BY JESS ZIMMERMAN

The kitchen of Philips Design’s “Microbial Home” turns food waste into compost and cooking gas. Organic waste gets thrown in a “bio-digester,” where specialized bacteria processes it into methane gas to fuel the range. Then the remaining solid matter is turned into compost. So the peelings from a potato might provide the heat to cook the potato and the fertilizer to grow more potatoes.

Philips calls it “an integrated cyclical ecosystem where each function’s output is another’s input.” You could also call it cradle-to-grave-to-cradle food production. And it’s an elegant, nature-inspired way of making home appliances sustainable.

The Microbial Home has other reasons you never need to leave your kitchen:

The connected “larder” includes a suspended vegetable garden and a terra cotta evaporative cooling unit built into the table, providing an alternative to energy-intensive refrigeration. Other elements of the Microbial Home include a beehive, a light powered by bioluminescent bacteria, and yes, a squatting toilet that captures “excreta” for the methane digester. There’s even a hand-cranked contraption for recycling plastic.

Too bad this is all theoretical, and likely to remain that way for the foreseeable future, because it’s a really neat idea. It’s not just that it would save energy and monetary spending on home utilities — Americans also waste a TON of food, though granted mostly not in the form of potato peelings. It’d be nice to have a way to harness that and turn it into a benefit.

BY JESS ZIMMERMAN

This 90-foot bridge in Wales Scotland (whoops, the company is Welsh, not the bridge) is Europe’s first to be made entirely out of recycled plastic, not to mention the longest plastic bridge ever built. More than 50 tons of plastic went into making the bridge, which can carry vehicles up to 44 metric tons (heavier than most tractor-trailers).

The bridge’s beams are molded out of a thermoplastic composite made from post-consumer waste. It has a life expectancy of 50 years (with little maintenance since the plastic is so damage-resistant), and when it’s worn out, you can just chuck it in the recycling bin all over again. Vertech, the company that made the bridge materials, calls it a “closed loop product” — fully recycled and fully recyclable.

I’m a huge fan of Patagonia, from the brand’s warm outerwear and comfortable and stylish yoga clothing, to its concern about fair labor practices and its environmental impact.

Not only does Patagonia care about the clothing and gear that it makes, but it also thinks about how it’s made and what happens to it at the end of its useful life. The company wants its products to cause the least harm to the environment possible. Patagonia employees evaluate raw materials, invest in innovative technologies and thoroughly monitor their waste.

When you have a Patagonia product that is finally worn out, you can return it, and the company will recycle it into new fiber or fabric (or repurpose what can’t yet be recycled). Since 2005, when Patagonia launched its Common Threads Initiative, it has taken back 45 tons of clothing for recycling and made 34 tons into new clothes.

“Recycling is what we do when we’re out of options to avoid, repair or reuse the product first. That’s why I am so impressed with Patagonia for starting its Common Threads Initiative with the real solution: Reduce. Don’t buy what we don’t need. Repair: Fix stuff that still has life in it. Reuse: Share. Then, only when you’ve exhausted those options, recycle.”

— Annie Leonard, author of ‘The Story of Stuff’

Patagonia also donates 1% of its sales to support environmental organizations worldwide, funding at the grassroots level in countries and communities where they have people on the ground.

If that’s not enough, here are a few more reasons to love Patagonia. Take a look at some of the new fall styles:

Patagonia Women’s Long-Sleeved Margot Dress

A graceful, contoured organic cotton stretch dress with three-quarter-length sleeves and a V-neck front. Made from 95% organic material.

Girls’ Inoa Jacket

A highly wind- and water-resistant insulated jacket with a polyester shell and toasty, lightweight 150-g high-loft polyester insulation.

Patagonia Men’s Lightweight Organic Crew Socks

These soft, everyday socks made from a comfortable organic cotton/nylon blend have an ultra-soft feel and excellent stretch. Made of 52% organic material.

Monday, October 31, 2011 :: Staff infoZine

Dear EarthTalk: Why don’t more states mandate deposits on beverage bottles as incentives for people to return them? Most bottles I’ve seen only list a few states on them. – Alan Wu, Cary, NC

Westport, CT – infoZine – E/The Environmental Magazine – So-called bottle bills, otherwise known as container recycling laws, mandate that certain types of beverage containers require a small deposit (usually five or ten cents) at checkout beyond the price of the beverage itself. Customers can return the empty containers later and reclaim their nickels and dimes. The idea is to provide a financial incentive for consumers to recycle and to force industry to re-use the raw materials.

According to the Container Recycling Institute (CRI), a California-based non-profit which encourages the collection and recycling of packaging materials (and runs the website BottleBill.org), the benefits of bottle bills include: supplying recyclable materials for a high-demand market; conserving energy, natural resources and landfill space; creating new businesses and green jobs; and reducing waste disposal costs and litter. The 10 U.S. states that currently have container recycling laws recycle at least 70 percent of their bottles and cans; this amounts to a recycling rate 2.5 times higher than in states without bottle bills.

