Snippets from the Interwebs 10

Yet another digest of snippets from the Intertubes. A lot is going on that the mainstream media barely reports on.




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Last week the state of Hawaii introduced a state-wide ban on plastic bags, becoming the first US state to do so. Now the city of Los Angeles has banned them too becoming the largest US city with a ban
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Globally, Mexico ranks 24^th in wind capacity and is expected to jump to 20^th, according to the Global Wind Energy Council (GWEC). Mexico only produced three megawatts (MW) of wind power in 2005, but now has almost 400 times that amount and by the end of this year will have two gigawatts (GW). Mexico has the 14^th largest economy in the world, is the 11^th largest greenhouse gas emitting country, and is the world’s 7^th largest producer of oil. Mexico also has Mexico City, which has some of the most severe air pollution in the world.
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Microsoft has committed to become carbon neutral beginning on July 1, the start of the company’s new fiscal year. The shift results from three years of internal discussions within the company to improve Microsoft’s carbon footprint and environmental performance. The company will roll out the new changes, including a new accounting system, across its operations in over 100 countries.

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Our Economic Development Minister Senator Alan Maclean has just been trying to drum up business for Jersey in Israel. Here’s what some of their entrepreneurs are doing -
Rafael Aharon, an Israeli entrepreneur, has come up with a plan to make paper from human waste. This might sound unsavoury, but he sees an untapped business with plenty of potential.
Aharon is the CEO of Applied Clean Tech (ACT), a sewage recycling company. Their system is an “integrated solution combining reduced sludge formation for municipal waste water treatment plants (WWTPs) with recycling of waste water bio-solids.”
They take sewage poop they treat it and make paper out of the fibre they find therein.
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In April, Mexico’s House of Representatives passed a new piece of climate change legislation, making it only the second country in the world behind the UK and its Climate Change Act to do so, once it is approved by Mexico’s Senate. The law calls for reducing carbon emissions by 50 percent by 2050.
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In March Virent and Virdia, formerly HCL CleanTech, announced the successful conversion of cellulosic pine tree sugars to drop-in hydrocarbon fuels within the BIRD Energy project, a joint program funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, the Israeli Ministry of National Infrastructure and the BIRD Foundation. The project, which commenced in January 2011, successfully demonstrated that Virdia’s deconstruction process generated high-quality sugars from cellulosic biomass, which were converted to fuel via Virent’s BioForming® process.
Virent used Virdia’s biomass-derived sugars to produce gasoline and jet fuel, the latter being sent to the U.S Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) for analysis where it passed rigorous testing. Tim Edwards of the Fuels Branch of the AFRL said, “This fuel passed the most stringent specification tests we could throw at it (such as thermal stability) under some conditions where conventional jet fuels would fail. This fuel is definitely worth further evaluation.”
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Here’s a good website – ifixit.com - for those who want to relearn how to fix things. It mainly concentrates on electrical devices

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In March, the Danish government once again threw down the green energy gauntlet by pledging to generate 35% of its total energy from renewable sources by 2020 and 100% by 2050
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It would be good to find a site that rates thousands of products for such things as health, ethical and environmental performance.
Hence GoodGuide, a Web site and iPhone application that lets consumers dig past the package’s marketing spiel by entering a product’s name and discovering its health, environmental and social impacts
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Volvo Group, the transportation equipment manufacturer, has set a tall order for itself. It wants to reduce its carbon emissions from the construction equipment, buses and trucks it makes by 30 million tons by the end of 2014. To put the Volvo/WWF alliance in perspective, the 30 million ton reduction goal is the equivalent of the total carbon dioxide emitted by all of Sweden over a seven month period
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This website lets you examine in detail the performance of Germany’s huge photovoltaic sector in  real time – none at night! On this site you can view at any time the total output of all PV plants in Germany installed up to the specified cutoff date. As required, you can view this information as an absolute value or as a percentage of total installed output
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Moving along with Scotland’s ambitious plans to be the European leader in wind energy, Korean-based Samsung Heavy Industries (SHI) has announced that it will base its first European offshore wind project in Fife. The venture is said to be worth up to £100m and is expected to create 500 new jobs in the clean energy sector in Scotland.
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Hank (who maintains the website EcoGeek and sings songs about particle physics) runs a YouTube channel that celebrates nerdiness. This Internet community is now a huge part of pop culture among self-professed teenage nerds. Hank’s new spin-off channel SciShow, which publishes videos about popular science topics, has only being going for a month but already has 90 000 subscribers and 1 million views. So I was very excited when Hank created this entertaining, polished, and wonderfully accurate video about climate change. He discusses sea level rise, anoxic events, and even the psychology of denial: In which Hank details the five scariest things that will likely happen because of climate change.

Snippets from the Interwebs 9

Insulate insulate insulate! It cuts down energy use but most types (foam, fibreglass wool, Rockwool etc) take a fair amount of (usually) fossil fuelled energy to create. Why not grow your own? Of course, in days gone by, people used such as bracken to keep their hovels warmer but bio-insulation is relatively rare these days. Sheep’s wool is excellent and is increasingly used and produced for this purpose – click on this link for “The Woolly Shepherd” - but is not particularly cheap.

Step forward Greensulate from Ecovative design. This wonder stuff is an insulation/packaging material that is made from a fungus mycelium grown on agricultural crop waste, such as rice husks. Its “R-Value” is comparable with fibreglass.

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Why you should look pityingly at anyone who recommends economic growth as the solution to our problems… 

There is an old story about the inventor of chess. As the story goes, when chess was presented to a great king, the king offered the inventor any reward that he wanted. The inventor asked that a single grain of rice be placed on the first square of the chessboard. Then two grains on the second square, four grains on the third, and so on. Doubling each time.

