Month: August 2009

Bottle Water Sales Decreasing

- Adam Clare 1 Comment

The Washington Post has some good news that’s worth noting: sales of bottle water are not faring well in the current economy. This is fantastic news for the environment as bottled water is a huge drain on resources (just think about the distance a bottle of water needs to travel compared to water from your tap).

According to Food & Water Watch, more than 17 million barrels of oil — enough to fuel 1 million cars for a year– are needed to produce the plastic water bottles sold in the United States annually. And about 86 percent of the empty bottles get thrown into the trash rather than recycled. Beverage companies have responded through recycling initiatives and purchasing carbon offsets.

Hauter said she has worked on water issues for about a decade but that the movement took off about three years ago. The group fans out to festivals and other public events pouring water for attendees into corn-based, biodegradable cups or metal containers bearing the name of its campaign, “Take Back the Tap.”

Think Good Thoughts About Yesterday for Happiness Today

- Adam Clare

This is a very simple way to make sure that you are happy and positive in life: just think about a good thing that happened to you yesterday.

It showed a 7 per cent increase in overall cheerfulness after the experiment.
”The figure is statistically significant,” said Prof Wiseman. ”I thought with a representative sample you wouldn’t see a change, but we got a 7 per cent rise. There was no big improvement in the weather or anything in the news that could have accounted for it, and we looked for that. Who knows, but I like to think we might have cheered up the nation.”
Participants were asked to carry out the tasks every day for a week and report any changes in their happiness, as well as that of people around them.

PuRE Makes Swimming Pools a Good Thing

- Adam Clare

Here’s a groovy idea that will hopefully take off: use swimming pools to filter water. Swimming pools consume a lot of water and energy and this concept is designed to take these resource-hogs and turn them into something useful. It’s part of a contest to make suburbs livable.

PuRE

Using the same principles employed in constructed wetlands, puRE treats wastewater through six stages. Wastewater first flows into closed treatment tanks during the first two stages before reaching four separate purification cells in stages 3-6. These purification cells contain several species of aquatic plants and animals which remove pollutants naturally and even allow for small-scale food production as a by-product. The solids from the wastewater stream are filtered and directed to a communal methane digester, generating another bounty for its users – power.

For those of with you with pools but think drinkable water is too expensive here’s some tips on how to make your swimming pool a little kinder for the environment.

Residential Fruit Picking Program in Toronto

- Adam Clare

One of the reason I love Toronto is that there are so many small programs that do great things. It seems as if every month I find another community group making the world a better place. Today I found out that in Toronto there’s a group of people who harvest all the fruit they can in the city. They pick fruit from residential trees (with permission of course) and from city trees (again, with permission) then the fruit is shared. They are called Not Far From the Tree and they are having a tree tour on Saturday which hopefully I’ll be able to attend.

nfftt logo

The core of our programming is our residential fruit-picking program, where we pick fruit from trees that would otherwise go to waste. We help fruit tree owners make use of the abundance of fruit that their trees offer by dispatching teams of volunteers to harvest it for them. One third goes to the fruit tree owners, another third goes to the volunteers for their labour, and the final third is distributed (by bicycle or cart) to community organizations in the neighbourhood who can make good use of the fresh fruit.

A Successful Rubbish Free Year

- Adam Clare

A couple in New Zealand successfully completed a rubbish free year (Google cache). I’m a little late on this since they finished in February, but it’s always inspirational to read that people can live trash free.

We celebrated the end of Rubbish Free Year with a 100% rubbish free event at our house on February the 1st. No rubbish was created during preparations apart from one piece of gladwrap (I thought the cheese monger at the local farmers market sold their rounds with out plastic around them but unfortunatly they don’t). At the party there was a rubbish ‘incident’ when someone attempted to bring a packet of chips. Apart from that though we hosted well over 100 people without a drop of rubbish.

Thanks Shea!

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