There were a number of posts I liked on Treehugger today, ranging from really cool to mildly worthy of a read. Here they are:
Fair-trade-organic coffee is old hat, if we consider what Cameron’s Coffee does. Based in Port Perry, Ontario, pretty much their entire business is run using the greenest means possible. They use solar, biodiesel, “bullfrog power”, they recycle their grounds, they use vegetable ink and biodegradable cups. Reading about them makes me feel like my own F-T-O (is that an understandble acronym?) coffeeshop is not doing all it could…
Fleming College in Canada has a Sustainable Building Design and Construction course. That’s cool, but what drew my attention was the blackboard-scrawled quote that treehugger posted from the course: “The way to subvert the dominant paradigm is to have more fun than they do and make sure they know it.” I’m not sure that’s a foolproof strategy, but having fun is good. The effort to apply that concept surely would only result in good.
There’s a new eco-mag, this one aimed at “sophisticated consumers”. It’s called Verdant.
Researchers at the University of Minnesota have assessed the energy efficiency and environmental impact of the entire lifecycle of both soybean-based biodiesel and corn-based ethanol. This is really cool, read more here. Basically, neither biodiesel or ethanol as they are now are good enough to replace gasoline, but they’re a good step. I can just feel all our green scientist friends working on ways to make better fuel. Change for the better will come, in time.
Also, the UK’s outlawing standby buttons on electronics, Prism Technologies is manufacturing a new kind of solar cell using holograms that is 25% more efficient than conventional PVs, and there’s a link to a great tutorial on water efficiency in the home from Inhabit.