GreeniacsArticles
Food and Beverage
SEARCH GREENIACS.COM
Latest News
- Emissions cut hiatus slows work to limit warming
- Green Blog: On Our Radar: Group of 8 Affirms Climate Change Efforts
- Tropical Storm Alberto turns away from shore
- Boca Sanibeni Journal: Dam Project Would Displace Villages in Jungle Valley of Peru
- Green Blog: N.R.C. Chairman Is Resigning
- Indonesia peatland back on protected list in test case
Green Facts
-
In California homes, about 10% of energy usage is related to TVs, DVRs, cable and satellite boxes, and DVD players.
-
You will save 100 pounds of carbon for each incandescent bulb that you replace with a compact fluorescent bulb (CFL), over the life of the bulb.
-
If every U.S. household turned the thermostat down by 10 degrees for seven hours each night during the cold months, and seven hours each weekday, it would prevent nearly gas emissions.
-
A single quart of motor oil, if disposed of improperly, can contaminate up to 2,000,000 gallons of fresh water.
-
Recycling for one year at Stanford University saved the equivalent of 33,913 trees and the need for 636 tons of iron ore, coal, and limestone.
-
Glass can be recycled over and over again without ever wearing down.
-
A laptop consumes five times less electricity than a desktop computer.
-
It takes 6,000,000 trees to make 1 year's worth of tissues for the world.
-
The World Health Organization estimates that 2 million people die prematurely worldwide every year due to air pollution.
-
In the United States, automobiles produce over 20 percent of total carbon emissions. Walk or bike and you'll save one pound of carbon for every mile you travel.
-
An aluminum can that is thrown away instead of recycled will still be a can 500 years from now!
-
States with bottle deposit laws have 35-40% less litter by volume.
-
Every week about 20 species of plants and animals become extinct.
-
Refrigerators built in 1975 used 4 times more energy than current models.
-
77% of people who commute to work by car drive alone.
-
82 percent of greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S. come from burning fossil fuels.
-
Nudge your thermostat up two degrees in the summer and down two degrees in the winter to prevent 2,000 pounds of carbon dioxide from entering the atmosphere.
-
A steel mill using recycled scrap reduces related water pollution, air pollution, and mining wastes by about 70%.
-
Recycling 1 million laptop computers can save the amount of energy used by 3,657 homes in the U.S. over the course of a year.
-
Turning off the tap when brushing your teeth can save as much as 10 gallons a day per person.
-
Recycling 100 million cell phones can save enough energy to power 18,500 homes in the U.S. for a year.
-
You will save 300 pounds of carbon dioxide for every 10,000 miles you drive if you always keep your car’s tires fully inflated.
-
Plastic bags and other plastic garbage thrown into the ocean kill as many as 1,000,000 sea creatures every year.
-
Current sea ice levels are at least 47% lower than they were in 1979.
-
Americans throw away more than 120 million cell phones each year, which contribute 60,000 tons of waste to landfills annually.
-
Less than 1% of electricity in the United States is generated from solar power.
-
One recycled aluminum can will save enough energy to run a 100-watt bulb for 20 hours, a computer for 3 hours, or a TV for 2 hours.
-
A tree that provides a home with shade from the sun can reduce the energy required to run the air conditioner and save an additional 200 to 2,000 pounds of carbon over its lifetime.
-
For every 38,000 bills consumers pay online instead of by mail, 5,058 pounds of greenhouse gases are avoided and two tons of trees are preserved.
-
American workers spend an average of 47 hours per year commuting through rush hour traffic. This adds up to 23 billion gallons of gas wasted in traffic each year.
-
Rainforests are being cut down at the rate of 100 acres per minute.
-
Due to tiger poaching, habitat destruction, and other human-tiger conflicts, tigers now number around 3,200—a decrease in population by about 70% from 100 years ago.
