Recycling

My compact fluorescent bulb finally died, and I had no idea what to do next. My building does recycle, but CFLs were not in the list of items to recycle.

Luckily, a quick google search for compact fluorescent bulb recycling brought me to earth911

It's a pretty cool website, that lets you know where to recycle different things. I just typed in "Compact Fluorescent Light Bulbs," typed in my zip code, and found out the nearest Ace Hardware to recycle the bulb.

Next time I need to recycle something, I'm definitely going to use earth911 again, it's a pretty cool website. They even have an iPhone app called iRecycle, so you can use the phone to find out where to recycle different things.

Chicago Green Festival

I'm going to be volunteering at the Chicago Green Festival this weekend on both Saturday and Sunday, and I'm really excited!

I looked through the speakers list, and I noticed that John Perkins is going to be there. I'm reading his book, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, right now, and it is a great read. He'll be doing a session on "Transforming Turmoil into a New Economy," so I'm looking forward to that.

Also, Michelle Kaufmann is also going to be speaking on Saturday. I volunteer at the Museum of Science and Industry, and they have an exhibit there called Green Home: Smart+Wired, an example of a pre-fab home that has all the latest green technologies. Kaufmann's company, Michelle Kaufmann Designs, helped create the Green Home exhibit, so she'll be talking about that at the Festival.

It's going to be an exciting weekend!

The Story of Stuff

I was reading the NY Times this morning, and I came across this article. It's about this woman named Annie Leonard, who created this video with support from different NGOs. The 20-minute video essentially goes through the human consumption cycle, following the creation of stuff from the extracting raw materials from the planet to the point where we dispose of these items.

Due to a lack of educational materials revolving around environmental impact and sustainability and a lack of clarity on how to teach the subject, the video has become extremely popular among educators across the world, who have started using it to segue into a discussion on the environment.

After reading the Times article, I decided to go to the Story of Stuff website and check out the video. 

According to the Times article, one of the parents who viewed this video claimed that the video was very anti-capitalistic and extremely one-sided. While I agree with this statement (after all, corporations are viewed as fat cats with top hats scheming with the government to set up an intricate system for US consumerism), I do believe that this video is an excellent tool to engage people to start thinking about things that are normally taken for granted and start questioning the way we currently do things.

There was a lot of talk in the video about the impact we have on developing nations, particularly how we tend to steal their resources and deprive their people of their future by forcing them into working in factories and providing us with resources. The video also mentioned that we throw away over 90% of the goods we buy, all of it driven by new models, new trends, etc., trapping us in a never-ending cycle of work, tv, and shopping. 

To rectify all of this, the video suggests at the end to start doing things in a sustainable way, using alternatives that involve clean energy and greener technologies with closed loop production processes that produce zero waste. There doesn't necessarily need to be a massive rehaul of the entire system as it stands now. A few adjustments here and there to rectify the outstanding issues and transform the system into a sustainable cycle will go a long way towards improving everyone's way of life.

I don't believe that mass production, mass consumerism, and globalism are necessarily bad like the video makes it out to be. After all, it allows a lot of people to get what they need quickly and cheaply, and it supports the economies of these developing countries as well as our own. But, I do agree that there is severe apathy and lack of understanding about how our products and goods are made and how they got to our store shelves.

What I think will especially help is educating consumers and making them more aware. Not only will this help alleviate the negative impacts of our current production cycle, it will help people gain a greater appreciation of the things they have, since they'll know how it was made, who it was made by, and where it will eventually end up if they throw it away. I also believe that greater awareness will increase support of greentech and cleantech companies and greater adoption of their products and technologies. 

I was happy to hear that students who watched the video have already taken it to heart, as the article mentioned a 9-year-old, who was considering the environmental impact of him buying a box of Legos, or an 18-year-old, who bought a water filter for her household and converted her family from bottled water drinkers to filtered water drinkers. There have also been other stories of kids becoming more environmentally conscious, so it's promising that the new generation of kids are taking these matters into consideration and are starting to influence their families.

Amazing Website

I have recently started getting emails from the Union of Concerned Scientists. I'm not quite sure how I signed up for their email lists, but I decided to check out their website and found that they have an amazing section on Clean Energy.

