Great Lakes Echo (https://greatlakesecho.org/tag/echo/page/33/)
Although farmers markets seem to be popping up all the time, both urban and rural areas adequate access to healthy, natural food, according to a report by the Michigan Food Policy Council.
A football stadium may have green grass but does it have green habits? Each week, Great Lakes Echo highlights a Big Ten football stadium’s attempts to do the most to impact the environment the least. All schools have information on the stadium’s diversion rate – the amount of waste recycled instead of put in a landfill. Stadium: Spartan Stadium
School: Michigan State University
Built: 1923
Capacity: 75,005
2012 diversion rate: 56.3 percent
Scouting report: Michigan State University has 80 recycling containers inside Spartan Stadium during games. Staff handpicks recyclables from the grounds outside stadium gates and on Sunday mornings from tailgating lots.
As your water rates creep higher, nearly six billion gallons of water that you paid to treat is lost nationwide every day.
In the Great Lakes region, that means enough yearly water loss to submerge Manhattan… and then some.
In the spirit of our “Green Gridirons” series (but just in case college football wasn’t your thing), the “Big Ten’s Eco Efforts” series highlights creative off-the-field sustainability efforts. Students at the University of Maryland are so passionate about protecting their environment that they’re willing to pay for it. In fact, they volunteered to. In 2010 students created the University Sustainability Fund, a self-imposed $12 fee per student each year. The money is then distributed to environmental projects across campus.
The “green chemistry” movement to make chemical manufacturing more environmentally friendly has gained steam and turned Michigan into a national leader.
Reports continue to show increasing traces of pharmaceuticals in the Great Lakes. Until recently, it has been commonplace to simply throw away or flush unused and unwanted drugs. The Yellow Jugs Old Drugs program offers a solution to this issue.
The Michigan Court of Appeals has upheld state permits for DTE Energy Co.’s modifications of its coal-fired power plant on the Lake Erie shore in Monroe, despite objections by a major environmental group.
In the spirit of our “Green Gridirons” series (but just in case college football wasn’t your thing), the “Big Ten’s Eco Efforts” series highlights creative off-the-field sustainability efforts. In the market for a karaoke machine or a piñata? What about a tie-dye lawn chair? The Hoosier to Hoosier sale may provide you with exactly what you’re looking for. It is a reuse program established in 2010 to prevent dorm furnishings from being taken to landfills during student move-out.
IJC Commissioner Dereth Glance says Great Lakes stewardship is fraught with frustrations and backslides.
But a combination of learning and action can get that Sisyphean boulder further up, if not to the top of the hill.
New York’s Finger Lakes, as seen in true-color by a NASA satellite.