my wu-chi blog » Environment

Beauty

ja — Thu, 21 Apr 2011 21:20:44 +0000

Watch. Breathe. Feel. Love. Live.

The Mountain from Terje Sorgjerd on Vimeo.

Hopefully, a sign of things to come

ja — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 05:40:57 +0000

I read an article a while back that I have been meaning to share. It describes how many Coke cans are sold every year and suggests that if they went with a ‘naked’ design, i.e., no paint on the can, then

naked can help to reduce air and water pollution occurred in its coloring process. It also reduces energy and effort to separate toxic color paint from aluminum in recycling process. Huge amount of energy and paint required to manufacture colored cans will be saved. Instead of toxic paint, manufacturers process aluminum with a pressing machine that indicates brand identity on surface.

I am sure that there would also be some energy and pollution savings when the cans get recycled.

You may be wondering how many Coke cans are sold every year? The article looked up some figures from 2007 and came up with almost 25 billion or 25,000,000,000 worldwide. Can you image if Coke, Pepsi, and all of the other cola and beer manufactures went this route how much pollution and energy could be saved?

E-waste

ja — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 06:37:14 +0000

Came across an article tonight about e-waste and what happens to a lot of ‘recycled’ electronics. At the end of the article is a link to a PBS Frontline/World video about e-waste in Ghana and China. I highly suggest you read the article and watch the video.

Ming Boggling, with video

ja — Tue, 19 May 2009 22:02:16 +0000

In an earlier post I talked about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. I came across a serires of videos that a group at VBS.TV put together that details their journey of sailing from California to the garbage patch and talking with researchers/scientists along the way about the patch. The videos give you a much better take on the garbage patch than just looking at an infographic.

There are 12 videos in the series starting with part 1 here. They get to the garbage patch in part 9. Each video is just a few minutes long. Oh, and there is language being used so be careful where you watch them.

Mind Boggling

ja — Sat, 02 May 2009 03:01:55 +0000

So I ran across this image yesterday about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. I have read about this a few other times but this is the first time that I paid attention to the size of the garbage patch. According to the details in the image, the garbage patch is about 1.76 million square kilometers in size.

To give a comparison, the image states that that is about the size of three Spain’s and Portugal’s combined. To give me a better comparison, I looked up the size of states in square kilometers and found that the garbage patch is a little bigger in size than Arizona + New Mexico + California + Texas. Yes all 4 freakin’ states! Another size match would be Alaska + Arizona.

To make matters worse, the garbage is about 10 meters thick throughout the whole patch. This means the garbage is taking up a volume of 17,600 cubic kilometers or 17.6 trillion cubic meters. To put this into perspective, if you would take out all of the water in the Great Lakes in North America and replace it with this garbage, you could fill up Lake Superior, Lake Erie, Lake Ontario and just under half of Lake Michigan-Huron. That is about 77% of the total volume of the Great Lakes!

And this stuff is just floating out there, potentially forever for plastic does not decompose.

I tried to think of some nice way to end this post, but unfortunately, there just isn’t one.

AZ Central Article

ja — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 05:33:23 +0000

AZ Central has an article about ASU, Whole Foods and Nordstroms sending their scraps to a farm in town that turns it into compost. Pretty cool. They need to create a program for all the landscapers and private residents too.

Cool ad

ja — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 21:33:14 +0000

Here is a cool video that came in second in the U@50 AARP video contest.

What was I thinking?

ja — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 03:21:50 +0000

Remember last year, around the time Dennis and Stacey got married, that I heard a story on NPR about working in Antarctica. Remember how I looked into this and did some research. Remember how clueless I was about how cold it would be. Well, if I had gone forward with this, below the fold is a sample video of what life would have been like.

Just 40 years ago

ja — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 03:14:01 +0000

Earthrise

40 years ago this week the iconic picture of ‘Earthrise’ was taken from the first people ‘to lose complete contact with their own planet, not being able to see or radio Earth for the duration of their journey behind the Moon’. There is a good story about this event at The Independent.

Plastic bag tax in Ireland works like a charm

ja — Sun, 03 Feb 2008 05:18:38 +0000

From the article:

In 2002, Ireland passed a tax on plastic bags; customers who want them must now pay 33 cents per bag at the register. There was an advertising awareness campaign. And then something happened that was bigger than the sum of these parts.

Within weeks, plastic bag use dropped 94 percent. Within a year, nearly everyone had bought reusable cloth bags, keeping them in offices and in the backs of cars. Plastic bags were not outlawed, but carrying them became socially unacceptable â€” on a par with wearing a fur coat or not cleaning up after oneâ€™s dog.

If only the US could have the cojones to pull off a campaign like this.

Read the article.