Published: 14 November 2007

British shops hand out a staggering 13 billion every year. But after a decision by 33 London councils yesterday, plastic bags could be soon be consigned to history, unmourned by anyone who cares about cleaning up the environment.

Eighty villages, towns and cities, including Brighton and Bath, have introduced or are considering a ban on them since shops in the Devon market town of Modbury went “plastic bag- free”. But yesterday represented the most significant move yet. The capital is now on board.

All 33 authorities in the London Councils group voted for legislation to prevent shops in the capital handing out free plastic bags. In the next fortnight Westminster Council will present a private Bill to the House of Commons which would apply to every London shop from the humblest newsagent to Harrods.

Shoppers clutching large numbers of bags in London’s West End could become a thing of the past; instead they will be asked to use sturdy reusable plastic “bags for life” or cotton or string hold-alls. London’s authorities said they needed to halt the environmental damage done by plastic bags, which use oil and landfill space and kill marine wildlife.

The ban is likely to be opposed by big retailers such as Tesco which prefer encouragement rather than coercion to change behaviour. But campaigners point to international trailblazers that have already banned the bags, places as diverse as Tasmania and Tanzania, which this year were joined by Paris and San Francisco. London would be the biggest urban centre yet to take the plunge.

Peter Robinson, director of Waste Watch, said: “We’ve seen successful action taken on carrier bags all across the world from Australia to Zanzibar, and now it’s time for London to take a lead on this issue in the UK.”

Although the London ban could take years to come into force, the groundswell of opposition to free disposable bags is unmistakable – and perhaps unstoppable. Major retailers have signed an agreement with the Government’s waste body, Wrap, to reduce the environmental impact of plastic bag use by 25 per cent by the end of next year. They are making the bags more lightweight, exploring biodegradable options, and discouraging their routine distribution.

Tesco says it has cut its use of carrier bags by 1 billion to 3 billion after a high-profile campaign to give loyalty points to shoppers reusing them. Today Sainsbury’s will announce in its financial results that it has cut plastic bag use by 10 per cent as a result of having signs at the checkouts asking shoppers to consider the environment and promoting jute and cotton bags. Marks & Spencer is to chargeshoppers 5p a plastic bag after a trial in Northern Ireland that cut the number handed out by 66 per cent.

The Government says it is monitoring the efforts in commerce, but is set against a plastic bag tax of the kind introduced five years ago in Ireland, where the number of carrier bags has fallen by 90 per cent. Officials claim there is evidence that Irish shoppers are using other types of plastic instead. The plastic revolution was started by a BBC camerawoman, Rebecca Hosking, from Modbury, after she had seen the deaths of albatross chicks that had eaten plastic. In the absence of government action, 43 traders in the town decided to start their own “plastic bag-free town” in May. The shops refused to give out free plastic bags, charging 5p for a cornstarch bag, 10p for a paper one or £1.50 for a cotton carrier.

Trade did not fall off, and the six-month experiment proved so successful that Modbury has made the change permanentand made the carrying of a plastic bag an antisocial activity.

Other towns such as Hebden Bridge in West Yorkshire and Overton in Hampshire have followed suit, and the idea of going “plastic bag-free” is taking hold elsewhere, such as in Brighton, where councillors last month called on the city’s retailers to stop giving out bags.

The plastics industry insisted that such bans were environmentally harmful, arguing that re-use of plastic bags – to line bins, wrap packed lunches and scoop up dogs’ mess – made them more environmentally friendly than cotton alternatives, and that the oil used to make the HDPE (high density polyethylene) bags came from a by-product of oil.

Nonetheless, the industry says that unnecessary use of bags is a problem, and is calling on shoppers to consider whether they really need them. Peter Woodall, of the Packaging and Industrial Films Association, said: “We are losing the battle in terms of hearts and minds of the public, who now certainly believe that the plastic bag is a hazard to health and the environment and something we need to eradicate from society.”

Ms Hosking, who started the Modbury experiment, said that plastic bags were the start of a campaign against disposable consumer culture. “It’s our consumption of everything – whether it’s petrol, water or consumer goods – that is driving virtually every environmental problem on the planet and it needs to stop. We have shown that individual people can make a difference,” she said.

A local convenience, a global problem

Anyone who has seen The Graduate, one of the great movie classics, will remember vividly the single-word piece of advice that Dustin Hoffman’s confused young career-hopeful, Benjamin Braddock, receives from a well-meaning family friend: Plastics.

Asked to clarify what exactly he means, the family friend, Mr McGuire, explains: “There’s a great future in plastics.” And in 1967, when the film was made, no doubt there was.