The king, baffled by such a small price for a wonderful game, immediately agreed, and ordered the treasurer to pay the agreed upon sum. A week later, the inventor went before the king and asked why he had not received his reward. The king, outraged that the treasurer had disobeyed him, immediately summoned him and demanded to know why the inventor had not been paid. The treasurer explained that the sum could not be paid – by the time you got even halfway through the chessboard, the amount of grain required was more than the entire kingdom possessed.

The king took in this information and thought for a while. Then he did the only rational thing a king could do in those circumstances. He had the inventor killed, as an object lesson in the perils of trying to outwit the king.

For the most part, this fable is used as a lesson in the power of exponential growth. From the one grain of rice on the first square of the chessboard, the amount increases to the point that by the time you get to square 64, there are over 18 quintillion grains of rice on the board. In mathematics, it’s a demonstration of extreme growth.

Eventually, you run out of rice. Or land. Or water. Or any resource.

Retold story adapted from  The Seduction of the Exponential Curve from Forbes.com

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An exciting idea to fend off mosquitoes. It also works on flies and wasps too. It uses a “wall” of infrared light to keep the little bloodsuckers out. Szabolcs Marka, an associate professor of physics at Columbia University, is developing a novel way to protect people from the vectors: a virtual mosquito net with infrared light vibrating at wavelengths that irritate the insects’ nervous systems.

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A panel of expert judges has chosen Pure Power’s Mobile Solar Power System as one of its Top 10 Green Building Products of 2011. Building sites often have mobile power supplies which are usually noisy diesel generators. Here’s a solar photovoltaic power supply on a trailer to stop all that nonsense. The S48T can supply 72 kilowatts (or about 20 domestic houses worth) because it has battery storage on board too. Amongst other uses, they are being used on location for movie filming e.g. Inception

They also supply a bio-diesel hybrid version for continuity of supply on less sunny days

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So much for “trickle down” economics

A recent UN Report - Human Development Report  - says developing countries will see reverse economic growth by 2050 -  it delineates the global challenges of sustainability and equity. It points out that although (conventionally measured) living standards in most countries have been rising, from now on if environmental deterioration and social inequalities continue to intensify, the least developed nations will show a downward growth by 2050.

adapted from triplepundit.com

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Floods account for more than half of global disasters, affecting more people than any other type of disaster. The menace of flooding is well known to the estimated 65,000 people living in Budalangi, an area in western Kenya near the Uganda border that is inundated by floods every few years. Mudimbia, a village in Budalangi, will be the site of a disaster relief demonstration conducted by Oregon-based Hydration Technology Innovations (HTI) in collaboration with the Kenyan Water for Health Organization

The project will focus on using the HydroPack™, a paper-thin 4-inch by 6-inch pouch filled with electrolytes and nutrients that on contact with water, any old dirty water, swells up over an 8-to-12 hour period to create a flavoured, healthy drink.

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Taken from Triplepundit.com

Honey is supposed to be one of the purest natural foods there is. However, a recent report by Food Safety News blacklisted several US brands of honey for being “ultra-filtered.” Ultra-filtration is a process that removes pollen and therefore, traceability from honey. This technique is also a tacit way for Chinese manufacturers to sell their honey in the US, as there have been strict import tariffs on Chinese honey since 2001 for contamination with antibiotics and heavy metals.

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Conventional farmers can sometimes sneer at organic agriculture. The facts are against them though.

Taken from The StarPhoenix

“The results are in from a 30-year side-by-side trial of conventional and organic farming methods at Pennsylvania's Rodale Institute. Contrary to conventional wisdom, organic farming outperformed conventional farming in every measure.

There are about 1,500 organic farmers in Saskatchewan, at last count. They eschew the synthetic fertilizers and toxic sprays that are the mainstay of conventional farms. Study after study indicates the conventional thinking on farming - that we have to tolerate toxic chemicals because organic farming can't feed the world - is wrong.

In fact, studies like the Rodale trials (www.rodaleinstitute.org/fst30years) show that after a three-year transition period, organic yields equalled conventional yields. What is more, the study showed organic crops were more resilient. Organic corn yields were 31 per cent higher than conventional in years of drought”

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On Monday the 14th November United Airlines Flight 1403 made history when it flew because it was the first biofuel powered flight either in the US or the world depending on which news source one reads.The Boeing 737-800 burned a “green jet fuel” derived partially from genetically modified algae that feed on plant waste and produce oil created by Solazyme corporation.

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Photovoltaic cells have been steadily falling in price due to to innovation and economies of scale in manufacturing. Here’s yet another innovation that promise not only cheaper manufacturing using less energy but also more efficient cells that make more electricity. A game-changing Optical Cavity Furnace developed by the U.S. Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory uses optics to heat and purify solar cells at unmatched precision while sharply boosting the cells' efficiency.

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Bill Gates backs a Tobin Tax! This tax is designed to slow down the insane pace of international financial speculation and such weapons of economic destruction as CDOs, deravatives etc  http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-15565479 . The EU are considering introducing it too

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Taken from Inhabitat.com

If just one percent of the Saharan Desert were covered in concentrating solar panels, like those in the picture, it would create enough energy to power the entire world. The Desertec Initiative announced, two years ago, its intentions to harness the power of the sun in the Sahara Desert. Now, the project is moving forward, with plans for the first construction to break ground in 2012. The 500-megawatt concentrated solar power plant (CSP) will cost a cool $2.8 billion and harness the power of the sun from the desert of Morocco. Desertec is a projected half-trillion dollar solar project that will occupy parts of the Sahara, the Middle East, and Europe. The potential for the project is great — if completed, it could produce enough electricity to meet 15-20 percent of Europe’s energy demand by 2050 while providing power to the Middle East and Northern Africa as well.

