Photo Credit: Organic-Cotton.us

     Sadly, cotton production also has hidden costs, mainly its incredible environmental impact. Cotton is considered “the world’s dirtiest crop” because even though it accounts for only 2.5% of the world’s cultivated land, it uses 16% of the pesticides! Traditional cotton growers often use pesticides and herbicides that are known human hazards. These dangerous toxins, such as aldicarb, then leach into ground water systems. 16 states have found aldicarb in drinking water supplies. Synthetic fertilizers are also used to grow cotton, which create an entirely different hazard. When fertilizers enter waterways, they add excess nutrients which lead to algae blooms. The algae absorbs much of the water’s oxygen, making it impossible for marine life to remain in the area. The best known example of this phenomenon is the hypoxic zone in the Gulf of Mexico. Since many farms line the length of the Mississippi River, lots of fertilizer travels downstream to the gulf, putting not only wildlife, but also the gulf coast economy, at risk.

Cotton is also a very water-intensive crop which adds to the cost and the environmental impact. It is also an expensive crop to spin to produce into final consumer goods. The United States is the second largest cotton grower, but most of the cotton is exported to countries that have cheap labor costs. This practice adds to the carbon footprint of cotton and to the humanitarian impact. Avoiding fast fashion and paying fair prices for cotton goods is one way to purchase cotton responsibly. Another way, of course, is to stick with organic cotton goods. Cotton is a great natural fiber and has a wide variety of applications, so it is hard to avoid altogether. However, purchasing organic, local, or fairly traded materials helps minimize your negative social and environmental footprint.

Cameron Bruns is a contributor to Merida, the premier source for distinctively designed natural rugs with a conscience for sustainability. Merida was founded on and is committed to a tradition of integrating the finest quality natural fibers with innovative textile design to create beautiful collections of custom rugs.

Lowering your carbon footprint online is quite simple: You go to a website like TerraPass, enter your credit card info, and that’s it! You can take your next trip guilt free. While these offset organizations are phenomenal and help raise awareness about emissions, you have very little control over how your money is used.

New Generation Energy is different.

We run a Green Project Listing Site that features green energy and energy efficiency projects at nonprofits nationwide. It’s similar to a microfinance site but support is in the form a donation rather than a loan, and all listed projects have measurable energy and carbon savings.

In other words, YOU pick the project, neighborhood, and organization your want your carbon offset dollars to go to. And you’re not only lowering your impact on the environment with your donation — you’re also helping a local community go green.

After you donate to a project, we email you your personal carbon savings as well as the dollar amount you saved the nonprofit. In addition, we update you regularly on the progress of the project and include photos and videos so you actually see your dollars being put to work and making a difference.

Some of our recently funded projects include a $21,000 solar panel installation at a school in Sudbury, Mass. that is expected to save 154,343 lbs of carbon over its lifetime, and a $25,000 geothermal installation at church in Tennessee with a carbon savings of 1,809,360 lbs. We’re also in the process of helping a senior center in Minnesota raise $16,000 for a weatherization project, which will offset 325,366 lbs of CO2 and First Parish in Brookline is using our site to raise $8000 for a green project trifiecta. It’s a water conservation and window and attic insulation project that will save about 389,654 lbs of CO2.

These figures are calculated from the organization’s energy audits — or estimates – as well as the latest energy metrics. You can check out more detailed information about a project’s carbon savings on its data sheet.  (Example here.)

In total, our listing site has helped save more than 5 million lbs of CO2 and fund 11 green projects nationwide!

Check out all the projects on the Green Project Listing Site and follow us on Twitter and Facebook!

– Bianca Strzelczyk is the digital marketing manager at New Generation Energy. She can be reached at media@newgenerationenergy.org.

The team at the Center for Science in the Public Interest would like to make it easier for people across the U.S. to understand how the content of their plates can affect their health and their environment.  To that end, they are launching the first annual Food Day on October 24^th, 2011.  Their goal is to turn Food Day in to the sustainable food system equivalent of Earth Day by encouraging discussion about how our food gets to our tables and how it affects our health.

