Day: October 30, 2019

Food-waste bin mandate coming to California restaurants

Read the full story from Nation’s Restaurant News.

California’s limited-service restaurants next year will be required to offer customers a separate recycling bin to toss organic waste under a new law signed by the governor earlier this month.

Restaurants across the state that generate more than four cubic yards per week of solid waste or eight cubic yards per week of organic waste are already required to separate food waste from the back of the house and arrange for recycling services. But this will be the first time the state will require bins to collect post-consumer food waste and food-soiled paper in the front of the house, alongside solid-waste recycling and trash bins.

Interactive map developed by Stanford researchers shows nature’s contributions to people

Read the full story from Stanford University’s Natural Capital Project.

Nature supports people in critical ways, often at a highly local level. Wild bees buzz through farms, pollinating vegetables as they go. Nearby, wetlands might remove chemicals from the farm’s runoff, protecting a community drinking water source. In communities all around the world, nature’s contributions are constantly flowing to people. Scientists have mapped these contributions at local levels for years, but a new Stanford-led study puts these local analyses on an interactive global map that emphasizes nature’s declining ability to protect people from water pollution, coastal storms and under-pollinated crops.

Lead pollution from Native Americans attributed to crushing galena for glitter paint

Read the full story at Phys.org.

Native American use of galena at Kincaid Mounds, a settlement occupied during the Mississippian period (1150 to 1450 CE), resulted in more than 1.5 metric tons of lead pollution deposited in a small lake near the Ohio River. New data from IUPUI researchers found the lead did not originate from this Southern Illinois settlement, but instead was brought to the site from other Midwest sources.

World scaled by number of documents published in 2017, 2007, 1997 with authors from each country

This map was produced by Juan Pablo Alperin (Simon Fraser University) and Rodrigo Costas (Centre for Science and Technology Studies) as part of a larger research collaboration to study the production and readership by countries, and over time. Data about publications by country is sourced from Scopus and population and GDP data is sourced from the World Bank. The map is powered by d3.js using cartogram.js which itself relies on this implementation of Dougenik, Chrisman, Niemeyer (1985).

A 2016 edition of this map can be found here and a 2011 version, using data from Web of Science, is availble here.

A battery technology worth its salt

Read the full story at Chemistry World.

With lithium-containing batteries facing constraints on many of the metals they contain, Nina Notman looks at whether its group 1 neighbour sodium can supply the answer

Careless citations don’t just spread scientific myths – they can make them stronger

Read the full story at Nature Index.

How misconceptions persist and proliferate within the scientific literature.

A Green New Jail

Read the full story at Longreads.

What does environmental justice look like in a landscape overrun by prisons? Where the incarcerated suffer from unusually polluted surroundings, and prisons are a toxin in their own right?

Chemical used in BPA-free plastics may play role in inflammation, obesity

Read the full story at MedicalXpress.

A compound used to reduce public exposure to possible toxic effects of the chemical Bisphenol A (BPA) may cause impairment to fat cells, which could lead to widespread inflammation and obesity. The first-of-its-kind study is published ahead of print in the American Journal of Physiology—Cell Physiology.

‘Start Listening’: Greta Thunberg Rejects Major Environmental Award

Read the full story from NPR.

Swedish environmental activist Greta Thunberg has declined a major environmental prize, saying that the “climate movement does not need any more awards.”

Graphic Packaging International creates KeelClip solution for cans

Read the full story from FoodBev Media.

Graphic Packaging International (GPI) has developed a new can packaging solution that it says offers sustainability and merchandising benefits.

Called KeelClip, the paperboard packaging works on a range of can styles and sizes, and in multiple product configurations.