Breast Cancer Awareness Month is an annual health campaign that is promoted every October to increase awareness of the disease. Progress has been made in achieving earlier detection, better treatment, and longer lives. But in spite of this progress, millions of women are still afflicted by this disease. In fact in the U.S., 1 in 8 women will be diagnosed with breast cancer during their lifetime. The...

Want to lose weight, reduce your risk for heart disease and cancer, and ward off diabetes? Start by putting down that soda and skipping the canned soup during your next supermarket visit. These products and health concerns might seem like they have nothing in common, but they’re all united by a single chemical compound that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration shamefully failed to ban from food...

Plastic Pollution Coalition joins Breast Cancer Fund, Natural Resources Defense Council, Environmental Working Group, Physicians for Social Responsibility, and many other organizations in a call on FDA to ban BPA.  The move is supported by Martha Stewart, Jeff Bridges, Bonnie Raitt, Rosanna Arquette, Hillary Swank, Fran Drescher, Ed Begley, Jr., Mario Batali, Jackson Browne and many other notable...

1. Make Your Own Wrapping Paper Most mass-produced wrapping paper you find in stores is not recyclable and ends up in a landfill. Instead, get creative with non-plastic gift wrapping. Wrap presents with old maps, the comics section of a newspaper, or children’s artwork.  You can also use a scarf, an attractive dish towel, a bandanna, or some other useful cloth item, and forgo the plastic tape...

The Plastic Pollution Coalition team has put together a fun list of suggestions to help reduce your family’s plastic footprint this Thanksgiving. Did you know that between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day, Americans generate 25 percent more waste per week than during the rest of the year? This creates an additional 1.2 million tons per week, or an extra 6 million tons, for the holiday season! Join...

In the last few weeks we have received many questions about “silken” teabags. You were worried that the material is not silk, but PLA plastic with undocumented additives. Some of you were concerned that claims of biodegradability and compostability might be misleading. You wrote that “silken” teabags have remained in compost piles for one, or two years without much visible...

University of California at Riverside philosophy professor Carl Cranor stepped into a different realm in his new book Legally Poisoned: How the Law Puts Us at Risk from Toxicants. But despite the fact that Cranor works in the philosophy department, not the law school, he appears to have done his legal homework. Just published by Harvard University Press, the book details the toxic chemicals people...

Back in 2008, everyone cheered when California’s Governor Schwarzenegger signed two bills (AB 1879 and SB 509) known collectively as the Green Chemistry Initiative. Dozens of environmental and public health nonprofits set to work laboring alongside state representatives over the course of two years to craft regulations that would tighten oversight of the 80,000-odd chemicals on the market...

We recycle; therefore, we are decent citizens of planet Earth, right? Well, sort of … Ever think about where stuff goes AFTER you toss it into your recycling bin? It’s great to recycle, but the sad truth is that a small percentage of the plastic we contribute to recycle actually gets recycled. Most of the plastic stuff you virtuously toss into your recycling bin often just eventually becomes pollution...

We are pleased to announce that on Saturday, November 6, 2010, Plastic Pollution Coalition will host TEDxGreatPacificGarbagePatch, in Santa Monica, California, at the Annenberg Community Beach House.  TEDx is a program of local, self-organized events where people share big ideas and become inspired.  Although independently organized, all TEDx events follow the spirit of TED conferences. TEDxGreatPacificGarbagePatch...