Home / treehugger.com rss archive / October-04-2007


San Francisco Moves Towards Bike-Sharing
Although a few cities are scaling down bike-sharing programs, many cities are exploring the option for their citizens. Copenhagen, for example has 2,000 bikes at 110 stations through the city. Paris? Ten times that many bikes and slightly more than ten times the stations. And, with many of the advantages of car-sharing, such as not needing a personal vehicle, and the eco-cred of zipping around the city with human power, it's no wonder. So who's next to...

Pemex to Cut Carbon Emissions Via Clean Development Mechanism
Mexico's state-owned oil company Petroleos Mexicanos, or Pemex, has identified 21 opportunities to cut greenhouse gas emissions and get paid for it under the Clean Development Mechanism, a pollutant trading system mandated under the Kyoto Protocol. The system, which is administered by the United Nations, has inspired companies around the world to invest in environmentally friendly projects in the developing world in exchange for carbon credits. Businesses in the developed world looking to meet pollution reduction targets buy those credits, and the intermediaries, like

Paris Pledges Emissions Cuts by 2020
Image: Flickr - markhillaryWhile many cities around the world are plagued by infighting when it comes to cutting carbon emissions, Parisians from all ends of the spectrum are coming together to create a green plan for the city. The city's new plan calls for a 30 percent reduction in energy usage and emissions from public buildings by the year 2020. In conjunction, Paris is taking steps to cut emissions in other city services. Paris city authorities have already taken steps to reduce their environmental impact, using "clean" vehicles and recycled paper, and ensuring that all new public housing answers...

India To Add More Ethanol From Sugarcane By 2008
After meeting with state government officials on Wednesday, Indias farm minister Sharad Pawar has announced that an agreement has been reached where by October 2008, there will be a mandatory 10 percent blending of ethanol with petrol. The state governments are also in support of moving towards deregulating Indian sugar mills and allowing them to directly produce the ethanol from sugarcane juice.India now allows a five percent mixing of molasses-derived ethanol with petrol and the new agreement will double this figure. In addition, Pawar said that any obstacles to the free movement of denatured ethanol and local taxes should be eliminated....

Loblaws: Something Can Must Be Done
Canada's biggest grocery chain has been struggling of late, and has been trying to paint itself green with its shopping bags and its tag line "something must be done". When Galen Weston Jr. took over he promised local food; we visited in July and were disappointed, as we noted here. We visited the Christie and Dupont store after our shop at Fiesta farms to check out progress. As promised, there was a stand in the store with a flag over saying "Ontario Grown-picked at its peak." In front of the stand: a few laquered ornamental pumpkins. Filling the s...

TreeHugger Picks: Baseball Getting Greener
America's favorite pastime has entered its second season after making some big green strides during the past year. Here are some of the ways that going green on the diamond is becoming more synonymous with apple pie.1) The Cincinatti Reds started the season off on a green foot, making their season opener against the Chicago Cubs carbon neutral. They picked up 96 tons worth of carbon offsets that wi...

FishPhone: Get Your Sustainable Seafood Report On the Go
So let's say you're out for a night on the town, getting ready to order dinner, but aren't sure if you should eat the shrimp or not. You check your wallet, but the handy Monterey Bay Acquarium Seafood Watch isn't there; oh no! What to do? Now you don't have to worry, as the guide is available as a text-messaging service aptly named FishPhone.Just text 30644 on your cell phone with the message "FISH" and the fish you want to know about; a matter of seconds later, you'll have an an...

Most Huggable: Paris Accords, More NASA Swiftboating, The New Black, and More
Paris adopts a climate plan to slash greenhouse emissions 30% by the year 2020NASA scientist James Hansen finds himself swept up in another episode of SwiftboatingIrish researchers are putting a bacterium to work digesting Styrofoam waste into biodegradable plasticsMassive ice sheets in northern Canada are splitting far faster than expected, one of them going more than 60 miles in a weekTasmin Blanchard speaks with Eco-Libris about her new book,...

Trevor O'Neil's Salvaged Sustainable Designs
Designer Trevor O'Neil took advantage of a building being gutted next door to salvage a bunch of materials into a pretty interesting collection of furniture. Not least of these is this funky, ultra-modern couch made from salvaged cork; we love that it's a sustainable material, and we love that it's already have a previous life as something else. O'Neil is no one trick pony; in addition to his furniture (more pics after the jump), he makes jewelry out of salvaged wood scraps, along with sculptures and paintings. ::Trevo...

