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NERC Blog

Recycling is not rocket science. It’s people science.

Today's guest blog is authored by NERC Board member Chaz Miller. The original posting can be located here.

I love to hike. I often go to Rock Creek Park in the District or the Northwest Branch Trail in Silver Spring and enjoy an hour or two on the trails. In the past, I’ve always seen some litter, usually water bottles and other odds and ends. Since the pandemic began I’ve seen a surge in those bottles along with masks and gloves used to protect from the virus. Littering may be bad behavior and illegal in the parks, but that doesn’t seem to prevent it from happening.

I thought about that when I read the latest news story about another Congressional hearing on recycling. How to cure recycling is a hot topic on the Hill these days. We are told at these hearings that recycling is “broken”.  However, if we just adopt this policy or that policy or maybe this whole long list of…

A Composter’s Guide to Project Drawdown

Today's guest blog was written by Angelina Peone, the Recycling Coordinator at Ulster County Resource Recovery Agency in Kingston New York. It originally appeared in the US Composting Council's Soil Builders Blog, and can be found here.

In 2017, a nonprofit organization of leading scientists and researchers called Project Drawdown published a comprehensive report of key climate solutions and options to achieve ‘drawdown’ – the future point in time when levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere stop climbing, and start to steadily decline. The organization published an update on their initial assessments in the 2020 Drawdown Review, a 91-page report that ranks the critical actions needed to curb global warming temperatures under 2˚C – which is widely regarded as the scientific consensus of a global warming tipping point where climate change impacts could devastate the planet. The researchers lay out two ambitions scenarios that could achieve their emission reduction goals by mid-century if all solutions are applied…

VT FEED publishes its ninth farm to school resource and creates database of school meal distribution

Since 2000, Vermont Food Education Every Day (VT FEED) has worked with schools throughout the state, “to grow robust farm to school programs, acting as a catalyst for rebuilding healthy food systems, and cultivating links between classrooms, cafeterias, communities, and local farms.” A significant part of the nonprofit’s work has been the publication of farm to school resources, which with the publication of Connecting Classrooms, Cafeterias, Communities: A Guide to Building Integrated Farm to School Programs now number nine.

The 130-page guide, which is a free download from VT FEED’s website, “is an updated compilation of earlier resources and offers new approaches and tools to help your school community successfully grow your farm to school program,” it states. The guide is part of a national wave of farm to school programs: according to the USDA Farm to School Census,…

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