Sadness, disenchantment, and disbelief

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Quand le lobby du patronat européen veut « minimiser » les efforts climatiques (When the European employers’ lobby wants to “minimize” the climate efforts): on September 19 Aude Massiot published a strikingly disturbing article in Libération . The original information is available on EURACTIV . Remember the summer of 2018. Looking at the average temperature measured by
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When 1+1 could well be >2

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A recent article by Desforges et al. [2017] included some pretty surprising information: “In the present study, complex contaminant cocktails derived from the blubber of polar bears (PB; Ursus maritimus) and killer whales (KW; Orcinus orca) were used for in vitro concentration−response experiments with PB, cetacean and seal spp. immune cells to evaluate the effect
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Can I eat some water, please ? 

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Common plastic bottles roughly take 500 – 1000 years to degrade. Obviously, there is a complete mismatch between how long they are used for and how long the environment takes to decompose them. Transparent plastic bottles made from polyethylene terephthalate (PET) are recycled into new bottles, plastic containers for fruits and vegetables, textile fibres, carpets and stuffing for mattresses, jackets and sleeping bags [https://www.fostplus.be/en]1. However, tons of empty bottles are dumped every
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May: the plastic-free month !

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Plastic is everywhere. It is now high time to ban it from our lives. This was the message that was announced in the media. The action “Mei Plasticvrij (a plastic-free month of May)” wants to make the Flemish people aware of the problem. Its aim is to significantly reduce the production and use of plastic.
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Plastic Attack, an event to highlight “our absurd plastic culture”, campaigners say

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A Few weeks ago, the Plastic Attack action received tremendous media coverage. Newspaper articles and television news bulletins showed supermarket customers tearing off the packagings of the consumables they had bought and dumping them in bins at the exit. Is the use of packaging redundant? Will it soon be banned? Admittedly, we face a problem
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It’s all corn !

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Well, maybe not all of it is corn. But there’s an awful lot of it hiding in our food. A lot more than we ever suspected. We think our supermarkets offer huge varieties of food. Yet, much of that food comes from one single crop [Michael Pollan 2006]. And it all starts with … corn.
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Today, the battle for market shares is being fought at the expense of the weakest links in the food production chain

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The Agrifood Atlas warns that the monopolising of the food chain by “ever-fewer-ever-larger” corporations has far reaching consequences for our food system. The Agrifood Atlas compiled by the Heinrich Böll Foundation [https://www.boell.de/en], the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation [https://www.rosalux.de/en/] and Friends of the Earth Europe [http://www.foeeurope.org/] stresses the fact that agrifood corporations foster industrialisation along the entire
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Cinnamon is a powerful spice that has been used for medical purposes around the world for thousands of years

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  Cinnamon has been known since ancient times. It received much attention in China as is witnessed by its entry in the ancient books on Chinese botanical medicine (dated ~2700 AD), attributed to the mythical Chinese sovereign Shennong. In Ayurveda, the Hindu health doctrine from India, cinnamon is recommended for the treatment of diabetes and
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