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Brooklyn Grange Farm is though to be the largest rooftop farm in the world. Their one-acre (40,000 square foot) commercial organic farm on a rooftop in Queens, New York is made up of roughly 1.2 million lbs of soil and over 20,000 linear feet of green roofing material. They grow vegetables in the city and sell them to local people and businesses. The goal is to improve access to very good food, to connect city people more closely to farms and food production, and to make urban farming a viable enterprise and livelihood.

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Starbucks concerned world coffee supply is threatened by climate change

From triplepundit.com and the Guardian

Coffee supplies are being reduced by higher temperatures, long droughts and intense rainfall, plus more resilient pests and plant diseases, according to the UCS, “all of which are associated with climate change.” Coffee varieties are adapted to certain climate zones so a temperature increase of just a half of a degree can have a big affect and cause lower crop yields.

Coffee is not the only food product affected by climate change. A recent International Centre for Tropical Agriculture (known by the Spanish acronym, CIAT) study predicted a one-degree Celsius temperature increase by 2030 and 2.3 degrees Celsius by 2050 in the Ivory Coast and Ghana, which would make it too hot to grow chocolate. Both countries supply more than half of the world’s cocoa.

Tea is also being affected by climate change, according to a CIAT report released in May. Climate change will cause increases in average temperatures and rainfall which will cause many Kenyan farmers at lower elevations to abandon growing tea.

Snippets from the Interwebs 8

Windpower marches on

Coal, if you discount the negative externalities it produces, generates the cheapest power around. Natural gas is probably second (and a helluva lot cleaner, pollution-wise and greenhouse gas-wise).

The Brazilian authorities have this week (August 24th) confirmed that wind power in the country currently costs less than natural gas, after a series of energy auctions saw wind farm operators undercut other forms of energy generation.

By the end of last year, wind power in the U.S. was cost-competitive with natural gas, the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA) reported in January.

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Ocean Acidification, global warming’s probably more evil twin, may be one of the root causes of the devastation of oyster farms in the Pacific NorthWest

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The seas off Canada’s Newfoundland coast have been one of the world’s richest fisheries for nearly 500 years. Click here for a CBC archive about the rise and fall of the Atlantic cod fishery. In the 1950s modern trawlers arrived in the area and by 1992 the fishery was closed for lack of fish. Cod stocks in the area remained at less than 5% of their former levels for decades in spite of the closure.  Since then the Grand Banks have been a case study for fisheries mismanagement and total ecosystem collapse brought on by over-fishing, a problem that is a severe threat to fish-stocks in the rest of the world.

This new study therefore brings some hope to the area. Canadian researchers from Queen’s University have found that cod are now at 34% of their pre-collapse peak, and biomass of all predatory fish is at more than 50% of pre-collapse levels. The collapse of cod has led to subsequent increase of haddock and pollock as well as herring which is what the cod used to eat. This imbalance of the food chain will take a longer time to recover.

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For 1 in 6 people, access to water requires hard work: hours of walking, waiting in line and heavy lifting.

The time spent fulfilling this basic need keeps many children out of school and prevents women from carrying out all the domestic and income generating work for which they are responsible. In much of the developing world, it is often necessary to walk five miles (8km) or more every day to fetch water. In the dry season, it is not uncommon to walk twice this distance. Collecting water can be dangerous too. The traditional method of carrying water – carrying a 5 gallon (20 litre) water bucket on the head – can severely damage the spine, causing severe pain. Step forward the Wello – click this link for their website - a cheap plastic roller tank that takes a lot of the effort out of fetching water

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Taken from Greenpeace’s website:

The world's #1 sportswear brand, Nike, has accepted our Detox challenge: today (August 17th - NP) it has officially committed to eliminating all hazardous chemicals across its entire supply chain, and the entire life-cycle of its products by 2020. This is a major win for our campaign to protect the planet’s precious water, and create a toxic-free future.

Nike's announcement comes just five weeks into our Detox campaign, which began when we launched the "Dirty Laundry" report, revealing commercial links between major clothing brands - including Nike, Puma and Adidas - and suppliers responsible for releasing hazardous chemicals into Chinese rivers.

Puma was first to break away from the pack, opening up an impressive lead by announcing that it would go toxic-free. Puma's commitment to remove all hazardous chemicals from its entire product-portfolio must have left their competition wondering how they were going to raise their game. Now, Nike and Puma are the front-runners, and Adidas is far behind.

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Here’s an interesting piece of research from “Environmental Health Perspectives” headlined:

“Lower Prevalence of Antibiotic-resistant Enterococci On U.S. Conventional Poultry Farms That Transitioned to Organic Practices”

It basically says that farms that transition to organic methods of rearing poultry quickly find a much lower prevalence of antibiotic resistant enterococcus (nasty) bacteria in their flocks. Not so much from the well known organic practises but more from the removal of the routine use of antibiotics that are in conventional food stuff, put there to “promote” growth etc. In cattle production, the routine use of antibiotics, described as ionophores because of their growth enhancing characteristics, rather than their bug killing abilities, can cause confusion. The U.S. Department of Agriculture sent a letter to Tyson Foods in 2007 to remove labels from chickens that said "raised without antibiotics" because of the use of ionophores in their feed.

The conclusion of the paper?:

“Conclusions: Our findings suggest that the voluntary removal of antibiotics from large-scale U.S. poultry farms that transition to organic practices is associated with a lower prevalence of antibiotic-resistant and MDR Enterococcus.”

(NP) MDR= multi drug resistant

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Plastic2oil recently announced that they would be “mining” the waste plastic landfill sites of  a large paper processor using their own technology that converts waste plastic (usually mixed polymers that have limited reusability) into a diesel oil substitute.

