Video: It Looks Like You’ve Got a Case of The Humans

Looks like you’ve got a case of the Humans!

Un-Effing-Believable: Military Contractor Used Armored Vehicles to Transport Hookers

Perhaps I’m still a bit naïve, but I find this news so crazy I can hardly believe it’s real. The Huffington Post is reporting that testimony from a panel of whistleblowers in the Senate yesterday revealed a shocking bit of info about DynCorp, a military contractor. Seems that a DynCorp manager used an armored car to transport prostitutes to hotels that the company operates. As the car was occupied by hookers, a DynCorp employee had to go without the armored protection and was killed as a result.

From The Huffington Post:

Naturally, this will lead many to question whether its appropriate for DynCorp to be awarded with future military contracts, but the more fitting question is whether or not DynCorp should have been awarded a contract in Iraq in the first place. Because, you see, this is not the first time DynCorp employees have been implicated in running prostitution rings abroad.

In 2002, DynCorp workers were involved in a Bosnia sex-slave trade, and due to some complicated loopholes, these people are able to get away with it. Some of the girls involved were as young as 12. The DynCorp employees escaped prosecution for crimes such as these made overseas, practically giving them free license to do whatever the hell they please.

These are the shady criminals America has doing its bidding in Iraq. Does anyone else feel the need to take a shower right about now?

Link [Huffington Post]

Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons

Lindsay Lohan Lending Her Name to Eco Fashion, Hopefully Getting Some Underwear in the Deal

Lindsay Lohan for eco fashion? Hmm. Hopefully the company she’s working with will donate a few pairs of organic cotton panties, cause lord knows she needs something. Sure, she could afford mountains of panties, but a little encouragement wouldn’t hurt.

Ecorazzi has it:

Lindsay Lohan has agreed to become the face of “Visa Swap” — a pop-up shop of sorts happening this summer in London’s Convent Gardens. The whole idea is to get people to bring their old used clothing to the swap in return for Visa points (based on the value of their swag). A few weeks later, people can then return to trade their points in for others’ second-hand items. Any of the clothing that fails to sell will be donated to TRAID, a British organization that raises money to support communities in developing countries by recycling clothing through its network of stores.

Some might say that Lindsay Lohan putting her name on eco-friendly fashion will get more younger kids interested in the concept, but doesn’t that also give kids a mixed message? They see her simply putting her name on something, perhaps appearing at an event or two, and that’s pretty much the limit of her ‘eco consciousness’. Ecorazzi deems it a paycheck rather than anything of substance, and I agree. So, what’s the point?

Link [Ecorazzi]

Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons

White House Preventing EPA From Testing Toxicity of Chemicals

What do you know, the White House and the EPA are in our ‘Planet Killers’ news once again. Congressional investigators have found that the Bush administration is keeping the EPA from performing important tests on chemicals to determine health effects. What they’re doing, basically, is allowing nonscientists to have a big say in the process, and keeping it a secret from the public (or trying to).

From MSNBC.com:

The administration’s decision to give the Defense Department and other agencies an early role in the process adds to years of delay in acting on harmful chemicals and jeopardizes the program’s credibility, the Government Accountability Office concluded.

At issue is the EPA’s screening of chemicals used in everything from household products to rocket fuel to determine if they pose serious risk of cancer or other illnesses.

A new review process begun by the White House in 2004 is adding more speed bumps for EPA scientists, the GAO said in its report, which will be the subject of a Senate Environment Committee hearing Tuesday. A formal policy effectively doubling the number of steps was adopted two weeks ago.

While we’re stewing in a toxic mix of chemicals that could very well be altering our cells in a way that science has yet to identify and understand, the government is engaging in this chaotic game of ping pong where various agencies are throwing information back and forth at each other with no apparent rhyme or reason to the process. I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised, since hardly anything the government does is actually efficient, but this is a matter of life and death – literally.

What it amounts to is the government protecting chemical companies. How many industries has the Bush administration whored itself out to? It’s astounding.

