links for 2008-09-28

"But well-meaning companies and consumers are finding that shopping bags, like biofuels, are another area where it's complicated to go green. 'If you don't reuse them, you're actually worse off by taking one of them,' says Bob Lilienfeld, author of the Use Less Stuff Report, an online newsletter about waste prevention. And because many of the bags are made from heavier material, they're also likely to sit longer in landfills than their thinner, disposable cousins, according to Ned Thomas, who heads the department of material science and engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology."