Video - The Majestic Plastic Bag - A Mockumentary

19 billion a year in California alone!

Check out Instructables

Reduce Reuse Recycle... see how it is done at Instructables

5 ways you can save Ocean Life

Thanks to Ecointeractive for the heads up on this,

Composter made from recycled pallets

We've been living with our friend Judy in Bermuda. She has been wanting to start growing food again and has been burying her kitchen waste for some time. She has allowed me to start a compost heap in an old wicker laundry basket that the bottom has rotted out of. We got to chatting about expanding the composting operation and I mentioned that she could make a system out of recycled pallets. She thought she might like to buy one of the commercial products.

Off we went to the garden centers to price up plastic composters. The cheapest one was $270. That settled that. On our way home we stopped by the local bottled spirit importer and they gave us 10 like new pallets.

It's built in 3 sections so that as the first section gets full it can be turned into the second. This island is subtropical and produces lots of garden trimmings and leaves. The third section is for the manufacture of leaf mould, an excellent soil conditioner.

The second shot shows that partially filled third section.

The third shot shows the full structure, the box on the table contains my first plantings in Bermuda, some jalapeno peppers I found at the farmers market this morning.

The first shot shows how I wired it together and to the existing fence, also Daisy the cat acting in a supervisory capacity.

The first two sections will get some chicken wire on the inside to help contain the compostables.

Is being green so hard?-By Robb

Over on celsias.com there a thread starting up about the difficulties of "Being Green"
It includes some good points and worth a read. I don't mean to deny that change isn't difficult but I think it needs to be put in context. The degree of change we, in the developed world, need to make are actually pretty minor compared to the level of change demanded of those on the front lines of climate change. I wonder, what do the citizens of Tuvalu think? Here is my post on the topic.

What's so hard about living an intentional life? For me it's simple, "being green" is about using less of anything produced with fossil fuels, being more self sufficient in as many ways possible, and helping others to do the same. It's the difference between being a citizen and being a consumer.

There is a well known mantra I try to live by at all times and I don't find it a hardship, REDUCE, REUSE, RECYCLE, with heavy emphasis on REDUCE.

"Being green" appears much less difficult than being an environmental refugee, starving to death, or drowning, all increasingly likely outcomes for billions of people, even those of us in the developed world, if we continue to consume fossil fuels.

Any action that reduces use of fossil fuel matters, the more the reduction, the more it matters.

For the citizens on the move in India due to the recent unprecedented flooding, those that didn't drown, a massive and immediate lifestyle change is required now. Right Now! No choice in the matter, no pondering how difficult it is, to survive it must be done.

We here in the developed world have the luxury of a continuum of change. It generally isn't forced upon us by calamity, though the citizens of the ninth ward in New Orleans might disagree. For instance, I personally have reduced my flying by over 60% per year in the last two years as I have come to understand it's impacts. Next winter's visit home I hope to be the last time I ever step foot on an airplane. After that I will travel by sea. It took effort, a bit of soul searching, some compromise with my family, and perhaps has been the most "difficult" aspect of my personal continuum of change. I know many people that have already sworn off flying for good, one man I know has not flown in 18 years. Not driving more than once every 2 weeks, not eating fast food more than once a month, not leaving devices on standby, drastically cutting meat eating while drastically increasing my consumption of organic food, changing all my lightbulbs to CFL's, buying only used clothing, growing as much of my own food as possible, staying out of debt to maintain flexibility, the list of actions grows and all are on some sort of continuum.

This is the luxury I have, this is to some extent the luxury I have created. Guilt comes from not doing these things, frustration is eased by understanding that the continuum is a necessary part of transition, and enthusiasm is not "dead of a thousand cuts" rather it flourishes on the life giving blood of a thousand efforts.

We have less than 10 years to get our emissions under control, do we have the luxury of the easy?

Vertical farming w/video - By Robb

If the population continues to grow as predicted, something I don't personally believe is possible, we will have nine billion humans, give or take half a billion, by 2050, mostly in cities. How will we feed them all? It is obvious the current methods of food transport are unsustainable and we would need 10 billion more hectares of farmland to do the job. So would we cut down all the remaining forest, the only effective carbon sequestration we have and are likely to have in the next fifty years, and plow under an area the size of Brazil with all the attendant water pollution, loss of diversity, and global warming effects of current industrial farming? I don't think so. Even if we hold the population at current levels cities need to become sustainable just as a households do. This means local food for one thing, closing the nutrient cycle by recycling waste for another.
I don't tend to favor high tech solutions but this urban farming concept, a 30 story tower that could feed 50,000 people is all organic, provides local food, recycles waste, and provides jobs is attractive. I wonder, could it be retrofitted to appropriately situated towers already in existence? Even if purpose built it would certainly be a better allocation of resources than some multinational headquarters full of computers. Here's a more in depth article on this concept over at Plenty magazine.

Toilet Paper and Carbon Sequestration? - by Robb

We’ve just returned from 2 weeks on the Coast Path in Cornwall. When we backpack we tend to get a bit obsessive about the weight we carry. We both carry a book to read and my practice is to tear out the pages of mine as I finish them and either use them as fire starter or toilet paper. Saves weight, saves resources, and is a sure fire carbon sequestration technology. How so?
First lets look under the seat at toilet paper. The following quote is from the Sustainable Concepts Newsletter http://www.designforward.net


“Toilet paper, that ubiquitous and apparently indispensable component of modern life, is often manufactured by cutting down the world's forests. In Canada, clear-cut logging claims half a million acres of Ontario and Alberta's boreal forests each year with much of the destruction earmarked for virgin paper tissue products. Similar activity is taking place in the Southeastern U.S. Recently, Greenpeace and the Natural Resources Defense Council have started campaigns to educate the public on the environmental impacts of using these kinds of products.

The good news is that all of this industrial pressure for tissue products can be avoided simply by using recycled paper toilet tissue. In fact, if every household in the U.S. replaced just 1 roll of virgin toilet paper with just 1 recycled roll 424,000 trees would be saved!”

Article & Picture © GreenLine Paper
More Info at Kleercut... http://www.kleercut.net/en/

So what is the link to carbon sequestration? While all the business as usual folks go on about clean coal and developing carbon sequestration technology we are literally flushing away the most effective carbon sequestration technology there is, trees.
So please use toilet paper made from recycled content or even better don’t buy it at all, use recycled newspaper or old books and either put it in the bin, burn it in your woodstove, or throw it in your composting toilet. I can’t think of anything better to do with all those old Michael Crichton novels.