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Archive for category the environment

The Cost of Living in Perspective ‘Groceries’

Jan 5

Posted by the editor in the environment, the health, the ingredients, the products | No Comments

There has been many an argument about the cost of living in Malta, and how high food prices are these days, I’ve heard the comments on the situation, that we are now paying the lowest we have ever paid for food in history, now these statements can ring true when you take in certain factors, such as cost of living in comparison to years ago when milk, bread, and other staples were half the price as it is now.

The reality of the situation is that it has gotten cheaper

The reality of the situation is that it has gotten cheaper.  The difference is that we have a wider variety now which is due to certain business factors, such as ’supply and demand’, and the dreaded ‘competition’. If we went and purchased ‘like for like’ as we bought 20 years ago, you would probably notice a reduction in the cost, without exaggerating at how cheap things used to be, as we are in a habit of making up crap such as “my weekly shopping only cost Lm1 back then”.

My point is that the variety is there because retailers can no longer compete on a carton of milk, or a loaf of bread, in fact they can no longer compete on a frozen pizza Margherita, having to offer you a different product to hide their margin.  You can compare a frozen pizza funghi from Goodfellas to the same pizza from McCains, but can you compare a frozen Pizza funghi to a Frozen Pizza Funghi ‘Stone Baked’ like for like? probably not, justifying a price hike on the ’stone baked’ pizza.

This is nothing to complain about, as retailers constantly have to innovate to compete, and to offer more ‘value’ to you the consumer.  This is why we find it easy to say that our weekly shopping was expensive, look at that ‘Austrian bourbon and Honey Glazed canned ham’ that you really had to have because it looked so tasty, or that ready made pizza that costs a quarter of the price to make it yourself.  Being more intelligent about your shopping habits, is not about being frugal, it’s about budgeting yourself.  I’ve seen so many people with deep cupboards containing remnants of that luxury porcini whole wheat pasta that “I’m going to make someday, as soon as I find a good recipe to make it with”.

To get to my second point about groceries and the cost of living, let’s get things into perspective.  The above picture is a pile of groceries that I picked up from the local grocer in Sliema.  This is NOT my weekly shopping, or my monthly shopping, these are just a few things to throw into soups, pastas, pies and whatever floats my boat that week.  Even though this won’t be all the ingredients I require, it’s just an example.  Stuff for sandwiches, pastas, and some fruit in the evening, I can squeeze out around 3-4 dinners out of all of this; with a good imagination, and if I really planned it, I could squeeze out a weeks worth.  The value… 11.38 Euro (Lm4.89)  I’m not breaking the bank, nor am I starving myself, and I’m certainly not a gourmet chef that can turn an onion into a soup that would wow patrons across europe.  I’m just giving you food for thought (pardon the pun).

Looking at this picture, one thing comes to mind, “@%&£!!! I forgot the eggs again”.

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Reducing carbon, and health problems in the 3rd world

Dec 17

Posted by the editor in the environment, the health, the politics | No Comments

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The Problem

In the late 1980’s, medical teams reported an alarming number of children being treated for burns and respiratory problems. A number of concerned volunteers found the problem emanated from the way people cooked.

Most of the poor continue to cook over indoor fires located on the floors of unventilated homes. These fires cause debilitating burns, skin and eye problems.

Excessive smoke in homes results in respiratory problems that, according to the World Health Organization, are the leading cause of death in children under the age of five. Testing of carbon monoxide, a deadly toxin, found readings in the homes to be as much as twice the level considered dangerous.

These inefficient open fires also result in massive deforestation.

The Solution

After an exhaustive investigation of the cultural and technological factors surrounding open fires, the new, fuel-efficient Ecocina stove was developed by StoveTeam International. It is economical to build and operate, saving up to 60% of the wood currently used while also reducing particulate matter and carbon output by 70%.

Visit their site and donate today

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King of the Environment?

Nov 12

Posted by the editor in the environment, the products | 1 Comment

I’m always looking at how I can cut my ‘landfill’ product use, and it always, as with anybody’s opinion starts with the household consumables.  What am I using and how can it be greener?

What am I using and how can it be greener?

