I do 30 December 16, 2009

This is a real quick post about a simple but valuable campaign/message that I came across called ‘I do 30′. The ‘I do 30’ campaign was started in Denmark by the bio-innovation company Novozymes, who creates the enzymes that makes it possible to wash your clothes at low temperatures. ‘I do 30’ is about those small climate friendly choices you can make in your everyday life to make a bigger change. Almost all of us wash clothes in hot water of temperature around 60 degrees C.

An environmental social media campaign called ‘I do 30’encourages people across the world to turn down the temperature on their laundry to 30 degrees C in order to save CO2. If you are at the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen (COP15) you will see them move around the streets of Copenhagen with speech bubbles, hoping the ‘I do 30’ statements will reach the leaders of the world. These bubbles have statements from the campaign supporters from around the world saying why “they do 30″.

This weekend, the Danish Prime Minister, Lars Løkke Rasmussen, was presented with more than 15,000 supporters of the campaign. And the Danish Crown Prince was also handed over a ‘I do 30’ washing machine. Check out the video and photos. If you want to know more about this campaign and participate, check out their website, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. Once of the few environmentally conscious groups that are making good use of the immense power of social media to reach out to people.

Unmentionables October 8, 2009

Image via Wikipedia

This link post comes straight from an email newsletter I recieved from Treehugger. As the title of the post says, all these links share articles about the “unmentionables” like human, cow and horse excreta and sink and shower water (not so unmentionable). But they’re all deal with the enviroment-friendly angle of them. So I suggest you read them.

• The Peepoo is a biodegradable single use toilet bag that could revolutionize developing world sanitation.
• A German town gets 40% of its power from cow and horse manure.
• Greywater Guerrillas help convert sink and shower water to yard irrigation water.

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• Eco Friendly Wallpaper By Graham & Brown (chictip.com)
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TED Tuesday: Seas of plastic September 15, 2009

Capt. Charles Moore of the Algalita Marine Research Foundation first discovered the Great Pacific Garbage Patch — an endless floating waste of plastic trash. Now he’s drawing attention to the growing, choking problem of plastic debris in our seas.

Aktivhaus generates power August 27, 2009

Lloyd Alter of Treehugger shares this great design and architecture achievement with us:

We love the Passivhaus, or Passive House as it is known in America, where houses are designed to be so well insulated and sited that they need no energy other than passive solar gain to keep warm. [...] Now we learn from Jetson Green about the Aktivhaus, set up to not only heat and power itself but to have some left over.

The first Aktivhaus has been deployed in Denmark and is predicted to produce enough energy in 30 years to neutralise the energy costs of building it. Eventhough 30 years sounds like a long time, it is definitely better than NEVER neutralising the energy cost gone into building the house. Read more about both these fabulous environmentally friendly house designs on the Treehugger and Jetson Green websites.

Point of no return August 13, 2009

Between 2005 and 2006, 43 international climate experts volunteered to evaluate each of five tipping points, judging the likelihood that achieving a tipping point would lead to potentially dangerous global warming. Tipping points occur when a small change in one factor, a “driver,” can cause a disproportionately large response in an overall system. These 5 tipping points are,

1. More than half the Amazon rain forest turns into something other than rain forest by 2200.
2. Atlantic “conveyor belt” and the flow of ocean water worldwide is severely disrupted by an influx of fresh water from melting ice caps due to rising temperatures.
3. If the world warms by 4 degrees Celsius (7.2 degrees Fahrenheit), the Greenland ice sheet will almost unavoidably melt away.
4. If El Niño, a periodic disruption of the ocean and atmosphere in the tropical Pacific, becomes the average state of the region’s climate as global warming progresses, widespread shifts in precipitation patterns will ensue.
5. If the ice sheet over West Antarctica disintegrates due to rising temperatures, revealing islands that are currently buried.

So now we just have to wait and see how long before we help the planet check all points on the list. Wired Science recently used pictures from NASA’s Earth Observatory to create time-lapse videos of our “achievements” in this regard so far. We’re not doing bad, are we?