Green Options

This post was originally posted on Eco-Libris blog on August 30.

Today I read a very interesting article at by Rod Edwards (”Paper from Wheat, not Wood“), who reports from Canada about exciting developments in what seems as a very eco-friendly alternative to trees as the source of paper: wheat.

No, it’s not the case of corn here where a food crop is transferred into (what some think is) an alternative “green” product. We’re talking here about pure agricultural waste - wheat straw.

The issue comes up following the printing of the Canadian National Geographic magazine’s June issue, which was printed using 20% wheat straw. The rest of the paper was made of 40% post-consumer recycled paper and 40% virgin paper.

Well, the wheat straw pulp was imported from China (because straw-pulping facilities have yet to be retrofitted in Canada), and that’s not that eco-friendly, but the point was definitely made in terms of feasibility and quality of this alternative. And the potential is huge, as we can learn from the Canadian printer Dollco, which was part of this effort and explains in its news release what could be the impact of using wheat straw for printing paper in Canada:

Worldchanging magazine has announced that it is selling the ultimate environmentalist gift for high school and college graduates: carbon offsets for life.

This means that for every donation above a certain level, Worldchanging will buy carbon offsets in the name of the graduate.

But the price of this gift is not cheap—the minimum donation is $6,000 to offset a graduate’s childhood, and the max is $25,000 to offset an entire career. It also raises an important question: what will such a present do to the mindset of the recipient?

Saturday I went to a discussion entitled Sustaining Change as part of the Creators Series hosted by Tomorrow Unlimited. The talk featured Jennifer Leonard, designer/journalist and co-author of Massive Change, and Sarah Rich, journalist and editor at Worldchanging.

In refreshing presentations that conventional power point users should take notes from (using simple slides, single quotes and vibrant images), both Leonard and Rich told of their own personal

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