Sustainable Business Alliance (SBA)

SBA on Jul 19th 2008

Please join Congresswoman Barbara Lee and distinguished guests for an informative discussion on the green jobs economy, immediately followed by a green career fair.

Connecting the Green Dots: Exploring the Green Jobs Economy in the 9th Congressional District

July 28th, 2008 • Berkeley City College, 2050 Center Street, Berkeley, CA 94704

Time
10:00 AM- 11:00 AM (Panel Discussion)
11:00 AM- 2:00 PM (Green Career Fair)

For driving directions, click here

A parking facility is located directly across the street from the entrance to the College.

To take Public Transportation: Take BART to the Downtown Berkeley Station and walk north to Center Street. Turn left and continue to the main entrance.

RSVP to the office of Congresswoman Barbara Lee by calling (510) 763-0370.

SBA on Jul 17th 2008

Even biodegradable items like food can hang around in garbage dumps for years. Trash is packed so tightly that it doesn’t always get the necessary light, oxygen, and/or microorganisms it needs to decompose, so truly, we implore: Reduce, reuse, and recycle when you can.

Researchers have found (perfectly compostable) 25-year-old corncobs and grapes, and (easily recyclable) 50-year-old newspapers that are still readable in landfills. The less waste we toss, the fewer mummified remains will hang around in dumps. You might be surprised what your local waste management facility will recycle and compost.

Luckily for San Francisco, Berkeley and Oakland residents, local recycling departments takes a lot of stuff, so our trash cans stay relatively empty in comparison to our compost and recycling bins.

Try making your trash can the smallest bin in your house, putting everything allowable into your recycling and compost bins.

Story of Stuff - I’ve talked about it before, but this 20-minute video is a good primer on what happens to trash when we chuck it.

SBA on Jul 17th 2008

Imagine 20 million televisions pitched into a landfill. It’s an e-waste nightmare, right?

Especially when you consider that a single cathode-ray tube television can contain hundreds of highly toxic chemicals, including mercury, brominated-flame-retardants, and PVC plastics, as well as up to eight pounds of lead.

In the fall 2007 Co-op America Quarterly (”Getting to Zero Waste”), readers are invited to write to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), urging them to get serious about combating e-waste. It’s the FCC that has mandated that all television broadcasters switch to digital in February 2009, rendering millions of old televisions obsolete.

We must convince the FCC and television manufacturers to take responsibility for recycling the components of their products. You can take action now to send an e-mail to the FCC about your e-waste concerns.

Take action now »

SBA on Jul 17th 2008

SBA on Jul 15th 2008

An interview with climate mockumentary filmmaker Randy Olson
BY ERIK HOFFNER
10 Jul 2008

Randy Olson became a filmmaker after fifteen years as a marine biologist, so the perspective he brings to the craft is rooted in science — but blended with his own irreverent humor. His hilarious new film on global warming is a perfect example. Randy Olson. After quitting his university job in 1993, Olson went to film school and teamed up with one of his heroes, renowned marine ecologist Jeremy Jackson of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Together they produced the short film Rediagnosing the Oceans, and their partnership led to the founding of the Shifting Baselines Ocean Media Project. Shifting Baselines creates short films and commercials on ocean conservation starring the likes of Jack Black, Dustin Hoffman, and the Groundlings Improv Comedy Theater. It also produces a truly indispensible blog. In 2006, Randy’s incisive documentary Flock of Dodos: the Evolution-Intelligent Design Circus drew on his biology background and his Kansas upbringing as he exposed the anarchic battle over that state’s effort to open the teaching of evolution to interpretation. It premiered at Tribeca and has more recently been shown on Showtime. A Global Warming Comedy. His new film is Sizzle: A Global Warming Comedy, a mockumentary in which he plays a climate scientist trying to make a hard-hitting documentary on global warming and climate disasters like Katrina. Throughout the film — which weaves in interviews with actual scientists, skeptics, and activists — he is dogged by an earnest if clueless production team and a disrespecting film crew peopled with deniers. It’s An Inconvenient Truth meets Waiting for Guffman, and the result is funny, informative, and also gut-wrenching: when the characters visit New Orleans on the two-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, the true cost of inaction on climate is painted with such stark overtones that the film takes on an important new weight. It’s a narrative step that seems antithetical to comedy, but it works brilliantly, lending a balance and gravity that completes the film. Sizzle, which also stars comic actors Mitch Silpa, Brian Clark, and Alex Thomas, will premiere on July 19 in Hollywood, then has its East Coast premiere a week later at the Woods Hole Film Festival in eastern Massachusetts. Grist caught up with Olson to talk about his new project, the power of narrative, and the urgent need to improve the communication of climate science.