Category Archives: Environment

Turn Old Cell Phones Into Trees

Posted on by
1

What if instead of throwing old cell phones into the trash those phones could be turned into trees?

From a friend:

Plant My Phone is a new company designed to reduce the very large number of old cell phones that end up in landfills. The idea is both simple and potentially far-reaching. You send them your old, unwanted cell phone for free using their postage-paid self-mailer bags. The free postage-paid plastic bags are available in cities like Chicago, San Francisco, Medford, MA, Corvallis, and New Orleans. If you don’t live in these cities, you can print a free shipping label from their website, or request a free self-mailer bag to be sent to you. Then mail in your old phone.

Their site says mailing in an average two-year old phone will result in the planting of fifteen trees. A first generation Apple iPhone in good condition equates to the planting of 79 trees, and a Nokia80 equals about 30, (depending on the condition). You can look at the phone to trees conversion table to see if your phone is there.

The mailed phones are recycled, and their materials are sold to fund tree planting. They say focusing on cell phone recycling is important because, “…of the 140 Million old cellphones each year, only 10% get recycled.” Cell phones contain heavy metals which are toxic to the environment.

The types of trees planted are: Cocoa, Coffee, Banana, Orange, Cedar, Teak, Mahogany, Oak, Acacia, Eucalyptus, Laurel and Leucaena. Their trees are planted in twelve countries: Belize, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Cameroon, Ethiopia, Burundi, Senegal, Zambia, India, Philippines and Haiti.

PlantMyPhone has a goal of planting seven billion trees. They are an official partner of the United Nations Environment Programme’s: Plant for the Planet: Billion Tree Campaign.

“The Myth of Sustainable Meat”

Posted on by
Reply

Dr. James E. McWilliams is the author of “Just Food: Where Locavores Get It Wrong and How We Can Truly Eat Responsibly.” The following quotes are from an op-ed piece he published in The New York Times on 2012 April 12.

 

For all the strengths of these alternatives, however, they’re ultimately a poor substitute for industrial production. Although these smaller systems appear to be environmentally sustainable, considerable evidence suggests otherwise.

Grass-grazing cows emit considerably more methane than grain-fed cows. Pastured organic chickens have a 20 percent greater impact on global warming. It requires 2 to 20 acres to raise a cow on grass. If we raised all the cows in the United States on grass (all 100 million of them), cattle would require (using the figure of 10 acres per cow) almost half the country’s land (and this figure excludes space needed for pastured chicken and pigs). A tract of land just larger than France has been carved out of the Brazilian rain forest and turned over to grazing cattle. Nothing about this is sustainable.

snip ….

The economics of alternative animal systems are similarly problematic. Subsidies notwithstanding, the unfortunate reality of commodifying animals is that confinement pays. If the production of meat and dairy was somehow decentralized into small free-range operations, common economic sense suggests that it wouldn’t last.

Full article.

Eat A PB&J Sandwich, Save The World

Posted on by
Reply

If you make just *ONE* meal out of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich you would reduce your environmental impact by about 2.5 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions.   That is 40% of the C02 reduction you would get by driving a hybrid car for a day. If you have this lunch just once a week for about a month you will save more water than if you installed a low-flow showerhead. This weekly habit would save about 24 square feet of arable land from being destroyed by agricultural pollution and deforestation.   All of that accomplishment from just one single plant based lunch, once a week.

You can read more about it at the The PB&J Campaign.