stories Challenge. We're accepting participation until December 11. Just today we announced a fellowship program. We'll be focusing on three storytellers and three innovators and working to support their efforts and their impact.

If you like to get together in person to convene people, we are asking people around the world to hold a conversation with people in your community and brainstorm ideas about how to better support climate innovation via our #COPisHere initiative. As people hold those events, we hope they will share pictures and ideas with hashtag #COPisHere.

And, if you are a partner or an organization that is interested in this call to support innovation related to climate change, just reach out using the link on our Accelerate page. We want partners for the program. All of our challenges are sponsored and we are trying to build a strong ecosystem of support for all of these efforts.

Image credits: 1) Ron Mader from Flickr under Creative Commons License. 2) Photo used with permission of Rob Han and Open IDEO.

Environmental sustainability is important in business. More and more consumers want the companies whose products they buy to be environmentally sustainable. A 2014 Nielsen survey found that 55 percent of global online consumers in 60 countries said they would pay more for products and services from companies committed to positive environmental and social impact.

And environmental sustainability can have an impact on stock performance, as a 2007 report by Goldman Sachs shows: The companies considered leaders in environmental, social and governance policies lead in stock performance by an average of 25 percent.

The United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) provides numerous examples of how environmental sustainability benefits companies in its report titled, "The Business Case for the Green Economy.” Here are a few:

• General Motors saved over $30 million in six years through its resource productivity program while reducing waste volume by 40 percent


• Grupo Bimbo in Mexico saved about $700,000 and 338,400 cubic meters of water in three years through its water reduction program


• General Electric’s sales of its Ecomagination products reached $18 billion in 2009

If environmental sustainability is important in business, then it should be important in business school programs, including graduate programs. Net Impact evaluated almost 100 programs and ranked them on their integration of social and environmental themes. Called the Business as UNusual (BAU) guide, it ranked 50 schools for environmental sustainability.

Here is a brief overview of the schools that made the top 10 list:

1. University of California, Santa Barbara, Bren School of Environmental Science and Management

Making the top spot is a school in sunny Santa Barbara, California. Bren School offers a two-year master of environmental science and management (MESM) degree. It features seven areas of specialization that include: corporate environmental management, coastal marine resources management, conservation planning, economics and politics of the environment, energy and climate, pollution prevention and remediation, and water resources management.

2. Presidio Graduate School

Located in San Francisco, the Presidio Graduate School (PGS) offers an MBA in Sustainable Management degree. The program’s curriculum is focused on three concepts: sustainable systems, sustainable leadership and business excellence.

One of the features of the program is applied learning. All students are required to do at least four intensive sustainability projects with companies, and since 2007, PGS students have completed more than 63,000 hours working with over 270 organizations, including Google. Every student completes the program by creating a venture plan for an original social enterprise.

3. Pinchot University, Bainbridge Graduate Institute

Pinchot University’s Bainbridge Graduate Institute in Seattle, Washington, offers students master’s degrees in two different formats. Both are great for busy, working adults.

The university offers an MBA in sustainable systems, which combines online classes with monthly learning intensives offered at its IslandWood campus on Bainbridge Island. And there is also the MBA in sustainable business, which features weekly classes at the Seattle campus. Pinchot graduates have a job placement rate of 82 percent three months after graduation.

4. University of Michigan, Ross School of Business

The Ross School of Business in Ann Arbor, Michigan, has been ranked No. 1 for leadership development for the last five years. Recently, the school was named No. 1 in both sustainability and entrepreneurship. 

BusinessWeek recognized Ross as the No. 1 school for sustainability and green business education in January 2013. Ross is also home to the renowned Erb Institute for Global Sustainable Enterprise.

5. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management

MIT’s Sloan School of Management in Cambridge, Massachusetts, offers a sustainability certificate within its MBA program. It is designed so that it can work with other concentration areas. The goal of the sustainability certificate is to “build a community of innovators,” the program’s website proclaims.

6. Cornell University, Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management

Located in Ithaca, New York, Cornell’s Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management was ranked No. 2 for sustainable global enterprise, which both designs and manages Johnson’s sustainability curriculum.

