CannedWater4Kids (CW4K) and INX International Ink Co. have joined forces to send a rush delivery of drinking water to help in the Hurricane Harvey disaster relief efforts. A truckload of 52,800, 12-ounce cans of fresh, purified water is scheduled to arrive today at a Red Cross Distribution Center near Houston.
Hurricane Harvey made landfall for the first time on August 25 and landed a devastating blow to the Gulf Coast of Texas. A multiple-day event, the Category 4 storm with 130 mph winds was the most powerful hurricane to hit the US in more than a decade. Damage caused by the high winds, torrential rains and record flooding displaced more than 30,000 people and prompted more than 17,000 rescues.
The effects of Hurricane Harvey will impact southeast Texas for a long time. Fortunately, humanitarian efforts from companies including CW4K and INX are helping the efforts in Texas.
“This is the first of many truckloads we hope to send,” said Greg Stromberg, CannedWater4Kids water charity CEO. “Without hesitation, we helped. It was the right thing to do because clean, safe drinking water is a valuable resource. One doesn’t realize how valuable until it is gone.”
“We are doing our part as good corporate citizens,” remarked Renee Schouten, director of marketing for INX. “It is important to be there for people, in good times and in bad. Providing clean water to communities enduring a crisis will aid in recovery and hopefully give some sense of comfort to those in need.”
Added Stromberg, “Coordinating and financing the water delivery was a team effort. We couldn’t have done it without the help of INX International and the Red Cross organization. Their help and support was incredible.”
CW4K is no stranger to disaster relief. Whether it was the earthquakes in Japan and Haiti, Hurricane Sandy in New Jersey in 2012, or help for the lead-contaminated municipal water supply in Flint, MI, the 501c3 charity was there with clean, safe drinking water packaged in 12-ounce aluminum beverage cans.
Amcor announced today it has joined the U.S. Plastics Pact, a collaborative, solutions-driven initiative to create a path forward to a circular economy for plastics in the United States by 2025. The U.S. Plastics Pact is focused on four ambitious goals intended to drive significant systems change by unifying diverse cross-sector approaches, setting a national strategy, and creating scalable solutions. The first North American Pact of its kind, the U.S. Plastics Pact is a collaboration led by The Recycling Partnership, World Wildlife Fund (WWF), and Ellen MacArthur Foundation.
As part of the revision process of the FSC forest management standard for continental France, FSC France has published its first public consultation, open to all until 18 July 2022. After a first phase of consultation with stakeholders in the regions and at national level in 2021, FSC France has set up a working group composed of environmental, social and economic organizations in order to improve its forest standard. The process includes two public consultations before validation by FSC International. The first consultation was published on 17 May 2022, and will be open to all until 18 July 2022 on the Consultation Platform, with the aim of collecting the opinions of all stakeholders interested in forest management on the proposals for the evolution of the FSC forest management standard.
Cost Cutting Cloaked in Greenwashing - - Even if it were true that the pharmaceutical industry could “save 11 million trees a year,” by switching from paper to electronic prescription information for doctors and pharmacists, such claims of environmental superiority are meaningless, if not deceptive, because they do not consider the vast and growing environmental footprint of digital communications. The environmental impact of digital communication is often underestimated because of the “invisible” nature of the infrastructure that supports it. Nowhere does your article mention the environmentally invasive mining and drilling required to extract finite raw materials (iron, copper, rare earths, petroleum for plastics, etc.) necessary to manufacture electronic devices and the massive server farms that support them, the predominance of greenhouse-gas emitting fossil fuel energy used to power them, the massive amounts of water consumed to cool data centers, and that only 15% of U.S. electronic waste gets recycled. Compare this to paper, which is in fact is one of the few products on earth that has a truly sustainable, circular life cycle. U.S. manufactured paper is made from an infinitely renewable resource - trees that are purpose-grown, harvested and regrown in sustainably managed forests – in a process that uses a lot of water but consumes very little of it, and is powered mostly (64% on average) by renewable bioenergy. And with a recovery rate of 68%, paper is recycled more than any other material in the U.S. municipal solid waste stream. Using unsubstantiated and misleading environmental claims as a means to a digital-only end is greenwashing that completely ignores the documented environmental impacts of digital communication and threatens the livelihoods of millions of workers across the U.S. print, paper and forest products value chain.