Overbrook Grantee Applauds Major Healthcare Nonprofit's GHG Reduction Plan

Kaiser Permanente has been praised by Overbrook environment grantee Health Care Without Harm for its latest announcement to reduce its carbon footprint by 30 percent by 2020.

“Kaiser Permanente is demonstrating how hospitals can reduce their climate change impact as part of their core mission to support healthy people in healthy communities,” stated Gary Cohen, president and founder of Health Care Without Harm.

By targeting greenhouse gases, Kaiser Permanente aims to reduce its environmental footprint and lead the health care sector in reducing the health effects associated with climate change. Both Kaiser Permanente and Health Care Without Harm are founding sponsors of the Healthier Hospitals Initiative (HHI), a variety of programs designed for hospitals to implement sustainable measures and create more sustainable products for hospitals. In April, HHI will launch a new program to accelerate the adoption of energy efficiency and other sustainability improvements across the health care sector.

Overbrook Foundation Sees the Future of Composting Firsthand

Food waste is a hot topic for environmentalists looking for ways to feasibly handle consumption. This morning, staff of The Overbrook Foundation has the pleasure of visiting a local restaurant working to combat food waste by composting.

At first glance, Brasserie Les Halles, located in Midtown Manhattan, doesn't look like an establishment concerned about giving back to the environment. Yet, tucked in the basement lies a bioreactor that converts the restaurant's food waste into organic natural compost.

Created by GLOBAL ENVIRO, a Norwegian company concerned with environmental sustainability, the bioreactor has a capacity of 110 tons per year meaning less waste for Les Halles. Here's how it works: First, food is dumped into a grinder located in the kitchen. After being ground down, the waste is automatically vacuumed into the main unit where water and grease will be separated. The dried out food waste then incubates for 18 hours and is transformed into clean, organic compost. Most impressive is that the entire process is clean and smell-free!

The Overbrook staff was sincerely impressed with the process and is eager to see more establishments, such as hotels and restaurants, implement this technology. It is truly exciting to see a positive future for food waste and sustainability.

Dogwood Alliance Releases Comprehensive Fast Food Packaging Report

Overbrook Foundation grantees the Dogwood Alliance and Global Green's Coalition for Resource Recovery (CoRR) were lauded in Greenbiz.com yesterday for their work to reduce paper consumption and increase recycling in the fast food industry.

With Dogwood's release of its "Greening Fast Food Packaging" report yesterday, Starbucks and McDonald's emerged as leaders in the industry. While some chains continue to lag, these fast food giants are leading through example -- reducing paper packaging, encouraging customers to recycle, and testing new types of packaging that are easier to recycle than traditional packaging. This is great, groundbreaking work from two trend-setting restaurant chains, but they certainly would not have gotten so far, so fast, without the urging and partnership of green groups like Dogwood and CoRR. Click here for a synopsis of the Dogwood report.

Dogwood has been pushing for these changes through citizen activist campaigns such as its Kentucky Fried Forests initiative. CoRR has been approaching the problem from the other side, most notably through collaborations with designers, scientists and the restaurant chains to test, rework and retest new and less wasteful types of packaging. Click here for a run-down of CoRR's paper packaging program.

Overbrook Grantees Form Global Roundtable for Sustainable Beef

Numerous Overbrook environment grantees are in the news today with the announcement of a new Global Roundtable for Sustainable Beef - an independent, non-profit working towards environmental and industry-related improvements across the global beef industry. The 17 founding members are Cargill, McDonald’s, Merck Animal Health, Grupo de Trabalho da Pecuaria Sustentavel (GTPS), National Wildlife Federation, Rainforest Alliance, Roundtable for Sustainable Beef Australia, The Nature Conservancy, Wal-mart, and the World Wildlife Fund.

The Global Roundtable for Sustainable Beef will be registered an international legal entity which will allow for local, regional, and national initiatives in beef production systems. The group has also received an endorsement from the Consumer Goods Forum and has formed an strategic alignment with Brazil’s The Working Group on Sustainable Beef.

In May 2012, this new NPO will participate in meetings at the Australian Beef Conference and intends to host the second Global Conference on Sustainable Beef later this year.