One of the focuses of the curriculum is clean-technology commercialization and innovation. Students at Johnson are offered one-on-one coaching and mentorship that is customized and offered through a sustainability counselor at the central career center.

7. Yale University, Yale School of Management

Yale University’s Yale School of Management in New Haven, Connecticut, requires first-year students to take core courses that incorporate social and environmental themes. MBA students have the flexibility to take classes across Yale.

8. Bard College

Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, offers an MBA program that focuses on the business case for sustainability. In its fifth year, it offers a course called NYCLab, which is one of the key parts of its MBA in sustainability program. Students work in teams and participate in consultancies for businesses, government agencies and nonprofit organizations. The projects are eight months long.

9. Pepperdine University, Graziadio School of Business and Management

Pepperdine University’s Graziadio School of Business and Management in Malibu, California, offers a social, ethical, and environmental responsibility (SEER) certificate program as part of its MBA program. The SEER certificate program “prepares students to be future leaders in today’s sustainable business landscape,” according to BAU. Launched in fall 2010, the SEER Certificate was started and created by three students that were Net Impact members.

10. Duquesne University, Donahue Graduate School of Business

Launched in 2007, Duquesne University’s Donahue Graduate School of Business in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, has been ranked among the Global Top 25 by the Aspen Institute. Corporate Knights ranked the program in 2013 as No. 1 in the U.S. and eighth in the world for integrating sustainability.

Image credit: Flickr/William Murphy

New research has shown that over 90% of primary school teachers in England believe they should be teaching children about the effects of climate change, despite sustainability no longer being a statutory requirement in the curriculum.

The study - commissioned as part of Bristol’s year as the UK’s first European Green Capital - found that over half (51%) of those surveyed felt it should be a high priority in primary school education, regardless of the national curriculum. However, over three quarters (76%) say they do not have the right resources to teach sustainability in the classroom.

In response Bristol 2015, the organisation set up to facilitate Bristol’s year as European Green Capital, is launching a new UK-wide education resource, designed to put sustainability back on the education agenda. Nearly all primary school teachers surveyed (96 per cent) said they would use a dedicated resource that enabled them to teach sustainability while covering multiple curriculum objectives.

The national schools programme will be shared with delegates at the UN Climate Change Conference (COP21) in Paris next month.

The term “natural” on a product label can be very misleading. Some food and beverages labeled “natural” can contain unnatural ingredients such as high fructose corn syrup, which a Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) report describes “made through a complex chemical industrial process.”

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced this month that will start taking public comments on the use of the term “natural” on food labeling starting November 12 and lasting through February 10, 2016. The FDA lists several reasons why it is taking comments on the use of the term “natural,” including the “changing landscape of food ingredients and production.” The other reasons include responding directly to consumers’ requests that the FDA look into the use of the term, and class action lawsuits against companies using the term “natural.”

There have been numerous class action lawsuits against companies using the term “natural” on their food labeling including one against Walmart for its “Great Value All Natural Cornstarch.” The lawsuit claimed that the cornstarch’s labeling as “natural was false and deceptive because it led consumers to think that the product really was “all natural” when it actually contained GMOs. Both parties in the lawsuit agreed to a settlement.

Part of the problem with the use of the term “natural” is that the FDA lacks a definition. However, it describes the term natural as meaning that “nothing artificial or synthetic  (including all color additives regardless of source) has been included in, or has been added to, a food that would not normally be expected to be in that food.” But the federal agency’s policy doesn’t address food processing and manufacturing methods nor does it address whether a food item labeled natural can include health benefits.

However, the FDA does acknowledge on its website that it’s difficult to define a product labeled natural from a food science perspective “because the food has probably been processed and is no longer the product of the earth." Although the federal agency has a description of the term natural, it lacks an actual definition. “The agency has not objected to the use of the term if the food does not contain added color, artificial flavors, or synthetic substances.”

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) does have a definition of the term “natural” and it is “a product containing no artificial ingredient or added color and is only minimally processed.” It defines minimal processing as meaning “that the product was processed in a manner that does not fundamentally alter the product.” That definition rules out products with high fructose corn syrup and citric acid. The CSPI report found that in 1992 the FDA sent a warning letter about All Natural Snapple Tea because it contains citric acid which is not considered natural under FDA policy. However, the company today appears “to have ignored or are not aware of that warning,” according to CSPI.