I’ve been using King of Shaves for a number of years now, this is due to a number of factors that would boggle the mind of the marketing people responsible.  I originally picked up my first tube primarily because it looked cool, and I had seen it in FHM a few times; the second reason was that I’m the kind of guy that loves to root for the underdog, I think they make better products than the big boys, and you can recognise the passion that they put behind their products.  This doesn’t account for every company and product that doesn’t have a large market share, but I’m sure you can recognise the ones I’m talking about.

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Only recently I realised that King of Shaves have been doing something right, without actually saying it.  They’ve been using a simple pure plastic container that is easily recyclable for years.  This is unlike Gillette and the rest of the shaving accessory market, that have been putting out more and more complicated dispensers over the years.  Now as an environmentalist that has some idea of how recycling works, I know that it is far easier to recycle an item that contains one type of plastic, or even 2 that are easily separated.  The majority of recycling facilities across the globe can only recycle a few types of plastic, and if they are products with a metal base, plastic top, and glass insert, this gets chucked away due to the impossibilities of dismantling these items on the fly, to their respected destinations.

Now King of shaves is a good product, it’s one of the few shaving gels that do not cause me to break out, or burn my skin.  I still use a gillette razor, but given the next opportunity to switch, I think I’ll look into the new razor from King of Shaves, that is supposed to last longer.

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Wrapping Solar Cells around an Optical Fiber

Oct 30

Posted by the editor in the environment, the technology | No Comments

By Katherine Bourzac for Technology Review

Dye-sensitized solar cells are flexible and cheap to make, but they tend to be inefficient at converting light into electricity. One way to boost the performance of any solar cell is to increase the surface area available to incoming light. So a group of researchers at Georgia Tech has made dye-sensitized solar cells with a much higher effective surface area by wrapping the cells around optical fibers. These fiber solar cells are six times more efficient than a zinc oxide solar cell with the same surface area, and if they can be built using cheap polymer fibers, they shouldn’t be significantly more expensive to make.

Solar on fiber: An optical fiber (left) is covered in dye-coated zinc-oxide nanowires (closeup, right). Both images were made using a scanning electron microscope. Credit: Angewandte Chemie

The advantage of a fiber-optic solar-cell system over a planar one is that light bounces around inside an optical fiber as it travels along its length, providing more opportunities to interact with the solar cell on its inner surface and producing more current. “For a given real estate, the total area of the cell is higher, and increased surface area means improved light harvesting and more energy,” says Max Shtein, an assistant professor of materials science and engineering at the University of Michigan who was not involved with the research.

Fiber-optic solar cells could also be used in ways that aren’t possible currently. Zhong Lin Wang, professor of materials science and engineering at Georgia Tech, says fiber solar cells would take up less roof area than planar cells because long lengths of the fibers could be nestled into the walls of a house like electrical wiring.

Dye-sensitized solar cells use dye molecules to absorb light and generate electrons. The Georgia Tech group first removes the cladding from optical fibers and then grows zinc-oxide nanowires along their surface, like bristles on a pipe cleaner. Next, the fibers are treated with dye molecules, which the zinc-oxide structures absorb. The advantage of coating nanowires, rather than a smooth surface, with the dye is that the wires collectively have a very large surface area. The more dye molecules there are over a given area of such a cell, the more light it can absorb, says Wang. The dye-coated fibers are then surrounded by an electrolyte and a metal film that carries electrons off the device. The work is described online in the journal Angewandte Chemie International Edition.

“The question is, can you absorb all the light using a small amount of materials?”

“The question is, can you absorb all the light using a small amount of materials?” says Yi Cui, assistant professor of materials science at Stanford University. Building a nanostructured cell on an optical fiber provides a way to do this by increasing both the surface area covered by the dye and the effective path length of the light, he says. The longer a photon travels through a solar cell, the more opportunities it has to interact and generate an electron.

One potential stumbling block for fiber cells is getting enough light inside them in the first place. Wang’s devices only collect light at their tips, so to get enough light into such a solar cell without having to track the sun, smaller fibers might be bundled together. Cui says the tips of the fibers could be made of materials that are very effective at directing light into the fiber. Another way to overcome this problem is to build fiber cells that can absorb light along their entire length, not just at the tips–which Michigan’s Shtein is working on. This is tricky, because it means the cells’ coatings need to be both electrically conductive and transparent, an unusual combination.

