Fairfood Friday #67

Every Friday we round up the most interesting, inspiring or funny stories we came across while conducting research for our news stories. This week: Every City Needs Healthy Honey Bees – Bees have been rapidly and mysteriously disappearing from rural areas, with grave implications for agriculture. However, bees seem to flourish in urban environments, and cities need their help. Noah Wilson-Rich suggests that urban beekeeping might play a role in revitalising both a city and a species.

Have you read something we should know about? Please let us know in the comments.

Every City Needs Healthy Honey Bees
Bees have been rapidly and mysteriously disappearing from rural areas, with grave implications for agriculture. However, bees seem to flourish in urban environments, and cities need their help. Noah Wilson-Rich suggests that urban beekeeping might play a role in revitalising both a city and a species.

With Funding Tight, Cities are Turning to Green Infrastructure
From Seattle to Sweden, an ever-growing number of city and regional governments are using roof gardens, specially designed wetlands, and other forms of “green infrastructure” to rein in pollution from countless diffuse sources — and to save money.

EcoCradle: Can Mushroom Packaging be the New Wave for Green Purchasing?
EcoCradle is derived from mushrooms and is an exciting new compostable alternative to styrofoam packaging. Ecovative Design was founded to produce alternative packing material out of sustainable materials such as mushroom roots.

Food Shortages Could Force World into Vegetarianism, Warn Scientists
Water scarcity’s effect on food production means radical steps will be needed to feed population expected to reach 9bn by 2050.

Forget Meat – There’s a World of Vegetarian Food Out There
As shortages threaten to force meat off the table, you don’t need to dust off dreary 1970s cookbooks to find great alternatives

Commercialising the Rising Tide of Ocean Plastic
Ocean Plastic: addressing a real and material environmental problem — in this case, the accumulation of persistent plastics in the environment; relying on solid science and creativity to generate a solution; and integrating sustainability into an innovative, effective, and engaging product design.

Campus Grows1000lbs of Food
When a campus lawn became a permaculture garden, TreeHuggers everywhere cheered. Then the UMass Amherst permaculture project got recognition from the White House, and threw a conference to discuss how similar projects might happen across the world. They’ve just released the third in a three-part video series looking at the campus permaculture project, exploring its many successes so far.

Dirkje Koene is a Copywriter for Fairfood International.

Image: austinevan (CC License)