The “natural” food market is growing. From just 2007 to 2008 the market for “natural” foods in the U.S. grew by 10 percent, and the second-most common label on new products was “all natural” in new food products launched in 2008, the CSPI report noted. The report had several recommendations for both the FDA and the USDA. The report recommended that the FDA prohibit use of the term natural on products that contain high fructose corn syrup, and restrict the use of the term natural to foods that don’t contain artificial ingredients and are minimally processed. It recommended that the USDA determine that high fructose corn syrup is not a natural ingredient and that products that contain it can’t be labeled as natural.

The big problem with the label “natural” is that consumer may think the product is more nutritious or has more health benefits. In 2014, Consumer Reports conducted a survey that found almost 60 percent of those polled look for the term “natural” when they buy food. About two-thirds of those polled thought it meant a processed food contains no artificial ingredients, pesticides, or GMOs.

Image credit Blue Bunny, Flickr

Next week delegates. ministers, heads-of-state and civil socity meet in Paris at COP21 in hopes of striking an international commitment limiting global warming to 2 degrees Celsius from pre-industrial levels.

Data recently released from the MET Office in the U.K. projects average global surface temperatures in 2015 are set to reach the threshold of 1 degree Celsius, halfway to the limit of “acceptable” climate change. This temperature change emphasizes the urgency of the task at hand. With additional warming already baked into the system the risk, challenge and opportunity of our present moment could not be more sharply defined.

If we are to meet with any measure of success in Paris, we must realize that global warming does not exist in a vacuum, metaphorically speaking. It is a manifestation of the larger picture of sustainable human development. For far too long the challenges of global prosperity, sustainable development and climate change have shared a common ambition for a better world, but lacked a sense of context, at least in terms of a cohesive strategy aimed at integrated goals and solutions.

“Over the years we’ve managed to speak to them in silos,” special UN Advisor Amina Mohammed told TriplePundit in a recent interview, “and now we really do need to come back to that convergence of how one matters to the other.”

There is no sustainable human prosperity without addressing climate change, there is no hope of containing climate change without insuring human prosperity. This is the year that the two roads meet.

Sustainable Development Goals: Uniting a vision for a better world

“The Kyoto Protocol was a remarkable achievement in many ways," UNFCC secretary-general Christiana Figueres said earlier this year to mark the 10th anniversary of the Kyoto Protocol "It not only underscored the scientific reality that greenhouse gas emissions need to fall. But it also put in place pioneering concepts, flexible options, practical solutions and procedures for accountability that we often take for granted today."

“Paris will not solve climate change at a pen stroke," Figueres added, "But similarly it must trigger a world-wide over-achievement and a clear sense of direction that can restore the natural balance of emissions on planet Earth.”

In other words COP21 will not be a conclusion, we will not go home on December 12 thinking "well, now we've taken care of climate change." But we can know that real change is set in motion - that it is, at last, the end of the beginning.

"Few have the greatness to bend history itself; but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of all those acts will be written the history of this generation."

To all but the most altruistic among us, self-interest is at the core of our actions. That is human nature. But the great achievements of humankind, of civilization itself, rests  on mutual cooperation. There is obviously no denying the forces in the world that would undo all we have achieved and hope to achieve. We will remain unbowed, each one doing what we can to change a small portion of events and together, with firm ideals and goals in mind, we push forward to a just and healthy planet. We get nowhere without working together.

That's an easy sentiment to express, but much harder to realize in the real world we inhabit, especially in light of ongoing events - the context of our generation. But the alternative is unacceptable.

Paris is the next step.

