From more severe storms to prolonged heat waves, climate change is here and it’s happening now. Luckily, clean energy solutions like solar panels can help both our planet and our economy.
Over the years, Pecci said many communities in the state have gone to a single-stream recycling system. And those streams have increasingly captured items that either are not recyclable or for which there is no recycling market, such as coffee-cup lids. “What happened is we degraded the quality of the material,” Pecci said. “The cleaner and more sorted something is, the more value it is going to have.”
“This rule green-lights the dumping of pesticides and toxic chemicals into our waters,” says Heather Govern, director of the Conservation Law Foundation’s clean air and water program. “Drinking water in New England is threatened by rule changes like this, because you just won’t have those same protections for smaller streams.”
Since installing solar panels on their barn, Sean Mahoney and his wife have noticed a huge difference in their energy bills. They’ve also been able to reduce their carbon footprint.
Erica Kyzmir-McKeon is a Communities and Toxics Senior Attorney in CLF’s Environmental Justice Program. Erica first joined CLF as a Senior Fellow focused on legal food hub work. In 2019, she became a staff attorney, dividing her time between CLF’s Clean Air & Water and Environmental Justice programs. Most recently, Erica worked as a staff… Continue reading Erica Kyzmir-McKeon
Every winter the gas industry tries to scare us, claiming there isn’t enough gas during cold snaps to heat and power our homes. Their solution? More fracked gas and new, expensive gas pipelines. But we don’t have to buy into their propaganda. We have all the power we need without expensive new pipelines.
“We have many options for heating our homes,” says Greg Cunningham, Director of CLF’s Clean Energy and Climate Change program. “Alternatives like heat pumps avoid the use of oil and natural gas furnaces, which pollute our environment and damage our climate.”
Despite many good intentions, curbside recycling has turned out to be a disaster. But that doesn’t mean recycling is dead. We have solutions. One of the best systems for recycling our plastic, glass, and aluminum containers is the bottle return program, also known as the “bottle bill” or deposit-return.
Although some New England states pioneered the bottle return system, they have since fallen behind. But New England can improve its recycling by updating or adopting bottle return systems in each state. This would help reduce litter in our neighborhoods, parks, and waterways; it would keep recyclable material out of landfills and incinerators; and it would lift some recycling costs off of communities.
Our electricity grid was designed over 100 years ago. But times have changed. Today, clean, renewable energy can be harnessed right where we live, so electricity doesn’t have to come from polluting power plants miles away. But we have to update our electricity grid to take advantage of it.
