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]

China’s Down to 12 Days Worth of Coal and Counting – What Does it Mean to Us?

What would it mean to the world if China went dark? What would it mean to America?

That’s what people are starting to ponder as news has hit that most power stations in China are down to just 12 days worth of coal, and some have less than a week. That’s three days less than a month ago. Coal provides China with 70% of its electricity, and while production is up this year, demand is rapidly growing in this country of nearly 1.3 billion people. This report, which came out of Beijing on April 23rd, doesn’t elaborate on the exact reasons for the shortage.

One reason reserves are low is the dark and cold winter that has just passed, and a hotter than average upcoming summer along with lower than average rainfall is going to continue the strain. This summer’s Olympic Games will also put a squeeze on the country’s coal and power supply, something the Chinese government is currently scrambling to manage without much luck; the figures involved just can’t seem to agree to a compromise. China started importing coal last year, but so far, it hasn’t made much of a dent in the shortage.

Never mind, for the moment, what this means to the environment, as coal is the dirtiest of all fuels that produce energy. Never mind that according to many estimates, pollution is the number one cause of death in China. Never mind that China has plans to build nearly one coal plant a week for the next decade, causing a huge increase in greenhouse gas emissions that might just completely undo the efforts of every other nation in the world. It’s on the tail of the United States, headed toward becoming the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases.

Most of us are aware of just how pervasive Chinese-manufactured products are in our everyday lives. Trying to live entirely without anything that has been produced in China is likely to be fruitless, unless you’re living very low-tech out in the woods or the desert somewhere. The average American family couldn’t do it while maintaining their current lifestyle. What would happen if imports of Chinese goods temporarily stopped? Many American businesses rely on China for their daily operations. If they don’t have their China-made products, they don’t have anything to manufacture and/or sell. In an already damaged economy, this could be really bad news.

Not to mention the fact that China’s leaders aren’t exactly known for playing well with others. Constant expansion plus imperialism plus a desperate need for a particular asset in order to retain the current status quo could equal very, very bad news for the world. Who’s to say that, backed into a corner, China wouldn’t begin to wield its frightening potential for power as a weapon against the rest of us? The US-China trade deficit doesn’t exactly put us in a good position if such a thing were to happen. Our government has already allowed the destruction of our industrial base for the good of a communist country’s industrialization.

In the end, won’t there be a price to pay for the cheap goods and labor that Americans have enjoyed courtesy of the Chinese? We’re all so embroiled in a society of more, more, more. We are deep into a mess of dependence on China. Think about what’s in your own house. If someone suddenly came in and took away everything that was made in China, what would you have left? Not much.

Many are predicting that China will find a way to manage the situation fairly quickly, and it will all blow over. Americans will go on with their obsessive consumerist ways, constantly buying more than we need, and continuing to rely on China for a startling quantity of the products used daily in this country. I hate to say it, but, a close call won’t teach Americans anything – in fact, the vast majority of us probably don’t know about the coal situation in China and don’t care.

Some are of the viewpoint that China will soon realize that continuation of their current pace of growth is simply impossible, and they’ll be forced to slow down. This is a fairly optimistic take on the situation, and maybe – just maybe – we could see a change in daily life in America if that were to happen.

No one can accurately predict the consequences of this coal scenario; but one thing we Americans might want to consider is learning Mandarin – just in case.

Link [news.com.au]

Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons + Wikimedia Commons

Greening Up War: A Round Table Discussion on Environmentally Friendly Killin’

The Onion nails it just right- if we’re going to torture, wage war, and ethnically cleanse, it should be in a environmentally friendly way.

H/T to the big guy Jordan for dropping this link on me.

Radiohead Says, We’re Not Blowing Green Smoke Up Your Ass

Celebrities aren’t generally known for being environmentally friendly, and even the ones who try to put out that image are usually flying luxuriously in private jets with huge entourages. Practicing what they preach really isn’t all that common. Radiohead, however, is showing that they’re more than just talk: they refused to fly from England to the U.S. for a gig on Conan, and luckily the studio accommodated them.

Ecorazzi has it:

Conan O’Brien invited the group to play on his show last night, but Thom Yorke and the gang decided the planet would be better off if they didn’t all get on a plane and fly across the Atlantic for the gig. So instead, they decided to compromise by jamming via satellite — something that aligned perfectly for NBC’s Green Is Universal initiative happening all this week.