Link [MSNBC]

Photo credit: Flickr user Foxtongue

College Students: Pick Schools According to their Eco-Friendly Practices

College students, you’ve now got a great new tool at your disposal: a website that can help you choose a sustainable school. You may be wondering what exactly makes a school ‘sustainable’, and why you’d be interested in that information. The Daily Green has it:

Colleges can be as large as small cities, and therefore use a tremendous amount of resources, plus they have strong potential to mold the minds of the next generation of leaders.

In 2007 Grist released an editorial ranking of top green colleges, and this year the Kentucky-based Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education launched a pilot program to rate 90 U.S. and Canadian colleges on environmental impact.

It’s called Sustainability Tracking, Assessment and Rating System (STARS), and is designed to be a voluntary, self-reporting framework for gauging progress toward sustainability. It is associated with the group’s Chill Out Competition to reduce global warming contributions, and the comment period ends May 30.

Until that ranking becomes available, prospies may want to check out this informative post on the blog of major student loan lender NextStudent. It’s a summary of 12 of the greenest colleges in America, including many that have been honored in the past by other groups

Among the top sustainable colleges are College of the Altantic, Middlebury College, Evergreen State College, Oberlin College, Harvard University and Warren Wilson College. Highlights of their eco-friendly practices include solar panels, energy efficiency programs, waste reduction, composting and organic farming. If you’re interested in a ‘green collar’ career or just want to be part of an institution that promotes earth friendly initiatives, this info could be really helpful.

Link [Daily Green] + [NextStudent]

Photo credit: Warren Wilson College

Rock Port, Missouri Proves that Wind Power Really Works

Wind turbines haven’t just provided Rock Port, Missouri with 100% of their power. They’ve provided an extra 23% on top of that – enough to sell some to other cities.

Rock Port, Missouri, is a small city of 1,300 people, and they just made history by being the first city in the US to be 100% powered by the wind, also making them #1 in the US for percentage of renewable energy. The Loess Hills Wind Farm, built by the Wind Capital Group, employing 500 workers from 20 states for about a year, is expected to produce about 16 million kilowatt hours annually, while Rock Port only uses 13 million. The excess wind power will be sold to other communities in the area.

They’ve provided a great example for the rest of the nation. It’s time to start doing this in more cities. Of course, there are always those people that will complain that wind turbines are ‘ugly’ – the whole Not in My Backyard thing. Personally, I think they’re beautiful because of what they stand for: renewable energy. Doesn’t that mean more than having ‘eyesores’ in your city?

Link [Treehugger]

Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons

Heap Some Home Cookin’ Onto Pig Piss Plastic Plates

Imagine enjoying a delicious meal at a friend’s home, noticing their nice dinnerware and complimenting them on it. “Oh, these? They’re made of pig urine!”

Agroplast of Denmark aims to put pig piss plates on the tables of restaurants and homes around the world. Cnet news has it:

The company has essentially devised a way to better commercialize urea, a compound of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and hydrogen, found in urine.

Other animal waste products like manure can be inserted into the system, but pig urine is particularly interesting because it is an environmental hazard, says Peter Tøttrup, a partner at Seed Capital, a Danish venture firm that also helps the government incubate start-ups. We ran into Tøttrup at the coffee urn at the NordicGreen conference in Menlo Park, Calif., this week.

“There are 20 million pigs in Denmark, and what they do environmentally is a problem,” he said.

Agroplast sees pig waste as an eco-friendly solution to the fossil-fuel-plastic dilemma. Not only can it be used in products, it eliminates the issue of disposing of the waste. Tøttrup claims that these pig waste plastics would cost less than fossil fuel plastics, but others disagree, as historically bioplastics have been more expensive. Either way, the company advocates using pig waste in fertilizers (okay, sounds about right) lotion (getting grosser) and as a “flavor enhancer in cigarettes” (um, vomit).

