The Green Wrap-up 12.March, 2013

“These jeans are made of garbage” is the pitch line Levi Strauss is using for its latest denim line, Waste‹Less, which uses eight brown or green plastic bottles to make every pair of the jeans.
…Last week, University of Minnesota agricultural scientist Jonathan Foley, author of peer-reviewed research into the global impacts of agriculture, took to the pages of Scientific American to declare that corn is far too dominant in the U.S. agricultural landscape, that it uses too much land, water, fertilizer, pesticides, and taxpayer dollars, and that it produces too little food.
Whole Foods customers asked for it, and they got it. Last week at the Natural Products Expo West, Whole Foods Market announced that by 2018, all of their suppliers must either make their products with ingredients from non-GMO verified sources or they must clearly label all products as containing GMO ingredients.
  • GreenJoyment(Ally): Yay! Even though the GMO labeling proposition failed in California last year, Whole Foods is tackling the issue head-on. I like it! They said that the initiative is being taken in response to their consumers’ concerns. Just more encouragement for conscientious consumers to keep speaking out about the issues that are important to you and your families!
Suntech Power’s Goodyear, Ariz.-based solar panel facility–a factory often held up as an example of the company’s commitment to manufacturing in the U.S.–is shutting down in April.
A new study published in the Geophysical Research Letters reaches the scary conclusion that about 20% of all the ice contained in Canada’s glaciers – and there’s a multitude of them all over the country’s vast Northern area – could melt by the end of this century if global average temperatures increased by 3 degrees Celsius (5.4 F) and by 8 Celsius (14.4 F) in the Canadian Arctic. This alone would lead to an increase in sea levels by about 3.5 cm (1.4 inch).
Using data collected by NASA’s Wind solar probe, scientists have identified an energy source that causes solar winds to heat up and accelerate as they travel further away from their source. The discovery pinpoints ion cyclotron waves as the source of this strange phenomenon, which could revolutionize the nuclear energy industry.
Toyota has never been a big fan of lithium ion batteries, and has a plan in place to replace them with solid-state batteries that are three-to-four times more powerful. Toyota will commercialize solid-state batteries around 2020.

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