Good for NBC for playing along and greenlighting the satellite idea, but ‘Green Week’ shouldn’t be the only time it happens. Let’s hope we see more of this sort of thing in the future, year-round. There’s no reason why bands – or any celebs, for that matter – need to be physically present for performances or interviews, and they can save an incredible amount of pollution that way. Radiohead’s move, for example, saved the equivalent to driving a car for an entire year.

Link [Ecorazzi]

Photo credit: Flickr user nsanch

Airlines Slowing Down, Lightening Their Loads to Save Fuel

Would you care if you got to your destination 2 minutes later than usual? Airlines are starting to bet that you won’t even notice, and slowing down slightly will end up saving them big bucks in fuel. Belgium’s Brussels Airlines is the first to try it, slowing their speed by about 10 kilometers per hour and lightening each plane’s load by using lighter seat covers, bringing less water on board for toilet flushing and possibly getting rid of the ashtrays, all of which can add up pretty quickly.

From BBC News:

The airline said slowing its planes by about 10km/h would cut its annual fuel bill by 1m euros ($1.6m; £800,000) and add a minute or two to flight times.

The measures will also reduce the airline’s emissions of global warming greenhouse gases, a spokesman said.
Oil prices have risen steeply recently, adding hugely to airlines’ costs.

Brussels Airlines is looking at nearly 100 ways of cutting fuel use, including more efficient fuel use and reducing weight on its planes.

Undoubtedly these changes are due to strain on the airline’s finances rather than concerns about the environment, but in this case, who cares? What matters is, they’ll result in a huge reduction in fuel use, and if more airlines follow, we could see some dramatic effects. This is exactly the way more companies need to start thinking. Leave it to Europe to pioneer such a simple yet smart concept.

Link [BBC News] via [The Road to the Horizon]

D’oh! Earth to Online Retailers: Cut The Dumb Over-Packaging BS

Christ on a bicycle, this is some planet killing over-packaging madness. Gizmodo asked readers to submit photos of wasteful shipping from online retailers, and they delivered, providing dozens of images showing a handful of tiny items inside a giant box.

Of course, we could all help cut down on this sort of thing by shopping locally more often, but sometimes there’s a need to order online. Plus, from some retailers’ perspective, the issue is more complicated than just trying to solve it by not padding things as much.

Here’s the thing about shipping out products directly to customers: some items just plain need tons of padding. I once worked for an online retailer that sold very delicate sculptures made of easily breakable materials like glass, and UPS delivery guys and gals are famous for throwing boxes around like they contain pillows. When customers receive a broken shipment they paid thousands of dollars for, they call angrily blaming the retailer for not padding it well enough and demand a replacement immediately. This is wasteful in itself, and results in double the trips on a gas-guzzling UPS truck.

A small fragile item cushioned by biodegradable peanuts in a large recyclable box is one thing. However, the really boneheaded cases of over-packaging are the ones in which the giant box contains a tiny and virtually indestructible product, like Dell with their flash drives. The problem isn’t just the boxes themselves or the materials used to pad the items inside. Gizmodo explains it:

When a company like Dell or Amazon is shipping out thousands of small objects in large boxes every day, it takes up room on UPS and FedEx trucks. Clearly, many more trucks need to be on the road, consuming gas and pumping CO2 into the atmosphere, to get these to where they need to go. If padded mailers or more appropriately sized boxes were used, it would allow for many more to fit in each truck, cutting down on the greenhouse gases emitted every day by shipping companies.

Retailers need to take responsibility for their shipping practices, and they need to do it now. Though most won’t be able to come up with custom-sized boxes for everything they sell (especially if they sell a wide variety of items), they can at least get smaller boxes for items that aren’t likely to break if thrown around a little bit. But retailers aren’t the only ones that can do something to help.

UPS, FedEx and your ilk: is it too much to ask to be a little more gentle with packages? And consumers, you can do your part too: first of all, when you receive packaging like this, complain to the company about it. Second, reuse all of the materials next time you send something out. Finally, if all you need is a single roll of scotch tape that you can pick up at the convenience store one block away, you have no business ordering it online.

Link [Gizmodo]

More Criticism for Ethanol: Now it’s Affecting Food Prices

Those who have looked to corn as the next great biofuel better be prepared for a new barrage of criticism. Missouri is currently seeing an uprising against its measures supporting ethanol production, because using corn for fuel means there’s less for food – both for people and for livestock. That means skyrocketing prices in an already damaged economy.

