Adam Clare

Town uses Beer Waste to Save Money

beer

Waste water is a headache to deal with since it’s a complex soup of bacteria and other tiny elements which vary day to day. When a brewery puts its waste into the sewage system it can really mess things up for the facilities cleaning waste water since the chemical balance changes so drastically. A town in Montana decided to work with their local brewery to turn that negative impact into a positive one and it worked like a charm!

If you home-brew beer you should dump your leftovers from the brewing process on your garden. It’s great for the plants and, trust me, it works.

Because it’s rich in yeast, hops and sugar, brewery waste can throw off the microbes that wastewater treatment plants rely on to remove nitrogen and phosphorus. The two nutrients can cause algae blooms in rivers and kill off fish.

“But if we can use [brewery waste] correctly and put it in the right spot, it’s very beneficial to the process,” engineering consultant Coralynn Revis says.

Revis led a pilot project here last summer to try to do just that. Bozeman worked with a local brewery to feed its beer waste to the treatment plant’s bacteria at just the right time in just the right dosage.

“This is super-simplified, but like, if they’re eating their french fries, they need a little ketchup with it. So to get the nitrate out, you dose a little carbon, and the bugs are happier,” Revis explained.

She says it worked.

Be Conscious of Wild Animal Pictures with Tourists

Elephants

It’s a sad truth that animals are caught in the wild and are then subsequently forced to entertain tourists against their will. Too often “influencers” and regular tourists take pictures alongside these animals to show how pleasant their travel experience has been, but this ignores the plight of the animals. This practice of exploiting animals needs to stop. Last year, National Geographic released a great expose on how animals are being treated in many tourist-friendly places (primarily in South East Asia) and how tourists themselves contribute to the animal abuse.

People have become aware of this horrible practice and are instead going to sanctuaries instead. Still, not every ethical place operates, errr ethically. At the very least they are an improvement to the current popular practices seen around the world. I took the picture above at the Elephant Conservation Centre in Laos.

What you can do to help stop animal abuse in the tourism industry:
-Stop liking pictures with animals in it
-Comment on the posts saying you hope the person went to an ethical place
-Donate to an animal sanctuary

Meenaâ€™s life is set to follow the same trajectory as many of the roughly 3,800 captive elephants in Thailand and thousands more throughout Southeast Asia. Sheâ€™ll perform in shows until sheâ€™s about 10. After that, sheâ€™ll become a riding elephant. Tourists will sit on a bench strapped to her back, and sheâ€™ll give several rides a day. When Meena is too old or sick to give ridesâ€”maybe at 55, maybe at 75â€”sheâ€™ll die. If sheâ€™s lucky, sheâ€™ll get a few years of retirement. Sheâ€™ll spend most of her life on a chain in a stall.

One way you can help the solve problem right now:

Teck Halts Work on Tarsands Proposal

industry

Canada is waking up to the reality of the climate crisis, those ringing the alarms includes a diverse group from the Wet’suwet’en Nation to Greenpeace. Now a large fossil fuel company, Teck Resources Ltd., has decided to not move ahead with an environment-destroying tarsands project partly due to the fact that planet is facing catastrophic climate change. The company CEO released a statement stating that the Canadian government needs to clarify its climate policy (essentially asking for regulation) and that the economic benefit of fossil fuels isn’t as clear as it used to be. The pressure that people put on Teck over the last years has proven effective, thanks to everyone that helped fight Teck’s initial plan!

Hopefully this helps empower the Wet’suwet’en pipeline protests. Protesting works.

Lindsay wrote that customers want policies that reconcile resource development and climate change â€” something he said the region has yet to achieve, but he did not clarify if the region he was referring to was Alberta or Canada.

“Unfortunately, the growing debate around this issue has placed Frontier and our company squarely at the nexus of much broader issues that need to be resolved. In that context, it is now evident that there is no constructive path forward for the project,” he wrote.
…
Energy consultant Greg Stringham, who has worked for the industry, government and the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, said tight economics and increasing risks put Teck at the centre of debate around energy projects.

Washington State Limits Water Profiteering

ocean shore

Water is a necessity for life and is the most previous resource on the planet as a result. Currently we allow massive mega-corporations to destroy ecosystems to seal water in little packets which they then sell for astronomical profits. In Ontario this issue has been raging and it looks like the “Conservative” government is only concerned with preserving the profits of a foreign company. In Washington State the opposite is happening: there they are standing up for water and ensuring that the preservation of life comes before the preservation of profits.

â€œWashington State is carving the path towards a groundbreaking solution,â€ said Mary Grant, the director of Food & Water Actionâ€™s public water for all campaign, in a statement. â€œThis legislation â€¦ would ban one of the worst corporate water abuses â€“ the extraction of local water supplies in plastic bottles shipped out of watersheds and around the country.â€

Bottled water is the most popular packaged beverage in America by volume. But in the places where that water is sourced, the industry has enjoyed far less approval. Residents of Lewis county, in the watershed at the base of Mt St Helens in southwest Washington, have been fighting a new Crystal Geyser bottling plant that would pump and package 400 gallons a minute. SB 6278 would scuttle the companyâ€™s plans.

Enjoyment of Life Increases by Deleting Facebook

It’s well known that Facebook is bad for your mental health, and let’s be honest it’s likely bad for humanity at large. The engineers at Facebook purposefully create algorithms to get you hooked on the site and exploit your emotions so you spend more time on the site. Why? So they can sell your data to advertisers. This all combines to make an experience that feels good at the time, but is ultimately bad for you (like junk food). People who left Facebook report lower levels of depression and improved we’ll-being.

If deleting Facebook is too much for you, just reduce your use of the site. Trust me, once you stop regularly checking it you won’t miss it.

People who deactivated Facebook as part of the experiment were happier afterward, reporting higher levels of life satisfaction and lower levels of depression and anxiety. The change was modest but significant â€” equal to about 25 to 40 percent of the beneficial effect typically reported for psychotherapy.

Why are people willing to pay so much money for something that reduces their happiness? One possibility is that social media acts like an addictive drug â€” in fact, the people Allcott et al. paid to deactivate Facebook ended up using it less after the experiment was over. But another possibility is that people use services like Facebook because theyâ€™re compelled by motivations other than the pursuit of happiness.