Link [cnet]

Photo credit: Flickr user beelden zeggen meer

‘Unbuilding’ Offers an Eco-Friendly Alternative to Tearing Down Houses

I’ve always thought, passing by buildings being demolished to make way for something new, that surely all of those materials that were being crushed and thrown away could have been used for something else. It seems incredibly wasteful to throw so much into landfills when it could be resold or even donated to charities that help build homes for the poor. I’m not the only one – more and more people are forgoing the old wrecking ball routine in favor of a more eco-friendly model, despite the increased cost and time.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that some people are choosing to ‘unbuild’ rather than tear down, which makes a lot of sense in today’s climate of heightened sensitivity to waste.

From the Wall Street Journal’s Nancy Keates:

Unbuilding our home will take longer (two weeks) and is more expensive (about $4,000 more) than simply crushing it and throwing everything out. Even with the tax deduction and what we save by reusing our old materials and appliances, we still come out a little behind. But since we are reusing so many things — and because it seemed like the eco-friendly/right thing to do — we decided to go ahead. (Another option is to hire the local fire department to burn it down as practice; that often allows a whole house deduction for tax purposes. Instead of deducting just the pieces, which are worth less.)

This kind of thing is exciting – it represents a change in the way people are thinking about so many different aspects of life. It also means that more history will be preserved, even if it’s taken apart and put back together again somewhere else. The important thing is, all of those materials won’t be sitting in a landfill of no use to anyone at all.

Link [Wall Street Journal]
Photo credit: Flickr user Editor B

Fujitsu’s Zero Watt Computer Monitor Uses No Power in Standby Mode

We’re all aware of the issue of phantom power, wherein all of your electrical items that are left plugged into outlets constantly draw a small stream of energy even if they’re turned off. The energy savings from eliminating these phantom power draws can definitely add up over time, but one thing that’s annoying for many technophiles is constantly unplugging and plugging back in items that we use regularly every day.

Computer monitors are one of those items. For those of us that don’t use notebook computers but still use our computers frequently throughout the day, the new Fujitsu Zero Watt computer monitor may be exactly what we need. The technology may even cross over to other electronics.

Treehugger has it:

A new computer monitor by Fujitsu Siemens Computers breaks with its brethren and uses no power at all in idle mode. It works with a clever switch that shuts down the monitor when there’s no signal from the computer, and turns it back on when there is one.

If we extrapolate a bit, we see that this probably can’t be used on all electronics if we want remotes to still work, but in a home entertainment system (stereo, TV, etc), it could easily be fitted on all accessories except one that would catch the signal from the remote, and then when it powers on, that would give the signal to the rest to follow suit.

It’s pretty awesome that as issues like phantom power are being identified, solutions are being invented fairly quickly. We can be thankful to those with super-crazy-smart ideas for continuing the trend of breakthroughs in green technology. Thank you, crazy smart people! We’re not worthy!

Link [Treehugger]

Tactical Biorefineries Head To Iraq To Make Fuel From Trash

Remember Mr. Fusion from the Back To The Future movie? Doc Brown would throw cans, old shoes, banana peels, and anything else into the device which would then produce fuel to zoom around time and space. Well, the military isn’t quite pulling a Marty McFly on us yet, but their new “tactical biorefineries” are one step closer to producing a closed-loop system for waste. Specifically, the massive amounts of waste created by our armed forces. From the article,

The Army’s two prototypes of the Tactical Garbage to Energy Refinery, or TGER, are shipping out to Victory Base Camp in Baghdad today for a 90 day test of the units under extreme working conditions. The refineries, which can take in food slop, plastic, paper and styrofoam and output synthetic gas or hydrous ethanol, were developed by McLean, Va.-based defense contractor Defense Life Sciences, Purdue University and the Army’s Edgewood Chemical Biological Center in Maryland.

Instead of being burned, the items inside the machine (after being broken down) are heated and turned into a low-grad propane. Organic materials get converted into a hydrous ethanol. Both streams are then blended together to run a standard Army 60KW generator. Each machine can handle roughly one ton of garbage per day and fits into standard ISO containers for easy transport.

If these initial test prove successful, expect the “Tigers” to be mass-produced and become a standard accessory for military divisions around the globe. Doc would be proud.

Link [CleanTech]

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