Yes, it’s true, guys.  Steve Wasik, the CEO of SIGG, officially announced in a two-page letter on the SIGG website that all of their water bottles manufactured before August of 2008 contain BPA.  What’s even more noteworthy is that the company has apparently known for years about this BPA presence and did not disclose the information until now.

Not surprisingly, SIGG has come under much fire since the release of Mr. Wasik’s letter.  The blogging world has been full of criticism for the company, and established news organizations like The Boston Globe, Mother Jones, and Salon.com have all covered the story.  And in a meaningful move, Patagonia terminated their contract with SIGG over the controversy.

In response to this negative backlash, Mr. Wasik published a second letter with a decidedly more humble, apologetic tone.  Here’s an excerpt:

After reading and responding to hundreds of emails and viewing nearly as many blog & Twitter posts, I realize that my first letter may have missed the mark.  What I should have said simply and loudly to all of our loyal SIGG fans is:  I am sorry that we did not make our communications on the original SIGG liner more clear from the very beginning.

SIGG has initiated a voluntary exchange program (not a recall), in which consumers who own these pre-August 2008 bottles can send their product back to the company for a BPA-free product in exchange.  We wonder how many of you own BPA-containing SIGG water bottles.  And if you do, do you plan to utilize SIGG’s exchange program, or will you instead apply the dollars you would have spent on shipping your bottle back to the purchase of a new water bottle from a different company?

1) The Washington Post highlights yoga people who make a difference! It’s often observed that the overwhelming majority of stories covered by the news media are negative ones, but this Washington Post piece is a shining example to the contrary.  We’re so pleased that a newspaper as established and respected as the Post took the time to write about these amazingly impressive “do-gooder” yoga organizations.  The groups featured include Sprout Yoga, which works to bring free yoga classes to post-traumatic stress and eating disorder sufferers, Upward Bound, which brings yoga to low-income kids, and Street Yoga, which teaches at-risk homeless youths, sexual abuse victims, and more.  We hope that the next time a news journal writes a piece on this topic, they remember to include Yoga Bear, a non-profit dedicated to bringing yoga to cancer survivors.  [Activists Aim to Make Yoga An Exercise in Accessibility]

2) Mercury is basically in every single fish in the universe. Yikes!  Is it the case that while we try to identify specific fish and their home waters as relatively low-risk when it comes to mercury, the truth is that mercury can be found in all fish everywhere?  What’s a lacto-ovo vegetarian to do? [Federal Study Shows Mercury in Fish Widespread]

3) (From the “Is This Really News” Department): Ex-wall street exec quits her job to teach yoga. Really, now – should this story truly be news? People change career tracks every day, and teaching yoga is certainly a popular career option, hence the abundance of yoga teacher training programs offered across the country.  But for some reason (probably a combination of the Wall Street/ivy league/young woman elements of this story), a plethora of news organizations have written about this, including the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, and New York Magazine.  Check it out yourself to learn more about one woman’s choice to ditch the high-powered banking exec life in favor of the peace-and-love yoga life. [Princeton Grad Quits Morgan Stanley to Teach Yoga to Bankers]

4) Random fact of the day: Did you know that the uber well-known economist Paul Krugman (a Nobel Prize-winning Princeton professor who regularly writes op-ed pieces for the New York Times) is married to a yoga teacher?  This bit of trivia goes along with the  “Major Political Figures With Yoga Practices” post we ran earlier this year. ) Robin Wells Krugman is an economics professor at Princeton who also happens to teach Forrest Yoga at Four Winds Yoga Studio in Princeton, New Jersey. For proof of this exciting addition to the roster of yogis in politics, just read this.

5) The Landmark Form. It’s a “transformational” personal-growth weekend-workshop around whom the accusation of “cult” has often flittered.  Many of you are probably familiar with this workshop, and some well-known yoga businesses even sponsor their employees to attend it.  Interestingly, the notable magazine Mother Jones recently sent one of their reporters to the Landmark Forum armed with the task of experiencing and writing about it.  The title of the article is “The Landmark Forum: 42 Hours, $500, 65 Breakdowns: My lost weekend with the trademark happy, bathroom-break hating, slightly spooky inheritors of est.”  The article isn’t quite the scathing expose that Landmark opponents might hope for, but it’s certainly critical and eye-rolling in its tone.  Check it out here if you’re so inclined!

6) In the health and science department, the New York Times ran a piece titled “Does Exercise Reduce Your Cancer Risk?” (the answer is a tentative yes) and another about a newly-revealed fact about an insidious connection between the brain and stress: “The sensation of being highly stressed can rewire the brain in ways that promote its sinister persistence.”  Oh no!  (“Brain Is a Co-Conspirator in a Vicious Stress Loop“)

7) From the “Scary Water Bottling Companies You Might Not Want to Support With Your Dollars!” department: A brutal military dictatorship backs Fiji water.

Fiji Water isn’t just devastating to the environment of Fiji, the planet that endures the cost of shipping it, and the environments of the places where it is consumed. It is also the product of a brutal military regime that monitors all outgoing Internet traffic from the island for criticisms of the water business and immediately arrests people who transmit them, bringing them in for intensive questioning and the occasional prison-rape threat, as journalist Anna Lenzer discovered.

