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Red sky, flying embers: Australia’s fires are the first climate disaster of the decade

Wildfires scorched almost every continent in 2019, but the ongoing wildfires in Australia have caused unprecedented damage.

As fires have blanketed more than 12 million acres of land in Australia, killing at least 20 people and leveling more than 1,000 homes, tens of thousands of people have evacuated to safer ground while many are missing. On Thursday, the Australian state of New South Wales — which includes Sydney, the country’s largest city — declared its third state of emergency since November, and experts say the flames are getting worse. The New South Wales Rural Fire Service issued a fire spread prediction map that shows where the flames are projected to expand over the weekend as weather conditions deteriorate.

A record-breaking heatwave and ongoing drought caused by extreme temperature patterns in the Indian Ocean — all connected to climate change — created the conditions allowing these exceptionally intense wildfires to thrive. For those of us outside of Australia, photos of blood-orange skies, thick gray smoke, and people fleeing for their lives offer a small but devastating glimpse at the first major climate catastrophe of the 2020s.

Helicopters dump water on bushfires as they approach homes located on the outskirts of the town of Bargo on December 21, 2019 in Sydney, Australia. David Gray / Getty Images

This picture taken on December 31, 2019 shows firefighters struggling against the strong wind in an effort to secure nearby houses from bushfires near the town of Nowra in the Australian state of New South Wales. Saeed Khan / AFP via Getty Images

Smoke and flames rise from burning trees as bushfires hit the area around the town of Nowra in the Australian state of New South Wales on December 31, 2019. Saeed Khan / AFP via Getty Images

Cars line up to leave the town of Batemans Bay in New South Wales to head north on January 2, 2020. Peter Parks / AFP via Getty Images

Tourists walk with a dog through dense smoke from bushfires in front of the Batemans Bay bridge as cars line up to leave the town in New South Wales to head north on January 2, 2020. Peter Parks / AFP via Getty Images

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Red sky, flying embers: Australia’s fires are the first climate disaster of the decade

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The power’s out in California. Is this what our future looks like?

You’d think a power outage would make things quieter, but not so here in the hills above the San Francisco Bay Area. When the electricity went off it was replaced with wails of rage and the steady thrum of diesel generators. When I rode my bike up into the streets where the lights went off, I saw people seemingly going about their business as usual, with perhaps a little more frustration than usual. And I wondered if I was catching a glimpse of a future in which we constrain energy to restore the climate.

On Wednesday, Pacific Gas and Electric, the biggest power utility in California, turned off electricity for half a million people. Why did PG&E shut down big swathes of its system? Because it routinely sparks fires. Last year, when the dry winds began rushing across the state, drying vegetation to a flammable crisp and knocking tree limbs against power lines, PG&E considered shutting off the power. It didn’t, and the utility’s powerlines started the Camp Fire, which destroyed the town of Paradise and pushed PG&E into bankruptcy.

This year, PG&E is taking no chances. It’s working furiously to cut trees back from power lines. But the company has deferred far more maintenance than it could complete in one year, so it’s also switching off the power whenever the weather favors fire.

This sort of thing could become more common as the climate heats. First, warmer, wilder weather is likely to increase the danger of big fires. Second, society may opt for power systems that periodically go dark in order to slash emissions. It’s a lot less expensive to build a 100-percent renewable electric system if that system doesn’t have to be on 100 percent of the time, as David Roberts recently pointed out in Vox. When you’re dealing with renewable power controlled by nature, it’s much easier on the collective wallet to guarantee that the lights will stay on 95 percent of the time, while allowing for some blackouts on the 5 percent of days that are abnormally dark and windless.

So outages like this are a good test run for a climate-changed future. They give us a chance to see how we might cope with less reliable electricity.

For months, PG&E customers like me have been getting multiple mailings and emails warning of the coming service cuts, yet lots of people seem caught off guard. Shoppers cleared store shelves of batteries and flashlights this week, after learning the shutdowns were coming for real. Cars cued up at gas stations, orders for portable generators rose, and drivers slammed into each other as traffic lights went out.

The state highway agency, Caltrans, realized that the shutdown would sever roads where they passed through tunnels. Without electricity to run the ventilation, the poisons that spew from tailpipes would turn tunnels into deadly traps. So Caltrans announced that it would cut off a major artery where it passed through the Caldecott tunnel, but then, at the last minute, got diesel generators to keep the fans (and cars) moving.

