Sustianable Upgrades for the Home or Office

Benjamin Roman of metaefficient.com brings us this incredible infographic on ways to upgrade buildings to save on energy bills, heating and cooling, and water bills. The coolest part of these sustainable systems is that they will pay for themselves in the long run. Check it out!

Note: the figures in red, or "added cost" denotes the initial investment in the technology. 

Give up the TP for a Sustainable Alternative

Could you ever go without toilet paper? Most Americans wouldn't dream of it, and you may even be shocked that I asked such a heinous question.

Yet in the rest of the world, toilet paper would be a novelty as bidets, the superior hygiene and environmental choice, dominate.

In case you are unfamiliar with this foreign piece of technology, it is like a cross between a toilet and a fountain that cleans you thoroughly, much better than with toilet tissue, without using your hands. For obvious reasons, the bidet is the much healthier option, especially considering that about half of all people do not wash their hands after using the loo. But is it any better environmentally? Wouldn't using water to wash after ever visit to the rest room just waste a lot more water? 

The Beautiful Bidet, Credit

According to Justin Thomas of metaefficient.com, Americans cumulatively use 36.5 billion rolls of TP every year, which equals 15 million trees, 573 BILLION gallons of water, and 253K tons of chlorine for bleaching the paper a nice white color. This process uses 17 terawatts of energy, and even more power and materials to package and ship the bathroom tissue. All in all, it takes about 37 gallons of water and 1.5lbs of wood to make a single roll of TP.

Bidets, on the other hand, use about an 1/8th of a gallon per usage.

Let's get math-matical, shall we? If your average roll of two-ply contains 500 squares of paper, and the average person uses five to ten sheets per visit to the loo, then the roll would be gone in 50 to 100 usages.
The same number of usages of a bidet would result in using 6.25 or 12.5 gallons, respectively, instead of the 37 gallons it takes to make a roll of toilet paper. It also saves all that electricity, wood, plastic, and other materials it takes to produce TP.  

Bidets come in a huge variety, but can cost as little as $69 (if you don't mind unheated water). At such an low one-time cost, its a wonder that America hasn't yet embraced the cleanliness and efficiency that is the bidet.

If you're not convinced yet, here is a review of the Japanese super toilet written by an American man.

Illinois First to Ban Polluting Face Wash

Facewash is one of those beauty products we just can't live without, and who can resist the pleasant scraping sensation of a facial scrub? Unfortunately, however, unless you are buying a scrub with an all natural scrubbing agent (like crushed appricot pit) that will decompose over time, chances are that your scrub is full of plastic microbeads. What are those? Literally tiny pieces of plastic. That's it. 

 

"Microbeads", Credit

So while plastic is not inherently bad for the skin in such small exposures (as far as I know), it turns out that washing all those tiny plastic particles down the drain and out into the closest lake or sea is extremely bad for the environment. Why? Plastic in our seas is a huge issue. The bigger, colorful pieces look like fish or other food that sea birds, turtles, and fish normally eat. These animals will fill up on plastic and actually starve to death. Smaller pieces of plastic are another issue, as it takes 500-1,000 years to degrade, they simply become this goopy plastic solution that floats on top of the ocean and attracts more debris, which creates ocean gyres. Similar disasters can occur in lakes too.

For this reason, Illinois is out to stop micro-plastic bead pollution. This summer, Governer Pat Quinn and other lawmakers voted to ban soaps, scrubs, washes, or toothpastes with the plastic beads. This ban will help to alleviate and eliminate plastic pollution in the Great Lakes.

Those are the amounts of plastic you put down the drain per bottle of wash, Credit

Like the plastic water bottle ban in San Francisco, this ban will gradually be put in place and only taking full effect by 2018. Some companies such as Unilever, Johnson & Johnson, and L'Oreal are already phasing out microbeads by themselves to beat the ban. 

New Research Could End the GMO Debate

[Note: Just for fun, I have included some of the most ridiculous shock-tactic anti-GMO pictures that the internet can provide.]

Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) are exactly what they sound like; any living organism that is genetically modified, aka, has undergone a procedure at some point in its life cycle to produce a result desired by humans. We have made salt-tolerant tomatoes,  water-conserving cotton, and fish that glow in the dark.

Yes, really. They are called GloFish, Credit

Genetically modifying plants, animals, fungi, and bacteria may seem suspiciously like playing God, and it is no wonder that the GMO debate continues to rage as one of the more controversial ethical, health, and environmental issues.

I mean, honestly. 1 2

Having taken university courses on this topic, I feel that I can unbiasedly and simply summarize both sides of the argument.

PRO-GMO: The geneticists behind GMO crops are problem solvers. They see overly-salted ag land and decide to make a crop that can withstand excess salt. They see that children in third-world countries are going blind from mal-nutrition, so they create Golden Rice high in Vitamin A.These are the do-gooders and dreamers who want to use technology to solve the world's problems, oftentimes by making more or new types of crops available.
Of course, there are also fortune 500 companies like Monsanto that appear to be in GMO technology only for the bottom line of exponentially maximizing profits. I say this because stories abound of small, independent farmers around the world getting caught up in buying their seed and the vicious GMO treadmills that result: Because the seed is genetically engineered, it is the intellectual property of Monsanto, and so farmers cannot "save seed" for next year, even though they bought and grew the seed themselves. When Monsanto suspects that farmers are saving seed, or even that wind pollination has brought their intellectual property into a neighboring farmer's fields, they can go to that field, take samples, and then sue the farmer into poverty (even if he had no idea that GMO genes where fertilizing his crops). So, is Monsanto working to spread the wonders of increased yield and pest resistance? Or are they destroying small, honest ag in favor of creating agribusinesses and factory farms that they essentially own?

My personal favorite. Credit

ANTI-GMO: These people are not just the dreadlocked, organic-loving, "free spirits" you might be imagining, but also the concerned parents, the health-food addicts, and the environmental activists. These people often protest outside supermarket chains, demanding local, organic, and sustainable options, not "franken-food".

There are actually human genes in rice. Credit

They are suspicious of genetic engineering, especially of what unknown effects it may have on the human body once digested. GMOs have only really been around since the 80's, and GMO crops didn't dominate our food choices until the late 1990's.  Since we have really only been exposed to GM foods for around 15 years, anti-GMOs think it is hard to say what their impacts of daily, long-term exposure might actually be. Anti-GMO's don't believe there is enough research to prove that GMOs are not harmful, and if they have learned anything from past environmental catastrophies (like the widespread use of DDT, CFCs, and other chemicals) is that everything must be considered guilty until proven innocent.
While perhaps touted as Luddites by the pro-GMO do-gooders, anti-GMOs simply see that organic food is what our ancestors ate, and believe that it is what we should be eating too: if it ain't broke, don't fix it. But are they actually selfishly keeping back a technology that could help to end world hunger and bring about more jobs?

Plus, look how un-original their propaganda is. 1 2 3

Do I seem biased? I don't mean to be. In fact, this week I'm reporting on an article published by Forbes entitled The Debate About GMO Safety Is Over, Thanks to a New Trillion-Meal Study. Is the debate really over? The controversial nature of GMOs is solved? GREAT! I'll tell all the organic-grazers they can shut up and sit down. But before I do, let's review the article.

Author Jon Entine begins by mocking anti-GMO websites for their fear-tactics and potentially faulty science. He says that, while these sites quote research, they very seldom link to the studies. According to Entine, over 2k studies have been conducted that show how biotech and GMOs do not harm humans or livestock. In fact, GMO foods may just be better somehow. While the occasional outlier will show harm done to test animals, the majority show how safe GMO is.

Entine harps on anti-GMOs like Jeffrey Smith for using anecdotal evidence on his personal website in his dismissal of GMO crops. However, Smith also includes twenty-eight other citations from peer-reviewed papers, mostly from European Journals where science isn't stiffed by capitalism.

