At Manayunk’s Crust Vegan Bakery this past May, PB&J scone season was giving way to jasmine peach scone season. Midseason, the dough invariably left over when a batch of scones is rolled and cut is incorporated into the next batch. “But at the end of the season, there’s no next batch,” Crust owner Meagan Benz
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A dancing penguin. A googly-eyed amoeba. Psychedelic fonts amidst splashes of avocado, harvest gold, mod magenta. “Playing Dirty,” the Science History Institute’s latest outdoor exhibition, features the “bright colors and groovy graphics” — to borrow senior manager of exhibition projects and programming Christy Schneider’s words — you’d expect from the era of lava lamps and
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If you want to go — ultimately, that is — the way of Nobel Peace Prize laureate Desmond Tutu, better call (email, write to … ) your legislators. When the South African theologian and human rights activist died in December 2021, his remains underwent — per his request — alkaline hydrolysis. Alkaline hydrolysis (AH) combines
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My boomer dad doesn’t do social media. So when he wanted to unload a decades-old desk ill-suited to his new condo, he went old school: He posted a flier on the bulletin board at MOM’s Organic Market in Bryn Mawr. “Free to a good home: pine desk in good condition.” He included the desk’s dimensions,
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Grid spoke in October with Samantha Wittchen, director of programs and operations at Circular Philadelphia, which she cofounded (with Grid’s Nic Esposito) in June 2021. Circular Philadelphia aims to drive the growth of a thriving circular economy in Greater Philadelphia through advocacy, education, infrastructure development and collaboration. The following interview has been edited for length
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One behemoth of a building in Eastwick looms large, both literally and in discussions about food recovery in Philadelphia. At 700,000 square feet — about 12 football fields — the Philadelphia Wholesale Produce Market (PWPM) is the largest refrigerated structure in the world. Eighteen of the largest produce vendors in the Mid-Atlantic share warehouse space
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At its height, it reached three feet. The color of chocolate milk, the water flooded The Tricycle Shop’s first-floor retail and café space, submerging bistro tables and balance bikes, buoying trash cans and stacks of paper cups, lapping at the midsections of mannequins sporting branded jerseys. Hurricane Ida’s September 2021 rampage through the Philadelphia region
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The “big story of solar,”according to Micah Gold-Markel, is not about slashing carbon footprints or lowering energy bills. “Yes, people can save money,” concedes the founder of Solar States LLC. “Yes, they can save the planet, but really they can do the most good because they’re saving their communities with good-paying jobs.” Inspired by the
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To Greg Trainor, executive director of Philly Reclaim, deconstruction is a no-brainer. An environmentally-friendlier alternative to demolition, deconstruction diverts building materials from the landfill and enables, through reuse, preservation of the embodied energy therein. And because systematically dismantling a building is more labor-intensive than leveling it with an excavator or a wrecking ball, deconstruction promises
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Before #vanlife became a hashtag, or “Nomadland” won the Academy Award for Best Picture, Kirsty Halliday faced niggling doubts about her path forward. Sitting in her windowless office at the (since shuttered) construction firm Greensaw Design & Build, she wondered, “What am I doing?” At night, in her LEED Platinum apartment in Fishtown, the Scottish
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