Adam Clare

Bioplastics Making a Comeback

In order to make this post understandable to 210 million people, this needs to be said: plastic is made from oil.

Petroleum based plastics take forever to biodegrade whereas soy based plastics biodegrade a lot faster – thus making bioplastics friendly to our planet. The International Herald Tribune has a good article outlining the benefits of bioplastics and the current state of the industry.

Apparently Henry Ford loved soybeans! Maybe he knew that oil was a limited resource our something crazy like that 😉

Much of the early research on bioplastics was supported by Henry Ford, who believed strongly in the potential of the soybean. One famous 1941 photo shows Ford swinging an ax head into the rear of a car to demonstrate the strength of the soy-based biocomposite used to make the auto body. But soy quickly lost out to petrochemical plastics.

“In those days you had a lot more oil around,” Tao said. “You didn’t have to wait until the growing season.”

Urban Farm Towers

farming

Urban farming is not a new idea, it’s such a great idea that it is often forgotten though. A solution to transporting food and improving urban air quality is literally under our feet, and can soon be over our heads. There is an ever growing need for using buildings in cities as farms and more companies are now behind the idea. Skyscrapers as farms just sounds cool!

Not to mention locally-grown produce for the residents of central London, Manhattan and Tokyo, eliminating the environmental costs of transport (with fresher lettuces to boot).
Skyscraper farms can operate year-round with artificial lighting, so, on average, one indoor acre is the equivalent to between four and six outdoors, and companies are vying to reap the financial rewards that come from this increased efficiency.

Via Tree Hugger

Planting Trees to Fight Climate Change

logo Tree-Nation will plant 8 million trees in Africa in the shape of a huge heart to fight Climate Change and Poverty. We will create the park in Niger which is one of the poorest countries in the world, and one that suffers the most from climate change and desertification. Furthermore, we are affiliated with the United Nations Environment Program in support of each others projects.

We have built a great new kind of website that combines a community with our own mapping tool. Inspired by Google maps we built our own special version to be able to plant 8 million trees, all with blogs and profiles.

So via our website you can buy trees for yourself or offer and send one to someone you love, and people are doing this for Weddings, Valentines, new born babies, birthdays, to advertise a business, or simply to share some thoughts. You can plant a tree on a virtual map and a real tree will be planted in the same place in the real world. The virtual trees all have Tree-Blogs and Profiles so that you can keep in touch with the recipient and interact with others who have bought trees via our community. You can share ideas, photos, messages, make contacts and debate on environmental issues.

It really is exciting to see members buying trees, writing beautiful messages and then sending them to loved ones via our website.

Note: This was not written by me, but by Jeremiah from Tree Nation.

Drive Slower to Improve Your Life

The calming blog Zen Habits has five reasons to drive slower and how that can improve your life. The author claims that by driving slower that their overall happiness, such a small change can make a huge difference.

A sample reason:

3. Save time? As Vadim pointed out in his email, while you think youâ€™re saving time by driving faster, itâ€™s not a lot of time. And that small amount of time youâ€™re saving isnâ€™t worth it, considering the other factors on this list. Better yet, start out a few minutes early and youâ€™ll arrive at the same time as someone who drove faster but started later, and youâ€™ll arrive much happier than that person to boot

Personally I prefer riding my bike over any other form of personal transport.

Buoys Make Power

In 2008 along the UK shoreline small underwater buoys will be generating electricity using that age old technology: wave power. The advantages to putting the buoys 50 meters under the water surface lies in that storms will not damage them, surface wave-powered generators can be damaged by rough seas.

“A town with 55,000 inhabitants would need half a square kilometre of seabed covered with 100 buoys to power it,” says Grey.

He adds that they could be effective in the North Atlantic, from Scotland down to Portugal, along the Pacific US shoreline, from San Francisco in the US up to Vancouver in Canada, along the coast of Chile, and even in South Africa and New Zealand.

But calmer seas, such as the Mediterranean do not have enough wave height to pump the buoy.