However, Shtein says that fibers that absorb light from the sides offer “an interesting architecture for light capture, because you can distribute the fibers in space in a way that helps you capture more photons more effectively than you can in a planar device.” The shallower the angle at which light hits a planar cell, the more light reflects off its surface. But the light reflecting off the curved surface of a fiber at a shallow angle will hit an adjacent fiber. These cells could be designed so that it’s not necessary to install them with sun-tracking systems, and they would work on cloudy days when the light is diffuse, Shtein says.

Wang says the next step is to try different materials. So far, he has built the cells on quartz optical fibers, which are relatively expensive. Next he plans to try making the cells using cheaper polymer fibers.

via Technology Review: Wrapping Solar Cells around an Optical Fiber.

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Sell-by dates past their sell-by date?

Oct 21

Posted by the editor in the environment, the health, the ingredients, the politics, the products | No Comments

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As part of the publicity surrounding yesterday’s launch of the DEFRA report and public consultation on food security, Hilary Benn suprised (and no doubt outraged) a lot of people by suggesting that shoppers should ignore “best before” dates on food to reduce the amount thrown away,

Checking the original DEFRA announcement (July) on its food labelling review (being conducted with the FSA and WRAP), these statistics caught my attention in particular:

“consumers often lack confidence in date labelling: 53% of consumers would never eat fresh fruit and vegetables past the “best before” date; 56% would never eat bread and cakes past the “best before” date; and almost 10% leave a day’s ‘buffer’ before any date. 21% would never “take a risk” with any food close to its date, even if it appeared fine.”

It appears that a lot of us get confused between best-before dates, use-by dates, sell-by dates and display-until dates. And so we throw away food, which goes into landfill and generates harmful methane, and also puts pressure on farmers to produce more than is actually required (and that’s before you start taking over-eating into consideration).

With the world looking ahead to serious food security issues created by climate change and population explosion, the last thing we need is needless waste increasing the amount our food producers need to provide.

“Use by” dates indicate time during which food is safe to eat. “Best before” dates indicate a period in which food is of optimum quality and after which it is may still perfectly edible but may decline in quality. These are mandated by law. Sell-by and Display-until are stock control dates used by retailers and are not mandated by law.

So should the Government insist on labelling changes? Not according to Stephen Robertson of the British Retail Consortium, who said “Scrapping best-before dates won’t reduce food waste. Customer education will.”

via Sell-by dates past their sell-by date? by VegBox Recipes – ooffoo.com .

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2010 Olympic Medals Are Made From Old Electronics

Oct 19

Posted by the editor in the environment | No Comments

The winning designs for Vancouver’s 2010 Olympic medals have been revealed: the gold, silver, and bronze medals will all be made from melted-down electronics.

Canadian designer Corrine Hunt’s medals are laser-etched, so no two are the same. The orca-whale themed pieces also feature an undulating design meant to invoke the Vancouver landscape.

The Vancouver Olympics made a smart choice in deciding to use precious metals from old electronics. By salvaging medal materials from old products, the Olympic committee is saving perfectly good gold, silver, and bronze from ending up in landfills. Because it makes no sense to mine for new gold when a single junked PC has more of the stuff in it than 17 tons of ore. And if the medals are promoted well, they could bring awareness to the cause of recycled scrap. With the entire world watching what happens at the Olympic games, there is no better venue to promote such an important–and easy-to-implement–solution to electronics recycling

via 2010 Olympic Medals Are Made From Old Electronics | Sustainability | Fast Company.

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Next Stop: Ultracapacitor Buses

Oct 19

Posted by the editor in the cars, the environment, the technology | No Comments

Municipal transit agencies have tried to reduce the carbon footprint of their bus fleets using a range of options over the years, from biofuels and hydrogen to batteries and hybrid-electric diesel. Now a Chinese company and its U.S. partner say that ultracapacitors could offer the greenest and most economical way of powering inner-city buses.

Fast charger: A bus that runs entirely on ultracapacitors charges up at a bus stop in Shanghai. The buses can only travel three to five miles between charges, but the ultracapacitors allow for fast recharging at designated bus stops. Credit: Sinautec Automobile Technologies

Fast charger: A bus that runs entirely on ultracapacitors charges up at a bus stop in Shanghai. The buses can only travel three to five miles between charges, but the ultracapacitors allow for fast recharging at designated bus stops. Credit: Sinautec Automobile Technologies

There’s just one catch: the best ultracapacitors can only store about 5 percent of the energy that lithium-ion batteries hold, limiting them to a couple of miles per charge. This makes them ineffective as an energy storage medium for passenger vehicles. But what ultracapacitors lack in range they make up in their ability to rapidly charge and discharge. So in vehicles that have to stop frequently and predictably as part of normal operation, energy storage based exclusively on ultracapacitors begins to make sense.