Unfortunately, in the succeeding years, many aspects of what then seemed to be those oh-so-convenient, revolutionary, synthetic materials have come to appear not a blessing but a curse – and plastic bags are high on the list.

The trouble with them is that they have the vices of their virtues. They are incredibly cheap and light, and so are produced in astronomical, scarcely credible, numbers; and remarkably tough for their lightness, they are incredibly persistent in the environment once we have finished with them.

Nobody knows exactly how many plastic bags are consumed annually worldwide, but a good estimate is between 500 billion and 1,000 billion, which comes out at more than a million a minute – and then they’re all thrown away. But as they do not biodegrade, huge numbers don’t disappear. They have become the most ubiquitous item of litter. They are the icons of the throwaway society.

In parts of Africa, there are so many blowing through the bush that a cottage industry has sprung up in harvesting windblown bags and using them to weave hats, or even more bags.

But in some parts of the environment, they represent a lethal threat to wildlife, in particular in the oceans. According to the British Antarctic Survey, they have spread from Spitzbergen north of the Arctic Circle to the Falkland Islands at the other end of the globe.

When floating they can resemble jellyfish, and so are often mistakenly eaten by sea turtles and other marine mammals and birds, with fatal results.

No one denies plastic bags are satisfyingly convenient. But as Billy Joel sang, you pay for your satisfaction somewhere along the line.

Michael McCarthy

Source: The Independent.

The plug will be pulled on nearly all conventional lightbulbs after supermarkets and energy suppliers agreed to gradually phase out incandescent bulbs from next year, the government said yesterday.

The initiative, announced by environment secretary Hilary Benn in Bournemouth, is expected to save 5m tonnes of carbon dioxide a year and be completed by 2012.

The old lightbulbs are being rapidly replaced by low-energy bulbs, which cost more to buy but last up to 12 times as long and use nearly 80% less electricity.

But the government’s voluntary initiative was criticised by environmental groups and other political parties, who argued that it was weak compared with initiatives in other countries. Australia has banned conventional bulbs beyond 2009.

Yesterday many stores said they were in favour. Currys has agreed to stop selling the bulbs by the end of this year, Habitat by 2009, Woolworths, the Co-op, Asda, Morrison’s, and Sainsbury’s by 2010, and Tesco by 2011. Only Somerfield has declined to give a date for a complete phase-out.

Greenpeace director John Sauven said: “The government needs to go further and introduce tough mandatory efficiency standards rather than relying on weak voluntary initiatives. For every year of delay in getting rid of these bulbs, 5m tonnes of CO2 are emitted into the atmosphere unnecessarily.”

Opposition parties urged the government to go further. “New standards should also seek to phase out stand-by. Instead, the EU has just announced an anti-dumping tariff on imports of energy-saving bulbs from China which will make them more expensive,” said Chris Huhne, the Lib Dems’ environment spokesman.

From:  http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2007/sep/28/energyefficiency.ethicalliving

The author of today’s post, John Balbus, M.D., M.P.H., is Chief Health Scientist at Environmental Defense.

In the past when I gave talks about dengue fever, I’d say it was a problem in Mexico, but relatively rare over the border in Texas. I need to update my slides. Following an outbreak of dengue fever in Brownsville, Texas, health investigators found that 38 percent of the town was at risk for the most dangerous form of the illness.

This is a big deal, and global warming may well play a role.

Dengue fever is a mosquito-borne viral illness found in tropical and subtropical regions. The most dangerous form is dengue hemorrhagic fever (DHF), which results from a second infection in someone previously infected. DHF involves low platelet counts and bleeding, and can lead to shock and death.

In 2005 there were 25 hospital cases of dengue fever in Brownsville, Texas, and 16 of these were DHF. The 16 people with DHF must have previously contracted dengue fever, possibly without realizing it.

Since people with good underlying health may not have symptoms with a first infection, health investigators from the Center for Disease Control screened residents’ blood for past infection. Disturbingly, they found that 38 percent of Brownsville residents had antibodies to dengue virus. All these people are at risk for DHF. This is not good news, to say the least.

Is the spread of dengue fever in Texas due to climate change? It’s impossible to say for sure, but right now dengue fever is partly kept in check by low winter temperatures in Texas that kill the mosquitoes. Unusually warm winters associated with changing climate could lead to more severe outbreaks in the future. And with few specific treatments available, people in Texas will need to remove breeding places for mosquitoes to keep the dengue at bay.

From: Enviromental Defense.

Published: 20 September 2007

Recent environmental messages have made such an impact on a friend of mine that, a couple of weeks ago, he broke a four-year prohibition and walked back into Burger King. “Intensive beef production, clone town Britain, just so much blah,” he said, by way of explanation. “Nobody else really seems to be doing much about it, so why should I bother?”

