Comments 2wheelsgood has made

Jobs vs. environment

This too is a false dichotomy. The answer to conservation is keep at it.  The 2 percent solution to global warming being advocated by Sierra Club involves taking steps each year to continue to reduce your consumption demand.  You've done a lot already, congratulations!  Look at closing the loop in your production process to reduce or eliminate waste generation. Reuse stuff to avoid it becoming waste. Have you eliminated disposable packaging waste in your products? Have you worked with suppliers to do the same on your raw materials? Do you use sustainable raw materials?  Is there a way to make your product with less embodied energy? When you've done that iteration for this year, offset your consumption with green tags.  Sell your product to customers and employees as sustainable and green-based.  Most of the time the answers to more progress are right under your nose, in your own employees brains. Empower them to help make more changes in the workplace to advance the effort. Your culture will be one of inspiring sustainability, and you will have no problems retaining and inspiring workers and investors.  Understand the links to sustainability and the triple bottom line in your company operations.  Quantify and report your efforts to investors, in a meaningful way.  Look at the Dow Jones Sustainability Index for more clues on how you may focus efforts.  Realize we are all on a continuum and sustainability is a goal, rarely a complete destination.
Renewable (preferably, local, distributed) energy is the only correct answer to the question being posed to Umbra.On Umbra on nuclear vs. coal posted 1 year, 10 months ago 25 Responses

Subtlety in the question

Rudmin and Brendan, don't be so hard on yourselves.

It's all in how the question is phrased.  Terms like "Eco-littering" are inherently judgemental and unproductive in the context of the question.  The origin of the fruit (domestic or foreign) may or may not have a bearing on the answer either.

Gardeners who grow their own food know how the system works.  We compost whatever we can get in our yard.  I pick up bags of leaves my neighbors have so carefully collected and put out, from up and down the street to enrich my garden soil each fall.   A few passes over it with my mulching mower and I have 2 inches of rich leaf mulch to protect my garden from winter rains.  I bring coffee grounds home from the office to keep them out of a landfill and reuse the organic material naturally scattered across my lawn.

The poster who mentioned how much natural material comes out of trees and bushes each year, is right.  One apple core is miniscule in comparison.  Nature is equipped to compost, if we can provide the material in a form she can use to our mutual advantage.

I have a reusable ziploc bag in my pack which I use to carry home my compostables (my first preference).  But I have also been known in a pinch to do the following: break the apple core into tiny pieces and scatter it or bury it under some mulch.  I feel this is okay because a.) it is no longer recognizable as human origin (litter); b.) I know it will break down quickly on the geologic timeframe, and is still far better for the planet than putting that item in a landfill forever.

We all know that "Compost Happens". I say any composting (done responsibly so as not to cause odors or attract vermin) is better than landfilling.

Think of the apples that fall in the orchards, at this time of year.  What happens to them? They rot. It is how nature works.  The orchards are not overrun with rats, people. Maybe a few bees scavenging the sugar for their nests.

Obviously the questioner had already given this much thought and deserves a far more subtle answer than Umbra provided today.  Guerilla eco-composting of food waste can be done responsibly, and need not consist of wantonly tossing a recognizable piece of garbage onto a roadside or into the nearest shrubbery. On Umbra on tossing food waste posted 2 years, 1 month ago 23 Responses