We’ve discussed the giant flood of coal ash and sludge that flooded towns and rivers when their containment pond burst forth last December.  

I was recently browsing the National Resource Defense Council’s OnEarth website and came across video coverage of activists/researchers visiting the area in the aftermath to collect samples.

It’s a sad video and (spoiler!) near the end, the researchers/activists are escorted off of public waters by Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) authorities, on land, by boat, and perhaps even the helicopter overhead belonged to the TVA.

Did you ever hear one word about it from a mainstream media outlet?  The coverage was a far cry from proportionate to the magnitude of the disaster.  Very little has been said and continuing coverage has been scant at best.  That’s right: what continuing coverage?

One of the worst environmental disasters since the Exxon-Valdez Oil Spill and we aren’t hearing about it one bit.  I had to hear about it from The Nation, but most of us aren’t reading that.  The Exxon-Valdez spilled it’s load in 1989, when I was in Kindergarten, but I still remember wall-to-wall coverage in our media and can still hear Dan Rather covering the story.  

Your detergent doesn't have to be sickly blue like this one! Make the switch to something more natural!

Green Life Project is a weekly series of posts highlighting one change for readers to make in their life in order to gradually green their lives.

||Week Nine||

This week’s Green Life Project action item is to purchase a green laundry detergent.

Green Life Project is into full swing and if you’re following along, I hope that you’re implementing these changes on a week-by-week basis, taking advantage of a gradual process our articles are meant to guide you through toward a more sustainable life.

And we’re focusing mostly on very simple choices you can make — many of them done at the grocery store, where it’s an easy difference in decision.

What’s next up for us?  Well, we’ve concentrated so far mostly on consuming less, consuming smarter, and making less waste.  So for example, using a metal water bottle will cut down on the amount of waste you produce (or that produced on your behalf) and using recycled paper toilet paper helps reduce the number of trees that get cut down, processed, and used for your dirty deeds.

Similar to when we recommended a switch to a greener dish soap, now we’re recommending that you change to a more sustainable laundry detergent.  The guidelines for choosing a greener laundry detergent are similar to those we used for a more sustainable dish soap.  Back then, I had this to say:

In an effort to further green their business (and image), Google is now mowing the grass around their office property with, that’s right, goats!

According to their blog, for about the same price as their lawnmowing service, they now have a herd of about 200 goats graze for a week at a time courtesy of California Grazing.  Not only do they trim all the grass but fertilize it too, yeah, exactly how you’d think!

I have mentioned The Huffington Post’s Green News and Opinion Page when I recommended you begin following a green blog or two in the Green Life Project.

I follow this page pretty much everyday. Rarely do I not visit to hear what their broad array of writers has to say. At the very least, I usually leave having read or learned something new.

So as we finished up, “Earth Month,” (yes, whatever that means), I actually started feeling a little down on the Huffington Post’s Green Page. Why?

I don’t know. It could have been one too many posts about Michele Obama’s Garden (not that I don’t love that the Obamas are gardening outside of the White House). It only lasted a day, but the page seemed stale at about the middle of this past week. Admittedly, I visit back too often and really, they do a great job all the time.

Regardless, their page actually seemed to follow this “down period” with some grade A awesome content. Because I can’t write a full response to each of these but wanted our readers to see these gems, I’ll link to some of their articles here:

Joseph Romm: The Green FDR: Obama’s First 100 Days Make — And May Remake — History

Check out this awesome oil industry ad spoof!

Update: Exxon Mobil responds and AVAAZ speaks out

Our tax policies should be brought into line with our priorities regarding the environment.

How many of us receive our paycheck stub and complain about the large amount of money taken out or at least lament the amount of money the government takes out?  Sure, we’re working and working hard, but the more we work, which is usually deemed a positive contribution to society, the more we pay in taxes.  Positive activity leads to a negative reaction?  What gives?

Yes, we pay taxes on our income and can expect for that to continue.  But how many negative aspects of our society could be discouraged with taxes?  That is to say that we could implement a negative reaction to negative activities.  And what’s stopping us, if not the lobbyists who have the ears of those in Washington?  

The premise comes down to this: if something taxes the environment and public health, we should be taxing that activity.  

Stated more simply: you should have to pay dearly to pollute the earth upon which we are all dependant.  

And we should start with the biggest corporations!

What’s Stopping Us?

This rose is red. But it can also be green!

A couple of weeks ago, I bought a rose bush.  And yesterday, I planted it.  Friday was Arbor Day, and I wanted to plant something that is tree-like at the very least.

I rent my apartment and planting a tree is not an option.

But the rose bush?  My landlord wouldn’t mind if I asked him and won’t notice it anyway (I didn’t ask).  You might want to ask, depending upon your landlord if you rent and before you dig, check that you won’t hit any cables with your shovel by calling the right people (your power company may be the best place to start).

But there’s more to my reasoning for planting a rose bush.

Why?  And how is this, “green”?  Why would I recommend it to you?  Let’s take a look!

Yes, even your crayons can be recycled!

Green Life Project is a weekly series of posts highlighting one change for readers to make in their lives in order to gradually green their lives.

||Week Eight||

This week’s green life project action item is to find one or more odd item you normally throw into the garbage and begin recycling it.

You’re reading about helping to improve your envirohuman impact and I suspect that you already recycle some things.  Most likely, you recycle such items as glass, metal cans, paper and cardboard, and plastic.  If you are not already doing that, please join in because those tend to be the simple ones!

We’re not going to concentrate on the simple stuff that you can recycle in this article.  Rather, let’s take a look at some of the small pieces of trash in your life that you could be recycling but maybe didn’t know that you could.  

We create mounds of plastic, metal, paper, and plastic waste (okay, so, “mounds,” is an understatement) but there are so many other sundry items your everyday recycler may not accept but that you could be giving a second life to by sending to a special recycler.

Ok, so I wanted an excuse to post a video of robotic penguins swimming and flying (below) through the air. The video was just too cool, but hear me out!

Festo, the company behind the robotic swimming and flying penguins, has recently unveiled their newest engineering marvel as part of the Bionic Learning Network. What really got me thinking was the BLN mission statement:

Maximum performance with minimum energy consumption: Nature shows the way to energy-efficient movement processes in tomorrow’s production and provides impulses for astounding new practical applications.

The key is in the first line:

The Associated Press reports that pharmaceutical manufacturers dump different chemicals into our water resources, untreated, for myriad reasons, sometimes expired product and at times simply from cleaning their manufacturing equipment.

From the story:

U.S. manufacturers, including major drugmakers, have legally released at least 271 million pounds of pharmaceuticals into waterways that often provide drinking water — contamination the federal government has consistently overlooked, according to an Associated Press investigation.

Hundreds of active pharmaceutical ingredients are used in a variety of manufacturing, including drugmaking: For example, lithium is used to make ceramics and treat bipolar disorder; nitroglycerin is a heart drug and also used in explosives; copper shows up in everything from pipes to contraceptives.

Federal and industry officials say they don’t know the extent to which pharmaceuticals are released by U.S. manufacturers because no one tracks them — as drugs. But a close analysis of 20 years of federal records found that, in fact, the government unintentionally keeps data on a few, allowing a glimpse of the pharmaceuticals coming from factories.

The story states that the 271 million pounds they can account for is a massive undercount from what is actually released.  Last September, we picked up a separate but similar Associated Press story that discussed largescale dumping by hospitals of hundreds of millions of pounds of drugs.  But now, it turns out that the manufacturers themselves are also to blame.