November 2009

Health officials in Ohio are attempting to bring back a dangerous pesticide to wipe out the growing number of bedbugs lurking in hotels and bedrooms.

But it’s not worth bringing a chemical that can cause nausea and vomiting back into households just to get rid of some tiny bugs.

More than two-thirds of hotels in one county in Ohio, however, have had bedbug infestations, according to the Associated Press. The state is now asking the Environmental Protection Agency to use the chemical Propoxur in hotels and homes. Propoxur was a widely used insecticide for lawn ants and in flea collars for pets before the stuff was banned in the 1990s.

Discussions have circled back to Propoxur because bedbugs seem to be resistant to many of the products now used to combat them. It’s supposed to be 100 percent affective in getting rid of the little critters.

This Thanksgiving Day, let’s stop with the doom and gloom for a brief moment to focus on how far the environmental movement has come since the days of riverside dumping stations and tossing old oil out in the back 40. It’s now hard to believe there was ever a time when these sorts of laws weren’t necessary.

National Environmental Policy Act: This is the grandfather of environmental policy. It set the stage for future action by making the “enhancement of the environment” a national policy instead of an obscure hippy obsession.

Clean Air Act: Although rather self-explanatory, it’s worth remembering how far we’ve come since the smog-filled cities brought forth by the industrial age. This protects against industry putting dangerous amounts of chemicals into the air while also addressing things like acid rain, ozone depletion and toxic air pollution.

Christmas is a huge time of year for retailers both on and off the web and strong demand for the Barnes & Noble Nook is a great example of that. The company just recently started accepting pre-orders and it’s already sold out with new orders not shipping until January 4th. It gives the Nook a jazzy entrance to a market currently dominated by Amazon’s Kindle 2 and Sony’s eBook Reader.

No major announcements have come from Amazon yet in regards to how the company will take the Kindle 2 to the next level and Barnes & Noble certainly plans to take full advantage of that. The company already ramped up its production though demand continues to exceed supply. A spokesman says “while we increased production based on the high consumer interest, we've sold out of our initial Nook allotment available for delivery before the holidays,” according to AFP.

Asian carp are the next great threat to the Great Lakes, but how exactly did this happen?

Did someone with a personal vendetta against sports fishermen plant them in the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal? Did they swim across the ocean and all the way up the mighty Mississippi just to make headlines?

The real answer starts with the aquatic equivalent to factory farms. Instead of braving the ocean blue to make their catches, the seafood industry now simply grows fish in big ponds.

To make a long story short, the rains came down and the floods came up and the Asian carp made it into the watershed. From their, they’ve found their way up the Mississippi River and are now a few short miles from Lake Michigan.

Most recently, scientists found Asian carp’s DNA on the wrong side of a multi-million dollar electric barrier created to keep invasive species out of the lakes.

This is a better time of year than any to think about trading in those long tangle strands of incandescent Christmas lights for some brighter, more efficient set of LED lights.

Of course, it may be better to simply swear off superfluous holiday lighting, but I highly doubt this vibrant tradition will disappear any time soon. It’s hard to imagine Time Square and all the other iconic downtown Christmas displays across the country giving up now.

So fortunately, big and small companies are pushing LED lights as an alternative to their inefficient predecessor. Home Depot is now offers a recycling program for LED Christmas light strings and many smaller companies such as HolidayLEDs.com are giving discounts on new LED lights when old ones are mailed in for recycling.

In the past, a green diaper was a cloth diaper. If a family wanted to be eco-friendly and avoid the harsh realities of a diaper sitting in a landfill for half a millennium, they would have to devote a lifetime (or at least it feels like a lifetime) to redundant cleaning and washing. Now, however, hybrid diapers offer the eco-friendly benefits of a cloth diaper with the convenience of a disposable diaper.

Green diapers have become a hot topic because of the distressing statistics surrounding the disposable diaper industry. According to the Real Diaper Association, 27.4 billion disposable diapers end up in landfills. The EPA estimates that is more than 3.4 million tons of waste.

The $5.7 billion disposable diaper industry continues to grow and with its growth, the amount of carbon emitting waste also continues to grow, but a new segment of the market, green diapers, may actually have an environmentally friendly impact.

So who has the best hybrid diaper?