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Renewable energy continues to make large strides, which is a conclusion you probably won’t have reached if you follow the mainstream media. Renewables 2011 goes into detail about the fast progress that has been made. Click for full report – Renewables 2011

“Renewable resources wound up supplying 16% of global final energy consumption and showed strong growth in all three sectors tracked – power, heat and transport. When it comes to electricity, renewable resources supplied an estimated 20% of global annual demand. Renewable power accounted for approximately 50% of new electric capacity globally and delivered nearly 20% of the global electricity supply. By early 2011, fully 25% of global power capacity from all sources came from renewables”

“Renewables accounted for about 26% of China’s total installed electric capacity, 18% of generation, and more than 9% of final energy consumption in 2010.”

“Germany met 11% of its total final energy consumption with renewable sources, which accounted for 16.8% of electricity consumption, 9.8% of heat production (mostly from biomass), and 5.8% of transport fuel consumption. Wind power accounted for nearly 36% of renewable generation, followed by biomass, hydropower, and solar photovoltaics ”

 

source of quotes: triplepundit.com

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This article explains how India could utilise portions of the “desert” state of Rajasthan for large concentrated solar power plants that could supply much of the energy they need in just a few years. CSP is where the sun is concentrated by mirrors onto a central point to generate steam.

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According to Shelton Group (a PR investor relations company), “a tipping point in American consumer interest in green products has occurred with 70% of consumers in our surveys saying they are searching for green products where green is defined as more energy efficient, natural, sustainable, etc.” Specifically, a few of Shelton Group’s market research findings in support of this green tipping point are:

Recycling: Growing in popularity with 64% of Americans saying they regularly recycle aluminum cans, plastic bottles  and newspapers

Energy Efficient Lighting: 55% said they’ve replaced most of their incandescent light bulbs with compact  fluorescent or LED bulbs

Energy Efficient Appliances:54% said they’ve purchased an Energy Star qualified appliance

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Biofuels deservedly have a dodgy reputation due to the Americans’ efforts at turning corn (maize) into ethanol which led to a jacking up of world food prices and wasn’t even of  any real benefit because the process took more or less the same amount of energy to create the biofuel as was available when using it. See EROEI… (or even the Elmer Fudd version of the article - someone obviously has too much time on their hands…).

Corn-into-ethanol is not the end of the biofuel story because the principle is still sound even though the previous practice was dumb.

Taken from The Green Economy Post:

12 Synthetic Biology Biofuel & Biochemical Companies to Watch

A detailed review of 12 U.S. based synthetic biology, biofuel & biochemical companies that are developing third and fourth generation biofuels, bioindustrial & household chemical, and food additive products

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Spin merchants continue to ply their morality free trade.

click for original article

“Over the last six months, some of the largest virgin fine-paper manufacturers in North America have launched major marketing initiatives holding themselves up as environmental leaders.  They support these claims by postulating that virgin paper manufacturing generates the same or less greenhouse gas emissions than recycled fine paper”

The Paper Task Force Final Report differs:

“making fine paper from waste paper is a more efficient process than making paper from trees, it uses less energy, less water, creating less effluent, and generating fewer greenhouse gas emissions.  These facts are supported by the most comprehensive, independent, scientific lifecycle analysis of the impacts of paper manufacturing”

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Taken from Triplepundit.com:

Bank of America announced an agreement in June, with ProLogis, and NRG Energy and the US DOE’s Loan Program Office, to finance the deployment of up to $2.6 billion of commercial and industrial rooftop solar installations, all across the USA.

This will be the largest distributed solar deal in history, which will create the equivalent of over 10,000 job-years, while providing 733MW of distributed solar energy, which is enough to power 100,000 homes across 28 states.

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Taken from Triplepundit.com

In York, the Nestlé plant, that churns out over a billion Kit Kats and 183 million Aero bars annually has achieved a zero waste milestone four years early.  For a company and brand that received sharp criticism last year for procuring controversial sources of  palm oil last year, Nestlé and Kit Kat’s waste diversion efforts are more steps in the right direction.

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Conventional agricultural practices have a large impact on greenhouse gas emissions, energy use, also soil erosion etc.

Organic produce and pasture based meat and dairy have less of an environmental impact than their conventionally produced counterparts, a recently released report by the Environmental Working Group (EWG) found. Titled A Meat Eater’s Guide to Climate Change and Health, the report includes lifecycle assessments of 20 popular types of meat, dairy and vegetable proteins.

A couple of quotes:

“Meat, eggs and dairy products that are certified organic, humane and/or grass-fed are generally the least environmentally damaging (although a few studies of the impact on climate show mixed results for grass-fed versus confined-feedlot meat,” according to the report. “Overall, these products are the least harmful, most ethical choices.”

“Well-managed grazing and grass-fed operations are better for the environment…Organic feed production and grazing practices are also better for the environment.”

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A lot of recycling is of the type that collects a raw material and recycles it into something else. This is described as “repurposing”. The type of recycling whereby a plastic bottle is used to make another plastic bottle is somewhat rarer.

Pepsico have announced the 7up recycled PET bottle click here for press release

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A ubiquitous component of the global supply chain is the pallet. Annually, 500 million new pallets are manufactured. They become part of the roughly 2 billion pallets that are in circulation in the U.S. at any given time. 93% of all goods move on a pallet.

Observation from one of my day jobs means I can vouch for the fact that the waste involved in the use of pallets is large.

Step forward the Ecoaluminum pallet made from recycled aluminium. It’s lighter than wood, doesn’t absorb chemicals mould etc

Snippets from the Interwebs 7

The US EPA conditionally approved a new herbicide – Imprelis - for sale last October.The chemical name of the product is aminocyclopyrachlor, one of a new class of herbicides that has been viewed as more“environmentally friendly” than earlier weed killers. Imprelis is used for “improving” lawns by killing broadleaf weeds like dandelion and clover and is sold to lawn care professionals only. Unfortunately reports are coming in of widespread severe effects to conifer trees such as Norway spruces and Eastern white pines. Investigations into the cause are continuing but the application of Imprelis to nearby turf looks to be a significant factor.

Picture taken from New York Times article (click for source).

