1. Fixing The Plastic Bottle Recycling Dilema. The latest front in the soda wars: hightech water fountains.
Longtime rivals Coca-Cola and Pepsi are dotting college campuses and workplaces across the country with machines that dispense cold, filtered water—and can add bubbles and flavors on demand. But the customers have to supply the bottles.
The soda giants are among the biggest bottled-water sellers in the country, with brands such as Dasani, Aquafina, smartwater and Lifewatr – all packaged in PET, the plastic used to make soda and water bottles. Attitudes toward plastic waste are shifting, though, so the two companies are planning for a future where single-use plastic bottles may be banned.
The new dispensers are part of broader efforts at both companies to respond to the mounting public concerns about plastic waste. PepsiCo last year bought SodaStream – a maker of countertop machines that carbonate tap water – in a $3.2 billion deal. And PepsiCo’s Drinkfinity brand sells reusable plastic bottles with capsules that add flavors to water. Coca-Cola, meanwhile, is rolling out 100% recycled plastic bottles in Western Europe and is exploring adding an aluminum option for its Dasani water brand in North America.
A wave of bans on plastic straws last year demonstrated a sharp turn in public opinion against single use plastic.
Even if lawmakers don’t ban plastic bottles, executives at both Coca Cola and PepsiCo said they are seeing consumers choose re-usable bottles over single-use plastic. Coca Cola’s Dsanti PureFill station was conceived in 2016. So far, the most popular option has been the free one: chilled, filtered water. The company has also found that many students are willing to pay a fee of 5¢ per ounce to add flavors or bubbles, or both.
The PureFill station is about the same weight as a regular vending machine. Where the company provides free beverages, the reusable bottles are Blue Sky Sciencee a great substitute. Source; Wall Street Journal
2. The Bugs We Can’t Live Without. Most of us tend to see insects largely as a nuisance—buzzing, biting, stinging pests to be avoided, shunned or even eradicated. But if you value life as we know it, you should rejoice in the omnipresence of our six-legged companions and even fear for their fate. Insects are the little cogs that make the natural world go round – and many of those cogs are in danger of coming loose.
Despite a 479-million-year track record of success going back before the time of the dinosaurs, bugs have lately begun to struggle.
Although there is no complete record of the insect population, data suggests that while we humans have doubled our population in the past 40 years, the number of insects has been reduced by almost a half, according to a 2014 report in the Journal of Science.
An April review of 73 historical report of insect declines, published in the Journal of Biological Conservation, concluded that nearly a third of evaluated insects are threatened by extinction, compared with 18% for vertebrates.
Why does this disappearance matter? Because biological diversity under pins all of the natural goods and services that we humans rely on, and insects make up an outsize proportion of that diversity.
Three quarters of all known plant and animal species on this planet are insects.
Those giant quantities help to keep nature in balance, so anything that affects them ultimately affects us. A decline in the number and diversity of insects and other small species ripples through the ecosystem., interfering with a range of essential functions.
Among the essential services that insects perform for us, and the planet, is waste management. As life ends for plants and animals of all sizes, from midges to moose, somebody or something has to break up and eliminate the dead organic material. The process of decomposition and decay are critical to life on Earth.
Herbivores eat just a tenth of all of the plants that sprout and grow. The rest, 90% of all plant production is left lying on the ground. The insects take care of the remains.
And then there’s our food supply. Insect pollination increases fruit or seed quantity in three quarters of our global food crops.It involves an estimated 20,000 different species of flies, beetles, ants, wasps, butterflies and other insects . The annual contribution of the pollinating insects is estimated to be worth as much as $577 billion, according to a 2016 study by a United Nations Study reveals.
Keep in mind, we can achieve a lot by belts of trees, leaving streams, roadsides, hedges and wildflower meadows to grow, allowing a high biological diversity for insects to prevail. Source: Wall Street Journal
3. Renewable Energy Can Be A Life Saver. The country could be fueled by alternative energy. In Arizona, These is adequate sunshine and in portions of the state, adequate wind.
In 1916, wind and solar generated about 8% of electricity; now, it is about10.5%.
One 2016 study by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration research laboratory concluded that by 2030, the U.S. could cut its carbon-dioxide emissions by 80%, using only existing technologies and cost.
4. Climate Change.
May Precipitation and Temperature: May precipitation was mostly above average to record wettest in Arizona, ranged from below average to much above average but most of the state was average or above-average.
May temperatures were below average or much below average across most of the Southwest.
Seasonal Precipitation and Temperature: Spring precipitation (Mar-Apr-May) was average to above average across most of Arizona. Temperatures for the same period were mostly average in Arizona.
Drought: Water year precipitation highlights the wet conditions since Oct. 1, which have led to above normal (top 33%) for a vast majority of the Southwest, along with much above normal (top 10%) and smaller pockets of record wettest in Utah, Nevada, and Colorado.
The Jun. 11 U.S. Drought Monitor (USDM) continues to show
improvements in regional drought conditions in the Southwest with
Arizona nearly clear of drought designations, and the intensity of drought
characterizations in the four corners region and northern New Mexico further reduced compared to last month.
Wildfire.
Wildfire outlooks for July identify above normal fire risk in lower elevation regions, linked to widespread fine fuel growth driven by above-average precipitation across the cool season.
Arizona Reservoirs
For the end of May
5. Over 2,000 Questionable Additives Are Lurking in Packaged Food. Organic Foods, However, Only Allow 40 Tested Chemicals.
The Food and Drug Administration has the power to review any substance in the food supply to determine its safety. But many food additives have found their way into chicken nuggets and ice cream due to an exemption originally passed in 1958 and updated in 2016. The Generally Recognized As Safe (GRAS) amendment allows food companies to add common ingredients to their products that are commonly known or generally believed to be safe, such as vinegar, without those products undergoing extensive testing by the FDA.
In recent decades, however, that GRAS exemption has gone well beyond a little vinegar. A manufacturer can self-affirm if something is GRAS, performing all the safety tests and analysis to determine whether an additive is safe or not. Or it can file a voluntary GRAS notification with the FDA, which will look over the data and decide whether to add a substance to its GRAS list. The ability for the food industry to determine the safety of its own additives has led to a proliferation of ingredients in food that consumers, and scientists, don’t completely understand.
That doesn’t mean all of the additives identified by the new report are harmful. “Consumers are increasingly interested in knowing where their food comes from, what’s in their food, and what these food additives are that they can’t pronounce,” says Dawn Undurraga, a nutritionist with the EWG. “When they came up with the GRAS alternative to the food petition process, that was supposed to be for things people knew or understood to be safe, like vinegar, milk, flour, and baking soda. Not for sodium carboxymethyl cellulose and butylated hydroxymethyl—these things that have only recently been discovered in the laboratory. We don’t know what the longterm impacts are. And even the science we do have raises questions.”
The report highlights several additives that passed the GRAS test and are currently in the food supply that raise red flags. Butylated Hydroxyanisole (BHA), a preservative found in frozen pizza and processed meats, is listed as a carcinogen by the state of California and is classed as a potential endocrine disruptor by the European Union. Butylated Hydroxytoluene (BHT), a derivative of tar and petroleum found in many cereals, causes lung tumors in animals. Sodium nitrate, a preservative in processed meats, has been associated with elevated cancer risks and cardiovascular problems.
Currently, it’s difficult to point to these specific GRAS additives—not to mention the 2,700 “flavor” chemicals approved by the Flavor and Extract Manufacturers Association—and say which consumers should avoid and which may be OK, since the independent analysis has not been done.
