Cartons as in milk cartons for example. Just trash or something that can be recycled and become sustainable? The City of Dallas has launched recently a new effort to add food and beverage cartons as part of its residential curbside recycling program. Dallas will be the first major city in Texas to have a carton recycling program, and boosts the number of households nationally that have access to carton recycling. The effort is supported by the Carton Council, a collaborative of carton manufacturers committed to expanding carton recycling in the U.S. According to the council there are 34 million households in the US and one in three have some form or recycling for cartons.

Necessity, as we’ve all been told can sometimes be the mother of invention. In Japan, there is a necessity for a power source that does not require fossil fuels, since they don’t have any. So the Japanese invested heavily in nuclear power, which, at the moment, is looking like a tenuous investment given the recent Fukushima meltdown. Fortunately, they did not put all their eggs in one basket, either. In fact, researchers at Kyushu University, which houses the International Institute for Carbon-Neutral Energy Research, had a hunch that the answer just might be blowin’ in the wind, if only they could squeeze a little more out of it than what conventional technology would allow.

Fishing restrictions near the coast lines have been in place for many years, of which many local fishermen are well aware. These restrictions are understood to be vital in maintaining a stable population of wild fish for harvesting. In recent years, due to these restrictions, many industrial fishing vessels have ventured deeper into the open ocean which are unregulated. Their massive nets literally destroy benthic ecosystems and annihilate fish populations. According to the UN, the harvesting of deep sea fish has increased sevenfold between 1960 and 2004. In an article published in the journal, Marine Policy, scientists in the field of marine conservation have called for an outright ban on industrial deep sea fishing.

They’re doing in person and specifically in Israel what Green Prophet has been doing for the last four years: showing a faith based and cultural context in environmental action. Launched last year, meet the Jerusalem-based Interfaith Center working on issues like climate change.

ScienceDaily (Sep. 8, 2011) — An international team of scientists, led by Dr Stephen Barker of Cardiff University, has produced a prediction of what climate records from Greenland might look like over the last 800,000 years.

Last month’s record earthquake in the eastern United States may have shaken a Virginia nuclear plant twice as hard as it was designed to withstand, a spokesman for the U.S. nuclear safety regulator said on Thursday. But Dominion Resources told the Nuclear Regulatory Commission that the ground under the plant exceeded its “design basis” only by about 10 to 20 percent, and it plans to prove in the next month that its reactors are safe to restart. The discrepancy is one of many items the NRC and company must deal with, in the first instance in which an operating U.S. nuclear power plant has experienced a quake beyond its design parameters. The NRC must sign off on Dominion’s restart plans for the North Anna plant, about 12 miles from the quake’s epicenter — and determine how it will make that decision.

King crabs and other crushing predators are thought to have been absent from cold Antarctic shelf waters for millions of years. Scientists speculate that the long absence of crushing predators has allowed the evolution of a unique Antarctic seafloor fauna with little resistance to predatory crabs. A recent study by researchers from the University of Hawaii at Mānoa, Duke University, Ghent University, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, and Hamilton College, indicates that one species of king crab has moved 120 km across the continental shelf in West Antarctica and established a large, reproductive population in the Palmer Deep along the west Antarctic Peninsula.

Although the burning of natural gas emits far less carbon dioxide than coal, a new study concludes that a greater reliance on natural gas would fail to significantly slow down climate change. The study by Tom Wigley, who is a senior research associate at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), underscores the complex and sometimes conflicting ways in which fossil fuel burning affects Earth’s climate. While coal use causes warming through emission of heat-trapping carbon dioxide, it also releases comparatively large amounts of sulfates and other particles that, although detrimental to the environment, cool the planet by blocking incoming sunlight. As always the final picture of climate effect is very complicated to put together.

Conservationists and politicians meeting in Bonn on Friday launched a new initiative to restore 150 million hectares (580,000 square miles) of deforested and degraded forests, reports the World Resources Institute (WRI), an NGO that is involved in the effort. Supporters say the target — dubbed the Bonn Challenge — could could boost economic growth while helping fight climate change.

A recent industry analysis projects the amount of solar power installed to grow to 15.5 percent per year, but revenues are to stay flat until 2016. Lux Research provided the report. A report from Navigant Consulting discovered that the price of solar panels is down almost 20 percent as of August 2011. The information derived from these two reports show that the consumer is poised to benefit from the price reduction while manufacturers can expect an almost flat profit margin for the next few years.