Read the full story in National Geographic Magazine.
The entire planet is urbanizing, and every city is different. So ultimately we need data from, well, everywhere. That’s why we’ve been taking lessons we learned in Chicago through the Urban Wildlife Institute at Lincoln Park Zoo and exporting them around the country. We’re creating, for the first time, a worldwide network for urban wildlife research: the Urban Wildlife Information Network (UWIN).
Read the full story at GreenBiz.
Some of the world’s most iconic hotels are to trial new approaches to tackling food waste, as part of a major new initiative launched today by WWF, the Rockefeller Foundation and the American Hotel and Lodging Association (AHLA).
Hilton, Hyatt, InterContinental Hotels, and Marriott International are among the high-profile brands to sign up to the 12-week pilot program, which aims to test a range of different technological and behavior change approaches to curbing food waste levels.
The program is part of the Rockefeller Foundation’s YieldWise Initiative, which aims to reduce post-harvest food loss and halve the world’s food waste by 2030. According to the group, currently around 40 percent of U.S. food waste occurs throughout the supply chain, with the hospitality and food services industry being a prime culprit.
Read the full story in the Washington Post.
President Trump proposed to slash the Environmental Protection Agency ’s budget by 31 percent, the biggest cut of any federal agency, in addition to eliminating a fifth of its workforce. Efforts to clean up the Chesapeake Bay and the Great Lakes are among the more than 50 programs that would be eliminated.
Read the full story in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune.
Researchers at the University of Minnesota reported recently that they have developed a way to use one of the most common of all cleaning tools to remove one of the most toxic and widespread pollutants from contaminated water. Their breakthrough: They permeate the sponge with the natural element selenium by growing it inside from the atom level on up. Soak the sponge in contaminated water, the mercury binds with the selenium, and the water is essentially purified.
Read the full story in the Washington Post.
President Trump will take the most significant step yet in obliterating his predecessor’s environmental record Tuesday, instructing federal regulators to rewrite key rules curbing U.S. carbon emissions.
The sweeping executive order also seeks to lift a moratorium on federal coal leasing and remove the requirement that federal officials consider the impact of climate change when making decisions.
Read the full story in Pacific Standard.
A recent Monsanto lawsuit opens a scary window into the industry of junk science.
Read the full story in Pacific Standard.
The Trump administration is targeting the Clean Power Plan in the name of jobs, but environmental regulations are not to blame for the demise of the coal industry.
Read the full story in Pacific Standard.
White House officials call for fewer rules for power plants, and more rules for federal environmental science.
Read the full story at Thrillist.
In the world’s outcry over waste — paper, plastics, fumes, foods — your hotel soap ain’t exactly a crisis. Still, everyone has wondered at least once: Where do all those once-used bars go? Not to the next guest, for sure. Heck, to be a five diamond property, a hotel’s staff must replace your soap daily, even if it wasn’t touched. That amounts to a lot of fine-smelling garbage: Travelers and hotels combine to toss out roughly a million bars a day in the US and perhaps 5 million bars a day worldwide.
But it’s not all waste. If you’re staying at certain hotels, your hair-streaked, Italian-milled body bar might be going toward fighting diseases around the world. An Orlando-based company called Clean the World has taken to collecting used hotel soap, melting it down, and making new soap to send to impoverished countries. They’re saving landfill space locally, and perhaps saving lives globally.
Read the full story in the Huffington Post.
Dozens of California communities have experienced recent rates of childhood lead poisoning that surpass those of Flint, Michigan, with one Fresno locale showing rates nearly three times higher, blood testing data obtained by Reuters shows.
The data shows how lead poisoning affects even a state known for its environmental advocacy, with high rates of childhood exposure found in a swath of the Bay Area and downtown Los Angeles. And the figures show that, despite national strides in eliminating lead-based products, hazards remain in areas far from the Rust Belt or East Coast regions filled with old housing and legacy industry.
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