Dr. Cregg, an associate professor of horticulture and forestry and an extension specialist with Michigan State University who has fielded many calls from landscapers and inspected affected trees, said the problem existed across the country. He said

“This is going to be a large-scale problem, affecting hundreds of thousands of trees, if not more”

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The Ford motor company are now using old car tyres and soy to make  gaskets and seals for their vehicles

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Back in 2009, Volvo Trucks in North America joined 31 other companies in a ten-year energy efficiency challenge issued by the U.S. Department of Energy, and it looks like Volvo has beaten everyone else to the punch. The company has announced that it is the first to meet the energy efficiency goal of a 25 percent reduction for its New River Valley plant in Virginia, and then beating it with 30 percent.

Paragraph taken from triplepundit.com

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Ever wondered about those small bars of soap they give you in hotels? If you just stay one night or so it seems pretty wasteful if they just throw them away barely used, when they clean your room after you’ve gone. People around the world die every day from acute respiratory infection and diarrheal disease because, amongst other causes, they have no soap. Each year more than five million lives are lost to these diseases with the majority of deaths being among children less than five years old. Studies have shown that simple hand washing substantially reduces the spread of these diseases.

Clean the World gets soap to people who really need it. They organise soap collection schemes with hotels etc then sanitise it, ship it overseas, and distribute it

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There may not be as much US shale gas as the hype suggested. This link to a June 25th New York Times article Insiders sound an alarm amid a natural gas rush  shows that concerns have been raised internally that economically recoverable reserves have been inflated to attract investment, and faster than expected field deterioration rates are suggesting  that fields will not last as long, or be as productive as expected. Shale gas was thought, in America, to be a bit of a get out of jail free card for their future energy “needs”, insulating them against many of the consequences of the peaking and decline of conventional oil reserves. Here’s another link Is shale gas a huge Ponzi scheme?

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New research shows that adverts can "implant false memories" in order to manipulate consumers.

Taken from the New Economics Foundation blog

For anybody who worries that the advertising and marketing industry is artificially creating insatiable wants in people, the latest edition of Wired magazine makes disturbing reading.

It describes a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research, and it is all about how advertising can trick the part of the brain that deals with long-term memory (the hippocampus).

The experiment used 100 students and introduced them to a non-existent new product, Orville Redenbacher’s Gourmet Fresh Microwave Popcorn.  Some of them watched adverts based on slogans and text about how delicious it was; some of them watched what are called ‘high-imagery’ commercials, of happy people enjoying the popcorn at home. 

Then they were divided again.  Half went to a room and given a sample of the popcorn; half were just given a survey.  A week later, they were asked what they remembered.

Here’s the scary bit.  Those who watched the high-imagery ad were just as likely to say they tried the popcorn as those which actually did.

Even more scary, they rated the product just as highly as those who had actually tasted it.  Also they were extremely confident about their memories.  They knew why they liked it – not because of the advert, but because it tasted so good.

This whole story is disturbing on a whole range of levels.  But one of them is just how subversive the system is.  It desperately tries to keep economic growth higher by selling us things we don’t actually want, and our poor befuddled brains say ‘more!’

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After San Francisco banned styrofoam in 2007, over 50 other municipalities in the state of California followed suit, and now, the entire state is poised to make it official–35M+ people will now get their take-out food in containers made from reusable or renewable materials as opposed to the lightweight plastic known as expanded polystyrene. The shift this law (beginning January 1, 2014) will have on the take-out industry as a whole is hard to fathom…it’s realistically the beginning of the end for styrofoam.

Taken from Triplepundit.com

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Starting in October, the 7,000 McDonald’s across 39 countries that serve 13 million customers daily will have the option to eat a locally named fish sandwich that is MSC-certified (Marine Stewardship Council). The MSC has, however, received some criticism from NGO Food and Water Watch http://www.foodandwaterwatch.org/factsheet/about-msc/

Like that of the FSC (Forest Stewardship Council), this eco label should not be regarded as giving carte blanche to consumers to use/eat as much as they want!

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Food price inflation is going to reach severe highs by 2030 and many of the world’s poorest people will not be able to afford to feed themselves. A recent FAO report stated that approximately 1.3 billion tons of food gets lost or wasted every year. It goes on to elaborate that consumers in rich countries waste almost as much food (222 million tonnes) as the entire net food production of sub-Saharan Africa (230 million tonnes). Here’s a 2010 map of global hunger to think about (red areas are regarded as “extremely alarming”). Click on the image for a much larger, higher definition, version.

 

The report is probably the first of its kind to distinguish between food loss and food waste. Food waste is an entirely preventable phenomenon mostly occurring richer countries involving throwing perfectly edible food away by consumers and retailers alike. Food loss on the other hand occurs mostly in developing economies where poor infrastructure does not ensure optimal preservation of food during processing, transporting and other intermediate steps.

The report states that per capita waste by consumers is between 95-115 kg a year in Europe and North America, while consumers in sub-Saharan Africa and South and Southeast Asia each throw away only 6-11 kg a year. Considering that agricultural land accounts for roughly 36% of the Earth’s land surface, wasting food is tantamount to wasting nature. Agricultural land is often land that was previously a habitat like grasslands, forests, and even deserts which were previously supporting complex ecosystems. Apart from land usage, agriculture is extremely energy intensive using vast amounts of fuel, fertilizer etc. Food wastage therefore is one of the worse kinds of preventable abominations.

source: http://www.triplepundit.com/2011/06/food-waste-be-reduce/

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Unilever has been recognized as a sustainability leader in a 2011 survey by SustainAbility, and the Ethical Corporation awarded the company its Responsible Business Award in the High Performance category. CEO Paul Polman talks about how the company has lowered its carbon emissions by 40 percent in the last ten years, how, as a large palm oil producer it is looking to move toward sustainable palm oil, and how it is working to change consumer habits to aid in conservation.