Some grocery stores are running gas-powered generators to keep food from spoiling, water utilities are using them to keep pumps running, and they are rumbling along at hospitals to keep people alive.

The fact that turning off (relatively clean) electricity could lead to the burning of more (relatively dirty) diesel is one of those unintended consequences that might not spring to mind without this kind of test. But it turns out this is a well-documented phenomenon: In disaster zones and anywhere electricity is unreliable, people turn to diesel.

How do people feel about losing power? Oh, they were not pleased. Twitter was even more swollen with bile than usual, if you happened to stumble into #PGEshutoff or #PGEshutdown. Reporters had no trouble finding sources that wanted to piss on PG&E, and it looks like someone in the town of Maxwell (north of Sacramento) shot at utility workers, hitting a truck. Some anger is understandable. After all, PG&E funnelled money it might have spent on safety to investors. But it also suggests some baser instincts. Americans, especially, get heated when inconvenienced. The sporadic gas-price spikes of the 1970s helped set off seismic shifts in U.S. politics. It’s easy to imagine this tide of venom turning against renewable energy if it came with too many brownouts.

Ideally, we’d use this experience to learn and prepare. We’re going to have to figure out better backup power systems than diesel generators for important infrastructure like tunnels and water supplies BART — the local commuter rail system figured out how to pull electricity from multiple parts of its system to keep moving (though it wasn’t perfect). Utilities and local governments are going to have to figure out how to make the electrical systems of the future reliable enough to keep people from losing their minds, setting fire to City Hall. Outage outrage is a thing. If only we could channel all that self-righteous anger back into the power lines.

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The power’s out in California. Is this what our future looks like?

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The Bering Sea’s ice has never melted this early before

On Alaska’s West Coast, the feeble April sun is shining this week on a fresh spot of open water. The sea ice found there for ages every spring is gone.

Ice in the Bering Sea, the narrow body of water between Russia and Alaska, has dropped to its lowest springtime level since at least 1850. In all that time, no other year has come close. After a winter filled with unusually high temperatures, sea ice now sits at less than 10 percent of what could previously be considered “normal”.

“We’ve fallen off a cliff,” said Rick Thoman, a climatologist at the National Weather Service in Alaska, in a tweet.

University of Alaska, Fairbanks

Coming on the heels of the warmest winter in the Arctic since records began, the loss of ice is at once predictable and shocking. The ice disappears every summer but never so early. It’s the latest sign of what scientists have been calling the New Arctic — a novel landscape that’s replacing the ecosystem that has existed at the top of the world for millennia. Arctic temperatures are rising at a rate twice that of the global average, which means that for the foreseeable future, the region will continue to showcase the effects of climate change at their extreme, with repercussions across the world.

For residents of western Alaska, this new record hits home. Waves on the Bering Sea are crashing into their houses and ports with unusual ferocity this spring. Huge ocean storms — commonplace at the far northern reaches of the Pacific — now bring waves the size of five-story apartment buildings.

In late February, an ocean storm ravaged the community of Little Diomede Island, knocking out power and damaging the town’s water treatment plant. The lack of protective sea ice means even storms of average strength hit the town of Shishmaref hard this winter, even as locals there have decided to permanently relocate further inland, away from the encroaching sea.

For native people around the Bering Sea, climate change is already an an existential threat.

“The sea ice loss has disrupted community’s timeframes, schedules, and areas where we normally hunt ice-associated marine mammals,” said Austin Ahmasuk, a community advocate for the Bering Straits Native Association, in an email to Grist.

Hunts for walrus, whales, and seals have historically provided native people in western Alaska with an ample source of food, but warmer weather has threatened catches. In some places, walrus catches have plummeted. Ahmasuk says that few communities have been spared the new reality of an ice-free spring.

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The Bering Sea’s ice has never melted this early before

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Here’s What Happens to a Plastic Bag After You Throw It Away

Globally, we use more than?1 trillion plastic bags each year. Yeah, that’s A LOT of plastic. Even more shocking, only 1 percent of plastic bags actually get recycled in the US.