My friend is the embodiment of one of the great fears of the environmental lobby. Fifteen years ago, the term “compassion fatigue” indicated a general disillusionment with fund-raising concerts and famine appeals. The cause was too hopeless, governments too apathetic, and individuals too impotent. Slowly, and for similar reasons, the term “green fatigue” has started to creep into the dinner-party conversations of the composting classes.

And, if anything, with more reason. Environmental campaigners worry that individuals see their actions as largely irrelevant when set against the enormity of global climate change. While famine appeals parade a simple, striking message – send a tenner, save a child – no such easy cause and effect exists for global warming. By contrast, the solutions to climate change seem hugely complex and controversial.

“The problems we face are of a magnitude no one has seen in at least two generations,” says Alex Steffen, the executive editor of WorldChanging, a website and book that promote innovative solutions for sustainable living. “The scale of the actions people are being told to take by green consumerism groups and businesses, on the other hand, are so small as to seem meaningless. I think that more and more people see this widening gulf and lose hope.”

And if we’re not all losing hope just yet, many of us are becoming increasingly cynical. To campaigners, that’s not surprising. As Steffen suggests, businesses have turned environmentalism into a marketing strategy. A new term, “green-washing”, describes companies that paint a superficial green gloss on conventional business practices. When firms such as BP and Wal-Mart parade their environmentally friendly credentials, scepticism is not only inevitable, says Steffen, it’s “a necessary antidote”.

At least the green lobby can count on celebrities to spread the message. Unfortunately, the message too often seems to be, “do as I say, not as I do”. Celebrity is an intrinsically unsustainable condition. The reaction to the Live Earth concerts – which prompted as much debate on the carbon footprint of the A-listers who’d been chauffeured in for the occasion as the campaign they were there to endorse – showed the insidious spread of green fatigue.

It could have been worse. In the States, Sheryl Crow’s “Stop Global Warming College Tour” was panned for stipulating parking for three tractor-trailers, four buses and six cars. John Travolta recently urged the British public to “do their bit” to combat global warming after flying in on his private Boeing 707, and got trounced in the press for his efforts. None of this is likely to keep the public on side in the long run – and countering climate change is likely to be a very long run indeed.

Even the pronouncements of more committed celebrities can seem, well, a little misjudged. A new book, edited by the socialite and former model Sheherazade Goldsmith, the wife of the Ecologist editor Zac, advises concerned greens to keep geese and make their own goat’s cheese. As my sceptical friend said: “The goose can stay on the balcony, but I doubt you’d call it free-range.”

Of course, many celebrities and businesses now offset their carbon emissions by paying for trees to be planted in sustainable forests or investments made in green energy projects. But “magic bullet” solutions to climate change are quickly losing their sheen. Recent investigations – including a widely trailed Dispatches programme on Channel 4 – question the effectiveness of carbon offsetting and suggest that it might even be counterproductive.

Some environmentalists worry that carbon offsetting promotes the idea that if you throw a few quid at the problem you can carry on as normal. According to Michael R Solomon, the author of Consumer Behaviour: Buying, Having and Being: “Consumers are always going to gravitate toward a more parsimonious solution that requires less behavioural change. We know that new products or ideas are more likely to be adopted if they don’t require us to alter our routines very much.”

Unfortunately, most environmentalists agree that altering our routines quite fundamentally is the only real way to save the planet. Meanwhile, another “magic bullet” solution – and one that would also allow many of us to carry on pretty much as normal – is coming in for unexpected criticism: a recent study has suggested that any widespread uptake of biofuels in Europe could decimate Asian rainforests.

What all this adds up to, experts fear, is a recipe for disillusionment and – eventually – disengagement. Psychologically, we’re primed to walk away from problems that are too complex to understand and too difficult to solve, and we’ll break into a run if we think cynical marketers and self-publicising celebrities are jumping on a green bandwagon. And green campaigners who think a deluge of apocalyptic information will cut through our cynicism are probably mistaken.

“In an information-filled world, people screen heavily what new information they let in, and I suspect that the run-of-the-mill global-warming story is just not crossing the threshold,” says the climate scientist Dr Susanne Moser, the co-author of Creating a Climate for Change: Communicating Climate Change and Facilitating Social Change. By run-of-the-mill, she means those all-too-familiar stories about melting ice shelves or endangered species. “Thinking about a global, complex, challenging, and potentially very dangerous and disastrous thing and not knowing what to do about it makes us go numb or into denial.”