Image credit: Léonard Cotte/Unsplash

By Michael Tlusty and Peter Tyedmers

Our society is working so very hard to create ecologically and socially less impactful food. We have developed an ever increasing number of certifications and ecolabels (27 for fish alone) to ensure supply side sustainability. Yet the harsh reality is that especially for protein, we are pissing away these sustainability efforts. Figuratively, we do this by wasting food. For all this effort at being better producers, the food often does not make it into our mouths. A recent study by Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future estimates that approximately 45 percent of all seafood we produce is wasted after it is purchased and taken home (full study by Love et al. is here). But what is not reported in these consumer-based food loss estimates is the actual pissing away of sustainability. In the case of proteins, we do not store it when we eat more than we need biologically. Excess protein is converted to glucose or fat, the surplus nitrogen is converted to urea, and then expelled from the body. How much is too much? For the quick review of the math behind this problem, assume 51g of protein per day per person is required (the midpoint of female / male requirements respectively). If each meal provides 1/3 of our protein, then a fast food fish sandwich (typically in the 15-18g protein range) is enough protein. Consume any more (how many fish meals are actually the size of a fish sandwich?) and we literally piss away the supply side sustainability.

Food overconsumption is a huge problem that is already burdening our health system, and the broader ecosystem impacts are only being realized. Food production is one of the most significant determinants of environmental and social impacts, and any waste (including overconsumption) only increase this burden. Including overconsumption in the estimate of waste will push the estimate half of what we produce as being wasted. Half! Any calculation of impacts, such as the energy required or green house gas emissions associated with food production needs to account for this waste , and without it, we are under-reporting the true cost of food.

We are in the midst of a sustainable food revolution. Creating supplies of food in a better, less environmentally impactful way is a key step toward greater sustainability and ultimately food security. Consumers have the right to ask for food produced in ways that are less damaging to the environment. Going beyond supply side sustainability, we need to be aware of the consumer’s responsibility in inclusively creating sustainability within the food system. A sustainable food system would be one where all produced food is distributed equitably amongst people across the globe, and enough food is produced to meet the biological needs of the global population. From where we stand now, a food system sustainability trajectory would be one that holds production constant, and decreases malnutrition, starvation and food waste. Yet when we look at World Health Organization projections, the global per capita caloric production in the 1960s was 2400 kcals per person per day (a little more than the average biological need for an adult, and yes we acknowledge the current disparity in waste and consumption patterns).Therefore, the sustainability trajectory should be to hold per capita caloric production constant and waste less food. We could even argue that a short term goal would be to increase calorie production to decrease malnutrition and starvation, assuming that some food waste will always occur. Yet that same WHO report estimates that by 2030, the global average calorie production will exceed 3,000 kcal per person per day, with developed countries producing 3500 kcal. This cannot be considered a sustainability trajectory, or even part of a sustainable food system.

To create a sustainability trajectory leading to a food secure world, we cannot rely on simply producing more food. Producing more food will merely result in new problems requiring technological fixes that we erroneously call sustainable. Instead, we need to continue to focus and the supply side sustainability by reducing the impacts of food we produce. This is critical as our collective food demands continue to soar with our global population headed to over 9 billion. Food production will increase, but this should mirror the population rise, not exceed it. Although global food systems are businesses, they can’t have unchecked growth. Unchecked production leads to waste, and that compounds our problems. But above all else, we must be more responsible consumers. It is not enough to shop with sustainability in mind. We must consume with those same goals, lest we piss away the sustainably produced food we covet so dearly.

Dr. Peter Tyedmers is the Professor & Director of the School for Resource and Environmental Studies at Dalhousie University. He is an ecological economist whose research explores questions related to the scale of human system dependence on ecosystem services and productivity. 

Dr. Michael Tlusty is the Director of Ocean Sustainability Science at the New England Aquarium. He works to improve aquaculture production and oversight to ensure ecological, economic, and social resiliency of our world's waters.

Image credit: Wilson Hui, Flickr

 

The United Nations COP21 talks in Paris are a week away, and many analysts have identified these climate change negotiations as critical in order for the world to agree on a plan to limit global warming to 2°C this century. Depending on which source one reads, anywhere from 120 to 140 world leaders will show up in Paris for this UN conference next week. There has been plenty of commentary spreading a wide variety of opinions on these talks, and therefore, many of us are left to wonder:

Just what is COP21 trying to solve, anyway?

Good question, says the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) a name and acronym that in themselves pose a head-scratcher. To that end, the UNFCCC, backed by the funding of wealthy (and lying precariously at sea level) Singapore, has issued an interactive guide that seeks to explain the big issues behind COP21—and shine light on the nature of the upcoming climate talks.