Polman urges other businesses to move toward sustainability. “It is a very simple message: you can wait for governments and use it as an excuse, you can wait for technology and use it as an excuse, but there are many things we can simply do now, and that business can do now. And it does make good business sense. There may be a slight cost in acting in some cases, but I think they are the exception. The cost of not acting and the cost of failure is going to be far higher.”

source: http://www.triplepundit.com/2011/06/unilever-2011-sustainability-survey/

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Many products that one can purchase have “planned obsolescence” built in. They are designed to last a certain length of time and then fail – usually they are also designed to be too expensive to repair economically, forcing most to have to buy another one or the “next generation” model over and over again. Good for GDP but bad for pollution, energy use and depletion of resources not to mention bad for one’s wallet. In short, not very sustainable on several levels.

Marcin Jakubowski has started a project (click link for his Ted talk) to give away blueprints of the 50 most vital machines that are needed to run civilisation. Like Firefox or Linux in the computer world, these are open source so anyone can modify them or improve them. These machines are designed to be built with basic tools and to be robust, long lived and economically repairable. Once people have them, they have them for a long time and a lot of time and effort does not need to be wasted buying them over and over again

Using wikis and digital fabrication tools, TED Fellow Marcin Jakubowski is open-sourcing the blueprints for 50 farm machines, allowing anyone to build their own tractor or harvester from scratch. And that's only the first step in a project to write an instruction set for an entire self-sustaining village (starting cost: $10,000).

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Snippets from the Interwebs 6

 

 

 

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Australia has some prominent AGW deniers such as Bob Carter and Ian Plimer. They also have genuine working climate scientists (a few of the younger ones were featured in the rap video I blogged about recently) and the Australian Climate Commission who have just published a report entitled The Critical Decade. This is how they introduce it:

“Over many decades thousands of scientists have painted an unambiguous picture: the global climate is changing and humanity is almost surely the primary cause. The risks have never been clearer and the case for action has never been more urgent.

Our Earth’s surface is warming rapidly and we can already see social, economic and environmental impacts in Australia.

Failing to take sufficient action today entails potentially huge risks to our economy, society and way of life into the future.

This is the critical decade for action”

Take that, deniers (particularly Baudains and Fergusson)!

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In 2008 Ecuador recognized the legal rights of Mother Earth in its new constitution. Article 1 of the new “Rights for Nature” chapter of the Ecuador constitution reads:  “Nature or Pachamama, where life is reproduced and exists, has the right to exist, persist, maintain and regenerate its vital cycles, structure, functions and its processes in evolution.  Every person, people, community or nationality, will be able to demand the recognitions of rights for nature before the public bodies.”

Also group of countries led by Bolivia have recently brought the issue to the agenda of the UN General Assembly as they ask for a UN treaty that would grant the same rights found in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to Mother Nature so there will be legal systems to maintain balance between human rights and what they say are the rights of other members of the Earth, such as plants, animals and terrain.

Taken from businessethicsnetwork.org

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The Thoughtful Bread Company claims to be England's first fully sustainable bakery.

click link for article The old school bread of the future

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One-third of the world's food produced for human consumption is lost or wasted each year, according to a study (pdf) released on Wednesday by the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO).

source: Guardian – news - global development

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Bankers aren’t always evil…  On May 18th the global finance giant Bank of America announced that it has set a goal of reducing its greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions 15 per cent by 2015 based on the company’s 2010 baseline. It’s not enough but it’s not bad for a start

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In a speech in early May Levi Strauss & Co. CEO and President John Anderson urged the clothing industry to adopt a new level of social, economic and environmental sustainability, moving beyond compliance with site-specific regulations to encompass improvements in the daily lives of workers in the global supply chain.

Puma is the first company in the world to put a value on the ecosystem services it uses to produce its sports shoes and clothes. In a huge leap for CSR, the company has published an economic valuation of the environmental impacts caused by greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) and water consumption along its entire supply chain. It plans to become even more ambitious by integrating both its  social and economic impacts.

 Taken from triplepundit.com

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Taken from the New York Times May 3rd 2011 (click for original article).

The population of the world, long expected to stabilize just above 9 billion in the middle of the century, will instead keep growing and may hit 10.1 billion by the year 2100, the United Nations projected in a report released Tuesday.

“Growth in Africa remains so high that the population there could more than triple in this century, rising from today’s one billion to 3.6 billion, the report said”

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We’re already using up Earth’s resources 1.5 times as fast as Earth can regenerate them. Dickens’ Mr Micawber summed up the inevitable result:

“Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen pounds nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery”

source:Global Footprint network.  http://www.footprintnetwork.org/en/index.php/GFN/page/world_footprint/

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Even Kentucky Fried Chicken is getting in on sustainability and CSR as far as one of their latest restaurants is concerned. KFC’s newest restaurant in Indianapolis is designed to use 25 percent less energy and water. The Indianapolis restaurant is part of KFC’s E3 initiative “which looks at Economically responsible ways of saving energy and being environmentally aware. Many corporations are now far in front of where government is in pro-active action. However, KFC still have the same rather less responsible menu.

Snippets from the Interwebs 5

Everything you need to know about the Real Bread campaign

http://www.sustainweb.org/realbread/

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Monsanto’s Roundup Ready crops may be encouraging the proliferation of a new pathogen – a viral sized microfungus. If so, then they should be outlawed. Click for a letter from the (emeritus) professor who discovered the pathogen to the US Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack warning about the new problem.

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An article from “The Green Economy Post” - Wind Solar Water Alone Could Power the World by 2030 New Study Claims

Here’s a link to the paper that the article was based on

And here’s another similar claim

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=a-path-to-sustainable-energy-by-2030

and a brand new article on Skepticalscience.com (which is mostly the best source on the Internet for skewering denialist disinformation) – A plan for 100% renewable energy by 2050

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I remember the cost of the US space programme being compared to how much the US consumer spent on cosmetics or toothpaste or some such a long time ago. This was because there were people then claiming that spending on NASA was starving funds from those who would do good works for the poor and hungry etc.

