The popular North American ice-cream corporation has committed itself to use only fair-trade-certified ingredients in all its flavours by the end of 2013. This is both a huge dare and an opportunity, given the increasing social demands for more sustainable products and companies.

Europe will be the first area to meet this ambitious goal, by the end of 2011. This year, in May, 60% of the company’s flavours in Europe will be fair-trade. And next year, the whole of the flavours will be fair-trade certified.

Ben & Jerry’s was founded by childhood friends Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, back in 1978, in Burlington, Vermont, USA. Since 2005, Ben & Jerry’s has started using ingredients that come from fair-trade sources, adding one fair-trade certified flavour each year, which made it the first ice cream company to certify its ingredients fair-trade.

Continue reading Ben & Jerry’s: fair-trade ice cream

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Lately, I’ve been hearing a lot about jeans being recycled into insulating material. Apparently, it works very well, and it uses an already existent material, that could otherwise become trash. Like for example, your old jeans. This week, until March 14, you can take your old jeans to any Gap store in the US. They will be used to create insulating material, and you will get 30% off new purchases.

Gap has teamed up with Cotton Inc, establishing this “denim drive” to collect as much jeans as possible. The resulting insulating material is then donated to places in need.

The program started in 2006, and it is called “Cotton, from blue to green”. Since then more than 270,000 pieces of denim have been collected, which were then used for insulation in 540 houses. Most of these houses were located in areas which had suffered from natural disasters, like New Orleans, after hurricane Katrina.

By recycling jeans, 200 tons of denim are kept from being sent to landfills each month.

Some benefits of this cotton insulating material include the absence of VOC (volatile organic compounds), it absorbs sound very well reducing noise, it prevents mold and mildew, and it has no irritating components.

Cotton Inc has been helped by National Geographic Kids magazine, which in 2009 set a Guinness record for “Most Items of Clothing Collected for Recycling”, collecting 33,088 pieces of denim. All of these were donated to the Cotton from blue to green denim drive.

Being jeans such a popular garment, this initiative is great. If I try to remember how many pair of jeans I’ve bought during my life, I have no clue, but undoubtedly more than 15. All those jeans required resources and energy for being manufactured. They also have characteristics that make them useful. So why just dump them? By transforming jeans into an insulation material, we avoid landfilling, and we generate a sustainable material that will help insulate houses, which in turn helps reduce energy usage.

VIA: Treehugger

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Sweden has for years been working to lower its dependence on fossil fuels for energy, while investing and developing renewable energies. Last week, the Enterprise and Energy Minister Maud Olofsson announced that 2,000 new wind turbines will be built during the next decade. This will help Sweden reach its goal of being supplied by renewable energies 50% by 2020.

The project to build 2,000 wind turbines is intended to add 10 terawatt hours (TWh) a year. One terawatt is one trillion watts.

"This would be the highest share in the world," Olofsson said. No other country has such a high share of renewable energies. Actually, Sweden is already one of the most advanced countries in terms of usage of renewable energy. “Renewable energy makes up 40 percent of our energy consumption”.

Oil accounts for one third of Sweden’s energy system. In the 70s, oil represented more than 70% of the total energy supply. Thanks to diversification of fuels and an increasingly efficient use of energy, this percentage keeps going down.

Nowadays, around half of the electricity comes from hydropower, and nuclear power also plays an important role.

Among the renewable energies that have been growing in Sweden are biomass and wind energy. Biomass is very much used for heating. In fact, bio-energy has been growing very much in the last decades. In the 80s, it accounted for around 10% of the total energy supply; in 2004 that share had risen to 16% or 100 TWh. Some of the biofuels used include wood fuels, black liquors and tall oil pitches, and ethanol.

An interesting tool which is used by the Swedish government is the green electricity certificate system. Energy suppliers need to have a quota of renewable energy. The goal of this Renewable electricity with green certificates Bill is to foster the development of renewable electricity production. There are established targets of renewable energy growth rates which help determine quotas. Renewable energy producers are given certificates for every MWh of electricity produced, which can be bought by electricity suppliers, who need to complete their quota obligation.