For example, the guide starts out explaining the elephant in the room, climate change, in very simple terms—followed by a narrative outlining the resulting risks in greater detail. But in addition to the “what” and the “how,” the guide presents the “who,” as in the organization from which the UN gathers its data—which in this case, is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). In sum, if your company has suddenly tasked you with a report or a Power Point on climate change or the COP21 talks, you now have a handy cheat sheet that makes these often pesky and laborious terms easy to understand in plain English. For now, however, the guide is only in English—not in the other five official languages of the UN.

In addition, the guide is a useful tool to understand terms we often see bandied about the media—as in adaptation and mitigation. And whether or not you agree with the reasoning behind climate finance, the logic behind the push to fund these efforts, as well as current mechanisms used for such projects, are also described for easy reference. Those who are more policy oriented will appreciate the section on INDCs, or intended nationally determined contributions (and therein lies the problem with climate change communications!), which are generally understood as nations’ individual climate change, emission reduction and/or clean energy “goals.”

Finally, the guide offers a detailed section covering the COP21 negotiations. Talks that had occurred in cities you may have heard discussed in the news, including Durban, Lima and of course, Kyoto, are explained, and the guide also is full of graphics that describe this messy and confusing process in a way that is easier to understand contextually.

We are all going to be bombarded by a lot of news about COP21 in the next few weeks, and the talking heads on TV will throw out all kinds of opinions. So whether you have a latent interest in these issues or are a policy wonk, this guide offers a solid launchpad from which we can better grasp these issues. It is best viewed on your laptop, however; my Andriod browser loaded it with minimal problems, but my old iPhone just gave me a blank screen.

Image credit: Leon Kaye

By Dianna Cohen, CEO, Plastic Pollution Coalition

By now, six million people and counting have viewed this disturbing viral video of a sea turtle in bloody distress as two researchers work to extract a 4-inch plastic straw stuck in his nostril.

The plastic was lodged in the turtle’s nasal cavity, reaching down into his throat, inhibiting his breathing and sense of smell—a turtle’s most important tool for finding food. There’s no telling how long the turtle was swimming around with the straw in its nose, but there’s little doubt it was affecting the turtle’s orientation and migration, and possibly even hindering his ability to find a mate.

“He might have also had trouble eating,” said Christine Figgener, a Texas A&M University PhD student and sea turtle expert, who was on the team that found the distressed creature and gave him aid. “Imagine regurgitating a hard spaghetti—for example while laughing—which ends up in your nose and gets stuck.”

Watching the video makes me reflect that, while the environmental movement—and the planet—won a major victory earlier this month when President Obama rejected the Keystone XL pipeline (another giant straw sucking dirty fossil fuels out of the ground), the oceans of disposable plastic right in front of our own noses go largely unaddressed.

When Figgener saw the turtle, she thought, “Is it a straw? Don’t tell me it’s a frickin’ straw.” You can hear her German-accented voice of exasperation and determination in the video. “We’ve been talking about the detrimental effects of straws for years, but seeing that video, as horrible as it was, is what we needed to wake people up,” Figgener said in an interview with Plastic Free Times.

The video can only make you think about the ubiquitous nature of seemingly innocuous plastic straws—just another example of our insane, fossil fuel-derived, throwaway plastic culture. Consider these facts supplied by the Plastic Pollution Coalition:

• More than 500 million disposable straws are used in the United States every day, and plastic straws are among the top items found in beach cleanups.

• Fish in the North Pacific ingest 12,000 to 24,000 tons of plastic each year, which can cause intestinal injury and death and transfers plastic up the food chain to bigger fish and marine mammals which suffer from entanglement in plastic debris, leading to injury and even death.

• Sea turtles mistake floating plastic garbage for food. While plastic bags are the most commonly ingested item, loggerhead sea turtles have been found with soft plastic, ropes, polystyrene foam, and monofilament lines in their stomachs.

• Plastic debris floating in the seawater absorbs dangerous pollutants like PCBs, DDT, BPA and PAH—highly toxic chemicals in concentrations of 100,000 to 1 million times that of surrounding waters, which cause endocrine disruption and cancerous mutations. Fish eat them and then we eat the fish.