Reuters has it:

St. Onge said the committee is studying a measure that would roll back the mandate and is still determining whether to push any action before the end of Missouri’s legislative session next month.

The moves in Missouri come as Texas Gov. Rick Perry is asking the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for a 50 percent waiver of the mandate for grain-based ethanol production.

Pilgrim’s Pride Corp and Tyson Foods issued statements over the weekend supporting Perry’s request, saying “unprecedented increases for corn and soybean meal” would add billions of dollars of cost to the food industry this year.

The cons of ethanol are piling up with no signs of stopping. Stephen Pizzo of AlterNet said it well:

Is turning food into fuel as millions starve to death really the ethical answer to our oil addiction? If the ethanol folks have their way and Detroit starts cranking out E85 cars by the millions, how are you going to feel when you have to buy one. How will you feel filling up your car with food-juice during the day and then watching starving children on the evening news as some horse’s ass in Washington pontificates about how the world needs to do something about that? How will you feel?

Time to throw in the towel here, folks. It ain’t going to work. When it comes right down to it, it’s doubtful that ethanol will be any better for the earth than oil, and we’ll all be better off in the end if they stop funneling money into a useless cause. There are so many other options out there.

Link [Reuters] + [Alternet]
Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Forget Shoes, Going Barefoot is the New Hotness

You walk wrong. In another classic illustration of why being accustomed to something doesn’t make it right, researchers are finding increasing evidence that the health of the human foot is declining, and it’s not because we’re wearing uncomfortable shoes: it’s because we’re wearing shoes, period.

New York Magazine has it:

Last year, researchers at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, published a study titled “Shod Versus Unshod: The Emergence of Forefoot Pathology in Modern Humans?” in the podiatry journal The Foot. The study examined 180 modern humans from three different population groups (Sotho, Zulu, and European), comparing their feet to one another’s, as well as to the feet of 2,000-year-old skeletons. The researchers concluded that, prior to the invention of shoes, people had healthier feet. Among the modern subjects, the Zulu population, which often goes barefoot, had the healthiest feet while the Europeans-i.e., the habitual shoe-wearers-had the unhealthiest.

The problem is, shoes keep us from walking in a natural human gait – in fact, it’s biomechanically impossible. 4 million years of evolution produced a distinctive human gait that has been warped by ‘carelessly designed’ shoes. Even the spawn of a shoe company empire who now owns one himself, Galahad Clark, admits that shoes are bad for you, no matter how comfy. He’s designed a shoe that complements the shape of the human foot as closely as possible, but still says that barefoot is better. Studies have shown that wearing any type of shoes increases knee injuries.

As New York Magazine puts it,

The sole of your foot has over 200,000 nerve endings in it, one of the highest concentrations anywhere in the body. Our feet are designed to act as earthward antennae, helping us balance and transmitting information to us about the ground we’re walking on.

All of this, along with a ‘back to nature’ trend has inspired the ‘barefoot movement’ with followers numbering in the thousands, most of whom have pledged to go without shoes whenever physically possible. These ‘Barefooters’ go au naturel as they go about their daily routine, hike, run, bicycle, some even strolling in the city.

This news about the wrecking of the human foot isn’t likely to start a mainstream revolution, though. We aren’t about to see masses of people walking into gas station bathrooms barefoot a la Britney Spears, or dashing to their executive offices on Wall Street trying to avoid broken glass and the occasional pile of vomit. But, it may inspire people to kick their shoes off more often when at home, even if they’re digging in the dirt out in the garden.

Link [New York Magazine]
Photo credit: Tom Shierlitz

Green Urban Myth: Can We Please Kill the Idea that Black Screens Save Energy?

ReadWriteWeb published a nice little write-up on Earth Day about the best green search engines, with a list that included Green Maven, Greensie, Blackle, Searchgreener and EcoSeek, among others. How can a search engine be eco-friendly? Well, some of them, like Green Maven, search the ‘green web’, bringing you the latest eco-news and media. Others, like Ecocho, plant trees each time you reach a set amount of searches, providing a nice way to offset carbon while doing what you need to do on the web.

Some, however, are a little slow, shall we say: they’re still running on the concept that a black screen saves energy. Blackle, Eco-find and Earthle’s black backgrounds are the only supposed eco friendly benefit to their use. Here’s the thing: unless you’re still using an old CRT monitor, it’s not even true. Call it a green technology urban myth. It’s time to give this misinformation a boot in the ass. Carl Bialik of the Wall Street Journal crunched the numbers nearly a year ago, and Bill Schindler of Panasonic Plasma Display Laboratory of America confirmed his findings.