[Brutal Military Dictatorship That Backs Fiji Water]

To be honest though, the study didn’t really turn up anything especially damning about reusable bags (but we’re sure its sponsors would have liked it to!)  Funded by the Canadian Plastics Industry, the research basically found that if a small amount of water sits at the bottom of a folded reusable bag for an extended amount of time, certain types of bacteria could develop, some of which could be harmful if they were to come in direct contact with food.

In teenager speak, “Um… no duh!  Did it really take a specially-funded scientific study to discover this?”

In short, to be super safe, clean your reusable bags from time-to-time!  Just like you would your yoga mat – another surface which could potentially accumulate harmful bacteria if moisture remains trapped inside a rolled-up mat for a certain length of time.  Hey, maybe someone should sponsor a study about the scary risks of yoga mats!  Hello, Pilates Mat Industry?

[NewsDay]

Check out this New York Times article for more information about “Food, Inc”, which opens soon!

Related… Some Cool Food Tidbits

We’re delighted to see that food politics and the movement away from industrialized agriculture has become quite the hot topic lately.  It’s true that this important cause has had a small group of dedicated followers in our country for decades, but over the past few years the number of people who have jumped onto the sustainable food train has increased dramatically.

The recent revitalization of this movement is due in large part to the work of UC Berkeley professor Michael Pollan (The Omnivore’s Dilemma, In Defense of Food), and we at Drishti are strong supporters of Mr. Pollan and his food ideology!  We also found this thought which we recently read quite intriguing:  because every single one of us makes a conscious decision about what we eat on a daily basis, food politics is an issue to which we are all personally connected.  This is one compelling reason that the sustainable food movement has the potential to become very powerful in the not-too-distant future.

Over the past month or so, we’ve come across several compelling food-related articles in the media, and we thought you might find some of them interesting:

1) Yesterday, the New York Times ran an article entitled “Many Summer Internships Are Going Organic“.  This interesting piece is about “a new wave of liberal arts students who are heading to farms as interns this summer, in search of both work, even if it might pay next to nothing, and social change.”  

2) The NRDC started a great interactive web page titled “Eat Local” which produces for you a full report of all produce which is currently in-season in your area – simply input your state and the current season, and voila!

3) The Food & Water Watch website launched a fun and informative tool called “The Global Grocer: Where is Your Produce From?” which simulates a grocery store-shopping experience (complete with sound effects!) and provides pertinent ‘food miles’ information for each item that you add to your ‘cart’.

4) Here’s an informative graphic created by the New York Times which details the locations of organic farms vs. conventional farms throughout the U.S.

5) This is a piece from The Huffington Post which reminds us that making the “right” food-buying decisions is not always as simple as choosing “organic” over “conventional”.

6) And lastly, we heard this fascinating piece on NPR about a “Cancer Train” that runs in the Punjab state of India and its connection to pesticide-using farms in the region.  The train has been given its eerie name because an inordinate percentage of its regular passengers are cancer patients.  From the piece:

People say they never used to see so many cancer patients in this farm region. Cancer was considered an urban disease, suffered by people who lived in cities choked with industry and pollution.

But research by one of the most respected medical institutes in India recently found that farming villages using large amounts of pesticides have significantly higher rates of cancer than villages that use less of the chemicals.

What if your gym workout did more than just benefit your personal health? What if it contributed to the health of the planet as well? In Hong Kong, California Fitness (subsidiary of 24 Hour Fitness Worldwide), runs a popular gym program called “Powered by YOU”, which converts the energy burned by its members on workout machines into the powering of its lighting fixtures, storing additional energy in a battery.

Now, US companies are in the process of developing the same technology for gyms closer to home. One such gym, The Green Microgym in Portland, has launched the first human-powered gym in the country by creating the Human Dynamo, a battery hooked up to several workout machines which allows those working out to convert their energy into electricity. The gym’s goal is to one day run solely on the clean, sustainable energy it generates.

We can’t wait until more eco-friendly gyms start popping up all over the country so that we, too, can work out while at the same time cutting down on the burning of fossil fuels.

Talk about motivation to hit the gym!

-A battery hooked up to workout machines
at The Green Microgym in Portland, OR-

]]> http://drishtiyoga.com/environmental-issues/green-gyms/feed/ 0 http://drishtiyoga.com/environmental-issues/the-story-of-stuff/ http://drishtiyoga.com/environmental-issues/the-story-of-stuff/#comments Sun, 08 Mar 2009 05:00:00 +0000 jenni http://drishtiyoga.com/blog/?p=179 This 20-minute animated movie will hold your interest as it connects the dots between the production and consumption of “stuff” and many environmental and social issues affecting our world today. (Plus, it has a cool name. ) The film is fast-paced and presents important concepts in an easy-to-grasp manner. If you have a few minutes to spare, we recommend that you check it out! For more info, visit The Story of Stuff’s website.

We found these two article links on the informative culinary website Culinate.

The first is an intriguing investigative report called “The Real Story Behind Bisphenol A: How a handful of consultants used Big Tobacco’s tactics to sow doubt about science and hold off regulation of BPA, a chemical in hundreds of products that could be harming an entire generation.”
It’s kind of long (it is an investigative report, after all), but it’s a fascinating look into the majorly controversial backstory of BPA.

The second article is a helpful list of 10 Ways to Wean Yourself Off Plastics.  It includes some good reminders and great new tips to decrease your dependency on plastics.

Bye now!