A great PSA print ad from Surfrider

A friend of mine shared this great PSA print ad from Surfrider today on Facebook, and I thought I'd share it here also. Well done, high impact advertisement that really gets people thinking.

Coca-cola, advocating!

I was going to a meeting today in a different part of Manila when our driver pointed out a new billboard along EDSA - one of the major (and most congested and therefore most polluted) roads in the city. It was a billboard sponsored by Coca-cola, white and green, with an outline of the iconic Coca-cola bottle. Nothing unusual there - but upon closer look, this billboard was co-sponsored by the World Wide Fund for Nature - or the World Wildlife Fund as we still know it in the US. And turns out, the green parts of the billboard were actually made with plants, not paint. Across the middle of it, read "This billboard absorbs air pollution."

Greenwashing? Sure. Interesting? Yes, also. I'm not sure it's a great piece of advocacy, since I'm not sure what action follows, but it obviously (as proven by my driver pointing it out to me) is a point of conversation for people. Getting people talking about pollution is better than not, isn't it? How many kudos does Coca-cola deserve for doing this though?

Check out a local blog entry (and pictures of the billboard) here.

The Organic Golf Course Movement

Photo: Julia Cumes for the New York Times

Well, I just don't know what to think about this. The New York Times had an article recently about America's most organic golf, located in Martha's Vineyard. Super-exclusive, and uber-expensive, the Vineyard Golf Club doesn't use any synthetic pesticides, herbicides, or fertilizers. It is content to let some weeds grow, and from the pictures it seems like the natural vegetation covers all of the out of bounds areas.

A side note: I really think the following paragraph shows how win-win-win something like this has the potential to be:

"Nothing at the Vineyard Golf Club, now in its ninth season, is left to chance. To prevent fungal disease, crews go out daily at dawn using a long, whip-like device that whisks condensation off the grass throughout the course’s 69 acres. And visitors have their shoes cleaned before they play to keep contrary grass seeds or diseases from infiltrating the fairways and greens. The club’s maintenance labor budget is higher than those of most clubs its size, but Carlson said his net costs were the same “because of the money we save on traditional pesticides, which are very expensive.”"

Better for the environment, better for employment, and in the long run, perhaps better for the budget.

On the one hand, this seems pretty dern cool - making golf courses, which are naturally huge wasters of resources and extreme polluters, more green. On the other hand - and this is the age-old question - does it matter how green you make something that is fundamentally flawed and environmentally unfriendly by its very nature? What do you all think? Does making a golf course (an inherently poor use of land) greener actually mean much in the grand scheme of things?

Trash Vortex, Part Deux

I thought I would share a recent article from the New York Times about the huge accumulation of plastic waste in the pacific.

Exfoliant DANGER - BOYCOTT

I am currently reading Alan Weisman's book "The World Without Us" that is part anthropological study and part thought experiment. Basically, Weisman takes the admittedly inconceivable premise of "what if humans disappeared, all at once, all together, tomorrow" and runs with it. Part of what he does is explore how we got to where we are, and how things would look after we disappeared - what of our "civilization" would remain, and what would not?

So, the part that has just distressed me is this. In it, he talks about the permanency of plastic. This is not news to most who follow environmental topics. Plastic is a nasty nasty substance that doesn't go away. He also quickly debunks the myth that biodegradable plastic bags are good. Apparently, they only degrade in optimum circumstances (which does not include the ocean, where many of them end up) and if they do degrade, they still leave fibers that can be dangerous for marine animals.

But, what has me MOST distressed is the fact that many cosmetic and industrial exfoliating agents are actually made with tiny plastic pebbles to scrub things away. So, we are not talking about plastic that escapes into the ocean on accident - no, we're talking about plastic that companies are putting into the products that are SUPPOSED to go into our water sources. This is a sort of mass pollution that I've not really heard of at all to this point, and really, is just criminal. There should be an uproar about this, but I've barely found any articles on it. (One of the few is this one from Slate.) We need to spread the word somehow.

Beyond that, please please please, read the ingredients labels for any cosmetics or facial wash that you buy - anything that promises to be exfoliate. If it has polyethelene or any derivative there-of, DO NOT PURCHASE IT. I would also highly suggest a complete boycott of any companies producing products with plastic beads as exfoliants. According the to researcher quoted by Weisman, a scrub like St. Ives' Apricot Scrub containing 100% natural exfoliating substances (usually made from ground seeds or grains) is fine. But many are not. Be a conscious buyer please! And SPREAD THE WORD.

A Trash Vortex?

Apparently all of our litter has decided to get together for one big party in the Pacific Ocean. Called the Pacific Trash Vortex or the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, this huge man-made "structure" on the ocean is caused by ocean currents carrying trash from our coastal waters into the deep ocean. A video from G-Word talks about how the vortex has take over ocean waters in some parts.

Don't believe me? It's on Wiki! :)

Read more at the Independent here which discusses the size and potential dangers of all that floating plastic gunk out there on the ocean.