It is after Earth Day and that means that you should still care about sustainability and being more efficient. To that end, I recommend viewing this Good Magazine produced video that illuminates how many of our electric appliances and devices suck electricity, even when they are turned off.

Yup, I have been sick over the past few days - hence the hiatus. Well, let’s get back to it:

- Teenage Pregnancy Implementation Manager is a real job title.
- Here is a great article about the years when Barack Obama came up.
- Golf is declining in its popularity. (via arts and letters daily).
- Paper airfare tickets are just about to be a thing of the past.

Treehugger has put together this fantastic overview of the carbon footprint. Learn what the carbon footprint is, why it is such an important metric and a couple of ideas on how to reduce yours.

Here is a simple thing that you can do to reduce paper usage in your everyday: reduce the frequency of receiving your bank statements by paper or simply stop them all together and go electronic.

The Detroit News reports about how Sweden’s use of ethanol fuel may serve as a model for the U.S. shift away from pure crude oil-based fuels.

As reported on SustainableBusiness.com:

Pilot Pen Corporation of America introduced the world’s first full line of earth-friendly writing instruments this week.

Selling for the same price as their non-recycled products, Pilot’s BeGreen writing instruments–including ballpoint pens, rolling balls pens and mechanical pencils–are made from 70% recycled content and packaged in recycled materials.

Nice! I hope that this the beginning of something larger and also not part of a green-washing effort.

The BBC reports on an innovative green heating initiative in Stockholm:

In Sweden, the Jernhusen company, which owns Stockholm’s central station, is planning to channel passenger warmth to heat a 13-storey office block being built next to the station.

Heat exchangers in the station’s ventilation system will convert the body heat into hot water, which will be pumped into the heating system of the building.

It is not yet certain how effective the technique will be.

But Jernhusen engineers hope it will meet up to 15% of the heating needs of the building, which will provide about 40,000 square metres of space for offices, hotels, restaurants and shops.

Some existing buildings already recycle body heat from people in the building to contribute to heating requirements.

But this is the first time excess heat is to be transferred from one building to another.

Thanks to Dana

This is messed up, a man’s local local municipality has filed suite against him for withdrawing from use of its contracted trash removal service:

A man who claims to have reduced his waste to nearly nothing out of concern for the environment now faces a lawsuit from San Carlos for canceling his garbage-collection service.

Eddie House, 53, says he was shocked when he was served with a lawsuit Sunday at his Cedar Street home.

The lawsuit, filed by San Carlos Deputy City Attorney Linda Noeske in San Mateo Superior Court on Jan. 22, seeks a permanent injunction forcing House to maintain garbage service. City officials are also seeking to recoup from House the costs of the lawsuit.

As reported in the Examiner. (via celsias)

From Nature.org (via digg):

In fact, if you leave your computer on 24 hours a day, it could be responsible for releasing up to 1,500 pounds of CO2 into the atmosphere every year. The flying-toaster screen saver is cool…but is it that cool?

But if you have to leave your computer on, here’s a way you can make up for it: By joining a distributed computing network that models the effects of climate change.

Distributed computing networks harness the unused power of thousands of personal computers to perform complicated tasks.

For instance, climateprediction.net is a distributed network run by Oxford University and other partners that helps climate scientists run climate models on networked computers when those computers are on, but are not running at full capacity.

Wow - leaving a computer on to such a degree really does leave a heavy carbon foot-print for something that would just be sitting there otherwise. I say turn it off, but, yeah, if you do leave it on why have your CPU work away on something useful.

changethemargins.com promotes the idea that if we reduce the margins in our Word documents we can save paper. Serious amounts of paper. Good Magazine puts it nicely and bluntly:

…changing their margins from the current luxurious standard 1.25 inches to a the more modest .75 inches. It may sound like a small change, but if everyone in the nation did it, we’d save a little less than a Rhode Island’s worth of trees every year.

This is a great, simple idea that could effect change. So do it! Cut your margins and tell the others.

photograph by Mireille de la Lez

Vanity Fair has a 9 image sampling of Mirelle de la Lez’s pictures from the Arctic, which are visually stunning and full of impact. These pictures are part of the book described below.

An extraordinary visual summary of the landscape, wildlife, and beauty of the Far North, photographer and naturalist Mireille de la Lez’sVanishing World:The Endangered Arctic shows the Arctic as a place of surprising color and quickly fluctuating form. Accompanied by text from Fredrik Granath, the photos also function as an arresting reminder of what we stand to lose if climate change goes unchecked. In 30 years, according to Dr. Neil T. M. Hamilton, director of the World Wildlife Fund’s Arctic Initiative, in his foreword to the book, the warmer periods of the year may produce a contradiction in terms: an iceless Arctic.

How is that for an attempt at alliteration. Burt’s Bees, which is a natural personal care company (most famous for its chapped lips products) is being bought by Clorox Inc. for $950 million US.

Adage.com has some interesting insight into Clorox’s plans…

For those who thing Big Bleach is a corporate evil, see what the folks at Burt’s Bees have to say about who now owns the hive:

As you’ve probably heard by now, we at Burt’s Bees are entering an exciting new chapter in our lives as a result of the recent sale of the company to The Clorox Company. It’s a great opportunity to help us better deliver against our mission of making truly natural personal products available to everyone, everywhere.

This new journey gives us the energy and the resources to do even more. Not only will we be able to accelerate our growth, but this will also help us to grow the natural personal care category in general, furthering our commitment to The Greater Good.

You can keep counting on Burt’s Bees in the ways you always have. We will always stay steadfast behind our values and commitment to making the best natural personal care products with the most environmentally sensitive packaging and nature-safe manufacturing processes. And, above all, we’ll continue on with our social mission to make people’s lives better every day, naturally.