Plastic shopping bags are a huge environmental issue, mainly because they are so ubiquitous and there is a lot of?confusion around recycling them. The fact is, unless you are making a special effort to recycle your plastic bags at your local grocery store or drop-off location, your used bags are eventually ending up in one of 3 locations: the landfill, a tree by the highway or the ocean. And they’re not going away any time soon.

Here’s the timeline of what happens when you toss your plastic bags…

That day…

After a trip to the grocery store, you pull out a single bunch of bananas from a?plastic grocery bag. You stare at the bag?guiltily, wishing you had a better use for it, but your drawer is already overflowing with too many saved plastic bags as is. So you crumple the bag up, toss it in your trash, and forget about it.

A few days later…

You take out your trash and it gets collected. The garbage bag breaks open in the truck and all the contents spill out. Your plastic grocery?bag may?catch a breeze and blow off the truck, getting tangled in a high tree on the side of a busy road where it will cling for years to come. Otherwise, the bag makes its way to the landfill.

1 year later?

You?ve probably gained a wrinkle or two, maybe another gray hair, but that plastic bag you?ve tossed hasn?t changed all that much. At this point it has probably reached its home, one of 3 locations:

  1. If the bag was in a tree, perhaps it fell, tattered, to the ground, where it was?eaten by an innocent?seagull. The plastic makes the bird?feel unnaturally full and causes it to starve to death. The body decomposes in a matter of weeks, but the plastic bag in its stomach remains behind, fully intact.
  2. Your plastic bag may have?been?swept up in the breeze at the landfill and?end up near a waterway. A few hard rainfalls later, it is in a trickling stream en route to the ocean.
  3. Perhaps the bag remains in the landfill, lifeless, perfectly preserved. In any scenario, it hasn’t?broken down at all.

20 years later…

  1. If the bag was originally stuck in a tree, it finally decomposes after 20 years, thanks to photodegradation from solar UV light. Since bacteria do not eat plastic, it cannot biodegrade like a banana or a paper bag, which is why plastic?is extremely difficult to break down.
  2. If it became an?ocean-dwelling bag, it likely remains?fairly intact, very slowly breaking down into smaller pieces of harmful microplastics, which are already?destroying our oceans. And just because it is in the ocean doesn’t mean it is not your problem. Small fish feed on these plastic pieces, larger fish feed on small fish and we feed on larger fish. So, effectively, that fish dinner you or your loved ones eat in 20 years might contain toxic microplastics from?your grocery bag. Ew.
  3. In the landfill, rainfall causes water-soluble chemicals from the plastic to get carried away and leached into the ground. From there, these chemicals pollute the?water supply, poison local?farmland and harm local animal and plant life.

500 years later?

You?ve come and gone, and so have your great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandchildren (and their great-grandchildren, too). And finally, in some massive landfill, your grocery bag that held that single bunch of bananas has hopefully decomposed?although we can?t be sure, since plastic bags have only been around for about 50 years.

The process?may actually take over 1000 years, since plastic does not technically biodegrade and some types need?UV light to break down. So?it is possible that your grocery bag will be harming human health and the planet for the next 30?generations?to come. At least no one can say you didn’t leave your mark.

If your plastic bag ended up in the waterways, it is still floating around the ocean in the form of microplastics, killing sea life (if there still is any in 500 years) and further acidifying the ocean. The sad truth is that, in the ocean, plastics?may never fully break down, even in 1000 years.

Make a change!

Wow, that was bleak. But it doesn’t have to be that?way. Your humble actions today can make a huge difference for the next millennium!

While you cannot recycle plastic bags with your home recycling, they are fairly easy and convenient to recycle through a drop-off location. Just collect all of your plastic bags in a corner of your kitchen and bring them back to the grocery store, which should have a recycling drop-off?for them.?Find locations near you here. (Please do not try to recycle plastic bags in your home recycling. It causes major problems.) From there, the bags will be broken down into raw plastic pellets and get reused to create any number of useful products, from clothing to sunglasses to useful appliances. And hopefully those will get recycled or repurposed, and the cycle of good will continue.

Or, ideally, you can stop using plastic shopping bags altogether.

If you make one change this year to become greener, work on your plastic waste. Carry reusable bags with you to the grocery store so you don’t need plastic bags. Petition your local town to ban plastic bags from stores. Encourage more grocery stores?to offer recyclable boxes (leftover from their shipments) for people who forget their bags. These changes are small, easy and highly effective once they are widely implemented.