-
Washing your clothes in cold or warm instead of hot water saves 500 pounds of carbon dioxide a year, and drying your clothes on a clothesline six months out of the year would save another 700 pounds.
-
Recycling aluminum saves 95% of the energy used to make the material from scratch.
-
Americans throw away enough aluminum to rebuild our entire commercial fleet of airplanes every 3 months
-
Shaving 10 miles off of your weekly driving pattern can eliminate about 500 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions a year.
-
You’ll save two pounds of carbon for every 20 glass bottles that you recycle.
-
Bamboo absorbs 35% more carbon dioxide than equivalent stands of trees.
-
Americans use 100 million tin and steel cans every day.


You may not have heard of atrazine, but chances are it has been used as an herbicide—weed-killer—to help grow the food you eat. Atrazine is currently the second largest selling pesticide in the world. It is used primarily on corn in the United States, but it is also used to help...

Soy is a plant native to Southeast Asia and, perhaps surprisingly, is a member of the pea family, Fabaceae. The soy plant can grow from one to five-feet tall and grows in clusters of pods. Through fermentation techniques, soy can be made into other forms that you may encounter in restaurants more often, such as tempeh, miso, tofu, and of course...
They're yellow, sweet, seedless, always about the same shape and size. We love them in our breakfast cereals, our yogurts, our breads, and just on their own as an easy on-the-go snack. They're nutritious, filled with good potassium. But are bananas environmentally friendly? Who grows them, and how? Why is it that they're always about...
The Solution to World Hunger… Insects? After a marathon weekend watching the travel channel’s program, Bizarre Foods, where Andrew Zimmern travels the world to sample the cuisines from different countries and cultures, I found myself thinking that insects could be the solution to world hunger. Some of what Zimmern samples are pretty standard...
Chocolate is indulgence, youth, love, and happiness—except when it contributes to deforestation and child labor! Make a change and this Valentine's Day, get your sweetheart a chocolate treat that spreads your love all the way to the cocoa seeds of Africa. Chocolate’s Origins: Chocolate comes from the seeds of the Theobroma cacao tree, which means...
Caffeine is the world’s most popular psychoactive drug. Scientists even speculate that plants use caffeine to paralyze pests. Nonetheless, every person in the world drinks an average of one caffeinated beverage per day! We have consumed caffeinated plants since the Stone Age, though the caffeine molecule wasn’t isolated and named until...
Are you familiar with the new food lingo? There’s organic and slow food, pastured and GMO-free. There are locavores and omnivores, CSA members and foodies. And they’re all part of a global movement that’s reevaluating the relationships between us, our food, and our environment...
Who wants some eggs?! The answer is: a lot of us…on average, each American eats about 250 eggs a year. There are around 340 million egg-laying chickens in the United States and 5 billion worldwide.3 That’s almost equal to the number of human beings!
Why so many eggs? Because the egg really is incredible. We figured that out about 10,000...
LEED Certified Winery Set to Open at U.C. Davis… One of the best Viticulture and Enology programs in the country lies on the University of California at Davis campus, also known as U.C. Davis. For those of you who don’t know, the terms viticulture and enology are simply scientific words meaning: the study of making wine. The school’s...
Vegetarianism Goes Mainstream! The vegetarian diet has been around for thousands of years and consumed across many different cultures. Plato, Leonardo da Vinci, Henry David Thoreau, Mahatma Gandhi, and Albert Einstein are just a few noted famous vegetarians of the past. Einstein was even quoted to believe, “Nothing will benefit human...
For all of us residing between ten degrees North and Alaska, August marks the opening of the floodgates for farmers large and small. Festoons of tomatoes, basil, eggplant, peppers, peaches, and plums are being picked every day from immense fields and orchards to tiny little rooftop gardens in bustling metropolises. For those of us who...
