City Agriculture
Photo: Dwell Blog
Some say city farming is the wave of the future. If scientists can devise a way to produce hydroponic tomatoes with more taste than soggy cardboard, it may just happen.
From CNN.com:
Terry Fujimoto sees the future of agriculture in the exposed roots of the leafy greens he and his students grow in thin streams of water at a campus greenhouse.
The program run by the California State Polytechnic University agriculture professor is part of a growing effort to use hydroponics — a method of cultivating plants in water instead of soil — to bring farming into cities, where consumers are concentrated.
Because hydroponic farming requires less water and less land than traditional field farming, Fujimoto and researchers-turned-growers in other U.S. cities see it as ideal to bring agriculture to apartment buildings, rooftops and vacant lots.
Floating Wind Turbine
From Inhabitat:
Wind turbines at ground level produce at a rate of 20-25%, but when placed at altitudes from 600-1000 feet, energy output can double. Ottawa-based Magenn Power is in the prototype stages of the world’s first floating wind turbine. The Magenn Air Rotor System or MARS is a stationary blimp kept afloat with helium and tethered into place on an electrical grid. Centrifugal blades on the MARS can generate up to several megawatts of clean, renewable energy at a price well below our current grounded wind turbines.
The Plasticator
WCI student isolates microbe that lunches on plastic bags:
Getting ordinary plastic bags to rot away like banana peels would be an environmental dream come true.
After all, we produce 500 billion of them a year worldwide, and they take up to 1,000 years to decompose. They take up space in landfills, litter our streets and parks, pollute the ocean and kill the animals that eat them.
Now a Waterloo teenager has found a way to make plastic bags degrade faster — in three months, he figures.
Daniel Burd’s project won the top prize at the Canada-Wide Science Fair in Ottawa. He came back with a long list of awards, including a $10,000 prize, a $20,000 scholarship, and recognition that he has found a practical way to help the environment.
Burd, 16, a Grade 11 student at Waterloo Collegiate Institute, got the idea for his project from everyday life.
“Almost every week I have to do chores and when I open the closet door, I have this avalanche of plastic bags falling on top of me,” he said. “One day, I got tired of it and I wanted to know what other people are doing with these plastic bags.”
The answer: not much. So he decided to do something himself.
Via Treehugger
The Perfect T-Shirt?
In this world of ever expanding blog fluff, of which I’m sure I contribute my fair share, it’s nice to see people aiming towards something positive and substantial, something which if taken far enough can bring about very significant social, economic and environmental changes. The Perfect T-Shirt is the brainchild of UK outfit Better Thinking, which strives to create, you guessed it, the world’s most perfect t-shirt. But creating the perfect t-shirt is not necessarily the end goal, rather, the t-shirt is used as a universal symbol of clothing that while seemingly innocuous in its simple nature, represents an enormous environmental and social cost which leaves vast room for improvement. Current methods of production for t-shirts involves large amounts of chemical processing, use of fossil fuels, expensive transport costs, non renewable cotton plantations and abusive labor practices to just name a few.
To this end The Perfect T-Shirt project examines every single element of the production chain, from choice of fabrics to methods of transport and distribution. It is a mind bending challenge, a mathematical equation of sorts, where modifying any part of the chain can result in dramatic changes further down the line. They note how cultivating organic cotton from West Africa can be an almost perfectly sustainable solution, as natural rainfall makes any kind of irrigation unnecessary. But what if a retailer in Japan wants to use that same cotton for its t-shirts? Will the heavy use of fossil fuels to transport that cotton offset the positive effect to West Africa’s environment and economy?
In a sense, The Perfect T-Shirt is aware that it may never find the answers to all the problems it is facing. But it does allow for a space where all types of questions can be raised, which hopefully will lead to concrete measures for better production techniques in the future.