It’s all up to you. Go ahead, lead the plastic-free revolution in your town, in your country, in your planet.

?Related on Care2:

And 2018′s Dirtiest Produce Award Goes To…
8 Easiest Hacks to Reduce Your Plastic Consumption
A Guide to the Greenest Meal Delivery Kits Out There

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are solely those of the author and may not reflect those of Care2, Inc., its employees or advertisers.

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Here’s What Happens to a Plastic Bag After You Throw It Away

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“You’ll Be Hanging From A Tree.”

Mother Jones

Before Rep. Al Green (D-Texas) began his town hall Saturday morning, he instructed his aides to play a tape. It was, he explained, a voicemail he had received earlier in the week, shortly after he had delivered a speech on the House floor to become the first member of Congress to call for President Donald Trump to be impeached.

“Hey, Al Green, I’ve got an impeachment for ya—it’s gonna be yours,” said a man’s voice. “Actually we’re gonna give you a short trial before we hang your nigger ass.”

A murmur went up in the audience of 80 or so Houston-area constituents who had packed into a church hall in the city’s southwest corner. Green played another voicemail, which warned, “try it, and we’ll rinse out you fucking niggers, you’ll be hanging from a tree.”

When it was over, Green got to his point. “Friends, I want to assure you that no amounts of threats or intimidation will stop what I have started, I promise you—we are going to continue with this,” he said. “We are gonna move forward, we will not turn around.”

Green, a seven-term congressman and member of the Congressional Black Caucus, made his call for impeachment after Trump tweeted warning former FBI director James Comey not to leak details of their conversations with the press. Green told the audience he believes that Trump’s actions amounted to an admission of obstruction of justice, and the tweet constituted intimidation. It is imperative, he said, that the House move to indict Trump; nothing less than the rule of law is at stake.

Those who asked questions largely agreed with Green’s argument, but constituents seemed uncertain about the future. One man wondered if it was worth going through the impeachment process if the result was President Mike Pence. Another asked about impeaching Pence, too. A woman in the back wanted to know if there was any possibility of the president’s cabinet declaring him unfit. Unsurprisingly, given the president’s low approval in the district (just 18 percent of voters in the district voted for Green’s Republican opponent last fall), only one questioner voiced any real opposition to what Green had done, asking why he had said nothing about “the lawlessness of the Obama administration.”

Green himself suggested the process might plod along from here. He hadn’t introduced an official impeachment resolution yet and was planning more town halls on the subject. “I haven’t asked leadership for a response,” he told me, insisting that impeachment needed to come “from the bottom up, not the top down.” By the same token, no one in in the leadership had told him to pipe down, he said, although he allowed that there were “surely members who were thinking it.”

When a nine-year-old girl asked “why does it take so long to impeach Trump?” Green said that it “may never happen”—but it was worth giving the system time to function as it should. He has done a flurry of interviews over the last few days (there were NBC News cameras in the back of the room while he spoke) but is treading lightly when it comes to his fellow colleagues. Green told me he was not planning to lobby fellow members to get behind an impeachment measure—”people have to be guided by their conscience.” (He did hope, though, that they would listen to public opinion—at the event he asked residents to go to ImpeachTrumpNow.com to register their support.)

For now the road to impeachment is lonely, and perhaps very long. “I am a voice in the wilderness,” he said, “but history will vindicate me.”

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“You’ll Be Hanging From A Tree.”

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Justice Department Gets Ready to Turn the Cops Loose

Mother Jones

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Here we go:

Attorney General Jeff Sessions has ordered a sweeping review of federal agreements with dozens of law enforcement agencies….In a memorandum dated March 31 and made public Monday, the attorney general directed his staff to look at whether law enforcement programs adhere to principles put forth by the Trump administration, including one declaring that “the individual misdeeds of bad actors should not impugn” the work police officers perform “in keeping American communities safe.”

I think we can safely guess that many or most of these agreements will, upon review, be discovered to be heavy-handed and unfair sanctions based on a few individual bad apples. They will then be gutted or thrown out.

These are shaping up to be golden years for police departments, who are getting a very clear message: Paint the town red, boys. No need to worry anymore about the feds ginning up any ridiculous “civil rights” concerns just because you harass lots of black people or beat up prisoners in your jails. Just catch us some bad dudes, OK?

