Pecologix Political Ecology Blotter

In a single half-hour of news, one can view segments about the rising rates of obesity, the devastating failure of our financial markets, and a woman who hoards. All of these stories have one thing in common: they are effects of maladaptive resource-allocation decisions.Food, money, and material goods are necessary for survival. We have highly [...]

We estimated the amount of waste reduction induced by the use of refills for shampoo and hair conditioner in Japan using point-of-sales (POS) data collected by retailers. The amount of waste reduction estimated was about 276 in fiscal year 2000, and increased to about 54% in fiscal year 2008, contributing to a waste reduction of [...]

This paper investigates the effect of eco-labeling on rental rates, sale prices and occupancy rates. The consensus emerging from previous studies appears to be that investors in and occupiers of eco-labeled buildings obtain a bundle of benefits related to lower operating costs, reputation benefits and productivity higher. In this study, a hedonic model is used [...]

For products sold in the US that make label claims such as ‘naturally sourced’ or ‘plant based’, they found between between 3 and 57 per cent petroleum-derived carbon. ‘We were particularly surprised by one product claiming to be “petrochemical free”,’ says Kay Gebhardt, a product analyst from Seventh Generation. ‘It contained 31 per cent petroleum [...]

Most analysts agree that the economically efficient way to reduce greenhouse-gas (GHG) emissions is by pricing them. However, such prices will not be in place globally or in the largest emitting nations in the near term. The climate system has substantial inertia. Difficult-to-identify nonlinearities and tipping points are also likely. Thus waiting for a ‘best’ [...]

Trucost maintains the world’s most comprehensive database of carbon & other environmental emissions as are generated by the public & private companies, which database is used by global corporations, universities, cities and the public sector to manage their supply chain impacts, and has been a key feature of the Newsweek Green Rankings, as well as [...]

Effects of land use changes are starting to be included in estimates of life-cycle greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, so-called carbon footprints (CFs), from food production. Their omission can lead to serious underestimates, particularly for meat. Here we estimate emissions from the conversion of forest to pasture in the Legal Amazon Region (LAR) of Brazil and [...]