If you’re like me, you’ve stood puzzled at the fish counter trying to remember which seafarers are sustainably caught, which ones have mercury, and which ones to just plain avoid.  Well, ponder no more, the amazing Blue Ocean Institute has developed Fishphone, a cool text-messaging based application that let’s you know if your fish of choice is healthy for you and the environment.  To learn about the seafood in question simply text 30644 with the message FISH and the name of the fish and they’ll text you back with their rating of the fish and suggest alternatives if it doesn’t pass mustard.

And if you have a spiffy iPhone or similar device you can visit fishphone.org to view Blue Ocean Institute’s comprehensive list of fish formatted for phones.
takepart and help the Monterey Bay Aquarium protect the dwindling population of Bluefin Tuna.  And use the Fishphone to make smart seafood selections.

Screen capture: Coolhunting

The TakePart Top 10 Weekly Roundup is a compilation of the week’s most notable stories from our entertainment-meets-social-action blogging network. Check out some of our most popular stories of the week, as well as a few TakePart blogger favorites!

Nicole Hughes:

Should Drive-Thrus Be Banned?

Eco-Moms Mad About “Greenwash” Barbie

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Andy Kondrat:

Home Depot Will Recycle Your CLF Bulbs for Free

Department of Energy Predicts 50% Energy Increase By 2030

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Jon Popham:

NYC Waterfalls Installation Starts This Week

Capt. John Smith Is Back…and Running for President

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Giulia Rozzi:

Yoga Across the Border

Emile Norman: By His Own Design

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Gina Telaroli:

Silverdocs 08: A Post-Fest Wrap-Up

Human Rights Watch 08: Letter to Anna

You know those CFL bulbs that are all the rage because they last something like eight million times as long as a regular light bulb, and conserve a whole ton of energy at the same time?  Well, it turns out you shouldn’t just toss them once they’re finally burned out, because they contain trace amounts of mercury, a heavy metal (not the Poison kind, the poison kind).   Up until now, recycling centers for CFLs have been scarce, but have included Ikea and True Value Hardware.

But now, good news comes our way as Home Depot, which is the nation’s second-largest retailer, is announcing today that it will take back CFLs in every one of its nearly 2,000 stores.   And it’s free!

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Wal-Mart, the biggest toy retailer in the world, has raised its safety standards on toxics in toys. The announcement comes on the heels of some 25 million toys having been recalled in the United States last year, in many cases due to unsafe levels of lead. Toy suppliers for Wal-Mart must meet the new standards by later this year.

Wal-Mart’s new standards apply to several toxics including antimony, arsenic, barium, cadmium, chromium, lead and mercury. Their new lead standard is six times stricter than the current federal standards. Also, the levels of some phthalates will be restricted in products used by children under the age of three.

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Our second installation of the TakePart Top 10 Weekly Roundup is here give you the very best of Katie, Nicole, Giulia, Gina and Kerry! More blogs means more to love this Valentine’s Day week, and more social action means a healthier and happier world for everyone. Check out our most popular posts of the week, as well as a few TakePart blogger favorites.

Katie:

5 Ways to Take Action and Get Action On Valentine’s Day

Top 10 Guilt-Free Valentine’s Day Jewelry Gifts: Show Your Valentine You Have a Heart

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Nicole:

Kiva: Microlending to Change Lives

Top 10 New Releases to Inspire Social Change

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Giulia:

Alicia Keys Uses Grammys to Help Keep a Child Alive

V-Day Celebrates Its 10 Year Anniversary!

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Gina:

Top 10 Movie Characters That Make A Difference

Art As Politics In “The Silence Before Bach”

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Kerry:

Tap Project Gets Donations Flowing For Safe Global Water

Levon Helms’ “Dirt Farmer” Wins Grammy Gold

Just call him a wavehugger–Ted Danson’s been lobbying on behalf of our oceans since 1987, when he founded the American Oceans Campaign. Danson, now a board member of advocacy group Oceana, which merged with Danson’s organization, is calling on Americans to pay more attention to the problems of overfishing and contamination, as the AP reports:

“This is not about saving fish from the goodness of our hearts or taking care of our oceans because we want to be thought of as environmental. It is economic. It is moral, and it is public health”I guess it’s really tough to get people to focus on this great big, beautiful, gorgeous ocean.”

Find out what you can do to help protect our great big, beautiful, gorgeous oceans at Oceana.org.  

This Valentine’s Day, if you’re hoping to find that special someone who will “take actions” with you to make the world, and your love life, a better happier place, I have just the list for you. So here are the 5 best free on-line dating sites for finding that special someone to drink organic free trade hot cocoa with, to make a hemp necklace for, and to send action alerts to. Because, you know what they say: the personals is political.

1. Act For Love is a personals site where you can find the activist– and the cause– of your dreams. After you’re done searching through profiles, you can search through the action center where you will find things like “Less Pink, More Research” take action link, which urges Congress to pass the Breast Cancer and Environmental Research Act. Their motto, which I say after coming up with the title for this post, is “Take Action. Get Action.”

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Mercury contamination is accomplishing something that animal rights activists have been trying to do for years: persuade Japanese hunters to stop slaughtering dolphins. As MSNBC reports:

A series of scientific studies in recent years in Japan have documented high levels of the toxic heavy metal in dolphin meat”

“A leading regional supermarket chain has pulled dolphin from its shelves over the health concerns, and hunt critics in the town say villagers are shunning it. Meat from pilot whales ” a type of dolphin ” was taken off local school lunch menus in October.

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Yesterday’s New York Times expose about dangerously high levels of mercury in bluefin tuna set off a tsunami of wails from sushi lovers”and launched an avalanche of e-mails, judging by the article’s current status as the Time’s “most popular”  e-mailed story.

But there’s a footnote to this sushi scare on the Time’s editorial page today that deserves to be equally widely read. While everyone’s moaning about the toxin-tainted tuna, is anybody asking what all that mercury’s doing in our oceans in the first place? The Times connects the dots for us:

Though some mercury in the atmosphere occurs naturally, roughly two-thirds is produced by industrial sources ” especially coal-burning power plants. It settles into the water in a form called methylmercury, is absorbed by bacteria and then makes its way up to the very top of the food chain ” to humans. It is a reminder of how interconnected all life on earth really is. The mercury that worries us in the tuna we eat is the very residue of the way we live. The only way to reduce the one is to improve the other.   

To learn more about how pollution is harming our oceans, go to oceanconservancy.org.

 Sushi lovers, beware: the mercury levels in your tuna may exceed the legal limit, according to today’s New York Times:

Recent laboratory tests found so much mercury in tuna sushi from 20 Manhattan stores and restaurants that at most of them, a regular diet of six pieces a week would exceed the levels considered acceptable by the Environmental Protection Agency“

“Although the samples were gathered in New York City, experts believe similar results would be observed elsewhere.

“Mercury levels in bluefin are likely to be very high regardless of location,” said Tim Fitzgerald, a marine scientist for Environmental Defense, an advocacy group that works to protect the environment and improve human health.

While some of the tuna tested had mercury levels so high that the FDA could legally take it off the market, it has rarely, if ever, done so, according to the New York Times, which also notes that “no government agency regularly tests seafood for mercury.”

Dr. Michael Gochfeld, a professor of environmental and occupational medicine who analyzed the sushi samples for the Times, said “No one should eat a meal of tuna with mercury levels like those found in the restaurant samples more than about once every three weeks.”

With a recession looming, I don’t know how many of us will be eating sushi every week, anyway, but if you needed another incentive to cut back, you just got it.

To find out which seafood is safe–and sustainable–check out environmentaldefense.org’s eco-friendly seafood selector.