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Justice Department Gets Ready to Turn the Cops Loose

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Trump’s Solution to Crime in Black Neighborhoods: Stop-and-Frisk

Mother Jones

Donald Trump has a solution to crime in America’s black neighborhoods: stop-and-frisk.

Trump was in Cleveland on Wednesday for a conference of pastors at a local church, along with Fox News host Sean Hannity. As part of the event, Trump attended a town hall meeting on “African-American concerns,” according to the church’s website, that is slated to air Wednesday night on Hannity’s show. An excerpt of the transcript from the town hall shows an audience member asking Trump what he would do to help decrease violence in the black community.

Trump’s answer? Stop-and-frisk on a national level.

“We did it in New York—it worked incredibly well,” Trump said of the practice, which empowered police officers to stop a person on the street for a pat-down if they suspected him or her of wrongdoing. In fact, data showed that the practice effectively turned into racial profiling that disproportionately targeted black New Yorkers. Studies also found that stop-and-frisk was ineffective in catching criminals or preventing crime. A federal judge ruled it unconstitutional in 2013.

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Trump’s Solution to Crime in Black Neighborhoods: Stop-and-Frisk

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An Eco-Friendly Guide to Getting Rid of Your Food

Food waste is a huge problem in the United States. According to Feeding America, up to 40 percent of food thats harvested and prepared for consumption goes to waste. This is a problem not only because of the enormous amount of resources required to produce the food in the first place, but also because of what happens to it next.

Though natural food is biodegradable, throwing it in the landfill still has consequences. Feeding America reports that food in landfills breaks down to release methane, a harmful greenhouse gas that, when released, contributes to global warming. In fact, it has 21 times the global warming potential of carbon.

Look, were only humansometimes we buy things that dont get cooked. We prepare more food than we need. We end up going out to eat with friends instead of cooking. Even the most eco-conscious of us sometimes have to dispose of some food. When this happens, we try to do it in the most eco-friendly way possible. Here are some ideas.

Freeze it for Seasonal Broth

Freeze leftover veggies (even stems and leaves), compiling all your leftovers until youre ready to make a seasonal vegetable broth. This works especially well if you tend to buy locally and seasonally. After a few weeks, youll likely have a multitude of vegetables, leaves, cores and end pieces that can be used to make a delicious seasonal broth. If you keep up this practice for a while, you may observe that the flavors of your broth start to change with the seasons. Cool, huh?

Compost It

Composting is a great way to turn leftover food into nutrients for your garden. Its not as hard as you might think to get started: All youll need is some organic matter, some oxygen, warmth and a little moisture. You dont need a gigantic compost barrel, eithera small garbage can is plenty of space to create a small compost pile.

If you dont want to create your own composting system at home, check to see if your town or one nearby offers composting services. This will vary greatly by region, but if you have the resources available to you, you may simply be able to drop off your leftovers at a composting site.

Create a Food-Sharing Group

If you have a circle of friends that tends to be eco-conscious, why not start a conversation about food waste? If youre not going to use that bread baguette you bought, chances are your neighbor might be able to find a use for it. Create a Facebook or Meetup group (or just an old-fashioned network of people you can call) who are interested in exchanging leftovers on a regular basis.

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are solely those of the author and may not reflect those of Care2, Inc., its employees or advertisers.

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An Eco-Friendly Guide to Getting Rid of Your Food

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Black Lives Matter Just Officially Became Part of the Democratic Primary

Mother Jones

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On Wednesday, the Democratic National Committee invited activists from two prominent groups within the Black Lives Matter movement to organize and host a town hall forum on racial justice for the party’s presidential candidates.

In recent months, the movement—which began with protests in response to the August 2014 killing of black teenager Michael Brown but has since grown to political organizing nationwide—has become increasingly influential in shaping the Democratic Party’s stance on racial and criminal justice.

In August, the DNC passed a resolution declaring its support for the movement. Bernie Sanders introduced a criminal justice platform days after activists from the Black Lives Matter network, which was founded after the 2012 shooting of Trayvon Martin, interrupted him at a rally in Seattle over the summer. And members of the police-reform group Campaign Zero, which is also affiliated with the Black Lives Matter movement, introduced a well-received criminal justice policy agenda.

