Thanksgiving special: René Magritte. Credit: Hannah Rothstein.

What is the difference between excess and waste?

Approximately 204 million pounds of turkey were expected to be discarded this Thanksgiving, which could cost the country's sanitation departments up to $293 million.

It costs even more money to cultivate turkeys in the first place—the carbon equivalent of driving across the country 800,000 times. Please take advantage of food media's busiest season and do something with those leftovers. Here are ideas from Southern Living, The Kitchn, Food52, The Daily Meal, and Bon Apettit.

Nov 30, 2016

There are approximately 40,000 pieces of junk left in space by astronauts, some of which may forbode ill for Earth.

Gabrielle Nevitt remembers the first time she noticed the smell. It was sometime in the early 1980s and she was an undergraduate, heading out to sea on a research trip. “Hey, can you smell it?” a fisherman said to her. “It smells like a productive area for fishing.”

"I shall kill no albatross"? Actually, we might have already. Algae that grow on plastics we throw in the ocean release an alluring, "kinda seaweed-y" scent of DMS (dimethyl sulfide). Then sea birds mistakenly eat the plastic.
↩︎ The Atlantic
Nov 11, 2016

Climate change is often going to be the domino that falls. But that does not mean we can ignore the rest of the dominos in the row.

Blaming climate change for natural disasters like the Chennai floods—or even the situation in Syria—alleviates responsibility on the part of lawmakers. It is a convenient way to avoid employing policies and infrastructure that will benefit citizens.
↩︎ Slate
Nov 3, 2016

Oktoberfest garbage can be turned into a Nike Store, and cigarette butts can become high-design chairs. Engineer Arthur Huang goes through the basics of up-cycling trash.

Then, I saw it: Lebanon's new ski slope. But instead of freshly fallen snow, the white hill was made of garbage bags, extending for several hundred meters along the Jdeideh bridge."

​AFP photographer Joseph Eid documents heaping piles of garbage in Beirut, where government inefficiency to clean the streets has resulted in apathy and dark humor among city dwellers.
↩︎ AFP
Oct 12, 2016
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