On a warm Saturday morning in September, Mégane Simões and Sara Dufner — the volunteer managers of the Northern Liberties Community Compost Program — are tucked behind a playground at Liberty Lands, hard at work. Saturday is drop-off day, a time when neighbors bring buckets and bags of food scraps, which, over weeks and months,
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Since former Mayor Jim Kenney set a goal three years ago of making Philadelphia carbon neutral by 2050, City government has been busy. It has replaced street lights with efficient LEDs, electrified its vehicle fleet and improved the energy efficiency of City buildings. All those initiatives can only go so far to help Philadelphia become
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It’s 7:30 a.m. on a Friday in late March and Stephen Maciejewski is walking around Center City looking for dead or injured birds. He isn’t hoping to find any. But it’s spring migration, a time when millions of birds pass through the city on their way north. Maciejewski knows many of them are bound to
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Most mornings, Victoria Miles-Chambliss walks down the street from her home in Kingsessing to the Cecil Street Community Garden to drink a cup of coffee. Among the newly-planted native trees and echinacea plants, she sees something that was once a rare sight in her neighborhood: birds. “Our block has really changed since we put in
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For thousands of years, people used organic materials like plants, insects and minerals to create dyes. But in 1856, an 18-year-old chemistry student named William Henry Perkin changed everything. While attempting to create synthetic quinine using coal tar, Perkin accidentally developed mauveine, the world’s first synthetic dye. His invention of the rich purple hue unlocked
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“My life,” says Julie Slavet, “is all about tires.” Slavet is exaggerating — but only slightly. As the executive director of the Tookany/Tacony-Frankford Watershed Partnership, part of her job is to help improve Tacony Creek Park, a 300-acre preserve in Northeast Philadelphia. And for the last couple years, that’s meant dealing with illegally dumped tires.
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