AlternativesMagazine

Recent studies continue to shed light on how everyday cycling is not only good for our cardiovascular health but also a way to save billions in health care costs. While everyday cycling is starting to be recognized as a low-impact form of exercise there remains resistance to accepting riding a bike as a form of preventive health care across North America. Clearly, biking is advantageous for one’s physical health. It’s widely known that cycling is a low-impact form of exercise that’s good for the cardiovascular system, a way to control weight gain, and benefits our immune system. In addition, daily bicycling can have positive effects on our mental well-being. In June 2013, the American Medical Association voted in favor of recognizing obesity as a disease; the Food and Drug Administration already does. This newly-labeled disease is predicted to affect more than 44 percent of all Americans by 2030 if no action is taken. Canada is not exempt from this health crisis: in 2010, Statistics...

That shot of expresso you have every morning? It might just be making you live longer and reducing your risk of getting cancer, diabetes, liver disease, Parkinson’s disease, and Type 2 diabetes. According to the research as reported in Science Daily: “Drinking coffee was associated with lower risk of death due to heart disease, cancer, stroke, diabetes, and kidney disease. People who consumed a cup of coffee a day were 12 percent less likely to die compared to those who didn’t drink coffee.” And, it did not seem to matter whether you drank caffeinated or decaffeinated coffee which suggests that the effect is not related to caffeine. Even better news… when you drink 2-3 cups a day, the association becomes stronger– an 18 precent reduced chance of death as opposed to 12 percent. Researchers do not know what it is in coffee that creates this association to a long life, however, according to Veronica W. Setiawan, lead author of the study and an associate professor of preventive medicine...

WASHINGTON — Industry has made more than 9.1 billion tons of plastic since 1950 and there's enough left over to bury Manhattan under more than two miles of trash, according to a new cradle-to-grave global study. Plastics don't break down like other man-made materials, so three-quarters of the stuff ends up as waste in landfills, littered on land and floating in oceans, lakes and rivers, according to the research reported in Wednesday's journal Science Advances . "At the current rate, we are really heading toward a plastic planet," said study lead author Roland Geyer, an industrial ecologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara. "It is something we need to pay attention to." The plastics boom started after World War II, and now plastics are everywhere. They are used in packaging like plastic bottles and consumer goods like cellphones and refrigerators. They are in pipes and other construction material. They are in cars and clothing, usually a...

A 60-acre solar farm in Camp Ripley, a National Guard base in Minnesota. by Michael Reilly July 12, 2017   When it comes to renewable energy, Minnesota isn’t typically a headline-grabber: in 2016 it got about 18 percent of its energy from wind, good enough to rank in the top 10 states. But it’s just 28th in terms of installed solar capacity, and its relatively small size means projects within its borders rarely garner the attention that giants like California and Texas routinely get. A new report on the future of energy in the state should turn some heads (PDF). According to the University of Minnesota’s Energy Transition Lab, starting in 2019 and for the foreseeable future, the overall cost of building grid-scale storage there will be less than that of building natural-gas plants to meet future energy demand. Minnesota currently gets about 21 percent of its energy from renewables. That’s not bad, but current plans also call for bringing an additi...

A double-decker I-15 could be in Salt Lake City's commuting future Cities have become nearly unliveable. Correction: are unliveable. If you live in, or near one, traffic is the monster you have to white-knuckle through on a daily basis. The typical American family has more vehicles than licensed drivers and in our "drive everywhere culture" it's getting worse every year.  Salt Lake City, UT is a great example. It's one of the fastest growing cities in the country and it's having a hard time keeping up with the rapid growth. However, building more infrastructure to accommodate vehicles is pure lunacy. Not too mention the unbelievable cost. But that's what they are considering for the I-15 interstate through Salt Lake City. And the plan they are considering is to double-deck the highway. The political masses very rarely, if ever, entertain the thought of alternative forms of transportation. I mean REAL SERIOUS forms of alternative transp...

Add caption   Walking around in foul, soupy smog is bad enough; biking through it at a modest clip can feel like hooking your lungs up to a Ford F-150’s tail pipe. But in the future, cycling in heavy air pollution could be less damaging, if a two-wheeled intervention from Dutch artist Daan Roosegaarde pans out. This week Roosegaarde’s Rotterdam-based studio revealed its “smog-free bicycle” concept. The idea is to mobilize fleets of high-tech cycles (perhaps via Chinese bike-share programs like Mobike) to cleanse the nasty miasmas that enrobe the nation’s vast urban centers.  In theory, these bikes would include a device, likely mounted on the handlebars, that can pull in ambient air and run it through positive-ionization filters to remove particulate matter. The result — a clean, healthy breeze blowing into cyclists’ faces. If such a program was adopted on a huge scale, the bike-mounted smog scrubbers might even have a marginal impact on improving a city’s overall ...

INSANITY Why more cities need to embrace bike lanes, bike parking and other bicycle infrastructure in their urban cores. The Value of Bicycle Lanes and Thoroughfares There is a growing connection in the relationship between amenity- or service-oriented businesses and the proximity to bicycle thoroughfares. These kinds of businesses would include restaurants, coffee shops, pubs, boutiques, and the like. Michael Andersen, who writes for BikePortland and People for Bikes, has written numerous articles that detail this trend. “Bikes, it turns out, seem to be a perfect way to get people to the few retail categories that are thriving in the age of mail-order everything: bars, restaurants and personal services. And in Portland, where an early investment in basic bikeways has made bikes a popular way to run errands, retailers are responding by snapping up storefronts with good bike exposure.” Locally, an example of these changes taking place is North Williams Avenue (and Nor...