Oil Execs to World - We Must Cut Consumption
Image borrowed from Raise the Hammer - Image credit Trevor ShawPeak Oil, or the inevitable peaking and then decline of global oil supply, has become such a topic of conversation in environmental circles that it almost rivals climate change. As Lester Brown noted on TreeHugger, there is no doubt that it is coming, and that it will be a seismic economic event. It is amazing then, that we do not hear more in the mainstream media or business world about how to prepare for the coming challenges. All that, however, may be starting to chang...

Tainted Meat? USDA Will Tell You. Some Day.
One more reason to look your butcher in the face: nobody is out there protecting you from tainted meat. On September 25, the UD Department of Agriculture recalled 331,000 pounds of hamburger from the Topps Meat Company; last week they expanded the recall to 21.7 million pounds, because of contamination of E coli bacteria, which can cause kidney failure and death. First victim? July 5. Next? August 17. Link to Topps meat: September 7. First time the USDA gets together to discuss? September 25, 18 days later. Nothing like jumping into action to protect America's food supply."We gather information from various sources, including our public health partners in the states," said David Goldma...

Book Review: The Art of Simple Food by Alice Waters
Anyone with even the most passing interest in what goes on your platter needs to seize hold of Alice Water's The Art of Simple Food: Notes lessons, and Recipes From a Delicious Revolution (2007, Clarkson Potter), the first book the famed chef and slow-food champion has written for the home cook.Filled with 19 lessons for learning core culinary principlesincluding cutting techniques, if you can't tell your mince from your julienneas well as more than 200 recipes running the full gamut of sauces, pastas, breads and grains, vegetables, ...

Local Food: The New Competitive Edge
It sure doesn't look like much from the outside, and although we have lived in the neighbourhood for over 20 years we had never set foot in Fiesta Farms, usually going to the local Loblaws instead. Then we learned that Fiesta Farms is the first big store in Ontario to sign on with Local Food Plus, (previously covered in Treehugger as Local Flavour Plus), a non-profit that certifies food as "sustainable" which means it was produced in Ontario in a way that's gentle on the environment and strict on worker and animal rights. According to Catherine Porter in the Star, it's ethical food. "We're not looking at just where it co...

Broadcast Your Non-Profit Cause
At this year's Clinton Global Initiative, YouTube pledged $20 million over two years to kick into gear the YouTube Non-Profit Program, an initiative to encourage non-profit organizations to design and create "brand channels" to build communities, while raising awareness for their cause in a attention-deficit-plagued, media-obsessed world. (Are you still reading this?)This dedicated area on YouTube's site will provide non-profits with a personalized channel with an embedded Google checkout donation widget. Google will be processing donations throu...

David Byrne Talks Cycling
The New Yorker festival is being held this weekend, and Matt Seaton, the Guardian's resident cyclist, had the good fortune to run into David Byrne and ask him about cycling in New York. Byrne was there to host an evening that claimed to be "dedicated to the advancement of bicycling". ...

REI To Open New Prototype Green Store in Boulder
The green team at the outdoor gear co-op, REI (Recreational Equipment Inc,) cant be getting much sleep of late. They seem to be rolling our some new eco-endeavour every month. In August it was their Eco-Sensitive product labelling. Last month we learnt they were pledging a $100,000 USD grant to the Bikes Belong Foundation to make US cities more cyclist friendly. And now in October, with barely time to draw breath, they are about to unveil their long anticipated green prototype store in the Boulder, Colorado. This new retail store, opening tomorrow h...

Debate Over Seafood and Pregnancy Rages On
According to the Washington Post, a coalition of top scientists from private groups and federal agencies plans to declare today that pregnant and breast-feeding women should eat at least 12 ounces of fish and seafood per week to ensure their babies' optimal brain development. And that, of course, is a major break with current U.S. health advice that the women in question should eat no more than 12 ounces per week due to concerns about mercury contamination. The debate over fish and pregnant mothers has deepened over the last several years, and at its core is ...

Sassy & Sustainable : Ink & Wit Postcards
We're bowled over by Ink & Wit's striking and modern postcards, which designer Tara Hogan has been transitioning over to 100 percent post-consumer paper stock and soy inksincluding the two attention-drawing designs above. Hogan swapped her original notecards for postcards to save save paper and stamp money, so you can express more with less on occasions when digitally printed words on a computer screen just won't do. ::Ink & Wit...

Divine Chocolate's Hungry to Change the World Recipe Contest
Divine Chocolate is celebrating Fair Trade Month with a contest to find the tastiest fair-trade chocolate recipe in America. The catch? At least one ingredient has to be Divine Chocolate, but you smartypants probably figured that out already. You also have to submit a statement on "why you are hungry to change the world through fair trade." (Note: Although TransFair U.S.A.'s fair-trade certification accounts for sustainable practices, we wish Divine were also organic-certified.)For complete r...