Food Day has 6 principles:

I challenge all Green Drinks attendees, blog readers, and friends to observe Food Day in any way you can.  You can visit the Food Day website to find any number of fun and informative events across the country.  For the slightly more adventurous, reach out to existing event organizers and offer to help them plan.  Volunteer to spread the word, set up event rooms, or build websites.  If you have a food related business or service, sponsor or partner with one of the events.  However you choose to participate, you owe it to yourself, the people who bring food to your table, and the natural resources from which your food grows to learn how to make more sustainable choices about what you eat.

If you want to stay current on Food Day happenings around Boston, you can also “Like” Food Day Massachusetts on Facebook.

It’s time for America to Eat Real and Boston’s sustainability community can lead the way (that means you)!

Lyn Huckabee is a Boston Green Drinks Steering Committee member and co-founder of the Boston Food Swap.  She holds a seat on the Cambridge Climate Protection Action Committee and the Rappaport Center for Law and Public Service advisory board.  She is a long-time member of the Junior League of Boston.  By day, she is a public servant advancing state energy policy.

Image Credit: Flickr user Kenski1970 under a Creative Commons license

Tourism is recognized by the United Nations as the 4th largest industry in the world. As such, the industry’s global footprint threatens ecosystems and cultures worldwide and contributes to ever-growing carbon emissions. But it doesn’t have to.

The tourism and hospitality industry has made notable changes to business as usual and rightfully so—the natural world is its product after all. Contrary to other industries, tourism doesn’t have smokestacks that make it an obvious offender like some of its industrial counterparts. Nevertheless, given that tourists have to travel to travel, they’re flying, tour busing, driving and cruise boating hundreds of thousands of miles each year. You get the idea.

The relatively new and rapidly emerging field of sustainable tourism seeks to help develop and manage tourism with lower environmental impacts, social and cultural benefits to communities, and positive economic opportunities for countries around the world. You are likely familiar with its marketing buzz cousin, ecotourism. But isn’t that what sustainable tourism is? Sometimes. Let’s talk about what we’re talking about.

By definition, “ecotourism” is nature-based tourism. This includes activities such as biking, diving, rock-climbing, caving, skiing, or rafting. Sustainable tourism on the other hand is more all encompassing and representative of what professionals in the field are trying to accomplish. After all, not all “ecotourism” is sustainable.

As with anything, definitions will run the gamut and vary in their nuances. For example, the United Nations World Tourism Organization, “promotes the sustainable development and management of tourism globally… involving both public and private sectors for the generation of social, economic and cultural benefits for host communities commensurate with global development interests, for ensuring the supply of quality tourism products and avoiding or reducing negative impacts upon the natural and socio-cultural environments.”

The first US organization founded to promote responsible travel, the International Ecotourism Society, “promotes responsible travel to natural areas that conserves the environment and improves the well-being of local people.”

I like the Boy Scout’s motto: Help your neighbors and leave the campground better than you found it. At its most basic level, sustainable tourism is about managing environmental impact, preserving cultural heritage, and ensuring positive socio-economic benefits for local communities.

In 2009, tourism in Massachusetts generated $22.9 billion in total domestic and international traveler spending (direct and indirect); total payroll income of $6.5 billion; and 199,100 jobs statewide. And remember, this is in a recession.

Boston area groups have made great strides in developing sustainable tourism initiatives, which are essential to help minimize environmental impacts and protect the numerous natural and historical treasures Boston and greater Massachusetts offer. Click around on some of the great local initiatives below including those by Sustainable Business Leader Program certified participant Boston Duck Tours (now that deserves a Quack! Quack!).

This fall, I am helping teach a course on Environmental Management of International Tourism Development at the Harvard Extension School. This course provides professionals worldwide the opportunity to join the dialog on improving the environmental management of one of the world’s largest industries. We endeavor to expand professional knowledge in the field using student research to dive deeply into international challenges caused by extensive use of natural resources, little government oversight, and rapid growth.

