Recently in Sustainability Category

A circular economy

Maybe Wall Street was the wrong target for Occupy. Maybe we should occupy gardens instead. As Doiron says,

Increasing access to foods that are healthy for us and the planet is the biggest challenge we face.

Now watch the video and tell me that you disagree.

One challenge we all face as consumers is buying products that reflect our values. For me, that means buying products that are sustainably produced and have small impacts on the environment whenever I have the choice. I use the Monterey Bay Aquarium's Seafood Watch guide to seafood when I'm eating out to help me identify choices that are abundant, sustainably harvested, or farmed in ways that minimize environmental damage. But when I want to buy deodorant or toothpaste or cereal, I've had to trust the manufacturer's labeling and hope products that identify themselves as green really are.

Now there's an alternative.

GoodGuide is in business to provide authoritative information about the health, environmental and social performance of products and companies. Our mission is to help consumers make purchasing decisions that reflect their preferences and values. We believe that better information can transform the marketplace: as more consumers buy better products, retailers and manufacturers face compelling incentives to make products that are safe, environmentally sustainable and produced using ethical sourcing of raw materials and labor. (source)

There are even apps for iPhone and Android.



I just joined on Saturday, so I can't promise that it's going to be all that it's cracked up to be, but it looks promising so far.

Related articles

• 9 Sites That Measure Companies' Social Responsibility (mashable.com)
• How Green Is Your Gadget? (environmenteng.wordpress.com)

Greenbuild opens today in Toronto. It's the first time that the U.S. Green Building Council is hosting Greenbuild outside the United States. If you'd like more information about what's going on, head over to http://www.greenbuildexpo.org/Home.aspx.

Unless you buy recycled paper, the paper you use¹ is probably made from wood pulp. Cotton and linen are added to "fine" papers, and there are wood free alternatives. But here's a wood-free alternative you're not likely to find from your local supplier.²

Mahima Mehra, a Delhi-based paper merchant, turned to elephant dung as the raw material [for her paper]. Ms Mehra sells her paper, produced by her business partner Vijayendra Shekhawat, under the name Haathi Chaap, Hindi for "Elephant Mark". They stumbled on the idea during their visit to Amer fort in Jaipur. They observed that the clumps of roughage left behind by elephants ferrying tourists up to the fort bore a striking similarity to the raw fibre used in paper-making. ("Frugal innovation: wholly shit", The Economist, 14 September 2011)

Related articles

• How do you make an biodegradable paper (wiki.answers.com)
• What invented paper (wiki.answers.com)

For a long time demographers have projected that the world's population would stabilize at about 9 billion in the middle of this century. We crossed the 6 billion mark in 1999, and we are projected to cross 7 billion in late October.

Yesterday the Population Division of the United Nations Department of Social and Economic Affairs released its newest projections. There was a small upward revision of the projected population in 2050 (to 9.3 billion), but the headline news is that the U.N. now projects that population growth will continue to the end of this century, reaching 10.1 billion.

Just like the IPCC, however, the U.N. Population Division considers different scenarios. The high projection variant, which assumes fertility is only half a child greater than in the medium variant just quoted would result in a world population of 10.6 billion in 2050 and 15.8 billion in 2100.

High fertility countries are found mostly in Africa, which is also where the most alarming projections of future population sizes are concentrated,¹ but there are 9 in Asia, 6 in Oceania, and 4 in Latin America. Interestingly, China's population is projected to peak in a couple of decades and decline to less then a billion by the end of the century.

There were only about 3 billion people in the world when I was born. We've already added one world to the one I was born in. What will it be like when we add another?

Related articles

• U.N. Forecasts 10.1 Billion People by Century's End (www.nytimes.com)
• U.N.: Earth's population to hit 9 billion by 2050, 10 billion by 2100 (cnn.com)
• World population to reach 10.1 billion by 2100 (seattletimes.nwsource.com)

As individuals, one of the most important things we can do to protect biodiversity is to consume less. That means living close to where you work,¹ using mass transit rather than a personal car,², limiting purchases of non-essentials, and purchasing products that are produced sustainably. There are many different certifications by many different organizations. Renee Cho has identified a few of those that she thinks are the best. Hop over and take a look.

Purdue was planning to build a coal-fired boiler to supply steam and power to its campus.

The [Purdue University] Board [of Trustees] halted plans to install a new coal-fired boiler and instead will ask the Indiana Department of Environmental Management to alter the university's operating permit to allow installation of a natural gas boiler. (source)

I'm delighted to see Purdue giving up coal. I'm particularly pleased to see that the reason is that coal is more expensive. Burning natural gas will still produce carbon dioxide, but it will produce much less. I was also delighted to see that in a separate decision the Board will lease land for a commercial wind energy project. The wind energy project will produce about 100 megawatts of electricity, enough to power 25,000 homes for a year.

Related articles

• Plans for 150 coal plants scrapped: Sierra Club (reuters.com)
• Breaking: Purdue University Cancels Coal Project Thanks To Student Pressure (desmogblog.com)

You may have run across the visualization work done by Hans Rosling. If you haven't, you owe yourself a trip to Gapminder.org. The data that are available there on the health and wealth of nations and the tools that are available to visualize them are truly amazing. But even if you've been to Gapminder and you know about Hans Rosling's work. this short video will blow you away. His conclusion? "It's entirely possible that everyone can make it to the healthy, wealthy corner.



He's right isn't he? It's a pretty neat visualization, too. I wish I could pull something like this off. Talk about communicating science.

Live in a city. That's what Adam Stein argues, and he's pretty persuasive. A couple of weeks ago he gave Green Metropolis, a new book by David Owen, a favorable review. As the subtitle to Owen's book puts it, the key to living sustainably is living smaller, living closer, and driving less are the keys to sustainability. Put that way it's hard to argue with.

Living smaller? Sure. Living smaller means consuming less and making fewer demands on the planet's resources. My partner and I live reasonably simply. We're mostly vegetarian, for health reasons as much as environmental ones. We recycle as much as we can, we keep the thermostats turned down, and we turn lights off whenever we leave a room.

Driving less? Sure. Part of living smaller, isn't it. Who wouldn't take public transport if they live in a place where its comfortable and convenient. Public transit is non-existent in rural northeastern Connecticut, so I drive less by combining trips to school with stops at the grocery store and by combining several shopping trips into one whenever I can.

Living closer? This is where it gets interesting. I'll quote just a little of Stein's response to comments on his favorable review:

I recently read that a freight train can move a ton of goods 460 miles on a single gallon of diesel. Your car can move a bag of groceries about 20 miles on a single gallon of gasoline. Sustainability is best measured by proximity to a supermarket, not a farm. (emphasis in the original)

That's right. It matters more how close you live to where you buy your food than where it's produced. And it matters even more how it's produced. Over 80% of the carbon footprint associated with food is associated with producing it, not with transporting it (source).

Bottom line. Your friend with a small apartment in Manhattan probably has a smaller carbon footprint than you do. She almost certainly has a smaller carbon footprint than I do, since I live in a comfortable house on a little over an acre of land, and I have to drive back and forth to work, to the grocery, to the pharmacy, to anywhere I want to go other than for a walk around my neighborhood.¹

So if you really want to be green, move to Manhattan (or DC or San Francisco or Chicago or Seattle or Boston), take the subway or bus to work, and grow your vegetables in a community garden.