VIA: Treehugger

Sweden Energy Policy

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Marks & Spencer is a major British retailer, with over 1,700 stores in the UK and around the world. There’s no doubt that its impact is huge, so the fact that the company has great environmental plans is fantastic. Leaders of Marks & Spencer noted that in the last couple of years, their customers’ concerns for the environment have been growing, which led them to develop “Plan A”, a very ambitious strategy to go greener.

Plan A was launched in January 2007; it’s called that way because “there is no plan B”. The company has the “ultimate goal of becoming the world’s most sustainable major retailer.” The plan is organized in five main pillars, with 180 commitments; among them, making all of their UK and Irish operations carbon neutral by 2012.

1) Climate change

Some of this pillar’s commitments include the already mentioned aim of making all UK and Irish operations (stores, offices, warehouses, business travel and logistics) carbon neutral by 2012. That’s only two years away! Further, they have set the goal of “reducing the amount of energy we use in our stores by 25% per square foot of floor space.”

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Seattle has been working hard to be more environmentally friendly for years now. It is one of America’s more advanced cities in terms of sustainability. Last week, the City Council announced that Seattle aims at becoming carbon neutral by 2030. The city will analyze the feasibility of making this ambitious project a reality.

Let’s look at what Seattle has done so far.

In 2005, the city’s mayor, Greg Nickels, launched Seattle’s Climate Protection Initiative. This helped maintain the city’s already existent environmental programs. By 2008, greenhouse gas emissions were 7% below 1990 levels, meeting Kyoto’s targets. This stands out even more when we consider that Seattle has grown 16% since 1990.

Environmental actions are organized in different fronts.

The most challenging area is transportation which accounts for around 40% of Seattle’s GHG emissions. So what is being done? The car as a means of transport is intended to be increasingly replaced by alternative methods. Walking and biking are encouraged. Last year, Seattle adopted the Pedestrian Master Plan, which works specifically on fostering walking and improving conditions, such as better sidewalks. Regarding biking, there are now 201 miles of bike lanes. “The Bicycle Master Plan calls for Seattle’s bike system to more than double in size, stretching 450 miles.” Hopefully, biking as a means of transport will continue to grow; between 2007 and 2009, it grew 15%.

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Clean Energy advocates in the US are coming from every sector. Last week the ‘Hip Hop Caucus’ raped up a week-long tour that started in New Orleans and ended with DJ Biz Markie on the steps of Capitol Hill in Washington D.C. Lisa Jackson, the ‘Environmental Protection Agency’s’ (EPA) Administrator, said that “The tour has been across the country listening to young voices calling for good jobs, lower energy costs and cleaner communities”. Among a host of other speakers was Maggie Fox, CEO of the ‘Alliance for Climate Protection’, who said that “It is clear that our young people and communities of color will benefit from economic opportunities that come from investing in clean energy”.

Meanwhile ‘Operation Free’ is also working across the nation, its mission: to ‘Secure America with Clean Energy’. This coalition is made up of US army veterans and national security groups that promote the link between dependence on foreign energy and national security. They argue that by becoming more energy independent they will reduce dangerous involvement abroad.

Now, you might not like Hip-Hop and not everyone is a fan of the US Army but the point is that the message cuts across traditional demographics. On an international level the US is not leading the move towards clean energy but the fact that Americans themselves are trying to get organized across the board to push for this shift is a positive sign.

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The Solar Decathlon is a competition organized yearly by the US Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory, since 2002. Teams of college and university students can participate by designing and building solar powered houses. The goal is to help reduce the cost of such homes and advance solar technology.

