We all know by now that plastic bottles are filling landfills and supposedly drinking bottled water is evil. Of course, drinking Odwalla juices is merely outrageously expensive instead of evil, for reasons that have more to do with perceptions of evil than with the differences between a juice bottle and a water bottle. And of course, we know that a bottle of water, when production and transport and disposal are counted, uses roughly enough petroleum to fill that bottle a quarter of the way to the top (and a bottle of juice?). And finally, we know that the real looming crisis in America (and Australia and many other developed yet arid parts of the world) is not so much energy, but running out of water. So if all that’s old news, what’s the new news? The new news is that Elizabeth Royte has written an entire book about bottled water. If Bottlemania: How Water Went on Sale and Why We Bought It is as good as the New York Times review of it, it’s probably a surprisingly interesting read.

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How many times have we seen this?

I love this picture by Stephen de Sousa which has been going around to BlogTO and Treehugger (where I found it).

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The last couple of days, I’ve been listening to the radio and there has been a lot of reporting on the space shuttle taking a module to the space station: the launch, the arrival of the astronauts, the mission. Every time I hear something like this, I feel cheated. In 1969, when I was six years old and Neil Armstrong made one small step for man, one giant step for mankind, it seemed pretty obvious that we would all be visiting the Moon for vacation by the year 2000. Arthur C. Clarke, the author of Space Odyssey: 2001, said a few years back when we landed the rover on Mars that, back in 1969, he would never have believed that in 2001 we would land a toaster-sized unmanned rover on Mars and consider it a technological and scientific triumph.
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Eighteen dollars per gallon and rising? Could it be that something that bad for the environment is also that expensive? Yep, that’s right baby! That’s what you’ll be paying for water if you drink out of plastic bottles. (more…)

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First some facts. Paper production is the second-largest use of fresh water in the world (presumably after agriculture). Paper production accounts for 11% of all fresh water used. Paper production is the single largest contributor to cutting forest and makes up a huge portion of the volume poured into our landfills. Changing to narrower margins, using .75” instead of 1” as the default, results on average in a savings of 4.7%. In 2004, when Americans used eight billion tons of paper, changing to narrower margins would save 380,000 tons of paper (yes, that’s a lot less than 4.7% but there are many uses of paper that are not affected by changing the margins, such as grocery bags).
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Though it’s over a year old, I just came across a post where Phil Greenspun asks Philip Greenspun’s Weblog » Why can’t we buy a Chinese house at Walmart?
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National Geographic has some interesting news on the Global Warming feedback loop, that is to say that as the climate warms, it promotes the production of methane, which is belched into the atmosphere (in the article, particularly by Siberian lakes that were being studied). Since methane is a greenhouse gas, it causes more warming. How much more warming? During the Cold War, we used to talk about bombing people back to the Stone Age, but in fact it looks like we’ll be gassing ourselves back to the Dinosaur Age as CO2 levels rise to their highest levels in 25 million years. Meanwhile, Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma thinks that global warming is a huge hoax and many think that his pollution bill is an attempt to punish California for it’s recent anti-global warming legislation. Three guess which party he belongs to?

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I was looking over a brochure for decking material (you know that stuff you put on porches instead of floorboards - so old school) by a company called Certainteed. It’s made from a material called EcoTech. Must be friendly, right? You bet it is. This is made, as they brag, with “maple wood flour” and the finest PVC. PVC! Okay, so not only does EcoTech decking contain one of the most toxic materials known, with one of the most damaging manufacturing processes known (short of say, a nuclear fission plant), it also creates one of these completely non-reusable hybrid bio-industrial products that can never be reused or recycled, but goes straight in the ground. This is one of the least eco-friendly products you could imagine, as if the design spec said to create decking that was as harmful as possible. I guess if you spin it enough, you can make people believe anything. Screw them.

Why do I care? Because this just absolutely burns me because I know people who think that this is a responsible product (save trees and last a long time and that’s good, right?). No, lasting a long time is not good when the product is poisonous to produce, use and destroy and by “a long time” you mean 10,000 years. I think this is as deceptive if not more so than the tobacco industry tactics with filter cigarettes. Anyway, so I wrote to Certainteed and asked them to change the product name and I am urging everyone else to do the same.

Contact the sons of bitches (no offense to puppies intended):

• Certainteed’s contact form for consumers
• Certainteed’s contact form for construction professionals

In the comments on the contact form, make a note like this: “As a consumer, I am deeply disappointed that Certainteed has named its ecological irresponsible PVC decking material EcoTech. I consider this deceptive and request that Certainteed change the name or, better yet, change to a product that is in fact eco-friendly.

Read up on PVC:

• PVC: A Health Hazard From Production through Disposal by Paul Goettlich
• Polyvinyl chloride - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
• PVC: Recycling Killer, Public Health Menace

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Every so often I come across a book that makes it onto my “must read” list. It’s been a while, but William McDonough and Michael Braungart’s Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the way we make things is one of those books. For people unfamiliar with McDonough’s work, he is an environmentalist, architect and designer who has designed a factory for Herman Miller, is designing housing in China, and has consulted with Ford, Nike, Dell and others. He has also designed products like eco-friendly textiles and McDonough wants us to fundamentally rethink the way we make things and what we think it means to be environmentally responsible.
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According to the latest buzz, the future of American energy lies with biofuels like ethanol and biodiesel. According to the Archer Daniels Midlands (ADM) commercial, somewhere in Kansas a farmer is rising at 5:00am to plant the corn that ADM will turn into ethanol and the soy that they will turn into biodiesel that will save the environment and get us out of Iraq. Biofuels can be produced domestically and they are net carbon zero fuels, meaning that they sequester as much CO2 during production as they give off when burned, so they don’t make a net contribution to greenhouse gasses. In addition, they burn relatively cleanly so they should have a postive impact on air quality. In the case of biodiesel, furthermore, it can be made from cast off vegetable oil, so the jillions of gallons of deep fry oil from MacDonald’s can find a second life powering Willie Nelson’s bus rather than just going into the waste stream. Reduce, reuse and recycle, right? What’s not to love? Several things actually.
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