The Toronto-based brewery gets its electricity from Bullfrog Power, which uses wind and low-impact hydroelectric sources. Its cooling is by Enwave, which uses cold water from deep in Lake Ontario, and new brewing equipment that captures steam cuts their wastewater by a third. Its trucks run on biofuels and, thanks to improved route planning, they cut the amount of fuel they used last year by more than 7,000 litres – while increasing sales.

Of course, Steam Whistle isn’t the only brewery improving their environmental standards: Brasserie McAuslan in Montreal and Molson Coors have both reduced their water use in recent years.

You can read the whole article at The Globe and Mail.

This new feature includes: step-by-step bicycling directions; bike trails outlined directly on the map; and a new “Bicycling” layer that indicates bike trails, bike lanes, and bike-friendly roads. The directions feature provides step-by-step, bike-specific routing suggestions – similar to the directions provided by our driving, walking, or public transit modes. Simply enter a start point and destination and select “Bicycling” from the drop-down menu. You will receive a route that is optimized for cycling, taking advantage of bike trails, bike lanes, and bike-friendly streets and avoiding hilly terrain whenever possible.

Google has said that the inclusion of cycling directions has been the most requested addition to Google maps. Here’s hoping that additional pressure from cities around the world will soon lead to cycling directions becoming available in your city!

Read more at the League of American Bicyclists blog.

EDIT (March 12)

It appears at least one Canadian city won’t have to wait long for something similar! Ride the City has gone live with Toronto bike directions! Ride the City Toronto is based on the open source maps system, OpenStreetMap.org and offers much the same functionality as the Google map version in the States. Check it out here and start planning your route by bike!

According to Nocera, his new system can work at ambient temperatures and pressures, without corrosion in a simple glass of water, even polluted water. “If you need pure water for energy storage, they’ll drink it,” Nocera said. “Use puddle water instead.” In fact, Nocera has been running his prototype on untreated water from the Charles River in Boston. And it’s cheap, not $12,000 per kilowatt like commercial electrolyzers that do the same thing. “That’s not going to help the energy situation for the U.S. or poor people of the world.”

Using the electricity generated by a photovoltaic array five meters by six meters, Nocera claims he can split enough water in less than four hours “to store enough energy for the average American home” for a day, a little more than 30 kilowatt-hours. “We need to stop making big energy systems one a time to service lots of people. We need to do it the old American way of making one small one and then manufacturing that system to give it to the masses.”

Read more at Scientific American

Colin Church, the chair of the Kenya-based Rhino Ark conservation group and a leading expert on African leading wildlife, said the fence, which took 21 years for local communities to complete, had failed to save the rhino in the uplands it surrounds.

However, it had succeeded in protecting a large forest area and the sources of four of seven of Kenya’s largest rivers, all of which rise in the Aberdares and provide electricity and water to major cities including Nairobi.

“In the early days, the motivation was to protect the black rhino, but then we all woke up to the fact that the farmers [who lived near the fence] were celebrating, and the reality is that this forested mountain area was the lifeblood for millions of people. We realised the whole ecosystem was at stake,” he said.

“Our thinking had to change.The Aberdares are now the most secure mountain ecosystem in the whole of Kenya and maybe Africa.”

Keep reading at The Guardian.

Repentance, reflection and self-discipline are supposed to be observed during Lent, which symbolizes the 40 days Jesus spent in the desert and resisted Satan’s temptations, as described in the Bible.

A green Lent could mean “thinking about the environment and doing things to save it for yourself and those who come after us,” said White-Hassler, whose church possesses the mind-set year-round. Since the summer, Grace Episcopal has been undergoing eco-friendly renovations and is considering solar panels.

The practice of a carbon fast for Lent has been talked about in Christian circles since at least 2008, when the Church of England suggested shrinking one’s carbon footprint and provided a list of 40 green actions, one for each day of Lent. (”Day one, Ash Wednesday: Remove one lightbulb and live without it for the next 40 days.”)

The call was part of a global effort with Tearfund, a Christian relief agency, to help drought-ridden, impoverished communities that already suffer from the effects of climate change.

Keep reading the article.

The “Let’s Do It!” website is here, but in Estonian. So here’s a video in English!

Based on the success in Estonia, the campaign has gone worldwide!

An easy way to get carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere is to find a chemical that combines easily with it, similar to the way that some metals oxidize. For example, compounds involving copper will usually combine with oxygen in the atmosphere voluntarily without catalysts, covering the surface of the copper material with a green patina, like the Statue of Liberty.

Unlike oxygen, carbon dioxide cannot combine so easily with other materials. It is possible to remove one electron from the molecule to facilitate its integration into other molecules, but that removal requires an electric potential of -1.97 volts, which is unreasonably high for the purpose of processing a single molecule.

One group of scientists found a certain dinuclear copper (I) complex that turns green when exposed to air under a slight electric potential (-0.03 volts). At first, they assumed it was from the exposure to oxygen, but upon closer inspection they learned that this particular form of copper was reacting with carbon dioxide.

Keep reading at Ars

Offshore wind power and wave energy foundations can increase local abundances of fish and crabs. The reef-like constructions also favour for example blue mussels and barnacles. What’s more, it is possible to increase or decrease the abundance of various species by altering the structural design of foundation. This was shown by Dan Wilhelmsson of the Department of Zoology, Stockholm University, in a recently published dissertation.

“Hard surfaces are often hard currency in the ocean, and these foundations can function as artificial reefs. Rock boulders are often placed around the structures to prevent erosion (scouring) around these, and this strengthens the reef function,” says Dan Wilhelmsson.

Keep reading about offshore wind power at Science Daily.