How do we decide what food to eat? From PROCESSED FOOD, food made cheaper with PESTICIDES and ANTIBIOTICS, to LOCAL, ORGANIC and higher quality food, Americans choose how they eat based on their economic situation, knowledge of nutrition, and accessibility. The short film, Montana Fare, by Jaime Jelenchick, is a documentary about...
If you have ever seen a doctor for a cold or any other bacterial infection, it is almost certain you were prescribed a form of antibiotics to fight off the sickness. For this, antibiotics are miraculous, and one couldn't begin to count the lives they have saved and the amount of suffering relieved. On the downside, for several decades, humans...
Farming grows up… The sky is the limit, especially when it comes to the future of farming. In fact, vertical farming was recently named the 16th best world invention of 2009 by Time Magazine. Innovational companies, like Valcent, have created efficient, affordable systems that reduce water use, limit pesticides and can be place in...
It all began with Dolly the lamb. Now scientists have taken cloning to a whole new level: meat production. That’s right, in the not so distant future you could find yourself in the meat isle picking up laboratory grown pork. Scientists in the Netherlands who started this project call it “soggy meat,” however, I wouldn’t be...
As a child growing up in the Midwest, I was able to enjoy the luxuries of our seasonal vegetable garden and other fresh produce from local farms. I remember picking fresh berries on our camping trips to Lake Michigan and eating snap peas or cherry tomatoes directly from the vine in my backyard. I rarely considered washing these fresh picks...
For the greater half of my life, my daily diet has been vegetarian. My middle school years turned me onto the animal rights movement, causing me to dismiss red meat, and then white meat, and finally any form of seafood. As I got older, my taste for eggs and most dairy products began to fade, but I have yet to give up cheese and chocolate...
Free-range meats and eggs are exploding in popularity around the world. In the United Kingdom, free-range eggs have actually outsold those from traditional farms, and many major stores are selling only free-range eggs. In California, a proposition on the ballot in November of 2008 passed, which forces pig, cow, and chicken farmers to either...
In Hollywood the hottest new celebrity diet, major eco-food trend and secret is about to emerge as the next major national sensation! Did you know that many sources pointed to the raw organic diet as having brought Britney Spears to the road of recovery? Or that it saved Super Model Carol Alt’s health, life, and modeling career...
Biodynamic agriculture is one of the most sustainable methods of agriculture.1 It does so by incorporating organic farming techniques, composting, crop rotation, and attempts to integrate and reuse all of the natural resources on the farm. However, biodynamic agriculture is much more than just an agricultural method, it is...
People always seem to be talking about organic-this and organic-that, and all it really seems like people know about the word “organic” is that it represents something void of pesticides, that it is beaming with natural goodness, or it is somehow yoga-related. And yes, these things are true—except for maybe the yoga thing—but there is another reason to...
If you decide you want your own solar cooker, consider the advantages and disadvantages of each type. Box cookers are literally shaped like a box. While these can cook large quantities of food evenly without the need to monitor them, they take a long time to cook. Panel cookers are made up of flat panels which focus the rays into the food. The advantage of panel...
It has almost become expected to see a McDonalds in every city across the United States or even in any major city throughout the world. Living in a fast-paced world means that eating fast food is sometimes the easiest option. In the United States, we are spending almost $150 billion at fast food chains each year with the global fast food market...
“Food miles” has become a new buzz term, suddenly so common in the environmentalist vernacular that people may be shy about asking what it means! Simply put, food miles are the number of miles a food item has had to travel from its origin to its final destination in your home or on your plate at a restaurant. While it is not necessarily...
With hundreds of millions of people around the world living in hunger, food security is a major modern day issue. What is the best way to solve this massive dilemma? There is no time to dilly dally, waiting for the perfect solution to arise, so why not use a form of technology that already exists? Genetically modified crops have the potential...
The National Organic Program (NOP) is an extension of the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) created to accredit local organic certifying agencies. The NOP accredits a total of 95 certifying agencies across the globe, 55 of which are located in the United States. In order for an agricultural product to be certified organic, farmers...