Credit

Earlier, I admitted to being biased. Isn't is possible that, in working for Forbes and the fact that Monsanto is a Fortune 500 company, Entine is more than a little biased himself?


Entine goes on to say that since livestock consumer almost all of the GMO crops produced, wouldn't farmers notice if large numbers of their animals were sick or dying? What Entine doesn't realize is that, yes, American farmers and ranchers have noticed how sick their animals are, from GMO feed, poor living conditions, close confinement, or other factors. This is why 80% of antibiotics are used on our food, and not on us. Our food is ill, yet is kept alive by cocktails of antibiotics and hormones. The misuse of antibiotics in this way is no secret, and anti-biotic resistance has become a huge concern because of it.

But I digress. The main point of Entine's article is a newly published study in the Journal of Animal Science by Alison Van Eenennaam of UCD have compiled a meta-analysis of studies done from the present to before 1996. The study consists of over 29 years of studies on animal health and productivity from before and after the time that GMOs rose to dominance. According to Entine, they discovered that:

"GM feed is safe and nutritionally equivalent to non-GMO feed. There was no indication of any unusual trends in the health of animals since 1996 when GMO crops were first harvested. Considering the size of the dataset, it can reasonably be said that the debate over the impact of GE feed on animal health is closed: there is zero extraordinary impact."


Entine also shares a link to the Federation of Animal Science Societies and their list of GMO feeding studies.
All of these show that GMO feed is safe. 

This breadth of literature put forward by Entine is impressive. If this research is correctly done and unbiased then we should surely take it into account. However, we must not be blinded by this seemingly long study. Twenty-nine years may be long for a single human lifetime, but it is not compared to the length of human existence. While we may not worry about the harmfulness of GMOs for humans in this generation or even the next, we must think of the generations that will follow after our grandchildren for the rest of time. We should strive to think about the consequences of any major action to the seventh generation and beyond, as was originally done by Native Americans.

Let's for a moment imagine that GMOs are no worse for you than their organic counterparts. In this case, I would still argue that they are hazardous to the small farmer and to our agricultural heritage, both of which could (and will) be destroyed by big agribusiness. Studies show that GM corn and and will interbreed with heirloom varieties and destroy that unique and valuable diversity (from which new GMO crops are reliant on) possibly forever. And there is still the issue of pesticides and herbicides, most of which runoff to impact communities down-stream or involve the farmer in costly treadmills of resistance where more and more is needed to ensure maximum yield. When a crop, like Round-Up Ready, is genetically engineered to be sold hand-in-hand with a poison like Round-Up that will be sprayed over the field, there is no way to say that the crop is truly safe. Perhaps more frightening are Bt crops that don't need pesticide, because they have their own pesticide built right in.

With so many factors at play and with the game continually developing and changing, it is nearly impossible to come up with a yes or no answer to the question of "are GMOs good? bad? safe? evil? etc". It seems to me that there are good and bad studies on both sides of the debate.

I wholeheartedly disagree with Entine in that the GMO debate is over, and I ask you, which combination of factors lead you to whichever shade of grey you agree with? What is you opinion on GMOs?

How Sustainable Cities Save the Earth

The global population is booming. The US Census Bureau has estimated that global population will reach 9 billion before 2050. With so many people on a planet almost stretched to its limits, it is more important than ever to prepare and plan for a sustainable future. This nifty infographic lays down some cold, hard fact on how sustainable cities might save our future.

Credit: [www.citytowninfo.com]

Cheap Solar Gives Utilities Companies a Run for their Money

I feel like I've been blogging a lot about solar recently, disproportionately so over other forms of renewable energy. But maybe that's just because solar is really taking off in the here and now, and I've just got to share all the exciting articles I find on it!