The Coming Diatom Economy
British scientists are betting that diatoms - a group of unicellular, eukaryotic algae found (mostly) in the open oceans - could provide the ideal solution for making the manufacture a variety of consumer products, including cosmetics and fabrics, more cost-effective and eco-friendly. The plentiful phytoplankton possess a characteristic silica shell, known as a frustule, that is capable of displaying a stunning array of colors that fluctuates depending on its orientation towards light - similar to the effect produced by having light reflected from a thin layer of oil on water.The team of researchers from the University of Oxf...

US Department Of Energy Announces A "Three For One"
Just announced: high voltage power line corridors can be constructed over the objections of State and local government, over-running natural areas and parks, and delivering more coal-generated electricity to urban areas, just in time to prevent switching to cleaner alternatives."Huge transmission lines could soon skirt Civil War battlegrounds, historic districts, and the Appalachian Trail following a federal order that designates national corridors in two key regions of the United States with fast-growing electricity needs.""The corridors are designed to make it easier for utilities to get approval for power lines in areas where the electric grid is congested. They allow the US E...

Greenest. Business Card. Ever.
The designer was at a party just after graduating. "As the evening progressed cards were exhanged back and forth while a stack of white card stock grew in my left blazer pocket. As my own reserve began to diminish, a sense of panic set in....I reached into my left pocket and began scratching out business cards and adding my own details..." ...which probably offended half of the people at the party as they get their own business cards handed back to them with somebody else's information on it, but randomly put together and distributed by a third party, so to speak, is an interesting way to reuse and recycle. Now you can buy pre-scratched cards complete with a Vinyl (...

Ohio Turning Tobacco Settlement Money Into Greener Schools
At least thats the plan, since theyre securitizing their $18 Billion share of tobacco settlement money, and taking the $5 Billion proceeds today rather than the entire settlement over the course of the next 40 years. A genuinely bright idea, though it does break the promise made by his predecessors back in 1998 that a significant amount of the cash would go to prevent tobacco use, particularly among children.So how will they turn the windfall into greener schools? Well, since the Ohio School Facilities Commission recently adopted the LEED for Schools Rating System as part of its school design standards it looks like theyll be using it to incorpora...

TH Blog Love - Our Favourite Greens Of The Week
Asia Is Green: Staying Alive Forever, Islam and Environmental Conservation by Eugene. "This article was first published in the Apr-Jun 07 edition of NADi by the Islamic Religious Council of Singapore (MUIS). We find the article enlightening and it gave us more insights on how the teachings of Islam promote environmental consciousness and protection. We think that more people should be exposed to the relationship between the environment and religion. So we have republished the article below (in 2 parts) with kind permission from MUIS."

Quote of the Day: David Suzuki on Biofuels
Proponents of biofuels, which are often made from plants such as corn or sugar cane, often point to their many advantages over fossil fuels like gasoline. Biofuels are less toxic or non-toxic in comparison to fossil fuels. They are a renewable resource, whereas once fossil fuels are gone, they're gone. And biofuels can be grown just about anywhere you can grow crops, reducing the need for giant pipelines or oil tankers, and potentially helping to reduce conflicts in areas like the Middle East.So far so good. But things start to get complicated when you look more closely. Much has already been debated about the energy r...

Protect Your iPod nano with Recycled Cassette Tapes
If you secretly preferred cassette tapes to vinyl (but have made the jump to digital music via the trusty iPod), then this lil' gadget is for you. Brought to you by the same folks who dreamed up the iPod cases from old 45s, these create similar utility for old cassettes; if you aren't still listening to them, you might as well use 'em for something, right? They're built to fit 1st and 2nd generation iPod nanos (and are working on updating to the new, wider 3rd generation version) -- sorry, iPod Classic owners; you'll have to stick with the vinyl cases, for now. If protecting your music with ...

Lifehacker Tip: Buy the Right Size TV
One of the few things I didn't like in my tour of the Tridel Eco-suite was the monster LCD TV in the living room. It was considered green because it used "20% less power than a CRT TV and 30% less than a plasma" but was still huge. I also wondered about how good the picture would be if one was sitting that close; even with HDTV or HDVD there has to be a limit. Lifehacker to the rescue: they found a table with recommended minimum and maximum distances for the size of the monitor. So if you are in a small room, don't drop the megabucks on a megascreen, even if its megagreen.