Sinautec Automobile Technologies, based in Arlington, VA, and its Chinese partner, Shanghai Aowei Technology Development Company, have spent the past three years demonstrating the approach with 17 municipal buses on the outskirts of Shanghai. On October 21, the two companies will offer a one-day demonstration at American University in Washington, DC, where an 11-seat minibus running on ultracapacitors will spend the day shuttling people around campus.

The trick is to turn some bus stops along the route into charge stations, says Dan Ye, executive director of Sinautec. Unlike a conventional trolley bus that has to continually touch an overhead power line, Sinautec’s ultracapacitor buses take big sips of electricity every two or three miles at designated charging stations, which double as bus stops. When at these stations, a collector on the top of the bus rises a few feet and touches an overhead charging line. Within a couple of minutes, the ultracapacitor banks stored under the bus seats are fully charged.

“It’s a brilliant concept,” says ultracapacitor expert Joel Schindall, professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT. “It’s not well suited for electric-only cars, but it is practical to stop a bus every few city blocks.”

The buses can also capture energy from braking, and the company says that recharging stations can be equipped with solar panels (although this is mainly to further the perception that the vehicles have a lower carbon footprint). Ye says the buses use 40 percent less electricity compared to an electric trolley bus, mainly because they’re lighter and have the regenerative braking benefits. They’re also competitive with conventional buses based on fuel savings over the vehicle’s 12-year life, based on current oil and electricity prices. Sinautec estimates that one of its buses has one-tenth the energy cost of a diesel bus and can achieve lifetime fuel savings of $200,000.

“The ultracapacitor bus is also cheaper than lithium-ion battery buses,” says Ye. “We used the Olympics (lithium-ion) bus as a model and found ours about 40 percent less expensive with a far superior reliability rating.” Ye adds that the environmental benefits are compelling. “Even if you use the dirtiest coal plant on the planet, it generates a third of the carbon dioxide of diesel when used to charge an ultracapacitor.”

Buses in the Shanghai pilot are made by Germantown, TN-based Foton America Bus Co, which uses ultracapacitors manufactured by Shanghai Aowei. The ultracapacitors are made of activated carbon and have an energy density of six watt-hours per kilogram. (For comparison, a high-performance lithium-ion battery can achieve 200 watt-hours per kilogram.) Clifford Clare, chief executive of Foton America, says another 60 buses will be delivered early next year with ultracapacitors that supply 10 watt-hours per kilogram.

“The ones in Shanghai right now have been on the road for three years without incident, without failure whatsoever, which in the bus industry is phenomenal,” says Clare, who adds that his company is in talks with New York City, Chicago, and some towns in Florida about trialing the buses. “It will end up being a third generation of the product, which will give 20 miles [of range per charge] or better.”

Sinautec is also in discussions with MIT’s Schindall about developing ultracapacitors of higher energy density using vertically aligned carbon nanotube structures that give the devices more surface area for holding a charge.

“So far we’re able to get twice the energy density of an existing ultracapacitor, but that’s not enough,” says Schindall. “We’re trying to get about five times.” Schindall says that this would create an ultracapacitor with one-quarter of the energy density of a lithium-ion battery.

“Right now the [Foton] buses can only go every other stop, a range of about 5 or 10 city blocks, and that’s okay for some routes, but here in the Boston area that would be too far [between charging spots],” Schindall adds. “If they could double that, or even quadruple that, it would increase by an order of magnitude the numbers of routes for which it could be a technical solution.”

There are some other important limitations. The 41-passenger buses, based on current technology, have a maximum speed of just 30 miles per hour, lose 35 percent of their range when air conditioning is turned on, and have weak acceleration. But even under these conditions, they could still prove practical for municipal, campus, airport, and tourist buses.

We want to replace a large portion of the diesel fleet in the United States

“We want to replace a large portion of the diesel fleet in the United States,” says Ye. “We do need to have charging stations throughout various points of the network, but as energy density goes up, the number of stations will go down.”

via Technology Review: Next Stop: Ultracapacitor Buses.

