A world without bees would not be as sweet. Honey, wax, propolis, royal jelly, pollen, and even bee venom would not exist in the place we call home. Today, on World Bee Day, we celebrate and honor the tiny, but mighty workers who help to improve our environment and acknowledge how important it is to ensure they stay alive.
If you’ve gone for takeout recently and received your food in cardboard-like takeout boxes, then you may have met “bagasse” in real life. Many eco-friendly restaurants and companies are prioritizing sustainability within their single-use containers, choosing packaging that is made from environmentally-friendly materials. While bamboo is well-known for eco-friendly packages, bagasse is a lesser-known material.
Sustainability starts at home. With more and more of us working from home, now is as good an opportunity as ever to improve sustainability habits.
Harsh artificial lighting is one of the worst parts of working in an office — so why reproduce that at home? Save energy by positioning your desk near a sunny window and turning down the lights around your house. This study found that natural sunlight improves employee mood and productivity — aka energy-saving efforts plus an added boost to productivity.
Amongst the mountains and the deep green forests of central Africa lives the stoic mountain gorilla. Standing between 4 and 6 feet tall, weighing between 300 and 500 pounds, and covered in hair from head to toe, these gentle mammals form bands or troops for community living. Each troop covers an area of .75 to 16 square miles, and an adult gorilla can eat up to 39-44 pounds of vegetation in a day. These gentle giants spend most of their day eating while occasionally playing with their babies.
Climate change has brought a magnifying glass to the global problem of air pollution. As we build, create, and manufacture, our machines release toxic chemicals into the air that cause smog and other forms of pollution.
Fossil fuels emit harmful chemicals that can cause serious problems for the environment and people’s health. Greenhouse gas emissions come from the use of fuels such as natural gas, coal, wood, and petroleum.
Learning to dispose of bioplastics appropriately is crucial to optimizing all of the benefits of using bioplastics opposed to using regular plastic items. Bioplastics are meant to be better for the environment while still retaining the reliability and durability of plastic because they are able to decompose faster and better than regular plastic. However, bioplastics still only dispose well under the right conditions.
Sleeping through the day and active at night, the Australian quoll is a sleek animal with a cat-like body, a mouse-shaped face, lemur-like ears, and white polka-dotted fur. The quoll has approximately six species that vary in weight and sizes, from 11 ounces to 15 pounds. As a carnivorous marsupial, the quoll forages for food at night and avoids the toxic cane toads like the plague.
Gracefully statuesque with muscular shoulders and a long, arching neck, giraffes roam the African savanna, grazing from the treetops. Their legs are often longer than 6 feet, and they can reach speeds of 35 miles per hour for short distances. These tall creatures with goofy faces, long purple tongues, and an array of individual spotting patterns flaunt two horns alongside their ears that mimics a crown. Needing about 5-30 minutes of sleep per 24-hour period and requiring a sip of water every few days, giraffes are basically superbeings.
Renewable energy, also sometimes called clean energy, consists of naturally replenishable, flow-limited, inexhaustible resources such as sunlight, wind, or water. These energies, while not always consistent and limited in the amount of energy available for a unit of time, will not be used up like fossil fuels.