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Corn-Founded Garbage

Corn-based plastics have come a long way from the flimsy, expensive containers of the '90s that melted in the sun. With oil prices at new heights, price-competitive (and durable) plastic products can be made from processed corn. Colorado-based BIOTA Spring Water turned to this innovative polymer for its water bottles. The containers are clear and as durable as any petroleum-based bottle, and they cost about half as much to produce. The downside is that these plastics, unlike earlier iterations, are too durable to compost in your back yard. But in a commercial composting facility they break down completely within 80 days.

A Cut Below

Female genital mutilation is illegal in the United States and Canada, but girls and women ages 14 to 82 are paying plastic surgeons as much as $7,000 a snip for customized labia. Shameless (Fall 2005) estimates that thousands of women are trading in the lips they were born with, which surgeons say suffer from "deformity" and have "the unsightly appearance of excess skin," for a "small, neat, and tidy" look. One surgeon has performed his signature procedure -- slicing the lips and clitoral hood -- on so many women, it's been dubbed the "Toronto trim" after his hometown. But anti-mutilation laws could conceivably render the surgeries criminal, and the desire for down-there perfection can come with some out-there side effects: nerve damage, soreness, hemorrhaging, and lost sensitivity and pain during sex. Hey: Size doesn't matter!

Green Palms

Lent is supposed to be a time of living lighter, but even this season of self-restraint exacts an environmental toll: All those little palm frond crosses contribute to deforestation in Mexico and Guatemala. According to the North American Commission for Environmental Cooperation, services on Palm Sunday (April 9) alone account for almost 30 million palm fronds, about 10 percent of the annual U.S. demand for chamaedorea palms. To ease that impact, NACEC is connecting congregations with "eco-palm" operations that are fair trade certified and use sustainable harvest practices.

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