In one of several letters to leaders of the Black Lives Matter network and Campaign Zero, DNC Chief Executive Officer Amy K. Dacey wrote, “We believe that your organization would be an ideal host for a presidential candidate forum—where all of the Democratic candidates can showcase their ideas and policy positions that will expand opportunity for all, strengthen the middle class and address racism in America.”

The letters, which were obtained by the Washington Post, come a day after leaders of the Black Lives Matter network called on the DNC to hold an additional debate focused exclusively on racial and criminal justice. “We deserve substantive responses and policy recommendations,” Elle Hearns and two other leaders of the collective wrote in an online petition—which, just one day after it was posted, had garnered nearly 10,000 signatures.

While the DNC gave a green light to a racial-justice-themed town hall discussion, committee leaders said the organization would not add another debate to the six presidential debates already scheduled, according to the Post.

Reactions to that news from Black Lives Matter movement leaders were mixed. In her interview with the Post on Wednesday, Hearns called the town hall invitation “unsatisfactory.” Campaign Zero leader DeRay McKesson, however, indicated that he is already in talks with DNC officials to coordinate the town hall and has reached out to potential venues and corporate partners.

He has also been in touch with the Republican National Committee to explore including Republican candidates in the town hall as well. “We want to bring together all of the candidates, not focused on either political party, to have a conversation centered on race and criminal justice,” McKesson said.

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Black Lives Matter Just Officially Became Part of the Democratic Primary

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This communal fridge is pretty damn amazing

This communal fridge is pretty damn amazing

By on 13 Aug 2015commentsShare

Anyone who’s ever lived with roommates knows that communal fridges are basically just big boxes of chilled nightmares and disease sprinkled with 500 mostly empty condiment bottles. The idea of a communal fridge for 30,000 people should make even Sigourney Weaver shudder — but the people of the Spanish town of Galdakao are making it work. The goal, NPR reports, is to divert perfectly good food from the dumpster:

In April, the town established Spain’s first communal refrigerator. It sits on a city sidewalk, with a tidy little fence around it, so that no one mistakes it for an abandoned appliance. Anyone can deposit food inside or help themselves.

This crusade against throwing away leftovers is the brainchild of Alvaro Saiz, who used to run a food bank for the poor in Galdakao.

“The idea for a Solidarity Fridge started with the economic crisis — these images of people searching dumpsters for food — the indignity of it. That’s what got me thinking about how much food we waste,” Saiz told NPR over Skype from Mongolia, where he’s moved onto his next project, living in a yurt and building a hospital for handicapped children.

The town allocated about $5,580 for the fridge, which covers the purchase of the nightmare-box itself, electricity, and upkeep as well as a health safety study, NPR reports. And fortunately, the Solidarity Fridge isn’t a complete free-for-all, unlike that moldy food coffin mini-fridge you kept in your college dorm room:

There are rules: no raw meat, fish or eggs. Homemade food must be labeled with a date and thrown out after four days. But Javier Goikoetxea, one of the volunteers who cleans out the fridge, says nothing lasts that long.

“Restaurants drop off their leftover tapas at night — and they’re gone by next morning,” he says. “We even have grannies who cook especially for this fridge. And after weekend barbecues, you’ll find it stocked with ribs and sausage.”

If we had a Solidarity Fridge in my Seattle neighborhood, I, for one, would be willing to overcome the trauma of past fridge cleanings and passive aggressive roommates in order to help with the upkeep. Anything for grannie food and Thai leftovers.

Source:
To Cut Food Waste, Spain’s Solidarity Fridge Supplies Endless Leftovers

, NPR.

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A Grist Special Series

Oceans 15

What seafood is OK to eat, anyway? Ask an expertWhen it comes to sustainable seafood, you could say director of Seafood Watch Jennifer Dianto Kemmerly is the ultimate arbiter of taste.

What’s there to see at the bottom of the ocean? More than you’d thinkWe know more about the moon than the deep sea. National Geographic explorer David Gruber wants to change that.

What’s it like to be at home on the ocean? Ask a fishermanTele Aadsen fishes for salmon in southeast Alaska, which means she is up close and personal with the sea every day.

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This communal fridge is pretty damn amazing

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