Keeping It Green At MidWeek
Del.icio.usMidWeek reader Adam Kahualulani Mick e-mailed me with a good question. A gardener, he wanted to use old issues as mulch in his vegetable garden, but was worried that MidWeek might be printed with a petroleum-based ink. Absolutely not. Since well before I became editor we’ve used exclusively soy-based inks. Same is true of the Star-Bulletin, which is also printed at our Kaneohe plant ...
Like Adam, you might like to know that we also have an aggressive paper recycling program, from unused/old newspapers to phone books, as well as turning the thousands of faxed pages that arrive here into pads of scratch paper ...
And kudos to Foodland, Times, Star, Longs and other merchants who now offer customers reusable grocery bags. As a bonus, they give you anywhere from three to five cents back for each bag you bring to carry home your purchases ...
Safeway also offers plastic bag recycling bins outside its stores. How many plastic bags do we really need in our landfills? And according to the Sierra Club, when one ton of plastic bags is reused or recycled, the energy equivalent of 11 barrels of oil is saved….
And more kudos: Turtle Bay is now offering golfers tees that, if left in the ground, are biodegradeable ...
Speaking of eco issues: Roy Chang’s recent cartoon about the effects of global warming - showing TheBoat making stops at downtown Honolulu street corners - made me recall that Queen Street was once on the Honolulu Harbor waterfront, as seen in a 1906 Army Corps of Engineers map. Hopefully it will not become oceanfront again ...
And speaking of global warming: The organization that received the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize awarded earlier this month, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), is chaired by an East-West Center alumnus, Dr. Rajendra Pachauri. The award, shared with former Vice President Al Gore, was for “efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change.” At the East-West Center, he was involved with a number of environmental and energy projects during the 1980s, and is a great example of the wonderful and too-often unsung work that happens at the EWC ...
Full disclosure: I am rather partial to the EWC, especially after receiving a fellowship there two years ago for travel in Korea ...
Best analogy I’ve heard for why our planet is obviously heating up: Yes, we do seem to be in the early phases of a natural cycle in which the Earth’s temperatures are rising, but human activities that include deforestation and air pollution from PCBs and burning fossil fuels just multiply the effect - it’s as if we’re in a car heading toward a cliff and we’ve responded by stomping on the accelerator ...
Changing subjects: Walking through my Kaneohe neighborhood the other day, I noted that neighbors who have a variety of chew toys in the yard for their dogs have added a small football inscribed with the name of Michael Vick. A Standing O! ...
But who’s counting: Hard to believe, but last week I celebrated 28 years of writing columns in Hawaii, and next week celebrate 13 years as editor of MidWeek. Time flies when you’re having fun and working with great people ...
Our crazy language: Why don’t the first syllables of these two words rhyme? Pleasure and please ...
Just ran across a quote from humorist Malcolm Kushner: “There are three ways to get something done: Do it yourself, hire someone to do it for you, or forbid your kids to do it.”
True story ...
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