The site gives excellent descriptions of different clean energy technologies and how they work - photovoltaic solar, geothermal systems, biomass as replacements for fossil fuels, etc. It's more of a technical explanation of how the technologies work, but its written in a way that is easy to read and understand.

They also have a section on clean energy solutions, where I discovered that there is a proposal to build an offshore wind farm off of Cape Cod, which could be a big source of power for the New England region.

Check out the Union of Concerned Scientists website. It is pretty awesome.

When Clean Technology and Environmentalism Clash...

I came across an interesting article on Green Inc. today. Two environmental organizations, the Audubon Society and the Natural Resources Defense Council, have developed a map of 13 states in the Western United States which highlights areas where potential alternative energy development could adversely affect the environment.

If wind farms or massive solar plants were built in the areas highlighted in these maps, it could pose a threat to endangered or threatened species. This may be a challenge for companies that require large areas of land in order to develop wind farms, solar farms, geothermal plants, etc. On the one hand, they want to developing alternative energy, reduce greenhouse gases and protect the environment. On the other hand, the very act of creating their plants or wind farms could potentially be disastrous for endangered species.

The article led me to the question of the distinction between environmentalists and individuals who support clean technology. At what level is it okay to support alternative technology, though it may disrupt the habitats of many species?

Why Pirates Like Being Green...

I've put together a short list of why pirates (in the romantic, Pirates of the Caribbean sense...not the literal take-over-Ukranian-tankers-with-tanks-and-weapons-and-hold-it-for-ransom sense...) like environmental sustainability and clean technology:

1) Pirate ships run on one of the cleanest sources of energy available: Wind.

(The above picture shows you how Pirate ships are wind-powered...in case you were wondering)

It's no surprise then, that companies these days are looking again at wind to power the world's fleet. Not only does it reduce costs for shipping companies, it makes ships emission free. A German company called SkySails is bringing that one step closer to that ideal, making giant parachute looking sails for cargo ships. The company's website claims that ships can reduce fuel consumption by as much as 35% and in optimal cases as much as 50%.


2) Pirates like recycling.

Recycling instead of dumping stuff into landfills and dumps means there are more places to bury your booty. Pirates like to bury stuff: gold doubloons, chalices, precious stones, etc. They particularly like to bury stuff in remote areas where no one will find it.


Unfortunately, people like to build landfills in remote areas, since no one will be affected. If people keep dumping trash in landfills, then how are pirates going to bury stuff and keep it safe?!

Thankfully, some people are taking this pirate's woes into consideration. A company called RecycleBank is offering some incentives for individuals who recycle - drugstore discounts, grocery coupons, etc. According to this Newsweek article, communities with RecycleBank programs have seen 10-fold increases in recycling rates.


3) Pirates like clean air.

Pirates need to be able to actually see land if they want to know where they are going, and they can't do that if the coast is covered in smog and haze from pollution.

One company in Lima, Peru called Tierra Nuestra has developed an Urban Air Cleaner to hopefully fix this vexing problem. It uses a liquid filtration system that runs on the electricity of a vacuum cleaner, but has the air cleaning power of 1200 trees. The machines cost $100,000 to produce and the mud and wastewater by-products from the machine are deposited in the city sewage system.

You can check out a video about the UAC by National Geographic here.


4) Desalination projects are a pirate's best friend.

Pirates are constantly surrounded by water as they sail, but they can't drink a single drop ("Water, water everywhere, not a drop to spare," anyone?). However, desalination technology which allows salt water to be converted to drinkable fresh water is one of the best things ever, allowing us to tap into the vast resources of the ocean.

(The future of water on Pirate ships...)

While water desalination presents other problems (like what do to with all the salty junk taken out of the salt water and how to make desalination cheaper), there are companies like NanoH2O which has developed nanotube membranes that can process salt water much faster than the traditional reverse osmosis process.


So there you have it, with all these clean technologies being developed to make the world a cleaner place, the future of pirates (and probably everyone else in the world...) is looking pretty bright.


Source for pictures: Flickr Creative Commons