The Rainforest Alliance, a New York-based nonprofit, prides itself on its ability to help multinational companies improve their labor and environmental practices. That work, the organization maintains, improves livelihoods and helps preserve fragile lands and water sources in developing countries. But last month, the prominent environmental group and international certifier found itself accused in a civil lawsuit in Washington state Superior Court of “unfair and deceptive marketing practices.” At issue was its certification of allegedly unsound banana-producing operations in Guatemala by Chiquita Brands International. The civil suit was brought on Dec. 17 by Water and Sanitation Health (WASH), a Seattle-based nonprofit dedicated to guaranteeing clean water for poor communities. It alleges that the Rainforest Alliance certified as ecologically friendly and sustainable plantations...
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Two distilleries recently brought online in Brazil have become Latin America’s first producers of cellulosic ethanol, a process that reduces biofuel’s environmental impacts by making more efficient use of the crops used as feedstock. The distilleries are making ethanol from waste products of sugarcane, whose juice already is used extensively to make ethanol in Brazil, the world’s second largest ethanol producer after the United States. Brazil requires ethanol to be blended into gasoline. Currently the proportion is 72.5% gasoline and 27.5% ethanol. Pure ethanol also is sold at pumps nationwide, and nearly all new cars and most older cars in the country are designed to switch back and forth between the two fuels. In Brazil, ethanol, a biofuel with lower greenhouse gas emissions than gasoline...
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The Buenos Aires Zoo is looking for a foreign institution willing to give a new home to Sandra, an orangutan deemed recently by an Argentine court to be a “non-human individual” deserving of basic rights. Sandra won world attention when Argentina’s Federal Court of Appeals, acting last month on a habeas corpus petition, endorsed the view of animal-rights campaigners that orangutans, on account of their cognitive capacity, must not be treated as objects. The zoo insists that its search for a new home for Sandra, the only orangutan in Argentina, is not due to concern about her living conditions but, rather, to its plans to focus exclusively on native animal species. Sandra is a hybrid of the two existing ape species, Borneo (Pongo...
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The city of Florida, population 45,000, is becoming a proving ground for solid-waste processing in Uruguay with the construction of a US$1.5 million center to sort, compress, encapsulate and bury the municipality’s trash. The facility, built using Argentine technology by the Uruguayan company Eronal in partnership with the government of the local department of which Florida is the capital, is expected to process 50 metric tons of solid waste a day. “The departmental government as well as the citizens expect to end an endemic problem, 30 years of pollution from an open-air dump,” declares Florida Department Mayor Carlos Enciso. Enciso says 25% of the city’s trash will be recycled manually by 15 people who had previously been trash pickers working on their...
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