By Carol P. Chamberland, Central New Mexico Zero Waste
Recently a friend sent me a disturbing chart on the decomposition rates of various types of garbage. I looked further into the matter and found it’s worse than I thought. Way worse.
America is a wasteful country. Daily, we generate four pounds of waste per person. Annually, that’s more than 220 million tons of trash, three times the global average.
We use 1.6 million barrels of oil per year just to produce plastic water bottles that can take up to 1,000 years to decompose. Plastic bags can take up to 500 years.
But how do we know how long it takes to decompose? Plastic hasn’t been around that long, so there’s no firsthand ...
Diane has lived in New Mexico since 2007 – when she received orders to Kirtland AFB. She served 25 years as a medical service corps officer, beginning in the Navy and finishing in the Air Force. When she retired in 2010, Diane turned her attention to outdoor activities and to volunteering. She enjoys hiking, camping, skiing and long walks with her husband and dogs in the Bosque. She had her first taste of rafting with a 24 day trip on the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon this year, has summited 6 fourteeners and hopes to add to that in the coming years.
Diane has been a member of the Sierra Club since 1996 and a life member since 2017 ...
Derrick Toledo, from the Pueblo of Jemez, is a congressional staffer for Congresswoman Teresa Leger Fernández currently based out of Santa Fe. He previously served as a tribal official in Jemez and now works closely alongside the tribes in natural resource protection, language immersion, and energy policy. He is a graduate of the University of New Mexico where he studied Multimedia Journalism and Marketing Management and is currently in a masters program at Arizona State University studying Political Psychology.
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By Luis Guerrero, Rio Grande Chapter legislative and political organizer
This year is a “long” 60-day New Mexico legislative session starting Jan. 17, and there will be many exciting opportunities for Sierra Club members to provide input and participate (sometimes late into the night!) in the process. Below are a few of the bills we will be advocating for or against in this legislative session:
CLIMATE & ENERGY
Climate Solutions and Just Transition
This legislation will put into law aspects of Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham’s Executive Order on Climate Change and create a comprehensive framework for addressing climate change in New Mexico. Building on the Energy Transition Act, which focuses on the electricity sector, the Climate Action Act will likely ...
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