Do you need to rinse your recyclables?

Ask Umbra at Grist answers a reader's question about whether they should rinse out their recyclables.

As a California resident, ... I’m torn: Do I waste another gallon of water trying to get those last remnants out of the Sriracha bottle or do I save the water and recycle a less-than-pristine item?

Umbra's response, as usual, is well worth reading.

Reducing ozone by planting trees

Tropospheric ozone is the EPA 'criteria pollutant' which most frequently exceeds recommended thresholds in the US. It's pretty nasty stuff, capable of doing damage to lung tissue. It's also a pollutant that's expected to increase as the climate warms. Cities can do a variety of things to limit the amount of ozone precursors that are emitted into the environment. The Atlantic's 'City Lab' documents one proposal - plant trees (lots of them, in just the right places).

Studies have shown that certain urban area-adjacent forest makeups—notably, ones in Madrid and near Mexico City—absorb enough chemicals compared to what they put out that they can improve local air quality. This is the kind of beneficial vegetation that interests Timm Kroeger, a researcher at the Nature Conservancy and lead author of a new study examining the hypothetical impact of a new, 1.5-square-mile forest on the outskirts of Houston.

Feeding 9 billion?

It doesn't have to be factory farms versus small, organic ones. There's another way.

National Geographic presents a proposal to feed nine billion without further devastating the environment.

Tropical Managed Forests Observatory

How do tropical forests recover post-logging?

While attention on logging in the tropics has been increasing, studies on the long-term effects of silviculture on forest dynamics and ecology remain scare and spatially limited. Indeed, most of our knowledge on tropical forests arises from studies carried out in undisturbed tropical forests. This bias is problematic given that logged and disturbed tropical forests are now covering a larger area than the so-called primary forests.

So what do we do about that knowledge gap? The Tropical Managed Forest Observatory seeks to address this problem with a network of permanent sample plots across the world.

Thomson Reuters Foundation has an article about it.