Scientific American summed it up:

CRT monitors, which until a few years ago were the predominant models among PC users, consume more power when a computer screen is white. To confirm this, Schindler measured the energy output of an 18-inch (45.7-centimeter) CRT monitor and found it used 102 watts when the screen was white but only 79 watts when the display was black.

This is not the case, however, with LCD monitors, which have no phosphors and represent the lion’s share of every new monitored purchased in the developed world, including those used by laptops. Instead, LCD displays rely on an array of thin-tube fluorescent bulbs that provide a constant source of light to create a white screen. To make it black, LCDs rely on a diffuser to block this light. As a result, LCDs use more energy than CRTs to display a black screen. Measuring a 17-inch (43-centimeter) LCD monitor, Schindler found that white required 22.6 watts, while black came in a tad higher at 23.2 watts. With a 20-inch (50.8-centimeter) LCD, black required 6 percent more energy than white.

It’s time for Blackle and the others to make a change: they meant well, but the fact is their black search engines are actually accomplishing the opposite of their goal. They’re using more energy, and misleading people who want to help out the environment in any small way they can.

What’s even more annoying about this is the fact that this information has been available for so long. We’ve known about it since last May, and the black-screen search engines haven’t made a change. Um, hello? News flash, literally: y’all are now officially a year behind the times, and during that year, you’ve done more harm than good. It’s time to pat the black screen myth on the head, thank it for trying and quietly send it off to the place outdated eco practices go to die.

Link [ReadWriteWeb] + [Scientific American]

College Students Amped Up the Eco-Activism on Earth Day

The Earth Day Network accomplished one big goal last Tuesday: flooding the congressional switchboard with calls from people who wanted to encourage lawmakers to enact eco-friendly measures. With the help of 1,000 college students at 1,000 campuses nationwide, the Earth Day Network made sure that our nation’s leaders heard the voices of people who care about the planet. From the Washington Times:

“We’re really excited about this because Congress keeps saying they don’t hear from the American public on climate change,” said Kathleen Rogers, president of Earth Day Network, which bills itself as an eco-activism group connecting some 17,000 organizations in 174 countries. “The [presidential] candidates are not being asked about climate change. Climate change is the biggest threat to humanity that we’ve ever faced.” Rogers said she wasn’t worried about the switchboard being overwhelmed by the calls. She said she was assured by the office handling congressional calls that staff could handle 1.3 million calls during a 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. period. “They’re very, very competent, and they’re ready. We’re gong to help them as much as we can in advance,” Rogers said. “Our intention is really, really not to shut them down. If things went nuts, which we don’t expect them to, their operators are dreamboats. They consider their jobs part of the democratic process. If there’d be any problems, it’d be with the phone lines, not with the switchboard.”

Historically, college students have always been known for doing everything a little more vibrantly than the rest of the population, from activism to drunken debauchery, but lately it seems like more and more people are working hard to instigate change, and are more dedicated than ever. Keep it up, college students! God knows America needs your enthusiasm. Link [Washington Times] Photo credit: Flickr user GirlReporter

Florida College Student Invents Reusable Alternative to Styrofoam Take-Out Containers

Proving that simple solutions are often better than complicated high-tech ones, Eckerd College student Audrey Copeland has invented an alternative to Styrofoam take-out containers that you don’t even have to wash yourself. The EcoClamshell, made from a durable dishwasher-safe material, is available to students for a one-time fee of $5 and is designed to be brought back once you’re done with it. At least 200 students are currently using it.

From Bay News 9:

“Usually people bring them to their rooms,” Richards said. “Then afterwards they dump whatever the didn’t want and you can bring them back dirty, throw them in a bin. Then they rinse them out. It works great for me.”

Eckerd College has reduced the use of styrofoam by 25 percent a week.

“The same container circulates multiple times,” Copeland said. “Kinda like a plate.”

The student hopes to market the containers to cafeterias and restaurants with a regular customer base.

What a great way to encourage students to ditch the disposables. When you’re living on campus and depend on the dining hall for every meal – and trying to fit in lunch between a tight schedule of classes – you inevitably end up using lots of take-out containers, most of which aren’t biodegradable or reusable. The EcoClamshell offers a great way for college students to avoid introducing so many harmful materials into landfills – let’s hope it catches on nationwide!

Link [Bay News 9]

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