Category: Environment

Town Bans Bottled Water

In what is probably a first for our planet, a small town in Australia has banned the selling of bottled water. This is absolutely fantastic to see because bottle water is an asinine idea for the developed world. Most bottled water comes form the same source as municipal tap water then shipped around via fuel-burning vehicles.
Bottle water is a fantastic model of inefficiency so it’s good to see this news coming out of Australia

“Every bottle today was taken off the shelf and out of the fridges so you can only now buy refillable bottles in shops in Bundanoon,” Dee told AFP.

The tiny town, two hours south of Sydney, voted in July to ban bottled water after a drinks company moved to tap into a local aquifer for its bottled water business.

“In the process of the campaign against that the local people became educated about the environmental impact of bottled water,” said Dee.

“A local retailer came up with this idea of well why don’t we do something about that and actually stop selling the bottled water and it got a favourable reaction,” he said.

Dee said the 2,000-person town had made international headlines with their bid, which he hoped would spur communities across the world to action.

Keep reading.

Seattle Law Makes Restaurants Waste Less

Seattle has become the first place in North America to require restaurants to use compostable or recyclable items that are meant for only one use.

Put into effect July 1, the ordinance requires restaurants, coffee shops, food courts, cafeterias and other food service businesses to stop throwing away single-use food-service ware and packaging including napkins, paper bags, wooden coffee stir sticks, clamshells and hot and cold beverage cups and lids among others.
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“With our requirement that food service packaging must be compostable or recyclable, Seattle has taken a big step toward a zero waste future,” said City Councilmember Mike O’Brien. “You have to ask yourself why we should make stuff just to throw it away. With compostable and recyclable food containers, we’re closing the loop.”

Keep reading at Earth 911.

Green Jobs in Spain Reversed Economic Downturn

The Republican party in the USA has been trying to defend the drilling of oil despite an ongoing oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, nothing new there. They have also been arguing against progressive economic reforms to make the American economy more efficient and powered by renewable sources.

Thanks to the Republican incompetence I have stumbled across good news from Spain. They tried citing a report that they thought was against green reforms, turns out those reforms have turned a region of Spain from a place of economic misery to a haven of productivity.

Sixty-five percent of the electricity used in Navarra comes from renewable sources — primarily wind — built over the last twenty years. Over those years, the region went from having the highest unemployment rate in Spain to having the lowest rate, today.

“Under President Obama’s leadership,” the report concludes, “the United States’ decisive support of renewable energies…will aid in rapidly overcoming the current economic crisis…”

Read more about Spain’s success

RBC Cares About Water

The Royal Bank of Canada has launched a series of grants for charities to promote all good things about water. There project is called Blue Water and they want you to promote good water stewardship. It looks like a great project that they have created, it would be really great to see RBC promote good water usage in their wretched tar sands investments.

You can also take a short quiz about your water knowledge.

Here’s a video about the work they did with National Geographic: