It’s the home stretch for me. I’ve sold my home on the Outer Banks of North Carolina and it’s due to close this coming Friday. Although all the big items have already been packed up and placed in storage, there was still food in the house, since I occasionally returned to the Outer Banks during the 18 months it was listed for sale. Yesterday I decided it was time to tackle the pantry and refrigerator. I sorted the food into three groups:

1. Items that I would take back to Sarasota with me, like rice and dried beans
2. Non-perishable items that were still good but that I did not want to bring to Sarasota (these were destined for the local food bank)
3. Perishable items and non-perishable items that are out-of-date and must be thrown out

When I finished sorting, I grabbed a big black plastic trash bag and began loading it up with all the stuff to be thrown away. It was an uncomplicated task that let my mind wander, and I began thinking about a video I had watched that very morning at the coffee shop. It was a feature about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, an area of the ocean twice the size of Texas that is overloaded with floating trash. Located 500 miles off the coast of California, midway between the U.S. and Japan, this ocean patch is known as the north Pacific gyre, more commonly called the horse latitudes by sailors, who avoided the area at all costs for fear of being becalmed.

This ocean realm is created by a huge mountain of air that is heated at the equator and then descends in a gentle clockwise rotation as it approaches the North Pole. The winds produce circular ocean currents that spiral into a center, carrying with it the debris of civilization, some of it having floated around the Pacific Rim for as long as 12 years before Read the rest of this entry »

I eat a lot of yogurt. I stick to organic brands, my favorite being Stonyfield Farm, and I have always wondered why their containers are made from #5 plastic, which is not recyclable, rather than #2 plastic, which IS recyclable. Recently, I decided to investigate and discovered that the issue is not as simple as I thought. Aware that the manufacturing of million of cups annually has an enormous impact on the environment, Stonyfield Farm began examining their packaging issues in the mid-80′s. Although they initially assumed hat the most important criteria was recyclability, Stonyfield discovered that it is just one of the issues that must be considered when looking at the impact of packaging on our environment.

Stonyfield compared the various packaging options available to them, using a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), a tool that determines the cradle-to-grave environmental impact of a product from its manufacture and use, through its re-use, recycling and/or disposal. After examining their options (including glass, poly-coated paper, and plastic), they chose Read the rest of this entry »

I often write about our threatened environment, much of which has been the result of our materialistic, consumption-driven society. But words can only be so descriptive; it is images that have the real power. Photographer Chris Jordan’s work is all about consumption. He has created intricately detailed prints assembled from thousands of smaller photographs, many featuring disposable packaging related to food or drink. Check out the series below, a reproduction of a famous painting by Seurat, which has been created using photos of 106,000 aluminum cans, representing the number of cans used in the U.S. every thirty seconds: Read the rest of this entry »