The turtle featured in the film was a sexually mature Olive Ridley male—an endangered creature, found in waters between Playa Nancite (Santa Rosa National Park) and Playa Cabuyal, off the Pacific shore of Costa Rica. Olive Ridleys are thought to reach sexual maturity at about 12 years, and may live up to 50 years, but researchers don’t know for sure. “So our guy should have been somewhere between 12 and 50 years old,” Figgener surmised.

Natural predators are numerous, including sharks, killer whales and big fish. But the notoriously slow turtle cannot outrun a dog or a raccoon drawn to its nesting place because of someone’s trash that is strewn on the beach. Nor can it always tell a piece of plastic from a tasty crustacean in the water.

Figgener said the turtle may have ingested the straw while looking for food on the seabed. Perhaps he “gagged on it, regurgitated it and it ended up in the wrong passageway."

Without their permit for temporal removal of the turtle from its ocean habitat, Figgener said her team could have gone to jail. But after working in Costa Rica for almost a decade, they knew there was no vet around the corner, especially one specialized in reptiles. So they acted, and they filmed it.

After the incident, Figgener said the team spent the two-hour boat ride back to harbor in silence. “We had no words. We just knew we had to get the video out to the public.”

“This video had so much impact [because] it scared/shocked people out of their oblivion. But I’m a marine biologist and we stumble across plastic and fishing hooks all the time,” she said. “Sadly, at least a turtle per night has some kind of incident with ocean pollution.”

“When we find dead turtles, we dissect them and almost every single turtle has some kind of plastic. I had a turtle that had a piece of plastic sticking out when she was dropping her eggs. She’d ingested a plastic bag, and it was tangled in her intestines.”

We can each become part of the solution to plastic pollution through our simple everyday actions and by consistently and consciously refusing disposable plastic. When ordering your next lemonade, soda, iced tea or water, politely ask your waiter to “hold the straw” and “please do not put any plastic in my drink, thank you very much!”

Join the movement to refuse single-use plastic straws. Take the pledge.

 

Los Angeles-based International multi-media visual artist, painter and curator Dianna Cohen is best known for her two-dimensional and three-dimensional works using upcycled used plastic bags – sewn together – ranging from small hanging pieces to room-sized installations.

She is the CEO and Co-Founder of the Plastic Pollution Coalition, a global alliance of over 400 Organizations and Businesses working together to STOP plastic pollution and to raise awareness about the toxic impact of single-use and disposable plastics on the Ocean, the environment, animals and human health.

Cohen has shown work internationally at Galleries, Foundations and Museums.

In 2010, she gave a TED talk to share some tough truths about plastic pollution in the ocean -- and how to free ourselves from the plastic gyre in our own lives

 

Image credit Hillary Daniels, Flickr

“Think beyond your silo. In a world where everything is connected, we need to be too.” –Joel Makower at Verge 2015

What if you were in charge retrofitting the buildings in your company’s massive campus with a mission from your CEO to extend the life of those who work in those buildings by thirty years? That was the challenge in front of Drew Wenzel of Google’s Campus Design Team five years ago. Today, that challenge has resulted in a new resource aimed at making it faster, easier, and cheaper to identify non-toxic, lower-carbon-impact building materials. Quartz is a brand-new, open source database for the AEC (architecture, engineering, and construction) industry that includes health and sustainability data for more than 100 different building materials. Created by a unique collaboration between Flux, Google, HBN (Healthy Building Network) and thinkstep, Wenzel and development partners Larry Kilroy, Vivian Dien, and Heather Gaddinoix hope that free access to this data will help building designers and owners incorporate health and sustainability considerations into their building projects much earlier in the design process. For the first time, both life cycle impact and health hazard data are integrated into an open database. I had a chance to sit down with team in charge of creating Quartz in advance of Verge 2015, where the new database was announced in a press release last month in San Jose, California (October 26 – 29).