Toshiba Fuel-Cell PMP to Launch in 2008
You'd be hard-pressed to find a more ardent advocate of fuel cell technology in the world of electronics and high-end gadgetry than Toshiba. Having already announced the creation of a line of direct methanol fuel cell (DMFC) concept audio devices a few years back, the Japanese company has now introduced a prototype PMP (portable media player) that integrates the fuel cell block with the device. Previous mod...

Happy 160.944 Kilometer Canadian Thanksgiving
The Canadian Thanksgiving weekend is coming up and everyone is planning for the big dinner on Sunday or Monday. It is a harvest celebration, with the date bouncing around October and November until the Canadian Parliament declared in 1957 "A Day of General Thanksgiving... for the bountiful harvest with which Canada has been blessed ... to be observed on the 2nd Monday in October." So if you are going to celebrate a bountiful harvest, why not make it a local one? Have a look at the menus of the five finalists for last year's TreeHugger (American) 100 Mile Thanksgiving Dinner Contest for some neat ideas-

Lawyers, Not TreeHuggers
We've talked about LNG vs Coal and Conservation. Interstate, underwater territorial conflicts, however, were not one of the tradeoffs we had in mind when we summed up all under the title, Real Treehuggers Support Adding LNG Terminals. "The U.S. Supreme Court should reject New Jersey's attempts to carve away a chunk of Delaware [bottom center of picture] to benefit energy giant BP's plans for a liquefied natural gas import pier on the Delaware River, attorneys for Delaware argued in an interstate boundary dispute document made public Monday.""In a final written brief before the high court ...

Climate Paranoia Strikes Deep
"Australia must populate its undeveloped tropical north or face invasion by Asian refugees driven south by climate change, an outspoken Government MP has warned.""Northern Australia, which unlike the south of the continent enjoys an annual wet season and has plenty of water, could be coveted if temperature rises leave parts of Asia short of food and water. Rising sea levels could make millions of Asian people homeless and drive them to seek sanctuary elsewhere, Heffernan believes.""Nearly 40 per cent of Asia's four billion population live within 70km of the sea, with low-lying cities such as Bangkok particularly vulnerable to a surge i...

New Coal Pier Proposed For South Shore Of Lake Ontario
Shifting Great Lakes area coal shipments from trains to barges must be driven by significant cost savings. "AES Corp. plans to build a $25 million dock reaching into Lake Ontario to receive ships carrying coal and limestone to supply its power plant in Somerset in Niagara County...The 3,200-foot-long dock also will be made available to other companies in Western New York that want to use freighters to import cargo by way of the Great Lakes.""There are five such piers on northern shore of Lake Ontario in Canada, but this would be the first on American side.""Currently, AES receives 2.2 million tons of coal and limestone a year via ra...

EPA Petitioned to Limited CO2 Emissions from Ships
As TreeHugger has noted here and here, transport by ship is not exactly CO2 free. According to the New York Times, the 90,000 ocean-going container ships, tankers and cruise ships emit more CO2 than all but the six largest polluting nations, equal to the amount emitted by all of the cars in the USA. California Attorney General Jerry Brown, with environmental groups Earthjustice on behalf of the Center for Biological Diversity, Friends of the Earth and Oceana, have asked the Environmental Protection Agency to adopt standards for carbon dioxide...

ReForm School Hugs Trees
The freshly relaunched ReForm Schoolwhich we discovered through the freshly relaunched, and as always, lovely-to-behold Design Spongehas a healthy selection of earth-loving goods, including the above treehugging offerings from their featured artists of the month. Camilla Engman's $35 limited-edition "Save a Tree for Me" prints (only 100 have been made) were made using 100 percent post-consumer recycled paper and soy-based inks. Meanwhile, Ryan ...

Origin The London Craft Fair
Origin, The London Craft Fair is an extravaganza of craft; with 150 exhibitors showing their wares this week, and another group next week. All the work must be approved by a jury so the quality and workmanship is very high. These exquisite "Map Shoes" (pictured left) were made from vintage maps, with a button trim. Jennifer Collier also makes little girls' dresses, suitable for framing, not wearing, out of old stamps or sheet music pages and machine embroidery. The clothing is symbolic, making us think about the fragility of the human body, and the transience...

INDEX: Design to Improve Life, the 2007 Winners
In 2005 it was the Lifestraw and Architecture for Humanity who, amongst others, received the world's biggest design price of 100 000 each, awarded by INDEX:. INDEX: is a non-profit network organization, based in Copenhagen, that focuses on Design to Improve Life worldwide. This time around, they have yet again chosen 5 winners in each of their categories.The Tongue Sucker took first price in the category WORK. This clever little device allows even untrained people to open the airw...