The antidote to numbness and denial is a sense of progress, of things getting better. But in the fight against climate change, progress is hard to come by. Moser uses the analogy of a diet. How long would you stay on a diet that demanded stringent effort over a prolonged period and promised only that that your weight gain might slow down a bit? Let’s face it, it wouldn’t make the cover of Grazia.

She also admits that “we have terribly failed our audience” by focusing on apocalyptic scenarios and complex science. Instead, one key factor in keeping people enthused in the fight against climate change will be local, collective action, she says.

“Why do people go to Alcoholics Anonymous, or to Weight Watchers? Because in a group of like-minded people they have the support, accountability, peer pressure and the shared experience of others to help make the change. They also have opportunities to come together, check on progress, and get support around setbacks. That’s what we need for climate change – to recover from our fuel addiction.”

Progress on a small and local scale – such as saving a beloved local shop, voting in a councillor who will push green issues, or increasing local recycling rates – and even a desire to keep up with the Joneses (“if everybody’s ditching the gas-guzzler, I’ll do it, too”) are far more effective motivators than media-inspired guilt and vague fears of an uncertain future, she adds.

Alex Steffen also believes in the need for a local, community focus. But he says that we need to be honest about the scale of the changes that have to be made, and to counter green fatigue by imbuing the fight against climate change with an almost heroic spirit.

“I don’t think we need to sugar-coat the challenges we face,” he says. “We just need to ask people to rise to their real potential, and see that this is our moment for greatness. If we create a sustainable future for everyone, it will be an accomplishment as great as winning the Second World War.

“Many environmentalists assume people won’t do anything more than small steps, and hope those small steps will build the political will for more substantive changes. But history has shown a thousand times that “regular” people are capable of extraordinary courage, dedication and ingenuity when asked to answer the call. It’s time we put out that call, rather than another marketing pitch.”

The small actions that can make a big difference

* You’ve heard it before, but changing to energy-efficient light bulbs really can make a difference. Lighting uses 20 per cent of the world’s electricity, the equivalent of burning 600,000 tons of coal a day. Phasing out old bulbs would avoid the release of 700 million tons of carbon into the atmosphere every year.

* Shop local. If your food shopping amounts to £100 a week, that’s £5,200 a year that could be going into the pocket of a local butcher, grocer and baker, rather than the supermarket till. Imagine if 100 people in your area had the same idea.

* Is recycling really worth it? Yes. Recycling one glass jar saves enough energy to light a 100-watt bulb for four hours. Glass can be reused an infinite number of times. Think of all the jars recycled in your street in a year.

* Recycling a ton of paper saves 17 trees and 7,000 gallons of water.

* Turning your thermostat down by two degrees can save 2,000 pounds of carbon every year. Just imagine if everyone in your family and everyone in your office did it.

From: The Independent.

The Arctic is again highlighted as being among areas most at risk. Photograph: Corbis

The effects of climate change will be felt sooner than scientists realised and the world must learn to live with the effects, experts said today.

Professor Martin Parry, a climate scientist with the Met Office, said destructive changes in temperature, rainfall and agriculture were now forecast to occur several decades earlier than thought.

He said vulnerable people such as the old and poor would be the worst affected, and that world leaders had not yet accepted their countries would have to adapt to the likely consequences.

The professor was speaking in London at a meeting to launch the full report on the impacts of global warming by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The report – which had its executive summary released earlier this year – says hundreds of millions of people in developing nations will face natural disasters, water shortages and hunger due to the effects of climate change.

Today Professor Parry, co-chair of the IPCC working group that wrote the report, said: “We are all used to talking about these impacts coming in the lifetimes of our children and grandchildren. Now we know that it’s us.”

He said the international response to the problem had failed to grasp that serious consequences such as reduced crop yields and coastal flooding were now inevitable. “Mitigation has got all the attention but we cannot mitigate out of this problem. We now have a choice between a future with a damaged world or a severely damaged world.”

Countries such as Britain need to focus on helping nations in the developing world cope with the predicted impacts, by helping them to introduce irrigation and water management technology, drought resistant crops and new building techniques.

Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the IPCC, said: “Wheat production in India is already in decline, for no other reason than climate change.”

The report says that “extreme weather events” are likely to become more intense and more frequent, while higher global temperatures could affect crops and water supplies and spread disease.

The effect on ecosystems could be equally severe, with up to 30% of plant and animal species at risk of extinction if the average rise in global temperatures exceeds 1.5-2.5C.

The 1,000-page document is part of the IPCC’s fourth overall assessment of climate change, to be published in full later this year. It was put together by the so-called Working Group II, which examines global warming’s impact on the environment and people.