The winner team of the 2009 version of the competition was the Technische Universitat Damstadt of Germany, which designed a two-story house almost entirely covered in solar PV panels. It generates twice the energy it needs. Construction costs were more than $650,000. The team got the highest score possible, 150, on the net metering contest, which evaluated the constructions’ ability to generate all the energy needed and more.

The houses were exhibited in October last year, on the National Mall in Washington DC.

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World Without Oil is an online game that during May 2007 invited people to imagine life without oil. Over 1900 players participated with blog posts, videos, images and voicemails.

The game was created by Ken Enklund, presented by Independent Television Service (ITVS) and funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. It is an alternate reality game (ARG); it is based on the real world, and can be affected by players’ participation.

Its main goal is to get people thinking about the not so far-fetched possibility of the world being left without oil. By playing a game in which they have to accept this fact and do something about it, new and unexpected solutions and ideas could arise.

Many people who played it say that the game helped them change. The game is also related to James Surowiecky’s theory of collective intelligence, which claims that a decision is better and more effective if it is made collectively, rather than by a limited group of people. MIT researcher David Edery says that this sort of game helps develop collective intelligence.

Certain topics may seem too complex or intimidating to be thought of directly. That’s when a game such as World Without Oil comes in handy; it allows people to play with problems, possibilities and solutions. The game’s tagline is “Play it – before you live it”. Playing with a situation is an excellent way of preparing for it.

VIA: Le Monde

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"Once you see something, you can’t stop seeing it," says Alejandro Avampini, nature photographer and tireless traveler. He saw that the world population keeps growing, and resources are limited. And since he became aware of this, his life has changed. A year ago he pulled off one of his most significant projects; he and his wife Cecilia opened their own eco lodge, which they called Del Nomade, in Peninsula Valdes, Chubut province.

For years he traveled to various places in the world, taking photographs of nature, animals, and working for environmental organizations. Then he came to the town of Puerto Piramides, on the Valdes Peninsula and decided to settle there 16 years ago.

Del Nomade is the fruit of 10 years of plans, ideas, research and the determination to realize a dream. One of the biggest challenges was to get permission to build; it was not easy because the Valdes Peninsula was declared a World Heritage site a few years ago.

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David De Rothschild is a British 31-year-old banking heir, who in the last couple of years has been developing a number of environmental initiatives. He has now built –after months of hard work, research, and unrevealed, probably large investments– a catamaran made of recycled soda bottles, called Plastiki. He plans to cross the Pacific Ocean on it, hopefully setting sail in March.

De Rothschild’s goal is to show people what can be done with our trash, and what happens when we don’t deal with it. That’s why the Plastiki will visit the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. I can picture the two opposites: the fantastic recycled-plastic boat and the huge pile of trash that is contaminating our waters. It’s up to us to stop that pile from growing, and start finding witty ways of re-cycling and up-cycling our waste.

The name Plastiki was inspired by the journey of Thor Heyerdahl, who in 1947 sailed from South America to Polynesia on the Kon-Tiki.

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The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is developing a program to foster energy efficiency in data centers. Starting in June, data centers will be able to apply for Energy Star certification. Operators will first have to go through an online test, and depending on their score, be evaluated by the EPA.

With information technology (IT) growing as much as it is nowadays, data centers are all over the place, and consume impressive amounts of energy. That’s why the EPA’s initiative is most necessary. Data centers will have a way to measure their energy efficiency and show it to others. Besides, the environment is becoming an increasingly important concern for society, so this could work as a marketing strategy for companies.

First, data centers will have to enter specific information online. According to this data, they will be scored on a scale of 1-100. What will be evaluated is the power unit efficiency (PUE), which represents the total power used by the data center, divided by the amount of power that reaches the IT equipment.

A higher score means a more efficient operation. Data centers need to achieve over 75 points to be eligible for obtaining Energy Star. Those who do get the necessary score, are then audited by the EPA, and may get the sought certification.

VIA: Ecogeek

PC World

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Thanks Pablo from suelto.net for showing me this Ad

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