David De Rothschild is a British 31-year-old banking heir, who in the last couple of years has been developing a number of environmental initiatives. He has now built –after months of hard work, research, and unrevealed, probably large investments– a catamaran made of recycled soda bottles, called Plastiki. He plans to cross the Pacific Ocean on it, hopefully setting sail in March.
De Rothschild’s goal is to show people what can be done with our trash, and what happens when we don’t deal with it. That’s why the Plastiki will visit the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. I can picture the two opposites: the fantastic recycled-plastic boat and the huge pile of trash that is contaminating our waters. It’s up to us to stop that pile from growing, and start finding witty ways of re-cycling and up-cycling our waste.
The name Plastiki was inspired by the journey of Thor Heyerdahl, who in 1947 sailed from South America to Polynesia on the Kon-Tiki.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is developing a program to foster energy efficiency in data centers. Starting in June, data centers will be able to apply for Energy Star certification. Operators will first have to go through an online test, and depending on their score, be evaluated by the EPA.
With information technology (IT) growing as much as it is nowadays, data centers are all over the place, and consume impressive amounts of energy. That’s why the EPA’s initiative is most necessary. Data centers will have a way to measure their energy efficiency and show it to others. Besides, the environment is becoming an increasingly important concern for society, so this could work as a marketing strategy for companies.
First, data centers will have to enter specific information online. According to this data, they will be scored on a scale of 1-100. What will be evaluated is the power unit efficiency (PUE), which represents the total power used by the data center, divided by the amount of power that reaches the IT equipment.
A higher score means a more efficient operation. Data centers need to achieve over 75 points to be eligible for obtaining Energy Star. Those who do get the necessary score, are then audited by the EPA, and may get the sought certification.
VIA: Ecogeek
The University of British Columbia, in Canada, started building last September what is being referred to as the potentially greenest construction in North America. It will be home to CIRS (Centre for Interactive Research on Sustainability). The required investment has been $37 million.
The CIRS building will generate all the electricity it needs; and all the water it needs will be collected on-site, from rainwater. Stormwater and grey waters will also be treated. As a result, there will be no waste water. Among the many energy sources considered are fuel cells, solar photovoltaic, solar hot water heaters, and biomass (all of them renewable). The building will be completed in spring/summer 2011.
The UBC has already developed an interesting and successful project called ecotrek, which allowed the campus to reduce its energy use over 20%, and water use by 30%. Yearly electricity and water savings are around $2.6 million. Further, greenhouse gas emissions were reduced 15%. Through the ecotrek project, 300 of UBC’s buildings were upgraded and retrofitted.
We saw last week how Völkl is starting to manufacture greener skis, and developing a number of green strategies. Now we’ll look at Venture Snowboards, a company based in Colorado, that since its early days works to make snowboarding eco-friendlier.
All of the boards’ cores are made with FSC (Forest Stewardship Council) certified wood. “This ensures the wood was grown and harvested sustainably”, says Lisa Branner, who with her husband Klemens owns and operates Venture.
Besides, all of the company’s operations run on wind power since 2004.
As my plane was leaving LA after TED2010 and I watched the curious man-made landscape of circling streets and repetitive housing, I thought of the provoking book by Stewart Brand called Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto which stated some environmental heresies. The first one, and the one I will examine here, was that cities are green. It is hard to think about New York City, for instance, as a model for sustainability but let’s examine the lifestyle of organic eating, juice sucking, prius driving southern Californians for a minute. They all live 30 to 90 minutes away from their jobs, so each family has at least one car, usually two, with a big commute twice a day. If we do some math with this calculator from the EPA we’ll see that a typical Californian household emits between 20,000 to 35,000 Kg of CO2 a year.
Each house has to receive (at least) water, electricity and some bandwidth so pipes, copper cables and fiber optics have to be deployed to cover miles and miles of land. Furthermore, all those lawns require massive amounts of water and fertilizers, let’s not forget we are actually on a desert with almost no rain. Each time they need groceries they go to a supermarket, you need quite a bit of them to cover such big areas, and they all need truckloads (literally) of food and supplies. The amount of energy and other resources consumed by this design is monstrous.
The contrast of this way of living with Californian’s love for anything green is startling. At the TED conference we received an aluminum bottle to refill from filtered water dispensers instead of the typical and stupid water bottle. If 1500 persons consume 3 bottles of water a day for 5 days we would have fabricated a mountain of 22500 plastic bottles. Although you could argue that they can be recycled if properly disposed, it takes quite a bit of energy and carbon emissions to turn that amount of slightly used plastic into usable bottles. I personally think that it is a catastrophe that after installing all those water pipes, people everywhere in the world still consume bottled water. The plastic has to be fabricated from oil using energy to melt and take its shape, then sent to a spring, if you are lucky, and then back to supermarkets all over the world. Then you grab those waters, haul them to your trunk, take them home, drink them, throw them away and probably end in a landfill nearby.
TED had also on display Hybrid Cars by Lexus, and although I applaud Hybrid’s oil efficiency I hardly think that they constitute a solution for a zero-emissions, green way of transportation. There were a few Segways and a few bicycles but most people there had arrived either by car (bad) or by plane (the worst), including myself. I took a flight from Buenos Aires, to Dallas and then to LA. The carbon emissions of that flight were roughly 2,825 Kg of CO2. You can calculate them here. As one TED U session said, if you wanted to be green going to TED you would have to go walking.
I’d better start walking now to reach TED2011 on time.
