Disposable menstrual products are a huge source of single-use plastic packaging. Tampon applicators, for example, ultimately find their way into marine environments posing as detrimental a threat to marine life as plastic straws do In January, South Africa joined the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s global plastic pact network which encourages multilateral collaboration to accelerate the transition […]
waste
Trash, ‘Idiocracy’ and how to avoid it
Viewing the movie Idiocracy is quite an uncomfortable experience, despite it being a comedy. Its premise is simple: smart, intelligent people tend to have fewer children – sometimes no children at all, in fact – compared to less intelligent, less “educated” people, with hardly any future perspective. Project the imagined consequences of this premise into […]
Going green in 2012: 12 steps for the developing world
Many of us are thinking about the changes we want to make this year. For some, these changes will be financial; for others, physical or spiritual. But for all of us, there are important resolutions we can make to “green” our lives. Although this is often a subject focused on by industrialised nations, people in […]
Are Christmas gifts just a horrible waste of money?
December is almost upon us and Christmas is less than a month away. Already the malls are heaving with hollow-eyed wrecks ticking off mental lists of people on their Christmas gift lists (some of them fantasising, no doubt, about bombing a place that approximates Dante’s fourth circle of hell). Ernst & Young is predicting a […]