Most everyone has used a toilet at some point in their life, and habitual behaviors on a mass scale drive overall consumption patterns. That’s why the EPA is focused on marketing green toilets and urinals through its badge of approval: WaterSense.

In 2008 WaterSense saved 9.3 billion gallons of water through its certified network of brands building and selling products that meet the program’s specifications. High efficiency, or green toilets are a key part of that savings - especially considering toilets account for about 30% of residential indoor water consumption.

An average consumer will flush the toilet 140,000 times in their lifetime and a WaterSense labeled product can reduce the water consumed by that activity by saving about 4,000 gallons per year according to the EPA. Brands participating vary widely and include American Standard, Crane, Kohler and others.

How much energy does it take for your microwave to pop popcorn? Or for you to watch a feature-length film on your new flat screen TV?

New TalkingPlug devices, which fit on to any home electrical outlet, will be able to help you gauge how much energy each of your appliances and devices are using. The Toronto company Zerofootprint is currently creating TalkingPlugs, and expects to have them out soon. The company specializes in developing tools to monitor and reduce company and individual carbon footprints, according to its Web site.

A wave of California lawmakers flushed out an $11 billion fix to the state’s massive water conundrum. The problem? While the majority of people live in the deserts of Southern California, most of the water comes from the north.

To solve it, Gov. Terminator is proposing new dams so the Golden State can save up water for dry times. The measure will be up for a vote next November.

But as water expert Peter Gleick pointed out to the Environment Report, the idea fails to make water users accountable for their long showers and untamed irrigation.

“We will never ultimately, sustainably manage our water resources if we don’t know who is using how much water to do what,” he said. “And we don’t, with any degree of accuracy. And that’s still not addressed in this bill.”

Sprint and Samsung are hoping for some kudos from the green movement with their launch of the Reclaim, and overall it provides some great functionality for a midrange mobile phone. It’s made from recycled and recyclable plastics, but that doesn’t get in the way of this value-packed device.

Soy-based inks used in the instruction manual and minimalist packaging emphasize the Reclaim’s eco friendliness.

The Reclaim comfortably fit in my hand and the plastic felt sturdy. Button placement was intuitive although at times I found myself hitting the selector button and return button at once on accident because of cramped space.

Cadillac is a brand that’s synonymous with luxury and with ties going back to the dissolution of the Henry Ford Company, it’s rich in American history too. GM is likely counting on some of that brand equity to make people curious about newly planned Converj Coup Cadillac hybrid which will be in production sometime after 2013, well after the launch of the 2010 Chevy Volt.

Coupling the Chevrolet brand with Volt was a strategic choice for GM who is working to convince consumers that electric cars are ready for the mainstream. But with a $40,000 price tag before government incentives it’s a hard pill for the middle class to swallow. GM is expecting that, and it has a plan.

Rather than count on selling lots of 2010 Chevy Volts, GM is working to disseminate parts of the technology out into a breadth of products and the Cadillac Converj is the latest example. This model will utilize the same electric powertrain as the Chevy Volt.

Why can’t things like being good to others or the environment be fun? A site created by Volkswagen (VW) called “The Fun Theory,” features viral videos that use witty experiments to see if making things more fun can change people’s behavior.

Want to get that new book? Need some fresh magazines? Grab your library card and go on a free spree.

According to the Green Press Initiative, it takes around 30 million trees to produce all the books in the U.S. And that’s leaving out all the magazines and newspapers that cycle through the average American home.

While most books bought at the store get a few reads, library materials stay in circulation for years, delving out wisdom to many along the way. Libraries also carry local and national newspapers as well as magazines on a wide variety of topics. If you think you’re green by recycling your New Yorker, think again. By reading the exact same pages at the library, you’ll keep one copy completely out of the system.

With regular visits to the library, you don’t need a Kindle or a Nook either. While a Kindle holds hundreds of titles, each aisle of the library holds thousands.

Wind energy has immense potential to offset carbon emissions by generating electricity from a renewable source. But it also comes with its own set of ecological and safety risks. Case in point? Recently in Sweden two turbines spun out of control in the span of a week, flinging out some of their deadly blades.

Luckily in one instance the blade hit the ground and in the other a nearby power transformer, but the risk is obvious. Without proper installations and maintenance wind turbines can pose a safety threat for nearby residents. Bats also suffer in some instances because of the rapid drop in air pressure wind turbines cause.