The experts involved warn that the consequences of rising temperatures are already being felt on every continent, and sooner than expected. It is “probably too late” to avoid some impacts in developing countries because about 1C of warming is already in the climate system, they warn. If it is not kept below 2C – which “currently looks very unlikely to be achieved” – up to 3.2 billion people will face water shortages and up to 600 million will face hunger, they have predicted.

The trade and development minister, Gareth Thomas, told the launch of the report at the Royal Geographical Society: “Failing to tackle it [climate change] will lead to floods, droughts and natural disasters which can destroy poor people’s lives as well as their livelihoods.”

Professor Parry said today that he was pessimistic about the chances of keeping the increase in global average temperatures below 2C. “And it’s evident from the work of the IPCC that even with a maximum of 2C we’re not going to avoid some major impacts at the regional level.”

In February the report of the IPCC’s first working group, which looks at the scientific background of climate change, concluded that global warming was “very likely” – a probability of 90% or greater – to have been caused by human activity.

A report in May by the IPCC’s Working Group III, which examines how climate change can be addressed, argued that devastating global warming can be avoided without excessive economic cost but only if the world begins acting immediately.

Today’s report concludes that while the impact of a warmer globe will have mixed effects – for example, it notes that crop yields could increase in northern Europe – the overall impact will be deeply negative, particularly in Africa, in the so-called “mega-deltas” of south and east Asia, and on small islands and in polar regions.

By 2020, the report warns, up to 250 million Africans may be left short of water, while access to sufficient food is “projected to be severely compromised by climate variability and change”.

“New studies confirm that Africa is one of the most vulnerable continents to climate variability and change because of multiple stresses and low adaptive capacity,” says the document.

From: The Guardian.

BEIJING (Reuters) – Solar panels could generate over 10 percent of China’s power by the middle of the century, but only if Beijing steps up support for pioneering generating plants and sets more ambitious targets, a report said on Wednesday.

Although it is the world’s No. 3 producer of photovoltaic (PV) cells that convert sunlight into electricity, China sends 90 percent of its output abroad because it is too expensive for domestic use, according to the report launched by Greenpeace, the Chinese Renewable Energy Industry Association (CREIA) and WWF.

High PV cell prices and low power tariffs mean the cells that do stay in China are mainly used for rural areas, communications, and in industry, rather than for large generating plants linked into national grids — the main users in other countries and the key to large-scale solar generation.

Beijing aims to boost the portion of its power that comes from renewable energy, and has set out what it says are ambitious targets for the next two decades, aiming for 15 percent of energy to come from non-fossil fuel sources by 2020.

But the report says government solar energy targets are not very challenging, and supportive policies that look good on paper are not being properly implemented, the report added.

With strong government support, China could be generating an estimated 1,300 terawatt hours of solar power a year by 2050, of a total 10,000 TWh used nationwide, it added.

But currently around a dozen pilot plants with capacity of up 1 MW, which should be getting preferential prices, are not even able to link up with transmission networks.

“In no case has a feed-in tariff, calculated according to reasonable costs plus reasonable profits, been implemented, and no PV power system has as yet been permitted by grid companies to connect,” the report said. 

The report predicts that solar power prices will match conventional power prices by 2030, when installed capacity could be up to 100 GW with strong government support — or one-sixth of the country’s total generating ability at present.

But without support through the years when it cannot compete on price alone, solar will be just one-tenth that potential level, a still impressive 10 GW but far from enough to make a dent in China’s energy-related pollution problems or to contribute to its energy security.

“Market supportive mechanisms create incentives to technological innovation and industry development,” Li Junfeng, CREIA General Secretary, said at the report’s launch.

“The lack of a strong domestic market could limit the potential of the Chinese solar PV industry in the long term.”

China at least does not lack the raw material for solar power. About 96 percent of the country gets “abundant” sunlight, the report said, with more light potential than industry leaders Japan and Europe.

Many of the sunniest areas are also sparsely populated, lowering the prospects for potential disputes over land use.

From: Reuters.

Robert Durell / LAT

For one full hour — between 8 p.m. and 9 p.m. on Oct. 20 — Nate Tyler wants the people of San Francisco to turn off all unnecessary lights.

A former Google spokesman is pushing Lights Out San Francisco, a green campaign that encourages everyone to flip switches for an hour of darkness.

By John M. Glionna, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
September 19, 2007

SAN FRANCISCO — Nate Tyler was finishing off his salmon dinner at a restaurant in Sydney, Australia, last spring when suddenly the lights went out. The eatery went dark, along with much of downtown, including the city’s famous opera house.

“I thought ‘Holy moly, this is gorgeous!’ You could see stars in the sky,” he said. “The restaurant used candles. It was atmospheric. The food tasted better.”

