New Green Carpool Service Matches You Up with Rides to Concerts

Summer is the season of concerts, and all of us driving separately to get there isn’t exactly green. The folks at Reverb, who are already known for helping bands cut down their carbon footprint, have teamed up with PickupPal, a carpool service, to help people share rides when going to a concert.

From Mashable:

The partnership between PickupPal and Reverb won’t go live until next week, but PickupPal has already provided carpooling options for the Coachella Festival, and will be doing the same for the upcoming Virgin Mobile Festivals in Canada.

PickupPal provides a venue for passengers to match up with drivers to get around, giving the driver a small commission for their services. You submit a ride request to the PickupPal site and interested drivers offer rides. You check out their profile and make a decision based on reviews and the price. Afterward, the driver pays a small commission to PickupPal via PayPal.

It’s a pretty cool new way to get around, and all the better when going to concerts – hell, you can drink all you want and don’t have to worry about how you’re going to get home. My only concern is, do they let you search by drug preference? I mean, I don’t want to ride back home after a show rolling on E with a bunch of tweaked out speed freaks.

Link [Mashable]
Photo credit: Universal Pictures

The Ultimate in Green Booze: French Returning to Shipping Wine by Sailboat

When French vineyards decided they wanted to reduce their carbon footprint, they thought backwards instead of forwards: they’re going back to a shipping method they last used in the 1800’s. Some vintners are choosing sailboats to transport their most eco-friendly wines.

From The Guardian:

Later this month 60,000 bottles from Languedoc will be shipped to Ireland in a 19th-century barque, saving 18,375lb of carbon. Further voyages to Bristol, Manchester and even Canada are planned soon afterwards.

The three-mast barque Belem, which was launched in 1896, the last French merchant sailing vessel to be built, will sail into Dublin following a voyage from Bordeaux that should last about four days. The wines will be delivered to Bordeaux by barge using the Canal du Midi and Canal du Garonne, which run across southern France from Sète in the east, via Béziers in Languedoc. Each bottle will be labelled: ‘Carried by sailing ship, a better deal for the planet.’ Although the whole process will end up taking up to a week longer than a flight, it is estimated it will save 4.9oz of carbon per bottle.

Frederic Albert, founder of the shipping company Compagnie de Transport Maritime à la Voile (CTMV), said: ‘My idea was to do something for the planet and something for the wines of Languedoc. One of my grandfathers was a wine-maker and one was a sailor.’

Smart move! Not only is it a great eco-friendly way to ship wine, it increases visibility of these vineyards because of the great story. What makes this even cooler is that ships will return to France bearing an equal tonnage of crushed glass for recycling into wine bottles. The vineyards have chosen their best, most sustainably produced wines for the sailboat voyage, because they want their eco-conscious consumers to get the full ‘green wine’ experience. Despite all this trouble, the wines will remain fairly cheap - €7 to €20 a bottle.

I’m a bit of a wino and a history dork, so the idea of my Beaujolais coming across the Atlantic on a romantic sailboat voyage makes me want to drink even more of it. Hey, we’ve got to make it worth their time and investment, right? A round of red for everyone!

Link [The Guardian]
Photo credit: Flickr user Kables

The Greenest Tees Around: Teecycle Sells Hand Selected “Gently Used” T-shirts

T-shirts kick ass, green t-shirts kick even more ass. Teecycle.org is a cool new site that sells “gently used” one off t-shirts. It’s a super simple site set up on Blogger- each t-shirt gets a post with a photo, description, and link to buy it on PayPal. Most of the shirts run somewhere around ten bucks per with shipping- a great price about half the average cost of other cool tees online.
Here’s their schpiel-

Teecycle believes that your T-shirt says a lot about you, whether you know it or not.

When you buy off a rack in a department store, it says you have limited imagination, support giant corporate profits and have thousands of replicas. Who wants that?

When you own a Teecycle shirt, it says you have a unique one-of-a-kind item of clothing. It also says you care about the environment by keeping a perfectly usable item out of the landfill.

Each Teecycle shirt is hand-selected from rummage sales, thrift stores and, in a few cases, friend’s closets. Just not a rack in a nondescript department store.

Your purchase also supports the River Revitalization Foundation. $1 of each sale is donated to restore urban river trails and waterways in the Milwaukee area.

Head on over and pick up a new (old) shirt or three.

Link [www.Teecycle.org] via [T-Critic]

Next thing you know ol’ Jed’s a Billionaire- Todays Oil Prices Make Clampetts Billionaires

Jed Clampett, the lovable old patriarch of the Clampett family who struck black gold one day while shootin for some food, would be an incredibly rich Hillbilly had that fortunate hunting accident happened today. You could say he’d be happier than a tornado at a trailer park.

Had Jed discovered that bubblin crude these days instead of 1962 he’d be worth a cool billion dollars. Back in ‘62 when Jed stuck oil in Bugtussel, the price per barrel was around $2.85. Kin folk told Jed move away from there, so The Clampetts loaded up the truck and moved to Beverly (Hill’s that is) with $25,000,000 in Mr. Drysdale’s bank.

Which means, if we do the math …that Jed uncovered around 8.7 million barrels of oil. At any price above $115.55/barrel Jed’s north of 10 figures (a Billionaire). A quick stop to Bloomberg Energy shows crude oil futures currently going for ~$118/barrel.

