Untitled Document What are the best kinds of dishwasher and laundry soaps for the environment? The average North American produces between 60 and 150 gallons of wastewater every day, much of it a result of dishwashing and laundry. Municipal water-treatment facilities do their best to filter out the synthetic chemicals common in most mainstream dishwasher […]
Community & Lifestyle
Posted inArts & Culture
Enjoy winter squash
Untitled Document The fruits of summer may be nearing their end for the year, but winter squash, which comes in hundreds of varieties and a plethora of sizes, shapes, colors, and flavors, is a tasty, nutritious fall treat. Butternut squash is one of the most popular winter squash. This long, tan, pear-shaped squash has a […]
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Time to upgrade turfgrass
Untitled Document Fall is the best time to give your lawn some extra attention, because what is done for the turf this fall will have a big impact on cool-season grasses next summer. Most central-Illinois lawns contain cool-season grasses such as Kentucky bluegrass, perennial ryegrass, tall fescue, and fine fescue. As hard as we try […]
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Starting over
Untitled Document Ask Sheila Walk what she misses about her previous teaching job, and she ticks off a list ranging from the profound to the mundane: She misses the quaint architecture of the ancient building. She misses the students and teachers who filled its halls. She misses the “block scheduling” that allotted 90 minutes per […]
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Healthy school lunches
Untitled Document How can we get schools to offer healthier and more eco-friendly cafeteria food to our kids? Now that many schools have stopped selling sodas and other unhealthy vending-machine items to their students, improving the nutritional quality of cafeteria food is on the agenda of many parents and school administrators — and, luckily for […]
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Recycle Styrofoam
Untitled Document What can be done to recycle Styrofoam economically and efficiently? Known within the packaging industry as expanded polystyrene (EPS) and usually bearing the No. 6 recycling symbol, Styrofoam (which is actually the trademark name for Dow Chemical’s product) has long been an environmental bugaboo, partly because it contains chemicals known to cause central […]
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Getting children outdoors
Untitled Document It’s hard to believe that children have returned to school and another summer vacation has met its end. As I reflect on this summer, I wonder what my children will remember about the past 11 weeks. They spent most mornings playing in the back yard and the afternoons playing video games and watching […]
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A matter of timing
Aidah Mahmood’s e-mails were easy to ignore. The first one, on May 28, was a single rambling paragraph into which she had condensed an incredible horror story about being set on fire by her relatives. Full of desperate pleas (“Please Help Me”), random details (“thorny sticker bushes”), and quirky spellings (“herendis crime”), it came with […]
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When aphids attack
Untitled Document I park my car under the canopy of a large bur oak tree. For the past several weeks my car has been covered in a sticky substance: honeydew. Aphids are sucking insects that feed on plants by thrusting their long beaks into plant tissue and withdrawing sap from the plant. Aphids excrete large […]
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Economic justice and saving the earth
Untitled Document Aside from the obvious benefits to humanity of reducing poverty, how would promoting more economic equality around the world benefit the environment? Research has shown that environmental protection tends to be of lower priority in countries with a wide disparity between rich and poor. The inverse is also true: Countries with greater […]
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Controlling poison ivy
Untitled Document Controlling and eradicating poison ivy can be a challenge, but for many people elimination of this noxious plant is imperative because it can cause nightmarish rashes and itching. Not everyone is sensitive to the plant’s resins, but in some the allergy develops over time and even the leafless winter and early-spring stems can […]
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Driving on natural gas
Untitled Document Honda produces a natural-gas-powered Civic. What exactly comes out of the vehicle’s tailpipe, and how harmful to the environment is the extraction and refinement of natural gas? Which is greener, a hybrid or a car powered by natural gas? Honda’s natural-gas Civic GX, which debuted in 2006 in California but is now becoming […]
