Welcome to Bluedot San Diego! Every other Sunday (and this time a couple of days early to get ahead of the holidays), we share stories about local changemakers, sustainable homes and yards,
and the nature all around us, along with planet-friendly recipes and advice from Dear Dot. Together, we can make a difference for the blue dot we call home. – Nicki and Jim Miller
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SIMPLE / SMART / SUSTAINABLE / STORIES
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SIMPLE / SMART / SUSTAINABLE / STORIES
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Seaweed is basically a miracle plant. It’s a food (for people and animals), a fertilizer, an industrial input, an environmental remediator, and many other things. And it grows without the need for fertilizer, irrigation, or huge parcels of land. The potential is immense, but the U.S. is waaaay behind other parts of the world in exploiting this environmentally friendly resource. Our editor Jim Miller catches up with business partners/spouses Torre Polizzian and Leslie Booher of the San Diego–born business trying to close the seaweed gap with both research and commercial applications.
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Quick Links
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Skip scrolling! Here's what you'll find in today's Bluedot San Diego Newsletter:
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Dear Dot: Must I Remove Packing Tape and Labels Before Recycling Amazon Boxes?
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Dear Dot,
While Amazon and other online stores are using more recyclable packaging, they all come covered with packing tape and labels. Can cardboard boxes be recycled when covered with all of that, or does that need to be removed before recycling (which almost no one does or is willing to do)?
– Emily
Dear Emily,
What raises Dot’s dander is how companies dump responsibility for getting their packaging into recyclable shape (and sometimes even traveling to responsibly dispose of it), and onto our taxpayer-funded recycling and trash services. Do you have time to shuttle your packaging around to various drop-off depots for recycling, Emily? I suspect that, even if you do, there are myriad other things you would prefer to be doing with your one wild and precious life. Dot certainly has better things to do with hers.
The packaging industry is ripe for innovation, in Dot’s not-so-humble opinion. Packaging that disappears upon delivery! Edible packaging! Amazon claimed it was offering tips via a QR code on its boxes for how to reuse them (a pretend rocket ship! A canine car! A kitty condo!). Seriously? I say to Amazon. Like people haven’t been doing this without instruction since the advent of cardboard boxes? I have yet to see such a QR code on any Amazon boxes I’ve received, but if you have, please let Dot know. …
Read the rest of Dot’s
answer.
Got a question for Dot? Write her atdeardot@bluedotliving.com.
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Paid Advertisement
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BUY LESS/BUY BETTER: A few more gift ideas ...
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The San Diego newsletter and The Bluedot Marketplace include affiliate links.
If you purchase a product through one of our links, we may earn a small digital finder’s fee.
These commissions help us fund the valuable journalism that you see on Bluedot.
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If you’re looking for a last-minute gift, we’ve got some great suggestions. We love experiential presents, like online classes and
app subscriptions; the right gift cards can be thoughtful presents as well.
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San Diego Nature Watch
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The Endangered Species Act is fifty years old, and ninety-nine percent of the species listed have been saved from extinction. The adorable Stephens’ kangaroo rat is one of those success stories, being “downlisted” from Endangered to Threatened in 2022, after more than thirty years of efforts to help the San Diego native to find its preferred grassland habitat. Grasslands in Southern California have been largely built over, so San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance scientists played rodent real estate agent to get the picky cuties into safe new homes.
Do you have a special San Diego nature photo or story to share? Email
sdeditor@bluedotliving.com.
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BLUEDOT KITCHEN: Gifts From the Kitchen
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Tasty homemade treats make great gifts, especially when they’re packaged in reusable
containers. We plan to make this recipe for sweet, spicy roasted nuts and this gluten-, dairy-, and egg-free cranberry oat bread for our friends this season.
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Food waste is a problem we’ve highlighted a couple times, with an estimated forty percent of food in the U.S. ending up rotten and causing massive environmental
impacts. But food waste isn’t just a problem on the farm and in the supply chain: It happens in your refrigerator, too. Now, an ingenious app lets you plug in the ingredients you need to use, and it comes up with recipes using that stuff from the cookbooks (or magazines) you told it are on your shelf. Chef Cathy Walthers gives us the deets.
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Learn how to prevent unwanted and returned items from ending up in landfills.
For more Bluedot Climate Quick Tips, click here.
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Looking Back on a Greener Year
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Good news is often relegated to the back burner, especially in environmental news where so many challenges remain. But we ARE making progress. While there is always urgent work to be done, we can look back on a lot of exciting stories Bluedot Living has published in the last year. We’ve seen uplifting stories locally, statewide, nationally, and internationally. 2023 has been a great year for Bluedot Living, since we launched five new newsletter-and-website locations, including Santa Barbara (as well as San Diego, LA, Toronto, and Boston). We now have over 175,000 subscribers across all our newsletters (in the fall of 2022, it was about 10,000), and we’re going to keep growing like crazy in 2024, because you deserve to hear the good news! We hope you’ll consider contributing so we can keep telling stories about changing the world for the greener.
Happy Holidays! We’ll be back in two weeks.
– Nicki and Jim Miller
Editors, Bluedot Living San Diego
sdeditor@bluedotliving.com
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We live in San Diego and love the opportunity to be on the water and in the mountains in one day. Nicki, a writer and editor, and Jim, a writer and environmental economist, are excited
to combine skills as the editors of Bluedot Living San Diego. Since we’re avid cyclists, you may see us riding along the Silver Strand or hitting the trails in Cuyamaca (probably not on the same day). Thank you for joining us on this Bluedot ride!
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