"Green" bills get states' attention

Here is an article from the March 17th Kansas City Star outlining various "green" legislation in Jefferson City and Topeka. Read it before it goes into their paid archives.

Bridging the Gap

Green Cathedral
The Angelus, April 2008

If you are motivated to “green up” parts of your life but don’t know where to go for tips, here is a good place to start: Bridging the Gap.

Bridging the Gap began in 1991 as a volunteer group to operate recycling centers, and has grown into a professional organization. Its mission is to make the Kansas City area sustainable by “helping citizens, businesses and government understand the impact of our decisions and behavior on our present and future community and world.”

A useful resource for Kansas Citians is their website: www.bridgingthegap.org. On the site you can find lots of information to help you live a more sustainable lifestyle. You can find the locations of recycling centers and what they do and don’t accept. You can also learn about several volunteer opportunities and various other programs that Bridging the Gap sponsors. These include efforts to encourage buying local produce (Buy Fresh, Buy Local Kansas City), plant trees (Heartland Tree Alliance) and reduce the litter in Kansas City (Keep Kansas City Beautiful).

Perhaps the most useful section of their website has tips on things you can do at home, ranging from disposing of things you can’t put in the trash to building a backyard wildlife habitat. There is also a page where you can sign up for their quarterly newsletter and other e-mailings.

More E-sources

Don’t forget that you don’t have to go far from the Cathedral for environmental news. From the home page of the Cathedral website (www.ghtc-kc.org), you can sign up for several newsletters, including Caring for God's Creation, which brings you occasional e-mails about environmental topics. The information in them comes from MARC, the Mid-America Regional Council and includes advice that you can use to live greener.

Greener living: Take small steps to big energy savings in your home

The Kansas City Star recently ran this story about how you can make your home more energy-efficient. (Free for now, but it may eventually move into their paid archives.)

Drink Coffee, Save the Planet

Green Cathedral
The Angelus, March 2008

Okay, that may be a little bit exaggerated. But it is true that our choices often have an impact halfway around the world.

Take coffee, for instance. Most coffee is grown thousands of miles from the United States in communities where poverty is the rule. Thanks to Bishops Blend Coffee, which is offered in partnership with Episcopal Relief and Development, you can help foster a better way to grow and sell coffee:

- Fair Trade - Bishops Blend is grown by small coffee farmers in Central America, Ethiopia and Indonesia. They are guaranteed fair treatment and a fair price by selling through a cooperative, instead of on the open market.
- Organic - Bishops Blend is grown with no chemical fertilizers or pesticides.
- Shade-grown - Bishops Blend is grown beneath the tree canopy, which protects the coffee plants, helps return nutrients to the soil and reduces the need for clear-cutting.

Bishops Blend, which is sold by Seattle-based Pure Vida Coffee, also furthers ERD’s mission of responding to issues such as poverty, hunger, and disease worldwide. ERD receives 15% of the purchase price from the sale of Bishops Blend, which goes to its general fund. Note that’s 15% of the purchase price, not the much-lower profit.

The Bishops Blend section of the ERD website (see the link below) has much more information about Fair Trade, stories about how it has helped the lives of many coffee farmers and, of course, various ways to order it. You can order a bag or two at a time, or even have it delivered to you on a regular basis! The price of Bishops Blend is comparable to other premium coffee brands. Not to put down other national brands, but when you consider the benefits, Bishops Blend does offer a great deal for both you and the growers.

You can read more about Bishops Blend Coffee at http://www.ecusa.anglican.org/waystogive_63273_ENG_HTM.htm.

Landfills are filling up

NBC Action News recently aired a special report about landfills, and how they are filling up fast. Recycling, composting and generally better personal decision-making are part of the solution.

A Million Lights: Change a light, change the world

Did you know that the city of Kansas City, MO, is encouraging residents to switch a total of 1,000,000 incandescent light bulbs for compact fluorescents? Read about the city's effort here.

From the KC Star: Green projects sprout through caring kids

By MELODEE HALL BLOBAUM

The Kansas City Star

Rachel Anderson (left), 11, and Emma Crandall, 12, helped announce the idle-free zone in the school pickup lane on Wednesday at Overland Trail Elementary School.

Ask Allison Ullman what a kid can do to save the Earth, and she’ll probably point to signs that went up this week in front of Blue Valley schools.

More than 90 signs, three at each school campus, designate the pickup lanes in front of schools as “Idle-Free Zones.”

The signs resulted from an Earth-friendly Girl Scout project that continued long after troop members earned their Bronze Awards.

“Once we started, we couldn’t stop,” said Allison, 11, whose troop began the effort last year by asking Overland Trail Elementary School parents to turn off their cars while waiting to pick up students.

Allison and her fellow Scouts are part of a growing number of students who are taking it upon themselves to make their schools greener.

“The urgency of climate change weighs heavily on that generation,” said Margaret Thomas, chairwoman of the Prairie Village Environmental Committee.

Students bring a gung-ho, do-something-now urgency to efforts to save the Earth, said Matt Riggs of the Mid-America Regional Council.

“As soon as kids hear about a good idea, they want to implement it,” said Riggs, the outreach coordinator for MARC’s solid waste management district.

Often, he said, they’ll keep bugging adults on an issue until something happens.

That’s what some sixth-graders at Christa McAuliffe Elementary School in Lenexa hope will happen with their efforts to return to reusable lunch trays in their cafeteria.

In September, the school’s 20-year-old dishwasher broke down. The parts needed to fix it are no longer made, and custom-made parts would be a budget-buster, said Principal Kent Peach.

So the school began using disposable plastic foam trays until a new dishwasher could be installed over the summer. That bothered some students, who had learned in class that plastic foam fills up landfills and doesn’t biodegrade.

“We really think this needs to be changed,” said Dylan Crow, 12. “It’s a very big thing. It’s important to deal with it now.”

Some moms volunteered to hand-wash the trays with help from sixth-graders, but that wasn’t allowed because of health regulations and space limits. Peach said kitchen workers are already hand-washing and air-drying pots, pans and utensils, leaving no space to air dry the trays.

Students also tried boycotting school lunches and encouraging others to do the same, but they haven’t been able to sustain the boycott.

Now they’re researching biodegradable trays, which are more expensive but kinder to landfills.

Peach praised the students’ research and ideas. But, he said, the hard lesson they’re learning is that sometimes it’s simply not feasible to take action.

The Overland Trail Girl Scout troop’s search for a Bronze Award project turned up a simple idea: The air around their school would be cleaner if parents turned off their cars while waiting to pick up their children.

They prepared computer slide shows, made buttons, passed out fliers and installed their own signs at school.

A group of kids from Sunset Ridge Elementary had embarked on a similar project, and both groups approached facilities director Dave Hill this summer with the idea of establishing idle-free zones across the district.

The result was “Idle Free Zone Day” on Wednesday as part of Blue Valley’s first-ever Clean Air Week.

Joan Steurer, an air quality planner with MARC, said she expects to work with more young people on clean air issues.

“I think the kids are going to lead us,” she said. “Sometimes we don’t give kids enough credit. This is much more than a Girl Scout badge.”