There’s a lot of potential here, which is why avid travelers like me have dedicated their careers to harnessing the tremendous potential of the tourism industry to create positive and lasting change in the world. Now get inspired and get packing!

Useful links:

• Boston Green Tourism
• EcoLogical Solutions
• Saunders Hotel Group
• The Boston Harbor Association
• Mass Vacation Green Guide

Alison Hillegeist is a Sustainable Development Consultant who is currently helping teach courses in the Sustainability and Environmental Management program at Harvard Extension School. Alison has a Master’s Degree in Sustainable Development and 15 years of professional experience in communications and project management. She is motivated by the belief that travel is one of life’s great pleasures and that tourism can be a positive and transformative force for change in the world. Traveling the world has been a major influence in her personal and professional evolution and solidified her desire to pursue conservation and community development as her chosen career path. She is particularly interested in organizational/industry change management—helping organizations fulfill their responsibility to improve the environment and give back to the communities they serve.

If you’ve been in town for a while, you may remember Boston Green Drinks.  You may also have noticed that, since 2009, events became less frequent and consistent.  We noticed too.  We’re the new BGD Steering Committee and, seeing the need for the group to continue, we have re-launched with renewed energy (pun intended) and a host of new services for the sustainability community.  If you are new to Boston or if you hadn’t previously heard of BGD, lucky you!  You’ve stumbled upon a sustainability community that will let you know what’s fresh in the Hub!  If you’re wondering how BGD can help you, we’re dedicating our very first blog post to letting you know.

Connect with the city’s sustainability community

First and foremost, Boston Green Drinks holds happy hour events on the last Tuesday of every month where people in Boston’s sustainability community can connect with others.  These events are a low-key and fun place to unwind after work while meeting like-minded and interesting people.  You can find an always up-to-date list of BGD events at our Eventbrite page.

You can also connect with the community by posting or responding to career development opportunities on the Boston Green Drinks webpage (hot off the presses – more on that later).  The opportunities could include jobs, services and short-term gigs.  For example, this resource could range from a full-time job posting in energy engineering, to a consultant RFR, to a request for a business partner, all the way to a request for writers for your new green news website.  To make this work, people looking for green talent need to submit their opportunities, and talented people need to respond to them.  Check it out now!

Finally, connect with the community in other ways by attending events from the green events calendar on our website.  We want this to be as comprehensive as possible, so if you know of a great event we need to share, e-mail Cameron of the Boston Green Blog and she will add it.

Exchange green ideas

To help the great conversations we start at our monthly Happy Hours continue through the month, we have a few ways for the community to teach and learn from each other about sustainability issues.  The first tool is right in front of your nose!  We hope to build this blog in to a forum to discuss what Greater Boston is doing to be sustainable.  We seek community members with interesting things to say about green business and green living to provide guest posts and we encourage everyone to read what results.   Our guidelines are simple – local, sustainable, interesting, appropriate and informative.  If you would like to submit a guest post, e-mail us!

If you are looking for a more in-depth conversation about the city’s sustainability issues, we are planning a series of more topical events starting this fall.  We are currently looking for partners who want to bring quality programming about sustainability issues to the area.  If you have an idea for a speaker, venue, topic or partner, e-mail us with all the juicy details!  When these programs are announced, you can find them on our website, Eventbrite page or anywhere that BGD broadcasts news.

Promote a sustainable product or service

Let’s face it – creating an engaging sustainability community isn’t cheap.  Because we want to keep our events and services an inexpensive as possible, we are looking for appropriate sponsors for Boston Green Drinks.  We bring together a community of people who believe in sustainable economies.  As a result, we are a qualified audience for sustainable goods and services.  If you are interested in sponsoring BGD activity, e-mail us with information!

We can’t wait for this community of sustainability-minded Bostonians to grow and we thank you for helping to maximize the experience of everyone involved.

Thanks,

Bringing sustainability-minded Bostonians together

The Boston Green Drinks Steering Committee

Chris

Doug

Lyn

Tracy

and Tony