Car Trash What Do You Do With It? Here’s a Green Recycle Tip!

While living a greener lifestyle in our family does include bicycling and walking, we are still trying to find ways to reduce our automobile usage. In the end, with urban sprawl and larger wide-ranging communities, the car has become a necessary evil to help our family to survive in a modern age. With all the travel and activities we have, there is a bi-product created which lives in our car; garbage from our adventures.

Before recycling existed, we would dump the garbage out at the nearest trash receptacle and leave it at that. However, what I have learned is a lot of what we collect as trash during our car travels can be recycled. Our family has begun to save everything we gather and bring it home so we can place it in the recycling bin instead of throwing useful things out in the landfill.

Next time you’re out and about in your car, remember to save all your recyclables and bring them home. Think before you throw them out in a trash bin and make a conscious decision to make a difference for our environment. Recycle!

Shawna Coronado says Get Healthy! Get Green! Get Community www.thecasualgardener.com, The Green Blog -www.gardeningnude.com, or The Garden Blog -http://thecasualgardener.blogspot.com

Watermelon Juice May Be Next “Green” Fuel

Watermelon, the quintessential summer fruit, may soon be helping to fuel your car as well as your picnic guests.

According to a new U.S. government study, juice from unwanted watermelons could be a promising new source for making the biofuel ethanol.

Up to a fifth of all watermelons grown each year have odd shapes or scarred rinds that turn off consumers, said study co-author Wayne Fish, a chemist with the Agricultural Research Service in Lane, Oklahoma.

Instead of picking the fruit, farmers leave these reject melons on the vine.

“If you figure a field of watermelon may yield somewhere between 60 and 100 tons per acre of watermelon, a fifth of that can be substantial,” Fish said.

When he and colleagues were experimenting with extracting antioxidant compounds from watermelon juice, they realized the waste stream of sugary fluids could be a source of ethanol.

(Compare the costs and benefits of different biofuels.)

To read the rest of John Roach’s National Geograpgic News article, click HERE.

Newt Cuts Itself to Use Ribs as “Concealed Weapons”

Like the X-men’s Wolverine extending his claws, the Spanish ribbed newt slashes through itself with its sharp rib bones to create defensive spines, according to a new study.

Scientists were already aware that the amphibian species responds to threats by thrusting out its rib bones, which then get coated with toxic skin secretions.

But little was known about how the odd adaptation worked.

It had been thought that the newt simply contracted its body, forcing the ends of the ribs out through special openings in the skin.

Scott Norris
for National Geographic News

Voyage confirms plastic pollution

Scientists have confirmed that there are millions of tonnes of plastic floating in an area of ocean known as the North Pacific Gyre.

The first of two ships on a voyage to study plastic pollution there has recently returned to port.

Scientists on board say they found increasing amounts of plastic of all sizes as they travelled into the gyre.

They plan to analyse the effects of the waste on marine life and will propose methods to clear it up.

The North Pacific Gyre is a slow-moving clockwise vortex where four major ocean currents meet. Little lives there besides phytoplankton.

Larger than Texas

However the currents have carried millions of tonnes of rubbish into the centre of the gyre, which now covers an area estimated to be larger than the US state of Texas.

The two ships from Project Kaisei set off for the gyre from San Francisco more than three weeks ago.

The research vessel New Horizon from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography arrived back earlier this week. The second, the tall ship Kaisei, will be back on Monday.

To read more of Judith Burns  BBC article, click HERE.

Why I’ll Swig From My Sigg No More

“After I finished my talk about the hazards of bisphenol A at Powell’s City of Books in Portland, Oregon last week, I immediately reached beneath the podium and took a swig from my reusable Sigg water bottle.

The polite applause subsided, and one of the first to ask questions was a middle-aged man in the front row. “What’s that blue thing you’re drinking from? Does it have BPA in it?” As it turns out, the good man’s questions require an answer far more nuanced than the one I gave him the other night.

If you’ve not heard, BPA is a chemical used for making polycarbonate plastic baby bottles and sippy cups. It’s also a material in the resin linings that coat metal food cans (think soup, beans and the fruits and veggies in your pantry) and beverage containers, (think Coke, Pepsi and all the brands that wish they were).

No one, not even BPA manufacturers, disputes that BPA, which mimics the hormone estrogen, leaches from polycarbonate containers and metal-can linings into what we eat and drink. So, in light of dozens of independent, peer-reveiwed laboratory studies that show BPA causes troubling effects, and that the Center for Disease Control and Prevention has found BPA in nine out of 10 Americans, the Food and Drug Administration has promised a new safety assessment of BPA by Nov. 30.

In the meantime, Connecticut and Michigan, the city of Chicago, three counties in New York and the entire country of Canada have banned BPA in certain products intended for children. Nearly two dozen jurisdictions — including the U.S. Congress — are currently considering bans.

Personally, I’d rather be safe than sorry. So I got rid of my reusable polycarbonate plastic water bottle three years ago as I was researching my book, The Body Toxic: How the Hazardous Chemistry of Everyday Things Threatens Our Health and Well-being (North Point Press/Farrar, Straus and Giroux).