Tyler happened to be Down Under during Earth Hour, an annual event in which Sydney residentsswitch off lights for 60 minutes as a symbolic gesture to cut energy use and help reverse global warming.

That’s when a bulb — the energy-efficient kind — flashed on inside his brain: “I told myself, ‘Why can’t we try this in San Francisco?’ “

The former Google spokesman returned home to launch Lights Out San Francisco, an ambitious grass-roots campaign. For one full hour — between 8 p.m. and 9 p.m. on Oct. 20 — he wants the people of this city to turn off all unnecessary lights as a way to reduce carbon emissions and preserve natural resources.

Tyler isn’t talking about creating a public safety hazard by shutting off street lamps or traffic lights. He’s targeting nonessential lighting: floodlights at used-car lots, atmospheric illumination of the Golden Gate Bridge, the neon movie marquee and all the bulbs left burning at night in empty high rises.

He’s also not advocating major personal lifestyle changes — at least not yet. For now, he wants family members, neighbors and colleagues to join together in taking one simple, hourlong stand against mindless energy use. Turn off a hallway light, a computer, a TV. See how good it feels, he says, and you might begin to reconsider the extent of your personal energy use.

“People are burning needless energy and not even knowing it. They’re walking out of the office at night without turning off the light or shutting down the computer. We need to hit restart and start a conversation about how important this is,” he said.

“If we don’t do something, by 2050, all the polar bears will be gone. That’s where Santa Claus lives, man. That’s a bummer.”

With the slogan “Good Things Happen in the Dark” emblazoned on campaign T-shirts and posters, Tyler plans to give away 110,000 energy-efficient bulbs on his Lights Out day.

Tyler, 38, has long walked the environmental walk. Growing up in New Haven, Conn., he helped refurbish hiking trails and apprenticed in one of the nation’s last remaining wooden-boat shops in Maine. His car runs on reprocessed vegetable oil.

He’s an avid surfer with a Zen-like mind-set. He sprinkles conversations with longboard lexicon: “So the dude says. . .,” “Sweet!” and “That rocks.”

Tyler is basing his strategy on Sydney’s March 31 event, which this year conserved 25 tons of carbon dioxide that would have been released in the production of the energy — the equivalent of removing nearly 50,000 cars from the road for one hour, Tyler said.

In the call to action, he’s combining his environmental passions with lessons learned as a Google communications manager. Like many Internet start-ups, Tyler’s effort is low-budget and high-energy.

He relies on an eclectic word-of-mouth campaign, channeled through his easygoing, hanging-out-on-the-couch personality.

Back from Australia, Tyler, now a freelance media consultant, devoted himself to developing a website. Then, he called his stepbrother.

Nick Rubenstein, a former graphics artist for a punk-rock record label, who designed album covers for the bands Offspring and Bad Religion, got married this summer. Tyler made his pitch the night before the wedding, as he sat strumming a guitar on Rubenstein’s porch. He asked for help with website graphics — free of charge, of course. He got it.

“He’s not doing this for money,” Rubenstein said. “If he was making some huge amount of cash, I’d say ‘Look buddy, share the wealth.’ But he’s doing this because it’s close to his heart.”

Tyler also e-mailed friends with his Web page prototype asking, “Are you with me on this?” One introduced him to Mabel Liang, a freelance Web designer who was new to town. She cut her rate in half for him. And when it came time for him to pay the first installment, the pair agreed to barter: Tyler gave her an old couch and a coffee table for her effort.

When Tyler approached Exposure, a New York City company that specializes in nontraditional advertising, he hooked up with creative director Tom Phillips, who was floored by his enthusiasm and agreed to donate time. “I saw the sparks going off inside his head,” he said of Tyler.

Phillips’ team used copper wire and a pair of pliers to fashion the campaign’s signature image: the website’s name, lightsoutsf.org, in fluid cursive writing like the filament in a light bulb. Another artist created an image of a starry sky over San Francisco.

He brought on Brian Scott, a former Greenpeace activist who once chained himself to the Washington Monument to protest government inaction on global warming and who dreamed up the event’s catchy slogan.

Tyler also called his parents in Connecticut. Cheever Tyler, a lawyer and former board chairman of the New Haven Chamber of Commerce, gave his son some old-school advice.

“Nathan has enormous principle and unlimited energy, but he needed a way to distribute his product,” he said. “I told him he had to get the mayor and the chamber onboard. They were good partners to have.”

By August, Rob Black, the director of public policy for the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce, joined the team, and introduced Tyler to a restaurant owner who temporarily lent the group a vacant space in the Mission District.

Black also introduced Tyler to Mayor Gavin Newsom and Supervisor Jake McGoldrick, who passed a resolution sponsoring the event and naming Oct. 20 Lights Out San Francisco Day.

