Cool green gadget - LightCap 200/300 solar caps

This is a really cool gadget!  It’s a solar LED light that is made to fit on a standard 2″ water bottle such as a Nelgene.  What’s really cool about it is that when you have water in the bottle, water reflects the LED light and makes the bottle acting like a latern!  Check out more pictures and all features about LightCap 200 here!  It costs ~ $25 bucks, comes with light sensor so it turns off automatically during the day time!  Or check out the new design LightCap 300 - the batteries lasts 15 hours!

I think i’ve gotta buy it…..

Tool for thought - stapleless stapler to fight climate change

Staples are such little things in our life but they are every where.  We use them at home, at work, and they are also used extensively in construction.   We barely think about them and rarely ever recycle them…  They may be small but their (carbon) problem is that the staples are made of zinc coat on steel and therefore has carbon associated with them.  According to the American Iron and Steel Institute, 1.14 tonnes of CO2 is emitted per tonne of steel produced.  A typical staple for our home/office stapler is around 33mg, and a typical staple for construction staple is probably around 1g (no reference, i should weigh one).  Let’s just use home/office stapler as an example and ignore the carbon footprint of the zinc coat on staples.  Each staple came with a 36.1mg CO2-equivalent.  I probably use a stapler at least once a week.  Assume that 70% of the Canadian population uses staplers and we all try to use one less staple each week, then T this is equivalent to 4.4 44 tonnes of CO2-equivalent saved per year, similar to CO2 emitted if I one flies for 4 40 hours  or driving 10,000km 100,000km in a compact car.  That’s pretty significant eh?  

I have been looking for an alternative of using staples but current “staple-less” staplers on the market are only good for less than 10pages of document, like these demonstrated on this blog dedicated for stapleless staplers.  Another alternative for larger document is to use binders or binder clips. I try to eliminate the use of staplers as much as i can, but I have yet purchased a  stapleless stapler so that I have been loosing pages =p.  Any other suggestion?  

Finally - I have been staple free for 10 days.

Reducing climate change impacts one piece of meat at a time

I grew up in a Taoist society; even though I never understood the religion that well and was never really “religious”.  For a child, it was just part of our culture - we pray so many times a year, especially during Gods’ birthdays, and we (try to) eat vegetarian food on 1st and 15th of each lunar month.  Why two days a month?  I think it’s because most people can’t give up meat and just be a vegetarian…  But being a vegetarian is a good thing, for Taoist it’s to spare lives (of animals).  Now, there’re other reasons to reduce meat consumption!  It’s hard to go cold turkey with meat, but it is not that hard to reduce meat intake - one meal at a time.  Like Earth Hour, it could be something that we participate once a year to once every few months to once a month to more often!  

This is a great article by  Kathy Freston on Huffington Post with very interesting stats about the startling effects of going vegetarian for Just One Day. The stats are for US only.  I assume that the stats is based on the total population of approximately 300 Million.  Canada has roughly 10% of the US population, so it’s easy to do the math:

If everyone went vegetarian just for one day, the U.S. would save:

• 100 billion gallons of water, enough to supply all the homes in New England for almost 4 months;
• 1.5 billion pounds of crops otherwise fed to livestock, enough to feed the state of New Mexico for more than a year;
• 70 million gallons of gas — enough to fuel all the cars of Canada and Mexico combined with plenty to spare;
• 3 million acres of land, an area more than twice the size of Delaware;
• 33 tons of antibiotics.

If everyone went vegetarian just for one day, the U.S. would prevent:

• Greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to 1.2 million tons of CO2, as much as produced by all of France;
• 3 million tons of soil erosion and $70 million in resulting economic damages;
• 4.5 million tons of animal excrement;
• Almost 7 tons of ammonia emissions, a major air pollutant.

There’re more stats on the original article:

• if every American skipped one meal of chicken per week and substituted vegetarian foods instead, the CO2 equivalent savings would be the same as taking more than half a million cars off of U.S. roads; and
•  switching from standard American diet to a vegan diet is more effective in the fight against global warming than switching from a standard American car to a hybrid.

I propose to establish “vegetarian days” like the Taoists to reflect on our behaviour to the earth and reduce climate change impacts one meal at a time.  What do you say?

Have you heard of ePost.ca for electronic bill delivery?

epost.ca is a service provided by Canada Post.  It’s an awesome tool to reduce paper waste and have your bills mailed to you electronically.  These are some benifits:

I’ve been using it since 2005 and I really love it.  Unfortunately, it hasn’t improved much since 2005, and I still have to get paper bills pr sign up for electronic bills separately for many of my services (BC Hydro, AMEX, MBNA Master Cards, to name a few).  I think Canada Post needs to do more marketing on it!  I would like to know how much paper/energy can be saved using this initiative it is done better!

Go check out www.epost.ca i’m sure you can find one or two of your bills that can be sent to you electronically…  and let’s think of how can we get Canada Post to spend more money on this program and get more mailers!!

Green Index (grndx) by the Treehugger

I Came across the green index (grndx) that was prepared by the Treehunger and people from Daylife.  It’s a ranking tool that tracks mentions of certain key green phrases in the media.  It compares to the numbers tracked in the previous week and have an indicator showing whether the key green phrase has gained or lose ground in the media.  

I thought it’s fun, for sure!  I’m not sure how extensive the tracking strategy is, but i wouldn’t be suprised if the number per week jumps up to tens of thousands if it had included blogs or international news media.  Perhaps it can be combined with Google alert??

Guess what’s the highest 3 ranked terminologies this week?

1. solar
2. climate change
3. gloal warming