I learned how stacks of peer-reviewed studies plausibly link BPA to infertility, prostate and breast cancers, a decline in semen quality, Type 2 diabetes, obesity and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. And I saw chemical manufacturers using tricks straight out of Big Tobacco’s playbook in an attempt to downplay the hazards of BPA.

When I purchased a new reusable water container, I chose an aluminum Sigg bottle festooned in a cheery, blue-plaid pattern. Any concern that the shiny coppery-bronze interiors of Sigg bottles might contain and leach BPA was allayed by the company’s assurances that its “proprietary” lining was “totally inert and imparts absolutely no chemicals into the beverage.”

Soon, my editor, my agent, my friends and my family were sipping from colorful Siggs, too.
So imagine my outrage when I learned last Friday that the closely guarded secret ingredients of the lining inside all Sigg bottles made before August 2008 contain traces of BPA.

Sigg posted the information on its web site along with an announcement about its new BPA-free lining, which Sigg said has been in development since 2006 at a cost of $1 million. To reassure consumers like me who adapted early to Sigg bottles, the company stated that its BPA-containing bottles “were thoroughly and regularly tested…and all tests revealed absolutely no migration or leaching of BPA or any other substance.”

This is greenwashing at its worst. Sigg rode a wave of growing concerns about BPA, selling lot after lot of its products to people who believed they were reducing the risk of exposure to BPA by switching from reusable polycarbonate plastic drinking bottles.

Then, in order to tout its new BPA-free product (as many of its competitors already are doing), Sigg copped to the presence of BPA in its older products, and asked customers to take its word that testing (paid for by the company) confirms that the old linings don’t leach BPA.

If you write to Sigg to complain, the company is offering a free replacement — providing you pay the postage to send in your old BPA-containing bottle.

“We want our current and potential customers to have the facts,” said Steve Wasik, CEO of Sigg.

Well, Mr. Wasik, this former customer wishes you’d been straight with the facts from the beginning.

As much as I admire Sigg’s hip graphics and commitment to weaning us off throwaway water bottles, I won’t be sending in my old Sigg bottle for a replacement. Why should I condone corporate doublespeak or claims of “proprietary” business information that conveniently cloud the facts?

Instead, I’ll be applying the cost of postage to the purchase of a BPA-free product from one of Sigg’s competitors.”

-Nena Baker

Looks like SIGG’s Out, and Hydro Flask’s are in!

Arctic Circle – A Daily Global Warming Comic

BPA found in supposedly safe Swiss water bottles

OTTAWA  When the anti-plastics movement gained steam a few years ago, Brandi Nicholauson tossed out all the plastic water bottles in her house and coughed up the extra cash to buy her kids metal bottles.

Today, the Nova Scotia mom is one of thousands of consumers trying to make sense of the latest news. SIGG Switzerland has revealed that until last August, its Swiss-made aluminum reusable bottle, an iconic symbol for the health-conscious consumer and the outdoorsy environmentalist, was lined with an epoxy liner containing trace amounts of bisphenol A, which the federal government considers a toxic substance.

“Never did I expect them to have BPA in a liner. To me, it’s pretty obvious that people are buying metal bottles because they’re afraid of plastic and the BPA issue,” Nicholauson said Tuesday.

“I feel a little bit mislead. That’s how I feel. Whoever is making metal bottles out there are definitely benefiting from people being afraid of BPA and plastic.”

To read more of Sarah Schmidt’s chilling tale, click HERE.

Of course we all know Hydro Flask uses only the finest grade 18/8 Stainless Steel. The same material found in your cutlery.

Common weed killer showing up in drinking water supply

A popular weed killer that’s been suspected of causing frog deformities is turning up in drinking water systems throughout the country including some in Missouri and Illinois, according to a report by the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Banned in the European Union because of safety concerns, atrazine was found in 90 percent of all drinking water samples taken from 139 community water systems between 2003 and 2004, according to the group’s analysis of data gathered by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Those samples included water taken from systems in Missouri and Illinois. Two systems in Illinois’ Mount Olive in Macoupin County and Evansville in Randolph County had annual running averages that exceeded EPA’s drinking water standard of three parts per billion.

To read more of Kim McGuire’s story, click HERE.

Arctic Circle – A Daily Global Warming Comic

Moment before Hawaii surfer engulfed in wave captured on camera

Clark Little, 40, used a special water camera to capture the scene on Ke Iki beach as the 8ft wave rolled in.

Such a shorebreak is powerful enough to drag down unsuspecting surfers and has been known to cause neck and back injuries as it breaks in shallow water.

Mr Little, from Oahu, Hawaii, has only been taking pictures of waves for two years but his 35 years of surfing experience has meant he knows when to be in the right place at the right time.

This can mean actually getting into the wave itself – which can be up to 15 feet tall.

Mr Little said: “I just use my surfing experience and go in the waves. I love the feeling of getting into the waves, I am addicted to shooting the shorebreaks but you need to know your limits and the ocean.”

To read the rest of this breaking story by the Telegraph UK, click HERE