Here is an interesting graphic (source : Wellhome) which truly puts into perspective how much US government spending is being invested in renewable energy compared with how much the US consumer spends on such vital expenditure as that on the weight loss, plastic surgery and tanning industries.

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Oil from algae is a technology that has been mentioned for years. A lot of work was done in the Jimmy Carter years but was almost abandoned when the Reagan/Bush years happened. There are plenty of “algoil” start ups around nowadays and one of the most promising is Origin oil who are near commercialisation.

Link to Businesswire article about Origin Oil

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Pepsi recently announced (March 15 - click for link to story) it has developed the world's first PET plastic bottle made entirely from plant-based, fully renewable resources, enabling the company to manufacture a beverage container with a significantly reduced carbon footprint. This  steals a march on Coca Cola’s Plantbottle which so has 30% plant based material in it.

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Agave, the cactus that Tequila and Mezcal is made from, looks like it could have real potential as a biofuel. Link to paper. It is being investigated for use in Australia where its low rainfall requirement would be ideal.Reported dry biomass yields of various Agave species, when annualized, range from <1 to 34 Mg ha⁻¹ yr⁻¹ without irrigation, depending on species and location. A. salmiana and A. mapisaga can have high nocturnal net CO₂ uptake rates and high productivities averaging 40 tonnes dry weight ha⁻¹ yr⁻¹.

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Build your own biogas system using 3 IDB tote tanks. These are widely used and available second hand Click for detailed instructions

 

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Join the Cloud Appreciation Society! Have another look at my two recent posts featuring clouds - “Both sides now” and “Flytec 2010” - then head over to cloudappreciationsociety.org and celebrate finding that there are others who are a little deeper than those who only indulge in blue sky thinking.

 

Snippets from the Interwebs 4

 

The film: THE 6TH EXTINCTION

Teaser for Sixth Extinction Documentary from 6thExtinctionDoc on Vimeo.

The 6th Extinction is a grassroots documentary project. Few people realize that we are in the midst of a mass extinction crisis that rivals that of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.   The extinction rate has risen to more than 1000 times the pre-human rate and far outpaces the rate of evolution. Of the 45,000 species evaluated by the International Union for Conservation of Nature in 2008, 17,000 faced at least a high risk of extinction in the wild. Orang-utans, rhinos, tigers, bees, polar bears, chimpanzees, blue-finned tuna…the list of species in trouble is extensive with some scientists predicting that half of all species will go extinct in this century.

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Heinz Ketchup is Going “Green” with Coca-Cola

 

At a press conference on 23rd February 2011, the Coca-Cola Company and H.J. Heinz Company announced a strategic partnership that enables Heinz to produce its ketchup bottles using Coca-Cola’s PlantBottle packaging.

This shift in packaging will be the biggest change to Heinz’s iconic ketchup bottles since the company first introduced plastic in 1983.  Heinz plans to convert to PlantBottle globally, beginning with the 20-ounce variety of Heinz Ketchup, which will be rolled out to US consumers this summer. The plastic bottles which are PET, and thus full recyclable have received awards. They are,  so far made from a 30% plant based material but the intention is to move towards a 100% plant based plastic

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Biofuels have had a bit of a bad press. Dubya Bush’s government went gung ho for corn (maize really – they’re Americans you know…) to ethanol production which had elements of pork barrel politics about it

http://www.jouleunlimited.com/

Joule's Helioculture™ platform has a production cycle with up to 50 times the efficiencies of biofuel production to convert sunlight and waste CO₂ directly into clean diesel fuel that can substitute directly for the fossil fuelled product. Based on empirical measurements, Joule can directly produce 15,000 gallons of diesel per acre annually, as compared to 3,000 gallons of biodiesel produced indirectly from algae.

Requiring only sunlight and waste CO₂, this system can produce renewable diesel fuel in virtually unlimited quantities at costs as low as $30/barrel equivalent

Here’s a link to an accessible Press release about the process from a couple of days ago (Feb 17th).  Here’s a link to a scientific paper

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Not widely reported in the Sun, Mail or Express newspapers was the Global Compact LEAD. Whassat? I hear you cry.

 

Taken from Triple pundit.com:

“U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon announced the creation of the Global Compact LEAD on January 28, 2011 at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. A total of 54 companies are members, including Intel, Nestle, Coca-Cola, Siemens, Royal Dutch Shell, Tata Steel, Total and Unilever. Participating companies are also part of the UN Global Compact, which requires members to commit their company’s to align their strategies and operations with ten “universally accepted principles in the areas of human rights, labor, environment and anti-corruption.”

The companies have committed to the Blueprint for Corporate Sustainability leadership

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WindMade is a new “eco label” so people can tell if a product has been manufactured using wind power. Danish turbine manufacturer Vestas wants to make it easier to do. Announced just prior to the 2011 Zayed Future Energy prize, which Vestas won, the new consumer label is shown below.

 

It’s early days yet but I’ll be watching out for it. I remember campaigning for the Forest Stewardship Council standard (widely recognised logo below) to be applied to wood in the early 90’s – now it’s mainstream on an awful lot of timber and timber products such as paper.

Click for further info about Windmade

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“Invasivore” Diet Making Headway as Next Locavore Movement

Locavores try to eat only food that is grown or made locally. Slightly “out there” is this new idea. Invasive species were introduced to areas by the process of  international trade. They often have few native predators so their numbers increase wildly without check. This idea encourages people to eat the invaders…

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Reinsurer Munich Re assesses extreme climate events. Reinsurers are amongst the most hard nosed calculators of probabilities that there are – it’s their business. If they didn’t know what was really going on they would go out of business so when they say (click for link) that the last 12 months have shown exceptional destructive climatic events, maybe the denialist propagandists might just think again.