Beverage containers make up a whopping 5.6 percent of the overall U.S. waste stream, so every bottle and can that gets recycled counts toward freeing up landfill space. And CRI reports that beverage containers account for some 20 percent of the greenhouse gas emissions resulting from landfilling municipal solid waste and replacing the wasted products with new ones made from virgin feedstock. So by promoting more recycling, bottle bills indirectly reduce our carbon footprints.

The 10 U.S. states with bottle bills are California, Connecticut, Hawaii, Iowa, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, New York, Oregon and Vermont. Delaware’s legislature repealed its bottle bill after almost three decades on the books last year as the state’s bottle recycling rate had dropped to just 12 percent due to more and more retailers refusing to deal with the hassle of accepting returned containers. In place of its bottle bill, Delaware enacted a $0.04/bottle recycling fee that will help defray the costs of starting up a curbside recycling pickup system to service the entire state.

“We are extremely disappointed they chose to repeal their law, rather than enforce it,” reported CRI’s Susan Collins, adding that the new fee places a burden on consumers only. “Consumers will be subsidizing the producers and that is unfair.” CRI supports “extended producer responsibility” where producers and consumers together pay for the life cycle costs of product packaging.

Beyond Delaware, the main reason bottle bills haven’t caught on is because of opposition to them by the beverage industry, which doesn’t want to bear the costs of recycling and claims that the extra nickel or dime on the initial cost of the beverage is enough to turn potential customers away. The U.S. Public Interest Research Group (USPIRG) found that the beverage industry and its representatives spent about $14 million in campaign contributions aimed at defeating a national bottle bill between 1989 and 1994. Meanwhile, members of a Senate committee who voted against national bottle bill legislation in 1992 received some 75 times more in beverage-industry PAC money than those who voted in favor of the bill.

by David Groves

Many of us remember the first time we were introduced to the blue bin. Depending on where you lived in the late 1980s or 1990s, a curbside recycling program was probably established in your municipality (unless you’re still waiting for one). We separated out our glass, metals, plastics and paper, placed our blue bin on the curb and our obligations toward a sustainable world were satisfied. As long as the plastic water bottle ended up in the recycling bin, our conscience was cleared to consume as many as our paycheck allowed.

Given that the national recycling rate is under 34 percent, it’s clear that many of us don’t bother to recycle at all. Others maintain the attitude that by using the blue bin, we’ve done our environmental deed for the day. This is in part the fault of the green movement of the 80s and 90s, which unintentionally marketed this idea to encourage recycling. And like any first impression, it stuck. To many, municipal recycling programs provide the false sense that we are doing enough. This may have been the case decades ago. Unfortunately, as our world fills up—with both people and the natural resources we’ve transformed—the environmental problems we face require much more than just using the right colored collection bin.

A way to compare apples to apples in the complex world of environmental responsibility is to look at the reduced carbon footprint of recycling versus other energy-saving activities. As a baseline, most communities that have municipal recycling accept glass, aluminum, tin, plastics #1 and #2 and unsoiled paper and cardboard. If one recycles all of that material over the course of a year, his/her carbon footprint will shrink by about one-third of a ton of CO₂.

Yet, there are many other ways to reduce that same amount of carbon emissions:

• take one less flight of 630 miles in a year (e.g. San Francisco to Salt Lake City or Philadelphia to Atlanta)
• drive 900 fewer miles (in an average American car)
• stop eating meat for one meal per day
• turn your thermostat down 2 degrees (F) during the winter months
• limit your purchases of unnecessary items in the first place—like bottled water or canned beverages—regardless of the recyclability of the packaging

Let it be clear: the purpose of this post is not to discourage a single bottle or can from making it into a blue bin. Recycling is immensely important, as it significantly reduces society’s need for virgin raw materials and slows the pace at which refuse collects in our rapidly filling landfills. But it must be understood by anyone who cares about their children’s future that using those blue bins is only one of many tasks that must be undertaken to lessen the impacts of climate change. We cannot use recycling as a crutch for our conscience.

David Roberts is a staff writer for Grist. You can follow his Twitter feed at twitter.com/drgrist.

BY SARAH LASKOW

Chocolate lovers have two decades to consume all the Godiva they can before climate change drinks their milkshake. After that, global warming will cause production to dwindle in current cocoa-producing regions, like Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire, according to a new study by the International Center for Tropical Agriculture.

That doesn’t necessarily mean that humanity will lose chocolate, though. It just might have to come from somewhere else. And the change is really more problematic for cocoa farmers than for chocoholics: Farmers who depend on the bounty of cocoa for their income will need to diversify to heat-resistant crops, according to the study.

We hope that farmers plan ahead so that they continue earning money, but also that farmers in newly minted cocoa regions (mmm, minted cocoa) get on the ball so that there’s no chocolate shortage. It could get ugly.

straight to the source

• Climate Change Could Melt Chocolate Production, Scientific American