divine green: Sustainable Home, Beauty, & Lifestyle

On this Earth day–my first with Divine Green–I didn’t want to write about how to green your life or the many promising environmental initiatives that launched today. Thankfully, those topics were well covered in the mainstream press. Rather, I wanted to share a recent NPR “moment” that caused me to shift my thinking about conservation. (An NPR moment is the habit of staying in the car longer than intended just to listen to an engaging program on National Public Radio.)

The interview was with Arun Gandhi, the grandson of the Indian spiritual leader Mahatma Gandhi. Now a teacher of nonviolent practices himself (although he’s run into some issues in the world community of late), Arun was describing his experience with his grandfather as a young boy, after having thrown out a nearly worn-out pencil. Gandhi asked after the pencil, and when Arun replied that he had disposed of it, his grandfather told him to go find it. “But it’s nighttime,” Arun protested.

So Gandhi handed him a flashlight.

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By David Rittenhouse

TOKYO–One recent morning while I was hurrying into Shinjuku station here to catch the metro, I stopped at Starbucks for a small coffee and one of those really tasty sweet brown rice scones that they have in Japan.

When I finished my breakfast on-the-go I took my plastic tray with ceramic plate and paper cup to the return point/trash bin and had a sudden moment of conscientiousness. There were at least five different holes into which to separate and place the garbage–paper cups, plastic cups, tops, ice-liquids, other combustible and non-combustible items. (The Japanese government requires the recycling measures.)

This got me thinking. (more…)

Lake Mead, the U.S.’s largest manmade lake on the Nevada-Arizona border, has a 50 percent chance of going dry by 2021 if local population demands and global warming trends continue unchecked, according to a study last week from scientists at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego. That’s especially alarming news considering that Lake Mead, a body of water created by the Hoover Dam and the Colorado River, provides about 90 percent of the drinking water to Las Vegas, as well as a portion to southwest cities like Los Angeles and agricultural groups.

The forecast particularly highlights the precarious situation of a major city residing in the desert. Golf courses, unnatural residential lawns and ornate water fountains around Las Vegas are among massive drains on the water supply.

One of the ways Las Vegas authorities are trying to address issues of sustainability and educate the public on conservation is through a recent project called the Springs Preserve Sustainability Center, which opened last May. (more…)

SAN FRANCISCO–Ten years ago, a designer of a top-selling toothbrush might beam with pride over his or her creation. But seeing that indestructible saber of plastic washed up on a beach shore–battered but relatively unchanged–might cause the same designer some pause in today’s eco-conscious climate.

Valerie Casey would know. As head of global practice for design firm IDEO, whose clients include Johnson & Johnson and Sprint, Casey said at a recent design conference that she had a crisis of conscience about a year ago when she realized she wasn’t talking to her clients about sustainable design, for fear that they wouldn’t be amenable to ideas about eco alternatives.

So in the last year, she’s organized the Designer’s Accord, a nonprofit coalition of designers who pledge to share ideas and information about sustainable design practices with clients. The project launched in recent weeks.

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The Sundance Film Festival, the annual crème de la crème of independent film festivals in Park City, Utah, was a little greener and smelled of French Fries this year, thanks in part to the debut of Fields of Fuel, a documentary about the alternative fuel biodiesel. The film’s creator Josh Tickell and crew descended on Park City this weekend with their Veggie Van, a hippie-style VW run on vegetable oil or animal fat (pictured left), and helped educate people about how biodiesel works and its environmental benefits–all before the Sundance premiere of the film.

(The film features environmentalist-actor Woody Harrelson and Solayzme, a California company that makes biodiesel fuel from algae.) 

According to Tickell’s blog, Sunday “afternoon saw a greasy, french-fry-smelling version of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade…Overheard from Park City fans: ‘Look, it’s the Veggie Van! Do you smell that? It’s making me hungry.’”

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A recent article in the New York Times featured newly created buzzwords that crept into the American lexicon last year. Several terms were related to the environmental movement, if only in a laughable way.

“Vegansexual” is one noun. It refers to “a person who eats no meat, uses no animal derived goods and prefers not to have sex with non vegans,” according to the article. Personally, I prefer the term eco-sexual for the environmentally minded set who wouldn’t dream of kissing the less evolved. (Yes, I’m biased. Story here.)

Then, there’s “global weirding,” a term coined by Hunter Lovins, co-founder of the Rocky Mountain Institute, a think tank that works on energy issues. 

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For every liter of Fiji, Evian or Dasani bottled water that you buy, it takes another three to four liters of water to make the plastic container it sits in.

That unsettling research is from Peter Gleick, co-founder of the Pacific Institute, one of the nation’s top water-conservation assessment centers. National Public Radio’s Terry Gross interviewed Gleick on Tuesday for the show Fresh Air. (Interview here.)

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Metropolitan cities are setting the example this year on decorating with eco-Christmas lights. San Francisco this weekend, followed by Paris on Monday, lit massive holiday trees with mini light-emitting diode bulbs, which burn brighter than typical bulbs and emit no heat. The LEDs consume about 90 percent less electricity than typical lights and can last as many as 20 holiday seasons.

Paris’s tree on the Champs-Elysees was donned with close to 1 million new LED bulbs, according to a story from the Associated Press. A joint project by General Electric and French gas company Gaz de France, the energy efficient lights are expected to cut the city’s electricity bill by 70 percent for the holiday tree over previous years.

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Consumer electronics are the fastest growing hog of electricity in U.S. homes. That’s according to Noah Horowitz, senior scientist at the National Resources Defense Council, who said at a recent event that all those plasma TVs and Playstations now suck up as much as 15 percent of the household energy bill.

For example, Horowitz said, a 50 inch plasma TV uses 500 kilowatts of energy annually (if “on” an average of two to three hours daily), or about 4 percent of the household electricity bill. That’s the equivalent of adding another refrigerator to the house, he said.

Horowitz blamed the problem on designers of consumer electronics, who aren’t thinking about energy efficiency at the outset. Consider the DVR. Many of the digital recording devices don’t include an on/off switch.

“It’s on 24 hours at full power even if you’re not using it,” Horowitz said. “With the uptake of DVRs in homes, you could eliminate the need for new power plants if the box was designed better.”

One solution is to unplug (more…)

If there’s any good reason to rethink your carbon footprint, it’s the worrisome findings from a six-year study on global climate change from Nobel Prize-winning experts. The authority–the U.N Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a group of 2,000 scientists from 140 countries–released the culmination of its research on the effects of global warming last weekend. Here are some of the findings, but you can read the full report here.

Global greenhouse gases have risen by 70 percent since 1970, largely because of carbon dioxide emissions from factories, power plants and cars. The growth of atmospheric gases is responsible for global warming, or the rise of planetary temperatures by 1.3 degrees over the last century, according to the report. In fact, 11 of the last 12 years have been the warmest on record over the last century.

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