Category: Environment

Australia Creates Largest Network of Marine Parks

Australia has taken a step in the right direction when it comes to protecting their natural environment. The country has announced that they’ll be creating the largest network of protected marine areas in the world. Fishing and drilling for non-renewable resources has been been banned inside the network.

The announcement of the network was made a week before more than 130 heads of state and government will gather in Rio de Janeiro for the United Nations’ sustainable development conference as part of global efforts to curb climate change, one of the biggest conferences in U.N. history.

New reserves will be established from the Perth Canyon in the southwest to Kangaroo Island off the southern coast, but the “jewel in the crown” will be the protection of the Coral Sea area which surrounds the Great Barrier Reef in the northeast, Environment Minister Tony Burke said on Thursday.

“The Coral Sea marine national park … combined with the Great Barrier Reef area, becomes the largest marine protected area in the world,” Burke said.

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Renewable Energy Boosts Profits for UK Farmers

Farmers in the UK have benefited from complimenting their growing of crops with renewable energy production. Some farmers have installed wind turbines and others solar, but the result is the same: farmers can keep farming and profit from energy production.

Renewable energy is promising to overtake rural tourism as a secondary income for the agricultural sector, with 200 megawatts of power – enough for 40,000 households – installed, according to joint research by the National Farmers’ Union (NFU) and NatWest bank.

They found that one in six farmers will have solar photovoltaic (PV) systems in place by the middle of this year and one in five will be producing clean electricity by this date. If this trend continues, as much as 15% of all UK electricity from renewable sources come from the land by the end of this decade, they believe.

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Toronto Joins Other Cities and Bans Plastic Bags

Toronto has joined other cities around the world that has banned plastic bags. San Francisco banned plastic bags earlier in the year, and we mustn’t forget that a small town of Leaf Rapids, Manitoba was the first place in North America to enact such a ban. This ban flies in the face of an incompetent and backwards-thinking mayor that wanted to remove a tax on plastic bags, so the councillors voted to ban all bags instead.

“These bags are junk, whether you want to call them biodegradable or not. They end up in the same place: blowing around the streets or in landfill,” said Councillor David Shiner, a member of Mr. Ford’s executive who surprised many by introducing the ban.

“Let’s get rid of the plastic bags. Let’s make today a real statement. Let’s tell the industry that we’re not accepting your baloney any more,” he said.

Mr. Shiner said he didn’t know he was going to move the motion until partway through the debate. He based the language largely on Seattle’s recently passed ban on bags. Retailers will still be allowed to sell or give away single-use paper bags, he said, using the example of retailers such as provincial liquor stores and some department stores who already offer free paper bags to customers.

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Oil is Too Expensive for Wasteful Use

Looks like those “crazy environmentalists” were right all along: the cost of oil has gotten so high that companies are looking for alternatives. When it comes to companies that rely on petroleum-based products they’ve noticed that their profits are dwindling because the cost of oil has gone up, so the bioplastics industry is now on the rise.

Hopefully this increase in the insane consumption of oil will spur on more companies looking for alternative options. These options exist and are being produced already, we just need the forethought to use them now.

“A lot of brand owners, particularly those that rely heavily on packaging, are interested in protecting their long-term costs,” said Douglas A. Smock, a plastics analyst who wrote a report for market research firm BCC Research that predicted a boom in plant-based bioplastics. “They want more predictable cost structures going forward. The high price of oil is responsible for the rapid emergence in interest in bioplastics.”

Ford said it has eliminated 5 million pounds of petroleum annually by using soybean-based cushions in all of its North American vehicles. The company said it got rid of an additional 300,000 pounds of oil-based resins a year by making door bolsters out of kenaf, a tropical plant in the cotton family.

“Finding alternative sources for materials is becoming imperative as petroleum prices continue to rise and traditional, less-sustainable materials become more expensive,” said John Viera, Ford’s global director of sustainability and vehicle environmental matters.

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Dwell’s Top Green Projects of 2012

Architecture magazine Dwell has released their top ten green projects in the USA for this year. It would be great to see this done in a global perspective.

On April 19th, AIA’s Committee on the Environment (COTE) announced the COTE Top Ten Green Project Awards: their selection of the most sustainable buildings across the country. COTE advocates environmentally conscious building and focuses on educating architects and the public about green design. This year’s winners had an unprecedented focus on public utility and budgeting and there was an unusually high number of adaptive reuse projects and concentration on community ties. Watch the slideshow to learn what made the 10 winners.

View the slideshow.