On that night, the Golden Gate Bridge will turn off its decorative tower lights. The lights of Alcatraz Island will also be shut off, as will those of various city and county office buildings. The San Francisco Restaurant Assn. is promoting romantic candlelight dinners.

Gus Murad, owner of the restaurant Medjool, doesn’t think one hour of darkness is enough. “I’m going to go for eight hours,” he said. “Mother Nature has given us so much, it amazes me we can’t give just a little bit back.”

Businesses such as Gap and Yahoo, as well as nonprofits including the International Dark Sky Assn., have signed on to publicize the event. Tyler is working with Safeway stores in the Bay Area to advertise it on the back of store receipts and on a public address system broadcast inside stores.

Pacific Gas and Electric and Yahoo donated the 110,000 compact-fluorescent light bulbs. “I ask my team: How can we make energy efficiency sexy?” said the utility’s spokesman Keely Wachs. “Nate has done exactly that.”

Tyler mostly has focused on recruiting the younger generation. He attended Green Drinks — a social gathering for environment-minded professionals, spending $250 on cocktails while urging people to spread his message.

To reach kidshe plans to tour local schools in a biofuel-run bus.

He also wants to post on his website pictures of the worst offenders among office buildings that leave lights on at night.

Not everyone is receptive. Some gas stations, for instance, refuse to take part, saying they need lights on for safety.

Tyler hopes to cut energy use that night by 15%, monitoring the savings with the help of the utility company. And he’s already planning a Lights Out America event for March.

The other day at his donated storefront space, he opened an overnight envelope bearing a $10,000 donation from Esurance. He beamed.

“Sweet,” he said.

john.glionna@latimes.com

From: Los Angeles Times.

Published: 18 September 2007

A transatlantic backlash against soaring use of plastic bottles has forced the world’s two leading drinks manufacturers to pledge dramatically to improve their recycling rates amid growing public concern at the environmental impact of bottled drinks.

Figures released by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) show that sales of mineral water in Britain reached 965 million litres last year, an increase of nearly a third since 2001. Industry studies put the value of the bottled water market in the UK at £1.68bn. Sales in America have more than doubled in a decade to £5.4bn a year.

But there are growing signs that the major beverage companies are being forced to rethink their sales strategy amid a consumer-led wave of action by a number of public bodies – including Liverpool City Council and Defra – to ban bottled water and dispensers in their buildings while highlighting the ecological cost of using mineral water in plastic containers.

Coca-Cola and PepsiCo, which between them account for 55 per cent of the global soft drinks and mineral water market, have vowed to overhaul their operations to recover and recycle the billions of plastic containers used to sell their products worldwide.

Buoyed by this success, campaigners are calling for an EU-wide increase in compulsory plastic recycling targets for drinks manufacturers. In America, a campaign has been launched to lobby Congress to invest heavily in the public water system to cut down on bottled water use.

Global bottled water consumption now stands at 180 billion litres a year, up from 78 billion litres a decade ago. In the US, demand has risen by nearly four billion litres since 2004, to 31 billion litres last year.

Chief executives at drinks companies are concerned that the campaign by consumers and governments to curtail bottled water consumption will cut sales in the multibillion-pound industry, which has boosted profits significantly for companies such as Coca-Cola, PepsiCo and Nestlé as demand for healthier drinks increases.

Coca-Cola announced last week that it intended to recycle all its plastic bottles in the US within five years. A £30m recycling plant will be built in South Carolina with a capacity to handle two billion bottles a year with similar facilities planned for Austria, Mexico and the Philippines. Sandy Douglas, the head of Coca-Cola’s US operations, said: “The long-term sustainability of our business depends on our ability to ensure the sustainability of our packaging.” PepsiCo, which owns the Aquafina brand and is the second-largest bottled water producer after Nestlé, has vowed to improve its recycling performance. Indra Nooyi, the company’s chief executive, said the company needed to “do more” to recycle plastic containers.

Environmentalists argue the companies are reacting to growing unease at the expansion of the bottled drinks industry. Of the 13 billion plastic bottles bought in the UK last year, just 2.7 billion were recycled. It is estimated that it takes 1.5 million barrels of oil a year to produce all the plastic bottles required worldwide.

Liverpool City Council said it will save £48,000 a year by switching to tap water in all its buildings while San Francisco has banned city departments from buying bottled water dispensers and pledged to phase out large dispensers by the end of the year. In New York, the city authorities have run an advertising campaign encouraging the use of tap water.

