The holiday season is upon us and with it, a deluge of new tech, trinkets, and advertisements convincing us to indulge. But of course this torrent of consumption is nothing new, especially in the free-market capitalist consumerist nation of the United States. Every year, the holiday shopping season, spanning across November and December, sees massive […]
By Maciej Kolaczkowski In 2015, Parties to the UNFCCC adopted the Paris Agreement, to strengthen the global response to the threat of climate change by keeping the global temperature rise this century well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels, and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C. It was signed by 175 countries, […]
In December of 1924, the heads of all the major lightbulb manufacturers across the world met in Geneva to concoct a sinister plan. Their talks outlined limits on how long all of their lightbulbs would last. The idea is that if their bulbs failed quickly customers would have to buy more of their product. In […]
By Amanda Abrams By now, the word is out: Fashion, particularly “fast fashion,” is killing our planet. Low-cost, cheaply made clothes that are designed to be worn briefly until styles change are terrible for the environment. Over the past decade and a half, consumers have been buying and discarding considerably more outfits. Between 2000 and […]
Despite its association with the U.S. holiday Thanksgiving, Black Friday has spread to shoppers and stores around the world. Now, some French lawmakers are trying to stop that. A French legislative committee passed an amendment Monday that would ban the shopping day because it encourages “resource waste” and “overconsumption,” The Associated Press reported. The amendment […]
By Jacinta Bowler With climate change an ever-looming anxiety, whole industries have sprung up dedicated to help alleviate the stress. Tote bags. Metal straws. Existing companies are trying their best too: clothing retailer Zara has announced that 100 percent of the fabrics it uses will be sustainable by 2025 while Apple has said it has […]
By Joe Vukovich Under the guise of responding to consumer complaints that today’s energy- and water-efficient dishwashers take too long, the Department of Energy has proposed creating a new class of dishwashers that wouldn’t be subject to any water or energy efficiency standards at all. The move would not only undermine three decades of progress […]
By Cullen Schwarz Ethical shopping is a somewhat new phenomenon. We’re far more familiar with the “tried and tested” methods of doing good, like donating our money or time. But while Americans generously donated $390 billion to charities in 2017, that number pales in comparison to the $130 trillion we spent on buying stuff in […]
Today is the day on which we would have exhausted Earth’s resources for the year if everyone lived like residents of the European Union (EU), according to a new report from WWF and the Global Footprint Network. The report, the first to focus on the EU specifically, calculated that if everyone consumed as much fuel, […]