It’s your desire to improve your well-being and the world around you that has given us the support to take this next step. We thank you and ask for your continued support so we can keep the Burt’s Bees hive buzzing.

The International Herald Tribune explores the interesting subject of lighting. More specifically, the article discusses the various options for energy and not energy efficient lighting and how compact fluorescent bulb (CFL) is likely to be the future winner, even though it does not give off ‘nice’ light.

One designer has threatened to wage war against them. Another reckons they’re so depressing that we’ll be driven into psychotherapy. A manufacturer describes them as “very unfriendly” and, even, “a little violent.”

The objects of their derision are compact fluorescent bulbs, otherwise known as CFLs, the miniaturized versions of fluorescent strip lights, which are touted as energy-efficient alternatives to the incandescent bulbs that have lit our homes for over a century. The problem is the quality of their light. “It’s completely indifferent and boring,” said the German lighting designer, Ingo Maurer (the one who thinks they’ll be a boon for shrinks). “They make you feel as though you’re waiting for a bus or a train at a desolate station.”

This piece, over at WorldChanging, writes about New Zealand’s ambition to be the first carbon neutral country.

The strategy includes plans for substantial reductions in emissions, along with carbon offsetting projects such as increasing national forest area by 250,000 hectares by 2020. By 2025, the goal is to obtain 90 percent of all electricity from renewable sources. Is this achievable? We think so: Provision of renewable electricity is cheaper in New Zealand compared to other countries due to abundant renewable energy resources. Around 70 percent of New Zealand energy production is already from renewable sources, and a number of large scale wind farm proposals have recently been approved.

The Democratic Republic of Congo is taking steps to cancel a large number of timber contracts in order to protect the world’s second biggest tropical rain forest.

Congo issued a five-year moratorium on new logging contracts in 2002 in an effort to stem rampant deforestation aggravated by the conflict. That measure went largely unheeded and companies continued to sign new deals.

Around three million hectares (7.4 million acres) of illegal concessions have already been cancelled by Congo’s new government, which took office this year after historic post-war elections in 2006.

Friends of the Environment, an environmental organization, have launched a lawsuit against the Canadian government for breaching the Kyoto Accord, a global treaty to which Canada is a signatory.

Sustainablebusiness.com reports that PepsiCo. is purchasing renewable energy certificates (RECs) to offset its electricity use in the U.S. PepsiCo. will be buying 1.1 billion killowat-hours, which is the equivalent of its annual usage.

PepsiCo now leads the following lists:

The Top 25 list, which recognizes the nation’s largest purchasers of green power. EPA partners are buying more than 8.9 billion kilowatt-hours kWh of green power annually, an increase of nearly 425% since the end of 2004.

EPA’s Fortune 500 Challenge, launched in late 2006, focuses on the collective green power purchases of eligible Fortune 500 companies with a goal of a combined total of more than five billion kWh of green power by the end of 2007. Johnson & Johnson, Nike and Applied Materials also moved up in the challenge as a result of increased purchases, and Baxter Health Care corporate headquarters found its first ranking in the challenge.

The new “100 Percent Green Power Purchaser” list, which features organizations that are buying enough green power to meet 100 percent of their organization-wide purchased electricity use. This list includes more than 300 partner organizations demonstrating environmental leadership — from the largest corporations and government entities, down to some of the smallest organizations and businesses in the United States.

From Fortune:

On April 26, when the shareholders of French food giant Danone congregate in Paris for their annual meeting, they will have a unique proposal to consider: setting up a mutual fund to channel investment into Danone’s nonprofit social ventures in developing countries.

Unlike Danone’s regular business units - which produce yogurt, water, and cookies - the ones receiving investments through the proposed new fund, to be called “danone.communities,” will aim for “maximization of social objectives and not that of profit,” according to the proposed resolution.

Danone initially hopes to raise $135 million and promises it will return a guaranteed rate comparable to a money-market account - about 3% to 4% annually, says Emmanuel Faber, Danone’s president of Asia-Pacific operations and the brains behind the project. The company’s management says it is confident the measure will pass. The fund is to be managed separately by bank Crédit Agricole, and be open to the French public as well as institutional investors.

Kudos to Danone.

Alex Steffen and Sarah Rich have written an interesting and well thought out piece, which is posted on WorldChanging, entitled ‘Make This Earth Day Your Last!’

The biggest problem with Earth Day is that it has become a ritual of sympathy for the idea of environmental sanity. Small steps, we’re told, ignoring the fact that most of the steps most frequently promoted (returning your bottles, bringing your own bag, turning off the water while you brush your teeth) are of such minor impact (compared to our ecological footprints) that they are essentially meaningless without larger, systemic action as well. The strategy of recycling as a gateway drug — get them hooked on it and we can move them on to harder stuff — has failed miserably. We can do better.

It is, essentially, the politics of gesture, little different than wearing a rubber wrist band or a pink ribbon, and, such a politics is primarily a means of raising money for large NGOs while making regular folks feel a little better about their relationship to a terribly flawed system. It’s a broken model, and we can do better.

Their final thought is one worth considering:

So what we need is a dramatic break with the past. Earth Day accomplished its mission; the environment is now near the top of the global agenda. By making this Earth Day our last, we can signal that the time for mere awareness is over, and the time for real transformation has arrived

The question is whether the will is there. Perhaps not yet, but in a few years, maybe - just maybe.

From Science Daily:

In one of the most comprehensive and definitive studies of its kind to date, a team of researchers at the University of California, Davis have proven that organically grown kiwifruit contain more health-promoting factors than those grown under conventional conditions. The research is reported in the SCI’s magazine Chemistry & Industry. The debate over the relative health benefits of organic versus conventional food has raged for years, with UK environment secretary David Miliband declaring in January that buying organic is just a lifestyle choice.