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A compostable toothbrush from Australia. Aus $36 for a pack of 12. Invented by a Brisbane dentist, “The Environmental Toothbrush” is a simple solution. Made from bamboo, a natural cellulose fibre, they are 100% biodegradable, environmentally sustainable, and do not pollute the environment.

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Electric vehicles tend to cost more than the fossil fuelled vehicles they are based on. Step forward Tata of India. From an article by Gizmag:

“The Tata Indica Vista EV hits the market early in 2011, carries four people, has excellent performance and can run 150 miles on a charge. Most importantly, the EV is based on a best-selling, mass-market car from the Indian market where it sells for less than US$9000 and its performance in the recent Future Car Challenge verifies its extreme energy efficiency.”

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San Jose, California, bans plastic bags

In December, the San Jose City Council banned single use plastic shopping bags and prohibited retailers from giving away paper bags in a 10 to one vote. The ban will take effect on January 1, 2012. In 2012, retailers will have to charge 10 cents for a paper bag, and 25 cents in 2013. San Jose is the third largest U.S. city to ban plastic shopping bags.

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U.K. Prime Minister  David Cameron has been talking about a “happiness index” for the U.K. He has directed the Office of National Statistics to develop metrics to measure the UK’s “general well-being”. Using different ways to measure success than the brutally simplistic and out-dated GDP figures is a powerful way to make things better.

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M&S early on delivering their sustainability goals – four years early! Companies are outpacing governments in being (somewhat) environmentally friendlier

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Pedal powered lawn mower.. Get fit, save money!

Snippets from the Interwebs 3

China is installing the world's largest system (click link for Technology Review article) for generating electricity by collecting methane gas emitted by fermenting cow manure. Anaerobic digestion systems are very highly favoured in future to digest not only manure, which is what everyone is familiar with but also green and food waste – even special energy crops. It’s true that capturing methane and burning it produces CO2 but the carbon is from the planet’s “currrent account”, not the fossil fuel “deposit account” that contributes to altering the climate. Methane is also 23 times more powerful as a greenhouse gas than CO2 so it makes sense to collect and burn it anyway, particularly if by doing so, the obtained energy substitutes for and displaces the use of fossil fuel carbon.
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If all the toilet roll inner tubes produced every year in the United States were placed end to end they would stretch for a million miles, or 4 times further than the Moon
Scott paper have announced a new “tube free” toilet roll – click link to see original story
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Ocean acidification
This article from the geological society (yes, the original British, established in 1807, one) has more on ocean acidification. Scientists, from the University of Plymouth and the University of Santa Catarina, Brazil have studied the effect, on foraminifera (a species of plankton with a calcium carbonate shell) of increased levels of CO2 in the ocean. They state that at a mean pH of 7.8, the pH level predicted for the end of the century, calcified organisms begin to disappear, and non-calcifying ones take over. The current level is about 8.07. The pre-industrial level was about 8.18, thus ocean acidification is actually a reduction in alkalinity. Sea water des not need to actually become acidic before very serious effects happen.
Unless we curb CO2 emissions (forget climate change for the time being) we risk mass extinctions, degrading coastal waters and encouraging outbreaks of toxic jellyfish and algae. Similar lowering of ocean pH levels were closely associated with massive extinctions in the past.  Plankton are right at the bottom of the ocean food chain and they also sequester colossal quantities of CO2 in their shells, not to mention replenishing the oxygen supply of the atmoshere. We shouldn’t do anything to change them - but we sure as h*ll are doing.
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Peak Everything
The World Business Council for Sustainable Development reported, back at the end of last year, that an expert group had been set up by the European Commission  to screen a list of forty-nine "potentially critical" raw materials whose availability to industry could come under threat as global competition for natural resources intensifies. Of particular worry to Europeans are rare earths, collections of metals and elements found in a wide range of gadgets and consumer goods, including batteries used in electric cars. The Chinese are developing a stranglehold on supplies of many of the most important ones. Recycling will never mean as much as it will do when we can’t get enough stuff to make our stuff.
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Blade Runner meets Babylon

Text and picture adapted from from the New York Times 29/10/2010 (click picture for link to original story)
One family are going to live in this 27 story house in Mumbai. All five of them.
The tower, known as Antilia, is the new home of India’s richest person, Mukesh Ambani, whose $27 billion fortune also ranks him among the richest people in the world. And even here in the country’s financial capital, where residents bear daily witness to the stark extremes of Indian wealth and poverty, Mr. Ambani’s building is so spectacularly over the top that the city’s already elastic boundaries of excess and disparity are being stretched to new dimensions.
Here’s the understatement of the year:
“A gawking city has greeted the new tower with a mixture of moralizing and astonishment, envy and condemnation, all sprinkled with Freudian analysis of the most basic question: Why did he do it?
“We are all sort of perplexed,” said Alyque Padamsee, a long-time advertising executive and actor in the city. “I think people see it as a bit show-offy.”
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One way to do “food security”
Land grabbing… or at least buying up land.  South Korea, the United Arab Emirates, India, Saudi Arabia, China, Qatar, Kuwait. are buying up large areas in Africa to supply themselves with food and other agricultural products. Also leading the rush are international agribusinesses, investment banks, hedge funds, commodity traders, sovereign wealth funds as well as UK pension funds, foundations and individuals attracted by some of the world's cheapest land.  Here’s a link to an Observer investigation of this trend.
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LONDON, Sept 28 (Reuters) - Scotland should produce enough renewable electricity to meet all its power demand by 2025, First Minister Alex Salmond said. "I'm confident that by 2025 we will produce at least 100 percent of our electricity needs from renewables alone, and together with other sources it will enable us to become a net exporter of clean, green energy”