Here’s a neat idea for Canadians: have manufactures pay for waste management of their products. To our European (and some other) readers, this is not a new or crazy idea, but here in Canada this concept is revolutionary. For Earth day The Toronto Star has examined how Ontario can get manufactures to make more environmentally friendly products through legislation – and things are looking good.

One of the most obvious steps is Extended Producer Responsibility, the European concept that the manufacturer must cover the full cost of properly recycling or disposing of a product at the end of its life cycle.

The merits of EPR are simple: It entices companies strictly for cost reasons to redesign their products so they are easier and cheaper to recycle.

European rules, for example, forced Apple to create a computer without lead – leading to lower costs at the end of its life.

In its purest sense, EPR challenges companies to make product lines that lead to zero waste, because no waste would mean no charges at the end of the day.

The requirement may sound radical in Canada, but elsewhere, especially throughout the European Union, EPR is a familiar feature on the regulatory landscape.

“I’ve been struggling my whole life to figure out how to reach people and get them to understand they’re connected to the ocean,” Dr. Earle said.

“But I go to the supermarket and still see the United Nations of fish for sale,” she said. “Marine sanctuaries are still not really protected. Google Earth gets all this information now and puts it in one place for the littlest kid and the stuffiest grownup to see in a way that hasn’t been possible in all preceding history.”

By choosing among 20 buttons holding archives of information, called “layers” by Google, a visitor can read logs of oceanographic expeditions, see old film clips from the heyday of Jacques-Yves Cousteau and check daily Navy maps of sea temperatures.

Our planet’s climate is anything but simple. All kinds of factors influence it, from massive events on the Sun to the growth of microscopic creatures in the oceans, and there are subtle interactions between many of these factors.

Yet despite all the complexities, a firm and ever-growing body of evidence points to a clear picture: the world is warming, this warming is due to human activity increasing levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, and if emissions continue unabated the warming will too, with increasingly serious consequences.

Publishers have discovered that there is a demand for green coverage:

“Buoyed by the breakaway success of “An Inconvenient Truth,” the film documentary of Al Gore’s environmental lecture, publishers like The Washington Post, National Geographic and others are increasing their offerings of “green” content, hoping to attract readers and advertising revenues from manufacturers and retailers who are suddenly walking the earth-friendly path.”

And being earth friendly is good for advertising:

“Participating in Earth Day is a way for companies to get their name out there,” said Diane Osgood of Business for Social Responsibility in San Francisco. “It can get them publicity because right now green is in. Green is the new black.”

Earth Day Network

Earth Day from Wikipedia

Countdown Your Carbon

…and if you’re in Toronto come out to the street celebration and parade!

The list is rather simple as it includes things like recycling (who doesn’t?) and not buying bottled water.

It’s good to remind ourselves that there are simple everyday things we can do to protect the planet.

Sir Richard Branson brought his talent for publicity to bear on climate change yesterday, offering a $25m (£13m) prize to anyone who invents an economical way of removing carbon from the atmosphere.

The Virgin group chairman said: “We have no super-hero. We have only our own ingenuity to fall back on.”

The CBC has a news clip on the story (direct link to WMV file).

“In the early half of the 20th century, Serbian physicist Milutin Milankovitch first proposed that cyclical variations in the Earth-Sun geometry can alter the Earth’s climate and these changes can be discovered in the Earth’s geological archives, which is exactly what this research team, consisting of members from the United Kingdom, the U.S. and Canada, has done.”