Keeping your business (and you) Green: March 2007

Saturday, March 31, 2007

Charge It with Sugar Batteries

Though it's not the first battery to run on sugar, researchers at St. Louis University have developed a more efficient version that could last three to four times longer than conventional lithium ion batteries -- a boon for personal electronic devices. The icing on the cake: these new batteries are built completely from biodegradable materials. Let's hope for a rechargeable version so we don't have to test the biodegradability until absolutely necessary.

Coincidentally, the key part of the battery, a charge-stripping enzyme, is incorporated into a membrane that's made from chitosan -- the same compound that makes up Patagonia's Gladiodor natural odor control in our Capilene Baselayers.

Read the full story

[Via Google News and LiveScience; Photo: Batteries awaiting recycling. By: Free]

Thursday, March 22, 2007

Using Bottled Water to Turn the Tides

World Changing

Jonathan Greenblatt
March 22, 2007 7:23 AM

In a world seemingly teeming with problems, perhaps one of the most important challenges of our time is the world water crisis. Worldchanging readers are deeply familiar with this issue, but most people living in the Global North have only a glancing awareness of the problem. Yet the worldwide scarcity of clean water and adequate sanitation diminishes the prospects of almost half of the Earth’s population. Commentators often note that a person dies every eight seconds from a water-related disease. They often fail to mention the terrible plight of hundreds of millions of people who survive but endure lifetimes of chronic debilitation and pain due to the absence of basic, clean water. The forces of climate change and global urbanization will only exacerbate this problem in the coming years.

Food of the Future, and the Future of Food

Alex Steffen
February 26, 2007 11:54 PM

"The first freedom of man, I contend, is the freedom to eat" -- Eleanor Roosevelt

Perhaps because it is such a commonplace, defining the rhythms of our daily lives, many people who think seriously about the future have a tendency to dismiss food and food culture as a serious issue. That's too bad, not only because food is life, and questions of hunger and food supply still loom large on our planet (800 million people currently suffer from malnutrition, according to the FAO), but also because the growing, catching, selling and preparing of food creates some of our largest impacts on the planet and some of the largest conflicts between peoples.

Carbon dioxide 'released, not stored' by soil

Microbes in soil release carbon dioxide

Wagdy Sawahel
16 March 2007
Source: SciDev.Net

Increasing levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere may turn soil from a potential carbon sink into a carbon source by stimulating microbial communities to release, not store, carbon dioxide, according to a study.

Research published online in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences this week (13 March) suggests that altering microbial activity could help stabilise atmospheric carbon dioxide levels and help slow global warming.

Tuesday, March 20, 2007

Strainght Veggie Oil

Frybrid: How to Run Your Car on Grease
SARAH RICH | 15 MAR 07
What do you get when you cross hybrid transportation with local economic support and resource reuse? Frybrid. A small company in Seattle has developed a simple system for running any diesel automobile on vegetable oil discarded from the grease traps of restaurants. This is not biodiesel -- in which vegetable oil gets transformed into a highly viscous substance through transesterification; this is what many people call "straight vegetable oil" or "waste vegetable oil" (SVO/WVO) -- a direct line from the kitchen to the car.

The End of Garbage

The end of garbage
From CNN Money.com: Zero waste is just what it sounds like - producing, consuming, and recycling products without throwing anything away. Getting to a wasteless world will require nothing less than a total makeover of the global economy, which thinkers such as entrepreneur Paul Hawken, consultant Amory Lovins, and architect William McDonough have called the Next Industrial Revolution.

Read on….

Sustainable dance club

SUSTAINABLE DANCE CLUB

From: Inhabitat

It’s probably safe to say that few of us have used the phrases “dance club” and “renewable energy” in the same sentence. Enter the Sustainable Dance Club, a downright awesome project that turns fancy footwork into kilowatts to power the club’s basic utilities. The brainchild of environmental organization Enviu and Dutch architectural firm Döll, the Sustainable Dance Club project launched with a party called The Critical Mass last October in Rotterdam. So next time you’re out dancing with friends, don’t forget that all that booty shaking could be providing power for the club’s lights, speakers, and more. Check out the video to see just how the technology works.
read more »

conscious brands

News

Dell gets on the environmental bandwagon
From CNN Money: Michael Dell and his company will now recycle your computer hardware for free -- even if you're not buying anything new from Dell.

Dell is now the only computer maker to offer consumers free recycling, whether or not they are buying a new Dell product. You can go to a Dell website, and print out a prepaid shipping label to return your Dell desktop, laptop, printer or ink cartridge, free of charge. They'll send a service to pick the equipment up.

Keeping your business (and you) Green