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Hikers: eat bananas – but take your skins home

Sep 24

Posted by admin in the environment | No Comments

Don't drop it: a banana skin. Photograph: Getty Images/Anna Yu

I have climbed Ladhar Bheinn, one of Scotland’s finest peaks. The view was glorious. And I threw a banana skin at it. I have stood on the magnificent Aonach Eagach ridge and gazed down on Loch Achtriochtan. And I threw a banana skin at that, too.

In fact, there are few mountains in Scotland I haven’t thrown a banana skin on. Forget all those energy drinks: nothing gets you up a ben like a banana. What’s more, they come in handy biodegradable wrappers. So I’m practically doing the mountain a favour, feeding the eco-cycle of nature.

But apparently I’m not. The John Muir Trust, which protects many of Scotland’s wild places, has just given banana-skin chuckers a stern ticking off. The trust estimates that there are now 1,000 banana skins strewn across Ben Nevis. Walkers, it seems, don’t realise that it takes ages for a banana skin to degrade: two years, in fact.

This comes as a shock. I have tutted my way round the litter-strewn shores of Loch Lomond and chased Mars Bars wrappers grabbed by the wind. Now I find that I am part of a “significant minority, who are littering and spoiling the experience for everyone else”.

And it gets worse. According to Keep Scotland Beautiful, orange peel, another of my happily jettisoned waste products, is pretty bad too. Still, at least I’ve never left a glass bottle. They last 1 million years, apparently – though I wonder how they know.

A load of rot: how long your litter takes to biodegrade

  • Paper bag – 1 month
  • Apple core – 8 weeks
  • Orange peel and banana skins – 2 years
  • Cigarette end – 18 months to 500 years
  • Plastic bag – 10 to 20 years
  • A plastic bottle – 450 years
  • Chewing gum – 1 million years

From Keep Britain Tidy (keepbritaintidy,org)

via Hikers: eat bananas – but take your skins home | Environment | The Guardian .

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Douwe Egberts GREEN packaging

Sep 24

Posted by the editor in the environment, the products | No Comments

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We’ve been using Douwe Egberts instant range of coffee at home for a number of years now, this is for a number of reasons, primarily because it tastes better than other coffees on the market, but then again I don’t fall in the category that believes that Italian coffee is the best in the world, I prefer filtered (percolated) coffee, but then again that’s an argument for another article, because don’t get me started on the size of the handle that a coffee cup should have.

Douwe and Egberts Instant coffee range come in these re-usable jars that my wife and I wash and store things in, from spare change to spices, we use them for everything.  In fact I don’t think we’ve thrown a single jar out since we started buying them; the times when we bought another brand of instant coffee left us no choice but to throw them into the recycling bin.  Why aren’t we using past sauce jars with metal lids as a reusable jar for our kitchen?  The Douwe Egbert jars just look so much better, just like something out of an old apothecary; and you can decorate them with whatever label you want.

The Douwe Egbert jars just look so much better, just like something out of an old apothecary

As a few regulars in our fridge, we grate parmesan and store them in the jars, as well as sauces, and minced garlic.  Best of all, we chuck them in the dishwasher with no problems.  We did find that if you do chuck them in the dishwasher, remove the plastic liner on the cap, as water always seems to collect in the glass top, so chuck this plastic stopper liner into the cutlery holder of the Dishwasher so it doesn’t run amok in the machine.

For sustainability sake, and product packaging that I would gladly re-use again and again, I give Douwe Egberts 10 out of 10 for packaging.  If only other brands would follow suit..

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The Age of Stupid

Sep 22

Posted by the editor in the environment, the politics | No Comments

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Just had the opportunity to see the Age of Stupid premier. This is a fantastic approach to creating a main stream media effort in preparation to the Copenhagen Climate Summit this December. Global Warming is a huge problem, and descriptive and alarming as this movie is, it scared the crap out of my wife.  With any luck it will scare enough people into making a real change in their lives.

As a quick synopsis, please consider the mistakes we’ve done over the past 50 years, how stupid were we as a society to make these mistakes. Now this film is based in the future, looking back, and seeing the mistakes we’re making right now. You want to shake your head and say… we’re stupid.

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