Public Comments on EPA’s Waste Reduction Model (WARM)

Date: 26 Feb 2024 | posted in: Composting, environment, governance, waste - composting | 0 Facebooktwitterredditmail

Help us improve E.P.A.’s measurements to compare the climate impacts of materials management practices. They are accepting public comments on the Waste Reduction Model (WARM), a tool that influences policy, regulation, funding, and more. See here for ILSR’s recommendations and guidance to submit your comment before March 15, 2024.… Read More

Baltimore’s Zero Waste Future

ILSR has been assisting grass roots organizations in Baltimore to fend off new incinerators and shut down an existing aging and polluting garbage incinerator in Downtown Baltimore, planning for and implementing Zero Waste practices. These practices would also help the city and communities address other pressing problems in the city; including the need for more good jobs, reduced recidivism, elimination of the ‘digital divide’, and creation of new small businesses, community based food production and environmental education.

The following article makes suggestions for transforming the current recycling system, and an update on community based activity in the context of rapidly changing markets, technology and entrepreneurial opportunities.… Read More

For Cities, Big-Box Stores Are Becoming Even More of a Terrible Deal

Under what has become known as the “dark store” method, big-box retailers are declaring their busy stores to be functionally obsolescent and therefore nearly worthless for tax purposes —and they’re winning big judgments for back taxes. It’s the latest example of the way that, even as local governments continue to bend over backwards to attract big-box development, these stores are consistently a bad deal for communities. … Read More

Where is Kropotkin When We Really Need Him?

On February 8, 1921 twenty thousand people, braving temperatures so low that musical instruments froze, marched in a funeral procession in the town of Dimitrov, a suburb of Moscow. They came to pay their respects to a man, Petr Kropotkin, and his philosophy, anarchism. Some 90 years later few know of Kropotkin. And the word anarchism … Read More

Challenging the Republican’s Five Myths on Inequality

Recent comments by Mitt Romney, the probable Republican nominee for President all but guarantee the inequality issue will remain front and center this election year. When asked whether people who question the current distribution of wealth and power are motivated by “jealousy or fairness” Romney insisted, “I think it’s about envy. I think it’s about class … Read More

The Case For The Post Office

In the next few days we may decide the future of the Post Office.  The signs are not auspicious.  President Obama has agreed to a plan to cut Saturday delivery. The Post Service’s management wants to close 2500 post offices immediately and up to 16,000 by 2020.  Representative Darrell Issa (R-CA) has introduced a bill that … Read More

Once We Insisted On Civility: Reflections on Tucson

In the wake of the murders in Tucson, our leaders once again are calling for civility in public discourse. We forget that for almost 40 years we didn’t have to plead for civility. We demanded it. The story of how we did so, and why we stopped, illuminates the intersection of politics and culture. At the dawn of the broadcasting era, the government declared that the airwaves belonged to the public and fashioned rules to protect the public interest protect the public interest.… Read More

Every Justice is a ‘Judicial Activist’

Right-Wingers Just Don’t Like the Ones Who Don’t Agree with Them.  In 1787, writing in the Federalist Papers in support of state ratification of the Constitution, Alexander Hamilton argued that the proposed Supreme Court “will always be the least dangerous to the political rights of the constitution.” As for judicial activism, “contraventions of the will of the legislature may now and then happen; but they can never be as extensive as to affect the order of the political system.”… Read More

8 Words That Could Save Our Country

A rogue Supreme Court seems hellbent on establishing a corporate oligarchy. Congress can’t stop it. Every time Congress or state legislatures tries to curb the power of billionaires or mega corporations the Court slaps them down. Citizens United v. FEC, the recent Supreme Court decision that allowed corporations to spend unlimited sums of money to influence elections is only the most recent step in this process. There will be more. But the shocking decision may be sufficient to galvanize a political movement that can change the rules and ensure our democracy.

We can save our country by adding eight words to the fundamental law of the land, the US Constitution. "Corporations are not persons." "Money is not speech."… Read More

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