Monthly Archives: October 2019

Although plastics have become a dirty word the reality is, we can’t live without them. So, here’s the question- how much of it do we really need? Environmentalists are urging consumers to throw out the old idea of the three R’s — reduce, reuse and recycle — and instead adopt the five R’s: refuse, reduce, reuse,

It may be easy to assume using reusable cutlery and plates would increase water consumption as well as costs. However, a recent case study demonstrated that a middle school discovered first hand this is not the case. With a grant from the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency, Minnetonka Middle Schools replaced their disposable utensils and bowls with

Businesses have traditionally exploited resources in a linear way, extracting raw materials to manufacture products for customers worldwide who then use and ultimately discard them. Today, however, critical non-renewable materials like metals, minerals and energy supplies are increasingly scarce. Also, the regenerative capacity of forests, land and oceans is under mounting pressure. As a result,

 Although water seems plentiful, droughts and shortages can happen anywhere and it’s helpful to know the difference between conservation and efficiency. Water conservation includes all of the policies, programs and practices designed to help people change their behaviours and use less water. The goal is to use only the water needed; for example, turning off

In an ideal world everything manufactured by people would automatically be either repurposed or reduced to its component parts and recycled for other uses, thereby presenting a sustainable, closed loop that wasted no resources. Being an imperfect world, unfortunately, results in our unwanted goods ending up in a landfill. Can we turn that situation around?