Environment
Need some good news about the environment? The Optimist Daily is your go-to herald of positive environmental news, highlighting eco-friendly solutions and scientific progress around climate action, circularity, conservation, and more. Learn about everything eco in our Environment section.
Restoring native prairies is becoming profitable for farmers in the Great Plains
Often agricultural and environmental interests can be at odds. On the northern Great Plains, though, ranchers increasingly find that restoring native grasslands can benefit cattle and wildlife alike—simultaneously boosting profit and the environment. What we’re seeing in the Great Plains is Read More...
Eco-friendly bike tires made from dandelion rubber to feature at Tour de France
The Tour de France may be a much more sustainable racing competition than NASCAR, but it still generates a whole lot of waste in the form of used bike tires. In an effort to clean up cycling’s biggest event, Continental has developed new road bike tires made using rubber derived from dandelion Read More...
Finally, recyclable toothpaste tubes are hitting the market
Want a simple way to stop producing waste? Stop brushing your teeth—that way, you don’t throw all those toothbrushes and toothpaste tubes into the trash. OK, maybe that’s not a very cleanly option, which is why it’s good that Colgate is creating the first-ever recyclable toothpaste Read More...
Even KFC is now offering a plant-based burger
Kentucky Fried Chicken: The name of this famous fast-food chain implies that its main thing is serving up chicken. But with the demands of consumers have changed, KFC is diverting from its foundations and jumping on the plant-based bandwagon. That’s right, soon enough KFC will be serving the Read More...
Scientists are turning cotton waste into plastic that actually biodegrades
When a cotton gin is used to separate cotton fibers from their seeds, a lot of lint is produced as a waste product. In fact, approximately 32 million tons of cotton lint is produced annually, with about a third of that simply being burnt or put in landfills. Thanks to recent research out of Read More...
Each Spring, 70,000 snakes come to this region in Canada to mate
Tokyo has its cherry blossoms, the Netherlands has its tulip fields, and Paris offers itself. But the Canadian province of Manitoba has a remarkably distinct springtime attraction too: tens of thousands of amorous snakes writhing around in pits. While Manitoba’s tourist agency doesn’t Read More...
Indian town makes it a condition for new buildings to plant at least two trees
In a step to make the environment greener, a municipality in the district of Kerala, India, has decided to pass legislation that will require newly constructed buildings to have at least two native fruit trees planted mandatorily. The rule will apply to any new buildings, commercial or Read More...
Pomegranates may hold key compound to slowing down aging
Since aging is a key driver of many diseases, targeting that process could be a handy catch-all for treating a range of diseases and improving the quality of life for pretty much everybody. That’s why, for a long time, researchers have been busy looking for various ways to slow down the process Read More...
How activists in this Californian city stopped a gas plant from being built
When NRG Energy, one of the largest electric power producers in the country, won a contract to build a new gas plant on the beach in Oxnard, California, in 2014, nearly everyone assumed it was a done deal. The region’s electric utility, Southern California Edison, needed a new source of power to Read More...
A new marketplace is paying farmers to capture carbon emissions
If farmers make changes to the way they manage soil on farms—and that happened on farmland globally—it could theoretically suck a trillion tons of CO2 from the atmosphere, or as much as humans have emitted since the Industrial Revolution. The changes aren’t particularly complicated, and Read More...