Sarah Smarsh

Large, corporate pig farms are home to deep vats of untold tons of pig crap, called "lagoons," which regularly overflow or seep past inadequate lining into the earth.

Life Cycle is a series of posts that looks at the life and death of everyday things. Fool me once, shame on me. Fool me twice, shame on you. In...

Life Cycle is a series of posts that takes a closer look at the stuff we use and love. It's the end of class. You're breathing deeply, surrenderi...

Often, the greenest consumer route is not buying new products made with Earth-friendly methods but rather scoring used products made with traditional, possibly heinous methods. Reduce, reuse, then recycle.

While the production of soap--or anything, really--has environmental repercussions all its own, the pretty smells in our personal care products have been linked to not-so-fine human ailments.

Despite being chemically treated, sewage water is still rife with birth-control, anti-depressants and other pharmaceuticals we once ingested.

OK, it's just newsprint. But we journalists tend to get excited about it. More than 50 million newspapers hit stands and porches every morning in this country (double that in China). A tree falls. Many trees, really--200 million per year, just for newspapers.

Deforestation is the most direct environmental repercussion of the approximately ten gazillion cigarettes smoked in the world daily. Wood is used just about every step in production--to cure tobacco, to wrap the leaves with paper, to box them up with cardboard.

Next to crude oil, coffee may be our strongest addiction. More than half of Americans fuel themselves with one to four cups of coffee, totaling upwards of 330 million cups daily.

To make real progress, we have to not only change our products and behaviors but gain real context for those changes, and real reverence for the incredible life cycles of the things we use.