Knowing is half the battle.

Zerofootprint has partnered with the city of Toronto to come up with a nifty site that allows you to compute your personal carbon foot print. They even have an area geared specifically for kids.

[Read more]

Podcast with Vancouver Film Studios

Vancouver Film Studios has become the first film and TV production studio in Canada to go carbon neutral.

The company spent a year preparing to meet the carbon neutral challenge, and has implemented a number of new process to reduce their carbon footprint, as well as purchasing carbon offsets.

[Read more]

Eco Friendly Ipod Cases

It’s really great to see local companies contributing interesting new products that are both stylish and good for the environment.

Ipods are everywhere, and a Vancouver company, Imoeba, has unveiled a new line of cases for the Nano and the 80 or 160 gig iPod. [Read more]

Nash Trash Talking?

As if I needed another reason to love Steve Nash. He will now be wearing the Nike Trash Talk, their new environmentally-crafted-shoe. The first game test was on Valentine’s night in the Phoenix game against the Dallas Mavericks (his old team).

[Read more]

Tap into a good idea.

Water is a valuable commodity. Here on the West Coast drinkable water is easy to a take for granted. That is why this New York pay for your tap water initiative caught my eye. Beginning Sunday, March 16 through Saturday, March 22, over 300 New York based restaurants will invite their customers to donate a minimum of $1 for the tap water they would normally get for free. [Read more]

Grow Grain in Your Garden

If you’re lucky enough to have a garden, you know how rewarding it is to have fresh grown food on the table.  As a kid, I spent the summer on my grandparent’s farm and huge gardens were the norm. [Read more]

Trash Based Bio Fuels

Aron recently blogged about the issue related to corn biofuels. Meanwhile, BlueFire Ethanol, a company based in California, sees promise in converting some trash into usable fuels.

The remains of plants processed for human purposes molder in landfills across the world. Whether waste paper or raked leaves, the plant remnants still contain cellulose, a sugar in greenery that bonds with the chemical compound lignin to furnish a plant’s structure. Microbes living in the landfills break down this cellulose into methane….

BlueFire estimates 40 billion gallons of cellulosic ethanol could be produced from plant waste destined for the landfill, providing as much as one third of all U.S. transportation fuel needs.

And, if other forms of waste, such as the stalks of corn plants (corn stover) or the remnants of timber harvest are included, Klann [Arnold Klann, BlueFire's president] says, “we have enough feedstock in the U.S. to offset 70 percent of the oil import.”

read the full story in Scientific American

The Sustainable Restaurant Green Guide

The Green Table network recently put together a Green Guide aimed at the restaurant business. The Guide was part of their booth at the recent BC Foodservice Expo - the idea is to help restaurants find out about, and source, greener products and equipment for their establishments.

[Read more]

Wal-Mart Looks At Vancouver LNG system

I wrote a few weeks ago about the proliferation of ‘green’ efforts by mainstream companies. Green is in. And I’ll say it again - every effort helps.

This week, a Vancouver company signed a deal to provide Wal-Mart with 4 trucks, part of a pilot project… [Read more]

No corny solutions.

Alternative fuels are becoming big business as peak oil looms on the horizon. Unfortunately, it looks like corn is not the answer.

The rush to grow biofuel crops — widely embraced as part of the solution to global warming — is actually increasing greenhouse gas emissions rather than reducing them, according to two studies published Thursday in the journal Science.

….

The analysis calculated that a U.S. cornfield devoted to producing ethanol would have to be farmed for 167 years before it would begin to achieve a net reduction in emissions.

“Any biofuel that uses productive land is going to create more greenhouse gas emissions than it saves,” said Timothy Searchinger, a researcher at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University and the study’s lead author.

The studies prompted 10 prominent ecologists and environmental biologists to write to President Bush and congressional leaders Thursday, urging new policy “that ensures biofuels are not produced on productive forests, grassland or cropland.”

READ the full article.

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