News: OnEarth Magazine

Anthony Russo

Ribbon for doing diaper duty (in a big way). Santa Clarita, California, put up $250,000 toward the country's first-ever disposable-diaper recycling plant. If a diaper-collection pilot program set to begin by next summer is successful, the plant will keep 6,700 tons of the most regrettable aspect of parenting out of landfills each year.

Rebuke for plane speaking. Responding to criticism that his company's new sub-supersonic passenger plane is environmentally insensitive -- because it will guzzle 35 percent more fuel than its peers -- Boeing vice-chairman Harry Stonecipher was quite blunt. "There's plenty of fossil fuel still around," he said, leaving listeners to wonder if he, himself, was one of those fossils.

Rebuke for kowtowing to the bottom line. Two days after Wall Street Journal employees received a memo telling them to turn off their computers at night to save energy, they received another one instructing them to keep their PCs running. Why the sudden flip-flop? Insiders say the financial paper had conducted one of its beloved cost-benefit analyses-and determined that saving electricity wasn't worth the two minutes of work time each employee would lose waiting for the morning boot-up.

-- Jason Best

Briefings: Parking Lawns | Poached Salmon, Anyone? | Ribbons & Rebukes

OnEarth. Fall 2001
Copyright 2001 by the Natural Resources Defense Council

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