Image credit: danielfoster437 / Creative Commons Out of all the issues on which the Sierra Club Allegheny Group in Pennsylvania urges people to take action, few have gotten as huge a response as natural gas drilling. While in Pittsburgh last month, I spoke with Claudia Kirkpatrick of the Sierra Club Allegheny Group about Pennsylvanians finding themselves at the center of a fight over
Continue reading …The Trials and Tribulations of a 320-Mile Bike Trip Raising Climate Awareness (Slideshow)
October 20, 2010 No Comment
Photo: Kip Pierson for Climate Ride There is a certain safety in being an environmental activist behind the screen of a computer: When I decided to bike 320 miles in five days from Eureka, California to San Francisco as part of Brita Climate Ride , I knew there would be a lot more sweat than I was used to — and maybe even blood and tears. My biking history consisted of daily commuter cruises along the streets of Berlin — and although I did have one long trip un… Read the full story on TreeHugger
Continue reading …Odwalla Juice Soon to Come in "PlantBottles," HDPE Plastic from Plant-Based Materials
October 20, 2010 No Comment
Image: Flickr via Aaron Tait Starting in 2011, Odwalla will transition to “PlantBottle” packaging—an HDPE plastic bottle made almost entirely (at least 96 percent) from molasses and sugarcane juice. Even more exciting, most recycling facilities that currently process regular HDPE (high-density polyethylene) plastics will be able to accept PlantBottles, so people will be able to recycle them the same way they do regular plastic bottles. (Although there’s no word yet on whether or not the PlantBottle will be prone to the same issues with “
Continue reading …Silicon Nanopores Breakthrough Could Boost Lithium-Ion Battery Anode Capacity by 10x
October 20, 2010 No Comment
Photo: Jeff Fitlow/Rice University Nanotubes, Nanopores… The Future’s Happening on a Small Scale Last year, I wrote about a battery tech breakthrough by researchers at Stanford and Hanyang University in Ansan, South-Korea. By using silicon nanotubes, they boosted the capacity of a lithium-ion battery’s anode by a factor of about 10. Building on that work, a team of Rice University and Lockheed Martin scientists has done something that similar, but they instead… Read the full story on TreeHugger
Continue reading …Vedanta Resources’ Orissa Bauxite Refinery Expansion Blocked by Indian Government
October 20, 2010 No Comment
The existing bauxite processing facility, photo: Survival International Two months after the Indian government stop plans by UK-based Vedanta Resources to put a bauxite mine on a mountain held sacred by two indigenous tribal groups in Orissa, on the grounds that it would
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Photo via MikeBlogs I happen to order stuff online quite a bit. I know — it’s not the greenest thing to do. But when you don’t own a car and you need a desk for your office, it’s just so much easier to pick it out online and it magically appears on your doorstep a few days later (I’ve done the greener version: go to the thrift store, pick out a desk, go rent a truck from Zipcar, navigate crazy city streets to the thrift store and then from the thrift store to my apartment, lug the heavy thing up the stairwell, and go return the truck to the Zipcar l… Read the full story on TreeHugger
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Map of the length of time oil was in the Gulf. The lightest orange indicates 1-3 weeks coverage; the darkest is 16-18 weeks. Image: European Space Agency Six months from the start of the BP oil spill and we now know the answer to the question of how badly the spill would hurt spawning bluefin tuna . New satellite data from the European Space Agency shows 20% of juvenile bluefin tuna killed by oil. Which is pretty significant since Atlantic … Read the full story on TreeHugger
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Image: heatball.de Banning old lightbulbs seems like low-hanging fruit, an easy way to significantly reduce energy usage with little to no loss of lifestyle comforts. But the bulb bans persistently promote protest, and bring out the curmudgeons resistant to change. European regulators jumped aboard the bulb-ban bandwagon in 2009. Since 1 September of that year, it has been illegal to sell light bulbs that do not meet “eco-design” standards
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Photos by Jaymi Heimbuch In many ways, a community garden is less about the “garden” and more about the “community,” and such is the case with San Francisco’s Hayes Valley Farm . Once the site of a freeway damaged in the 1989 earthquake, the unused space was going to be turned into housing. Instead, a group of activists got their hands on it and have turned it into a 2.5 acre haven for gardeners and anyone who just feels like getting dirty for a few hours. In fact, that’s really more the point of the Hayes Valley Farm project –… Read the full story on TreeHugger
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Photo: bdonline Cambridge University in England, home to some of the most exquisite and ancient buildings in the world…and now this. These “solar trees” have just been installed to help power the Cambridge University Library’s archive storage and will provide 10% of its energy needs. Surely the architects could have come up with something better? … Read the full story on TreeHugger
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