Articles

The brawl over chemicals in farm country is threatening some of what we eat.

Digging deep into the history of phosphate mining, this article engages contemporary debates about the environmental sustainability of using Roundup to produce our food by focusing on the front end rather than the back end of the product's life cycle. Though many people may not know it, the critical raw material Monsanto uses to make Roundup an effective herbicide is elemental phosphorus, which comes from a processing plant in southeast Idaho that remains an operating Superfund site to this day.

When synthetic baking powder was invented in the mid-19th century, it was hailed by many as a time-saving miracle product. Bart Elmore reviews ‘Baking Powder Wars’ by Linda Civitello.

The drinks company junked its re-use system. Now the oceans are full of rubbish, will it clean up its act?

Radioactive waste piles, groundwater pollution, mercury emissions, and poisoned livestock: these are just some of the costs of producing the world’s most widely used herbicide.

Olivia Waxman interviews Bart Elmore about his argument that, even as environmentalism has become more mainstream, recycling advocacy efforts have failed in the last 25 years.

When news broke about the discovery of $56 million worth of cocaine at a Coca-Cola plant in France, the press was all abuzz. But as it turns out, this Cocaine-Cola connection is not entirely new; Coca-Cola has been intimately linked to domestic manufacture of cocaine in the United States for years.