Month: January 2010

How to Stop Shopping

- Adam Clare 1 Comment

One reporter has joined a growing movement of people who have sworn off buying new things. It’s a good read and a good introduction into how one can change their shopping habits to help our friendly planet.

Here are the ground rules: No buying anything new, with three exceptions – food, booze and health essentials, like medicine and toilet paper. Mary-Margaret suggests we could use leaves, but I think she’s joking.

Also accepted: Second-hand purchases. Value Village, Craigslist, vintage shops are all fair game, as the official point is to lighten our environmental load. We are in Planet Saving Mode, not Shopaholics Anonymous.

Borrowing is encouraged.

It’s an easy case to make after the stuff-gorging of Christmas. Torontonians, on average, throw 3.7 kilograms into the household trash each week – not including compost or recycling – according to city statistics. And for every garbage bin we pack, another 70 were filled to make the stuff we’re throwing out, according to American garbage guru Annie Leonard.

So, by boycotting new things for three months, I personally will keep more than 900 bags of garbage out of landfills or incinerators around the world. Not to mention the coal-fired electricity involved in making the stuff, the truck fumes, the mining and logging …

Read the rest of the article.

Hollywood is Playing it Safe

- Adam Clare

It appears that filmmakers in Hollywood have been listening to concerned doctors and parents as Hollywood is showing safer behaviour, well, at least when it comes to movies aimed at children.

The entertainment industry has improved its portrayals of walking, cycling and boating in movies aimed at children, but half of scenes still show risky behaviour, U.S. researchers found.

Unintentional injuries are the leading cause of death among children in Canada and the U.S. Previous studies have found movies marketed to children rarely portrayed safety measures such as wearing seatbelts, so the researchers set out to test if depictions have improved.

Jon Eric Tongren of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and his colleagues reviewed the top-grossing movies rated for general audiences or parental guidance per year from 2003 to 2007.

Why People Go Vegetarian

- Adam Clare

There are plenty of reasons to change your diet to a vegetarian one and blogger Brain Gordon has concluded that there are four primary reasons why people go veggie.

Many millions of people have considered going vegetarian at some point in their life, and millions have. (Hundreds of millions including those who do so as part of their religion.) As climate change, fisheries collapse, desertification, and other crises become less ignorable, many of us will have to consider eating less meat, if not forgoing many animal products entirely.
In my experience, there are four reasons that people go veg:

Personal Health
Weight Loss
Planetary Health
Compassion for Animals
There is a fifth reason that may remove the choice for many: Economic. Meat and animal products may simply become too costly.

Keep reading Brain’s reasons for going vegetarian.

A Reflection of Your Water Consumption

- Adam Clare

A designer has created a nifty concept to show people how much water they use while they are in the washroom. A mirror visualizes how much water you are using thanks to LEDs and RFID technology so that while you are washing/looking at your face you can see your water consumption.

Designer Jin Kim’s idea is that the mirror breaks down daily, monthly and annual use of water. As you use too much water, there’s a control in the mirror so your supply can be limited. And if the lights are meaningless to the user, there are also icons for those who are affected by water misuse – kids, ecosystems, polar bears – so you’re guilted into shutting off the faucet.

At the end of a year, you can see your usage patterns and know what kind of progress you’ve made in trimming down your consumption.

More words and images at Treehugger.

Thanks Shea!

Super Solar Storage to Revolutionize Sustainable Energy

- Adam Clare 1 Comment

Getting renewable energy is the easy part whereas storing it is the hard part. Battery technology has not kept pace with the green technology field. That is until a team at MIT figure out how to store sweet savoury solar energy efficiently.

Until now, solar power has been a daytime-only energy source, because storing extra solar energy for later use is prohibitively expensive and grossly inefficient. With today’s announcement, MIT researchers have hit upon a simple, inexpensive, highly efficient process for storing solar energy.

Requiring nothing but abundant, non-toxic natural materials, this discovery could unlock the most potent, carbon-free energy source of all: the sun. “This is the nirvana of what we’ve been talking about for years,” said MIT’s Daniel Nocera, the Henry Dreyfus Professor of Energy at MIT and senior author of a paper describing the work in the July 31 issue of Science. “Solar power has always been a limited, far-off solution. Now we can seriously think about solar power as unlimited and soon.”

Inspired by the photosynthesis performed by plants, Nocera and Matthew Kanan, a postdoctoral fellow in Nocera’s lab, have developed an unprecedented process that will allow the sun’s energy to be used to split water into hydrogen and oxygen gases. Later, the oxygen and hydrogen may be recombined inside a fuel cell, creating carbon-free electricity to power your house or your electric car, day or night.

Read more at MIT’s page on the project.

Thanks to Greg!

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