Wee Doggies!, imagine the party Jed, Granny, Jethro, Elly May, and Duke could throw with that kind of cash- the fancy vittles, moonshine and dancing out by the cee-ment pond. Which would make them all happier than cats a fish fry. Yeehaw.

New Firewinder Light Uses Wind Power

Years ago, ‘green’ things were known for being pretty boring. I can recall sitting through a demonstration at a power plant on a third grade field trip, desperately wishing I was someplace else while someone in a hard hat lectured to us about turning off the lights. Most of America feels the same way about all of the eco-education that’s going on right now, and that’s part of the problem. Green stuff isn’t thought of us fun. That’s why people like the inventor of the Firewinder make me happy.

From Firewinder:

Firewinder® is The Original Windlight™ – A decorative, 100% wind-powered outdoor light which harnesses the power of the wind from whichever direction it blows, to create a simple yet magical visual effect with a universal appeal.

Easy to install, you simply hang it up from a tree in your garden, on your roof terrace or mount it to a post or wall and watch it light up and glow every time the wind blows!

Firewinder’s patent pending technology elegantly transforms wind into light to enable the visualisation of the abundantly free energy in the wind as a mesmerising, endlessly upward spiralling helix of light.

It is pretty cool looking. Things like this would be a great help toward getting the general public to buy ‘green’. There’s a perception that green isn’t pretty or exciting, and that’s proving more and more to simply not be true.

Link [Firewinder]

If We Said Sayonara to the Penny, the Earth Would Thank Us

If you’ve got pennies in your pocket and a way to melt down metal, you might want to go ahead and do that: the metal made to make them is worth more than the pennies themselves. One hundred pennies could get you $1.40 worth of zinc. Seems like a big waste of money, doesn’t it?

Furthermore, zinc mining is, as Eco Geek put it, “an environmental disaster”. From Eco Geek:

The demand for zinc, mostly due to growth in China, has skyrocketed, and wasting the metal on a coin that is, in general, a nuisance, is foolish economic and environmental policy.

Unfortunately, there’s no quick fix. Switching to the nickel as our cheapest unit is confusing, especially in places with uneven sales tax. Transactions would, according on a bill proposed by Representative Jim Kolbe (R - AR), be rounded to the nearest five cents. But people aren’t a big fan of paying more for a certain amount of stuff…even if it’s just cents.

If we did make the switch, it would only affect cash transactions; credit card purchases and interest payments would still be made to the penny. Many other countries have dropped their lowest coin without much trouble, but Americans would undoubtedly raise a ruckus about occasionally paying a few cents more than they would otherwise. This, regardless of the fact that most of our pennies are sitting in fountains, jars and between our couch cushions, and when we drop them, we rarely bother to pick them up. That’s America!

Link [Eco Geek]

Photo credit: Flickr user totalAldo

San Franciscans Hope to Name Sewage Plant after George W. Bush

What better memorial to commemorate George W. Bush’s presidency than a sewage treatment plant? That’s what a group of people in San Francisco hope to accomplish after organizing a petition to rename the Oceanside Wastewater Treatment Facility.

From SFist:

The local grassroots movement, helmed by “Wayne Pickering,” is proposing an ordinance initiative for the November 2008 San Francisco ballot in order to get the poop/pee/vomit plant’s title changed. Why? To honor our current leader of the free world with an “appropriate and enduring legacy, for no other president in modern American history has accomplished so much in such a short time.

They held a signature drive last Friday, and we can only hope that they got enough to make this happen. While we may not ever be able to repair the damage Bush has done on this country, and will be left with the scars of his presidency for decades into the future, the least the American people deserve is a cesspool of shit officially named after him. They say that laughter is the best medicine, and as sick as we all are of the assclown that’s currently the head of our country, we need some healing. It would go great with George W. Bush toilet paper…

Link [SFist]

Photo credit: Prank Place

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

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

OMFG Cute Overload: Penguin’s Wet Suit Lets Him Swim Again

Stories like this send me nostalgically sliding back into my girlhood days of having cheesy ‘Kountry Kats’ calendars on my lavender bedroom walls. The little animals are just so cute I want to hug them and pet them OMG SQUEEE!

Biologists at the California Academy of Sciences have created a wetsuit for Pierre, an aging African penguin who was going bald.

From newsvine:

Unlike marine mammals, which have a layer of blubber to keep them warm, penguins rely on their waterproof feathers. Without them, Pierre was unwilling to plunge into the academy’s penguin tank and ended up shivering on the sidelines while his 19 peers played in the water.

“He was cold; he would shake,” said Pam Schaller, a senior aquatic biologist at the academy.

The little suit fastens at the back with Velcro and has small openings for Pierre’s flippers. In the six weeks since he was outfitted with the suit, Pierre has grown back some of his feathers, gained weight and is acting like his old self again. He’ll be ‘weaned off’ the suit as his feathers grow back.

What is it about animals in clothing? I can’t stand it. This reminds me of when my college roommate used to put frilly little shirts on her Siamese cat, and the cat would just stiffen and fall over like the indignity of being treated like a doll was just too much for her. But we all would laugh hysterically because damn, it was just so cute.

Link [newsvine]

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