A study carried out between December 2009 and January shows that most people care about the environment. The problem is few of them do something about it. The study was conducted by the Yale Project on Climate Change and the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication. 
The colors stand for:
BLUE: Believe the action is important & currently engage in it.
RED: Believe the action is important, but do not currently engage in it.
LIGHT GREY: Believe the action is unimportant, but currently engage in it.
GREY: Believe the action is unimportant & do not currently engage in it.
Entitled Americans’ Actions to Conserve Energy, Reduce Waste, and Limit Global Warming, it reminds us that having the right thoughts and values is not enough. These need to lead us to act in environmentally friendlier ways. Otherwise, we are being hypocritical.
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Many of you must have heard Jack Johnson’s song "Reduce, reuse, recycle" that promotes a green behaviour. But Jack goes beyond singing songs that encourage taking care of the environment. He is now recording a new CD, which goes on sale on June 1st this year, using solar power.
The new album is being recorded at Mango Tree, which uses solar energy for its operations. It will be released with the record of the musician, called Brushfire Records.
Jack Johnson’s previous CD, Sleep Through the Static, was also recorded using 100% solar energy, printed on recycled paper, and it included the logo of "1% for the planet". "1% For The Planet" is a movement of over 1,100 companies that donate 1% of their sales to about 1,700 organizations working for the environment.
Caryn Heilman and Nana Simopoulos have designed and built the Topia Inn, a small hotel not far from New York and Boston, that minimizes its environmental impact and introduces its guests into a green experience. From powering itself with solar energy to cleaning with ecological products, to covering its beds with organic cotton, the hotel goes far beyond green marketing and makes an effort to be as sustainable as possible.
In an interview with Sustentator, Caryn Heilman says finding the organic materials the Inn uses “took an incredible amount of research”, yet it enabled them to get to know green companies and artists, which was “so gratifying”.
The inn powers itself partly with solar photovoltaic panels. For heating and hot water generation, it uses biodiesel. Resorting to biodiesel allows the inn to emit 78% less carbon dioxide. When you’re taking your eco-friendlier hot bath, you also have access to organic shampooing. While in the bathroom, another useful gadget is the dual flush toilet, which helps reduce water consumption.
Caryn says most of the inn’s green products are more expensive than regular ones, including the organic beds, linens, bath and bodycare products, breakfast, fair trade coffee and tea, nontoxic building materials, FSC-certified wood, recycled insulation and efficient appliances. Besides, she adds that biodiesel is very expensive. Solar panels were also costly but they “will pay back within 5 years”, thanks to the savings on electric bills. All this spending and efforts in greening the inn are a great source of marketing; thus by attracting more guests, the costs are offset.
The World Solar Challenge is a race that has been run every year since 1987. It was created by Swiss pioneer Hans Tholstrup, who crossed Australia from west to east in 1982 in a solar car he made with his own hands.
This is how Hans defines the race: “Propelled by the spirit of friendly competition, the World Solar Challenge rewards creative integration of technology and scientific knowledge in a wide range of disciplines, providing a common focus for young and brilliant minds.”
The challenge consists of the following: Construct a car fueled exclusively by solar power and drive it 3010 kilometers from Darwin to Adelaide, in Australia.
The three basic rules are:
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The car should be fueled exclusively by solar power.
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The size of the vehicle is limited. It may be a maximum of 5 meters long, 1.8 meters wide, and less than 1.6 meters tall. Since 2007, the surface of the solar panels has also been limited to 6m². The driver must be seated in an upright position.
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It is driven exclusively from 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. The driver spends the night under the stars in the exact spot where the car stopped at 5:00 p.m.
Some time ago here on Sustentator we talked about a way to treat waste water with micro-algae, and how these micro-algae then could be used for different things, such as biodiesel, for example. This is a project from the Universidad de Valladolid in Spain. Now from another Spanish university – the one in Granada – a similar goal is being attempted, although it is directly tied to biodiesel.
The Spanish researchers’ idea is to make a diesel that’s more efficient and ecological than traditional diesel, if possible. This fuel will not be created from petroleum, but from the mud from waste water treatment plants, with the help of bacteria.
María Victoria Martínez and Maximino Manzanera from the Environmental Microbiology Group want to develop a type of diesel called micro-diesel since it is produced by microorganisms. To do this, they evaluated previous studies that already showed the viability of using bacteria as an alternative source in the production of biodiesel.
The most interesting thing is the novel raw material they use: sludge produced from waste water treatment. As we saw in the other article mentioned above, this sludge is rich in organic materials such as fats and oils. These serve to nourish certain bacteria so they produce the biodiesel.
Skiing, what a fantastic sport. It is fun, it stimulates a love for nature, and it is healthy. Yet it also has a shady eco side. Ski lifts are generally powered with fossil fuels. Ski gear requires energy for being produced; it consumes resources and raw materials, and if not disposed of correctly, it becomes waste, of which we already have more than enough to deal with.
Fortunately, ski companies are starting to realize that they too have an impact on the environment. Among them, Völkl, of German origin, is developing a series of products and initiatives to become eco-friendlier.
This year, their Amaruq eco skis were awarded the ISPO Eco Responsibility Award for their ski construction and manufacturing processes. These skis are almost entirely made of wood. The core is of wood, covered with wood sidewalls and topsheet. These are normally plastic or fiberglass. How are these elements bound together? In traditional skis, with the standard epoxy. But the Amaruq Eco skis resort to an organic wood resin.
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