NO MORE PLASTICS?

Can any of us really admit to having a life without plastics?
Is is even possible be be plastic free?
What are some of the best resources for living a plastic free existance?

Plastic bird deaths.. a photo series called Midway by Chris Jordan
http://www.chrisjordan.com/


A great quote about reducing plastics in our lives from the Fake Plastic Fish blog "... I didn't try to eliminate all plastics at once, and I would never recommend anyone else do it that way either. It's the road to burnout." 
http://fakeplasticfish.com/

More online resources to check out:
http://lifewithoutplastic.com/
http://www.newdream.org/water/
http://freecycle.org/search
http://zenhabits.net/2009/05/55-ways-to-get-more-energy/

Top 10 plastic reducing actions:
1. Avoid the worst plastics: Polyvinyl Chloride (#3 PVC), Polystyrene (#6 PS), Polycarbonate (#7 Other).  Good luck!
2. Carry reusable grocery bags. ChicoBag.com
3. Give up bottled water.  Klean Kanteens
4. Say no to plastic shopping bags.  Chicobag.com
5. Return the green plastic tomato baskets to the farmer’s market. They will love you.
6. Carry a stainless steel travel mug at all times for most drinks while out in the world.  Rei.com
7. Buy from bulk bins as much as possible. Bring your old plastic bags even!
8. Cut out sodas, juices, and all other plastic-bottled beverages. Buy Glass or Aluminum! 
9. Buy fresh artisanal bread which comes in either paper bags or no bags.  Yeah no bag!
10. Carry reusable personal utensils, stainless containers and glass drinking straws.  Bamboo even at Togoware.com     
More than the top ten are listed here: http://fakeplasticfish.com/list/ 

Great body products in compostable, not recyclable plastics: http://www.organic-essence.com/

So enjoy the new found advice and good luck in reducing your plastic footprint on the world.  Know is half the battle as G.I. Joe would always say.

My Sustainable MBA with Presidio!

In the Fall of 2010, Jared Brick (author) will begin his formal business career schooling with the new Presidio Graduate School with an MBA in Sustainable Management based in San Francisco, California.  This two year full time program is a newly concentrated area of study benefiting all types of private/public business ventures, civic government bold entrepreneurship and sustainable management.  It is my belief that the only business that will thrive in this new economy and even purely survive, will have dominant sustainable practices.

"Presidio is producing a new kind of leader in every area—from business management to public policy, from social entrepreneurship to global governance—with the courage and competence to manage, influence, develop, teach, and create."

Here is more about the Presidio Graduate School Sustainable MBA program:

"Presidio prepares MBA students to be skilled managers who are competitive and relevant in any field. Every business professional is challenged in today's marketplace to lead and manage successful organizations while understanding complex and interdependent issues such as greenhouse-gas emissions reduction, transportation planning, green building and procurement, waste management, and energy and water conservation. Navigating these challenges requires applying a new lens to traditional management practices.

Our degree in business administration connects rigorous management theory and practice with social responsibility, ecological awareness, systems thinking, and leadership within an integrated framework of sustainable management. As a unifying concept, sustainability weaves the core elements of the program together in ways that help students make connections, promote innovation, and create transformative solutions in service of a more sustainable future."

Please click Presidio Graduate School for an overview on their offerings altering the business world. 

10 Things the USA does NOT recycle well!

10 Things You Might Not Know About Recycling In The U.S.

0 comments Posted Thursday, January 28 2010, 06:00 AM | by Kieran K


http://www.greenwala.com/community/blogs/all/4429

Avatar Green Lessons for us all?

So you finally saw the much anticipated and popular Avatar movie, hopefully in 3D! If like many of you, you felt envious of their pretty much perfect bond with their planet... then we learned something right?

Pandora was an amazing world to experience and thanks to James Cameron we were shown a variety of cultures including Native American, African, Mayan, Maoris as a blending of indigenous tribes of the Earth in the blue coloration of the Na'Vi. Even the chief of the village was a famous Native American actor (Wes Studi) in all the great Indian films.

What the film lacked in original storyline it made up for in visual effects, creative landscapes and a wonderous connection to their vivid intense home planet. Earthlings have come so far from their world that even the jungles scare them, as I can attest to living now in the jungles of Maui.

What have you taken away and learned from this new environmental film?
How has it changed your perception of your connection to your own planet?
Who is our Eywa?

SF's 529 acres of underutilized city into a network of green spaces.

What if SF could create green spaces with all it's underutilized areas of development...?

As we have reported, Berkeley Professor Nicholas de Monchaux's Local Code proposal for activating San Francisco's "Unaccepted Streets" called for transforming the patchwork of 529 acres of underutilized alleys, street-ends, and pathways into a network of green spaces. Were San Francisco to build out the more than 1500 identified sites, de Monchaux estimates that the city would save $4.8 million in air pollution mitigation, $6.9 million in energy savings, and a staggering $1 billion in stormwater infrastructure.

From the proposal:

The final outcome of our proposal is a pedestrian network of places, and a virtual network of spaces as well. A focused web threaded through real and virtual fabric; our systematic interventions turn away from the idea of urban infrastructure driven by cars and highways to a more robust, and perhaps natural, notion of urbanity. Instead of the old metaphors of lungs and circulation, we propose a robust, networked logic of health and social welfare, a distributed immune system for the 21st-century metropolis.

While the project didn't win UCLA's WPA 2.0 design competition, Professor de Monchaux and the five other WPA 2.0 finalists were afforded an audience in late November with President Barack Obama's Director of the Office of Urban Affairs Adolfo Carrion and HUD Deputy Secretary Ron Sims, who both apparently showed great interest.

"My goal now is to initiate some of those conversations with local agencies," said de Monchaux. "I think a very interesting next step would be to implement some of the designs locally, create a community based laboratory to see how these designs would perform."

http://sf.streetsblog.org/2009/12/15/quantifying-the-value-of-san-franciscos-unaccepted-streets/

HUMANS- The next Endangered Species!

Are we the next species to be on the endangered species list... experts are starting to say yes! Yet our population is not dwidling, it may near 9 Billion in 20-30 years at this rate.

So maybe we should be regarded as a pest or virus and the earth is our host-carrier. The carrier is getting sick and may expel us from it's back soon, 2012 perhaps? Would it wake folks up to know that we are killing species at a rate of 1000 times the norm?

Should we be having more kids?
Who should be born, 1st world consumers or 3rd world developing nation poverty strains?
Does China have the right idea controlling the birth rate?

Are there too many people on the earth now...
http://planetgreen.discovery.com/videos/focus-earth-too-many-people.html