Honduras Upholds Ban on Emergency Contraception

After its Supreme Court ruled to uphold an absolute ban on emergency contraception, Honduras will have the strictest ban on emergency contraception in the world. The law will criminalize the sale, use and distribution of the emergency contraception, commonly known as “the morning after pill”. The penalties could be as extreme as the punishments for abortion in Honduras, three to six years in prison for those seeking abortion and three to ten years imprisonment for those performing them. In a country where it is extremely difficult for many to procure birth control for regular use and where those seeking and providing abortions face harsh penalties, this decision to deny reproductive rights to women is particularly devastating.

Since the law was passed by the Honduran Congress in 2009, the Center for Reproductive Rights (an Overbrook Grantee) has fought this legal ban in Honduran courts in partnership with other local and international women’s rights groups. This decision leads us to reaffirm The Overbrook Foundation's commitment to advancing reproductive rights and gender rights in Latin America. It also reminds us of the importance of the Center for Reproductive Rights and other organizations as they continue to fight an uphill battle to advance human rights for all women and to overturn policies that harm women’s health and lives.

To learn more about this law and the negative consequences of its implementation, please read the press release from the Center for Reproductive Rights. A blog post on RH Reality Check also builds on this press release to contextualize this decision by explaining how important these services are in Honduras, which has a high poverty rate and the highest adolescent birthrate in Central America.

Bill McKibben Continues His Keystone XL Campaign

Bill McKibben, founder of Overbrook grantee 350.org and a central rallying voice behind the Keystone protesters, appeared on The Colbert Report last night to discuss his latest efforts to stop the Senate from approving legislation to resurrect Keystone XL.

Yesterday, 350.org led a charge to send 500,000 emails to the Senate asking elected leaders to “block any efforts to revive the dangerous Keystone XL pipeline.” The push ends today, and as of this morning, the pile of emails was closing in on 700,000.

If you want more information on the trajectory of this movement and commentary from Bill McKibben, please watch 350.org's video on the fight against Keystone XL.

Dow Chemical Partners With The Nature Conservancy

Dow Chemical Co. has partnered with Overbrook environment grantee The Nature Conservancy to make environmental costs and benefits part of every business decision at its Freeport complex. The five-year, $10 million project has been developed as an effort to help Dow become a good steward while cutting waste from the bottom line.

Scientists from Dow and the conservancy will develop models to assess the company's operations and will include the value of "ecosystem services," such as clean water, hurricane protection, and carbon sequestration. Scientists will focus primarily on the freshwater supply from the Brazos River, as well as the potential of large-scale tree planting to mitigate smog-forming pollution and building wetlands as hurricane protection.

The Nature Conservancy's chief scientist of the project, Jennifer Molnar, said analytical work should be completed by the end of the year and will be peer-reviewed before being published for other corporations to see.

Major Step Forward for Marriage Equality

A federal appeals court on Tuesday declared California's same-sex marriage ban unconstitutional but agreed to give sponsors of the bitterly contested, voter-approved law time to appeal the ruling before ordering the state to resume allowing gay couples to wed.

The three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 2-1 that a lower court judge correctly interpreted the U.S. Constitution and Supreme Court precedents when he declared in 2010 that Proposition 8 – a response to an earlier state court decision that legalized gay marriage – was a violation of the civil rights of gays and lesbians.

"Proposition 8 serves no purpose, and has no effect, other than to lessen the status and human dignity of gays and lesbians in California, and to officially reclassify their relationships and families as inferior to those of opposite-sex couples," states the opinion written by Judge Stephen Reinhardt, one of the court's most liberal judges.

It is likely that this case will eventually reach the U.S. Supreme Court. At the same time, other cases challenging the constitutionality of the Defense of Marriage Act (denying Federal benefits to legally married same-sex couples) are also working their way toward consideration by the Supreme Court. The rulings emerging from these cases; the work of Overbrook grantees to advance marriage-equality through legislative action and public referenda and the ever growing support for marriage equality from Americans are providing enormous momentum to this movement.

Freedom to Marry and Lambda Legal both issued powerful statements describing the historic significance of this ruling by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.