Sustain, a UK-based campaigning group focusing on food and drink, said it was up to governments and institutions to set an example to consumers. Jeanette Longfield, the charity’s co-ordinator, said: “If public bodies are using taxpayers’ money to buy bottled water then they are not in a position to preach to consumers about changing their habits.”

Under the EU’s packaging directive, the current target for 20 per cent of all plastics to be recycled by producers will expire next year and campaigners say a more stringent target is vital. Michael Warhurst, waste and resources campaigner for Friends of the Earth, said: “There should be a push for that target to be set at 100 per cent. The directive means there is a well-understood structure in place to compel manufacturers to recycle more plastic than they currently do.”

From: The Independent.

SUMGAYIT, AZERBAIJAN

Affected people: 275,000
Pollutants: Organic chemicals, oil, heavy metals including mercury.
Source: Petrochemical and industrial sites

Once a Soviet centre of industry and the location of more than 40 rubber, chlorine and pesticides factories, Sumgayit is now home to piles of untreated sewage and mercury-contaminated sludge. Cancer rates are up to 50 per cent higher than the rest of Azerbaijan and a birth defects are common.

SUKINDA, INDIA

Affected people: 2,600,000
Pollutants: Hexavalent chromium and other metals
Source: Chromite mines and processing

Home to 97 per cent of India’s chromite deposits, Sukinda’s mines spew out millions of tons of waste rock into the rivers that residents drink from. A quarter of nearby residents have pollution-related illnesses

TIANJIN, CHINA

Affected people: 140,000
Pollutants: Lead and other heavy metals
Source: Mining and processing

Tianjin, one of China’s largest lead-production bases, has no pollution controls. Forced to breathe air with 10 times the legal levels of lead, residents suffer lower IQs, impaired growth and brain damage.

CHERNOBYL, UKRAINE

Affected people: Initially 5.5m, now disputed
Pollutants: Radioactive dust
Source: Meltdown of reactor core in 1986

From 1992 to 2002, 4,000 youngsters born in and around the 19-mile exclusion zone that still exists around the destroyed reactor developed thyroid cancer. Five million people still live in contaminated areas.

DZERZINSK, RUSSIA

Affected people: 300,000
Pollutants: Chemicals and toxic by-products, including Sarin and VX gas. Also lead, phenols.
Source: Cold War-era chemical weapons manufacturing. The principal site of chemical weapons production during the Cold War, Dzerzinsk is now a centre of chemical manufacturing. Over a period of 70 years until 1998, 300,000 tons of chemical waste were dumped, leaching almost 200 chemicals into groundwater. The drinking water is heavily contaminated and the life expectancy for men is just 42.

NORILSK, RUSSIA

Affected people: 134,000
Pollutants: Air pollution – particulates, sulphur dioxide, heavy metals (nickel, copper, cobalt, lead, selenium), phenols, hydrogen sulphide.
Source: The mining and processing of nickel and other related metals.

The snow is black in Norilsk, and 16 per cent of child deaths at the former Siberian slave labour camp are caused by respiratory illnesses related to the city’s mining operations. Residents at the world’s largest heavy metals smelting complex suffer a horrifying range of illnesses including respiratory illnesses and lung cancer. Birth defects are common.

VAPI, INDIA

Affected People: 71,000
Pollutants: Chemicals, heavy metals
Source: Industry estates

At the end of India’s 400 km-long “Golden Corridor” of industrial estates, Vapi has more than 50 factories producing petrochemicals, fertilisers, dyes and paint, discharging dangerous levels of pollutants into the groundwater. Doctors report a high incidence of respiratory diseases and spontaneous abortions.

KABWE, ZAMBIA

Affected people: 255,000
Pollutants: Lead, cadmium
Source: Lead mining and processing

Children in Kabwe still bathe in the heavily polluted river that runs from the town’s lead mine, which ran without safeguards from 1902 to 1994. Many have blood lead levels considered fatal.

LINFEN, CHINA

Affected People: 3,000,000
Pollutants: Fly-ash, carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides, sulphur dioxide, arsenic, lead.
Source: Automobile and industrial emissions

Linfen’s residents are forced to breathe the toxic output from hundreds of unregulated mines, factories and refineries. Clinics report an explosion in bronchitis, pneumonia and lung cancer.

LA OROYA, PERU

Affected people: 35,000
Pollutants: Lead, copper, zinc, sulphur dioxide.
Source: Heavy-metal mining and processing

The US owners of a metallic smelter in this mining town have failed to clean up the plant, which exposes residents to toxic emissions and waste. Ninety-nine per cent of children living in or around La Oyroya have blood lead levels that exceed safe limits and acid rain caused by sulphur dioxide in the air has decimated vegetation in the area.

From: The Independent.