“All-hands-on-deck” approach

Wenzel, who has been in charge of retrofitting buildings on the Google campuses to meet new needs, found that way too much labor was required in order to conduct basic assessments of the environmental and health impacts of building materials (think, chemical composition of steel beams, doors, and concrete). The data he needed was in too many places, in too many disparate formats. “We were looking into the same materials over and over again, using a lot of resources and not learning a whole lot each time,” Wenzel told me. He needed a better way to get early stage information on health and environmental data to make better decisions at the conceptual stage, at order of magnitude level. A problem this complex required a new approach, one the team hopes will be replicated more often throughout the industry. “We needed an ‘all-hands-on-deck’ approach to solving these problems,” Larry Kilroy of the Healthy Buildings Network commented during our discussion. “We need health people working with technology people working with LCA [Life Cycle Analysis] people. We will get better at solving problems if we get together in non-traditional collaborations like this one.”

Transparent, brand-agnostic information

The database contains rich details on each type of material, relieving project managers of the onerous task of painstakingly mining innumerable material safety data sheets for the information they need. The data is brand-agnostic – that is, it won’t help you pick what brand to buy, but it will help you decide what kind of material your flooring should be made of and why. All data is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Here is an example a profile you will find:

What do you get when you combine a form of renewable energy with a wastewater reclamation plant? You get a very environmentally friendly process, and that process will be in Los Angeles, the second most populous city in the U.S.

Constellation, subsidiary of Exelon Corporation and Los Angeles Sanitation, recently announced they broke ground on a 25-megawatt (MW) biogas fueled cogeneration plant. It will provide 100 percent of the steam and electricity needed to power LA Sanitation’s Hyperion Water Reclamation Plant.

Cogeneration, also called combined heat and power, is defined by the EPA as the “simultaneous production of electricity and heat from a single fuel source” and biogas is one of the sources.

The cogeneration plant is expected to generate more than 173 million kilowatt-hours of electricity a year and supply up to 70,000 pounds per hour of steam. And it will do so by capturing methane from Hyperion’s sewage treatment process. The use of biogas as a power source is expected to avoid the release of about 100,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide a year, equal to the emissions from over 21,000 passenger vehicles a year. It is slated to operate at the end of 2016.

“At LA Sanitation, we are committed to protecting public health and our environment,” said LA Sanitation Director, Enrique C. Zaldivar, P.E. “Keeping our commitment means continually improving and finding innovative new ways to meet the sustainability goals that Mayor Garcetti has set for the entire city. Today's groundbreaking brings us closer to fulfilling our pledge to the people of Los Angeles."  

The Hyperion plant is Los Angeles’ oldest and largest wastewater treatment facility and has operated since 1894. Hyperion produces an average of 650 wet tons per day (wtpd) of biosolids. Until 1989, the biosolids produced at the plant were dumped into the ocean and landfills.

It is one of four treatment and water reclamation plants LA Sanitation operates, serving over four million people in two service areas of over 600 square miles. The treatment plants remove pollutants from the city’s sewage, and combined the plants produce over 80 gallons of reclaimed water a day that can be used for industrial, landscape and recreational uses. They also produce biosolids that are used as fertilizers and soil amendments for agricultural and landscape uses.

Los Angeles' plan to be a sustainable city

The cogeneration plant fits into Los Angeles Mayor Eric Mayor Garcetti’s Sustainable City pLAn. Launched in April, it is the city’s first-ever sustainability plan. It contains short-term (2017) and long-term (2025 to 2035) goals in 14 categories. Some of its goals are environmental ones such as reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 45 percent by 2025, 60 percent by 2035 and 80 percent by 2050.

One way the city plans to reduce its GHG emissions is through increasing the use of renewables. To that end, the city’s goal is for LA’s Department of Water and Power (LADWP) to get 50 percent of its electricity from renewables by 2030. Solar power will be a large part of Los Angeles' renewable portfolio, which has already “become a leader in solar,” according to the Sustainable City pLAn. That is only natural considering that the city has over 250 days of sunshine a year and enough rooftop space for over 5,500 MW of solar power.

The city already has the most amount of solar power, in terms of installed capacity of MW, of any city in the nation. And Los Angeles is also already a leader in energy storage due to the LADWP Castaic Pumped-Storage Plant that provides over 1,500 MW of energy storage. In addition, the city has the largest solar feed-in tariff program in the U.S.

There is an old political saying that as California goes, so goes the nation. The entire nation would be smart to follow the plan of California's most populous city.

Photo: Kirk Crawford