This new article, Solar Power is growing so fast that older energy companies are trying to stop it, is from Vox.com by Brad Plumer. Despite the overly-dramatic headline, his message reads true: solar is soon going to be a highly competitive form of energy, so much so that it could really threaten typical gas and oil utility companies. In fact, Plumer states that solar popularity dramatically increases, utility profits may decrease as much as 41%.

While solar still contributes only a miniscule portion of America's power, companies like SolarCity are making it easier than ever to install pannels with their no-downpayment policy. Big upfront costs used to scare the average consumer away, but paying monthly increments make solar so affordable that it becomes a viable option for everyone. Even now, every four minutes a new solar setup is installed  in America. 

Of course, to save their own skins, utility companies are trying to retract or downgrade solar subsidies. Other groups are proposing monthly fees for residents with solar--some upwards of $50! But the pro-solar stance is strong and backed by groups like TUSK (Tell Utilities Solar Won't Be Killed) and, surprisingly, an offshoot of the Tea Party that focuses on environmental issues.

Who will win out? Will solar be able to surge ahead, undisturbed by this political whiplash? Read the full article here and stay tuned for more updates!

The Aral Sea: A Story of Despair and Redemption

As unfortunate as it is true, the media is full of stories of how prominent environmental features have been squandered due to the greed of modern day society. Take, for instance, the state of rivers in dense urban areas. China's Yangtze, Han, and Jianhe Rivers are but a few examples of how poor waste management, chemical runoff, and disregard for natural resources can leave water sources polluted, poisonous, and colored in a very unnatural palette. 

Pollution of Biblical proportions in the Jianhe, Credit

However, not every tale of environmental woe ends so disturbingly; some even seem to have a happy(-ish) ending. The case is such for a body of water that sits on the boarder of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, a once mighty sea called the Aral.

The Aral Sea was once the the fourth largest landlocked body of water in the world at 26,000 square miles. It was a mecca of fishing and hosted over 20 towns and villages whose people prospered in their trade. However, in the early1960's the Soviet Union diverted water from its main influx--the Amu Darya--to support the irrigation of water-heavy agriculture in the famously arid surrounding steppes.

By the 1980's, the sea had such a reduced influx of fresh water that it retreated from its banks and dried up significantly, to the point where a once great body of water  has become three distinct bodies, one of which is threatening to dry completely this year. As evaporation continued the sea become so saline that the fishery collapsed, and with it disappeared 24 species of endemic fish.

The Aral Sea in 1989 (left) and 2008, Credit

When the fishery vanished, so did the livelihoods of thousands of fishermen, cannery workers, and railroad workers. The Aral shrank to about half its size by 1985, and with it shrank the populations that once lined its shores. Those that decided to stay behind on the now arid plains found themselves without food or work in a land turned severe without the Aral there to buffer temperatures. Pesticides left in the soil from Soviet Agricultural runoff caused cancer and respiratory disease, and without fish, protein deficiency ran rampant and infant mortality increased.

Fishing vessels left in the sand, Credit

After Kazakhstan became independent in 1991, efforts to restore the Aral began. A dam was constructed to isolate the Southern basin from the North Sea, with the hopes that the trickle coming in from the Syr Darya would restore the North Aral. And slowly, it did. By 2005, a permanent eight-mile dam was constructed in its place, and this raised the North Aral by about 13 feet more, which lowered the levels of salinity and allowed fish to repopulate. In only about eight months, the North Aral grew by 20%. Native plants and birds returned as well, a good omen for any restoration.

Some fishing operations have resumed in the north, though on a much smaller scale than in the 1960s. The canneries are reopening and once-residents are returning to begin a new. However, while the North Aral has been somewhat of a success story, the same cannot be said for the South Aral. Much and more has been lost, and perhaps will never fill again.

While progress may be slow, it is clearly there. Locals hope that with help from the Kazakh government, World Bank, and expert scientists, the Aral may one day refill and flourish beyond any past prosperity.

Adapted from [Aral Sea Recovery?]