Environment

A Better Shower

- Adam Clare

People like to stay healthy and clean, well most people anyway, and the act of cleaning oneself can end up consuming a lot of resources. Showering and bathing can use up a lot of deliciously potable water and be quite wasteful in the process. There is tons of room for improvement in how these cleaning facilities use water, now a solution from Australia we have a shower that recycles water.

A person taking a 10-minute shower uses anywhere from 20 to 50 gallons of water, at the use of 2 to 5 gallons per minute.

Australian engineering firm CINTEP has developed a product that cuts that number by more than half. The Water Recycling Shower looks and feels like an ordinary shower, but is able to slash water consumption by 70 percent. It does this by automatically cleaning, filtering and pasteurizing used water. The shower then recirculates and reuses 70 percent of that clean water.

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Young, Urban, and Farming in Rural Ontario

- Adam Clare

In Ontario women from the city are defying stereotypes and running farms. Once the purview of the stereotypical old white farmer who hates cow-tippers, now women raised in cities are buying and operating farms in rural Ontario. These young and educated farmers are using organic process and community driven opportunities to run successful farms.

“I saw that something was wrong with the world, but I didn’t want to push paper around trying to change it,” she said. “When you work on a farm that respects the environment, you see your impact on the earth in a very real way.”

Now a proud owner of a 38-hectare vegetable farm in Neustadt, Ont., she finally feels she’s saving the earth from the ground up, caterpillars and all.
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Both Young and Moskovits sell organic vegetables using a community-supported agriculture model. Local families buy in at the start of the season and receive farm-fresh fruits and vegetables every week.

“It’s a great feeling to sell directly to people that are eating your food,” said Moskovits. “Marketing locally also means you aren’t shipping great distances and wasting energy.”

It’s also a model that is relatively drought proof. Since members have already paid, they, too, bear the burden when harvests are low.

Read more at The Star.

Paris Revitalizes the Seine for People

- Adam Clare

Paris is continuing it’s transition to be more people-focused. The city has a great plan to gut its highways in the city along the Seine and replace them with bike lanes, pedestrian walks, and cultural spaces. It’s bound to make a city known for its romantic appeal even more lovely.

From next month, a stretch of more than 1km (0.6 miles) on the right bank near the Hôtel de Ville will see the first narrowing of the road to make way for pedestrian corridors, riverside walkways, bars and cafes. Then in the spring the final promised masterpiece of pedestrianisation will be unveiled: a 2.5km car-free zone on the left bank, between the Musée d’Orsay and the Pont de l’Alma, with a riverside park, pedestrian promenades, floating botanic gardens, flower-market barges, sports courts, restaurants and even perhaps an archipelago of artificial islands.
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Delanoë promised his new scheme would “give Parisians back their river”, “profoundly change” the city and provide “an opportunity for happiness” for residents. But the mayor, who will not stand for re-election in 2014, also has an eye on his legacy, seeking to be remembered as the man who finally ended Parisian reverence to the car. He has expanded cycle routes and introduced the city’s famous short-term bike-hire and car-hire schemes.

Read more at The Guardian.

Germany’s Sustainable Energy Grid Keeps Improving

- Adam Clare

In May, Germany was able to supply 50% of their national energy consumption using renewable power sources. That was remarkable in itself given the size of Germany in both industrial and population size.

Now, it’s been announced that for the first half 2012 Germany produced 67.9 billion kilowatt hours of renewable energy which makes up a quarter of all energy production this far into the year.

Biomass, or material acquired from living organisms, accounted for 5.7 percent and solar technology for 5.3 percent.

Solar energy saw the biggest increase, up 47 percent from the previous year. Germany is the world’s top market for power converted from solar radiation and its installed capacity accounts for more than a third of the global total.

Germany aims to derive 35 percent of its total energy needs from renewable sources by 2035.

Link for more info.

Thanks to Reddit, here’s a website that tracks energy production by type.

A Stove That Uses Fire to Charge Electronics

- Adam Clare

BioLite is a company that focuses on creating clean-burning stoves. We’ve looked at stoves before and why it’s important to create efficient stoves for a better planet and healthier people.

Recently, an employee of BioLite gave a presentation at TEDx Montreal about the importance of clean stoves.

The company has tied their business model of selling camping stoves to improving home stoves in a smart way, here’s an advertisement about their camping stove:

BioLite CampStove Demo & Story from BioLite on Vimeo.

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