Canada to Label Bisphenol A dangerous

Bisphenol A is chemical that is used to make plastic containers like Nalgene water bottles. Health Canada has been looking into the chemical for some time now and will announce today that Bispehnol A is considered dangerous in Canada. Some stores have banned products that use the chemical, with San Fransico providing some legislation against the chemical.

It is believed that bisphenol A can leach out of food and beverage containers when they are exposed to high heat or highly acidic foods.

Studies show that it mimics the hormone estrogen in the bloodstream, and is linked to health problems including breast cancer and infertility.

If bisphenol A is indeed declared dangerous, it could be up to a year or more before the health minister is able to issue regulations controlling its use.

Previous reports claimed the announcement would come as early as last Wednesday. That prompted several Canadian retailers to pull products containing bisphenol A from their shelves.

Tesco Labels Food with Carbon Footprint

In Feburary the New Yorker looked into the complexity of carbon footprint labeling of food, and the article spent a lot of time looking at Tesco’s efforts. The most important point from that article (I think) is that it sometimes makes environmental sense to eat food shipped from other parts of the world. Eating locally is not always the best thing to do.

For British consumers eating environmentally will be easier now. Tesco is about to test their carbon labelling program. One of Tesco’s goals in doing this is to create an industry standard.

The retailer will put carbon-count labels on varieties of orange juice, potatoes, energy-efficient light bulbs and washing detergent, stating the quantity in grammes of CO2 equivalent put into the atmosphere by their manufacture and distribution.

Chief executive Sir Terry Leahy said: “We will give the carbon content of the product and the category average.” The labels should eventually allow shoppers to compare carbon costs in the same way they can now compare salt and calorie content.

The UK’s biggest supermarket first announced its intention to put carbon counts on up to 70,000 products some 15 months ago. It has since been working with the Carbon Trust to find an accurate method of labelling. “It has not been simple, but we are there,” said Leahy yesterday. Tesco will unveil the details of the scheme shortly, and the chief executive said he hoped the labels “will end up being a standard”.

Use Solar Power During the Night

Storing energy in batteries is expensive, not the best thing to the environment, and inefficient when used on a large scale. The inability to store solar energy over the long-term has been a problem for hte adoption of solar power generation. That is, until now. THe New York Times is reporting on some companies that have found ways to store the energy solar power plants use in a giant thermos.

At Black & Veatch, a builder of power plants, Larry Stoddard, the manager of renewable energy consulting, said that with a molten salt design, “your turbine is totally buffered from the vagaries of the sun.” By contrast, “if I’ve got a 50 megawatt photovoltaic plant, covering 300 acres or so, and a large cloud comes over, I lose 50 megawatts in something like 100 to 120 seconds,” he said, adding, “That strikes fear into the hearts of utility dispatchers.”

Thermal storage using molten salt can work in a system like Ausra’s, with miles of piping, but if the salt is spread out through a serpentine pipe, rather than held in a heavily insulated tank, it has to be kept warm at night so it does not solidify, among other complications.

A tower design could also allow for operation at higher latitudes or places with less sun. Designers could simply put in bigger fields of mirrors, proponents say. A small start-up, eSolar, is pursuing that design, backed by Google, which has announced a program to try to make renewable electricity for less than the price of coal-fired power

Free Flowing Hydro Power

TreeHugger has a post up that serves as a good reminder of all the tidal power generators that are being built in North America right now. Including Ontario’s announced tidal wave power feasibility study.

The Cornwall Ontario River Energy Project – 15 Megawatts
The province of Ontario is investing C$2.2 million into a project to demonstrate the feasibility and commercial viability of using free flow turbines to harness some of the St. Lawrence River’s kinetic energy and turn it into electricity.

This project is for 15 megawatts, enough to power 11,000 average-sized homes, but Verdant estimates that “there is enough potential power in the water currents of Canada’s tides, rivers and manmade channels to generate 15,000 MW of electricity using its technology”. That would be about the equivalent of 15 big coal power plants.

But we have to wonder… Did they pick Cornwall just because they could make a really cool acronym? The Cornwall Ontario River Energy (CORE) Project.

LED Cycling Jacket is a Winner

I have lights on my bike and I’m a safe rider; however, there is always room for improvenment. An inventor has created a jacket for cyclists that uses LED lights. The lights communicate to other cyclists and most importantly car drivers what the cyclist is doing. The jacket recently won an international design award. The BBC has the scoop.

The jacket uses an accelerometer to sense movement, changing the colour of LEDs on the back from green when accelerating, then to red when braking.

A tilt switch in the jacket also makes LEDs in the arm flash amber when the wearer lifts their arm to indicate a turn.