Environmentalists believe that requiring companies to report what they're pumping into the air or dumping into the water has had a lot to do with recent declines in nasty emissions. It's the power of shame -- and now the Web is giving polluters even more cause to be nervous about what the people might find out. The Chemical Scorecard, produced by the Environmental Defense Fund, pulls together a wide variety of publicly available information on pollution in the United States. With a database searchable by ZIP code, users can easily uncover exactly what might be going wrong in their neck of the woods, or their hood. The site went live last week, and according to The New York Times, cost more than US$1 million for the Oakland-based EDF to create.
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Speaking of shame: It was Earth Day, 1971, when Americans first saw Iron Eyes Cody, a Cree Cherokee, shed a tear for the degradation of nature. Twenty-seven years later, the icon of both the environmental movement and advertising is coming back to television in an updated form. Keep America Beautiful, the antilitter nonprofit that brought the first ad and a sequel to the country, has commissioned a new version of the ad that will begin airing today. The setting for the spot: a bus shelter that just happens to have an ad featuring a large photograph of a certain crying Indian plastered on it.
