With this in mind, the “New Year x(1)” practice of sustainability has been released as a very simple and painless way for each member of the world population to participate in contributing toward an increase in sustainability practices.

During the upcoming year, people can start their “New Year x(1)” practice as follows:

1. Use one less light each day, wherever it’s convenient. (reduces demand for electricity)
2. Buy one additional local product. (encourages local production to serve local communities)
3. Buy one less foreign product. (reduces supply chain CO2 emissions and demand for fossil fuels)
4. Turn the thermostat down one degree at bedtime. (reduces generation of greenhouse gases used to produce energy)
5. Buy one more product made from recycled materials. (promotes the economic engine that makes recycling a feasible business model)
6. Mow the lawn one time with a mulching mower (provides natural fertilizer for the lawn & reduces the need for so much chemical fertilizer)
7. Use one less plastic trash bag to collect the grass clippings. (reduces the requirement for more fossil fuels used in plastics manufacturing)
8. Eat one less hamburger. (reduces CO2 emissions from cow burps, the petroleum used for shipping, and the electricity used for freezing and cooking)
9. Rescue and put to use one item that’s headed for the landfill. (As Ben Franklin once said: Waste not, want not.”)
10. Devise one unique sustainable practice for yourself.  (choose from hundreds of options to spread new sustainable practices; the imagination has no limits – see Steven Sisters’ photo on natural pest control!)

A mixture of coffee and rum is placed in the bottom and then hung on the coffee tree. The bugs are attracted to the coffee smell, drink the mixture, get drunk, fall into the liquid and drown. Voila! Instant, natural pest control!

Such a list can grow exponentially for those who choose, but let’s look at the results from simple “New Year x(1)” math to measure effectiveness: 10 practices for each member of the population of this country – now counting at 308 million people – multiplies out to 3.8 billion sustainable practices in one year. Or if the world population of 6.9 billion people takes up this practice, multiplying by a factor of 10 will generate 69 billion more sustainable acts than were generated in 2010.

This is doable, quite easy to practice, and saves more than money. Cheers to the Future!

Happy New Year!

That is when bloggers across more than 100 countries participate in Change.org’s Blog Action Day for clean water. The purpose of this event is to debate, brainstorm and raise global awareness around clean water. Participating bloggers will take this single day to write about this very important and ill-understood issue.

“Why Water?” asks the Blog Action Day website. Many people just take water for granted, like the photo on the left. But there are one billion people on this planet without enough water.

Change.org writes, “Right now, almost a billion people on the planet don’t have access to clean, safe drinking water. That’s one in eight of us who are subject to preventable disease and even death because of something that many of us take for granted. Access to clean water is not just a human rights issue. It’s an environmental issue. An animal welfare issue. A sustainability issue. Water is a global issue, and it affects all of us.”

Here is a list of suggested posts copied from the website:

• Water as a Human Right: In July, the United Nations declared access to clean water and sanitation a human right over objection from the United States. Today, nearly one billion people lack basic access to safe drinking water. More Info »
• Women: In Africa, women are predominantly responsible for collecting water. They walk over 40 billion hours each year carrying cisterns weighing up to 40 pounds to gather water for their community, which is usually still not safe to drink. More Info »
• Polluted Oceans: Not only is pollution bad for the environment, it’s also expensive! Death and disease caused by polluted coastal waters costs the global economy $12.8 billion a year. More Info »
• Uninhabitable Rivers: Today, 40% of America’s rivers and 46% of America’s lakes are too polluted for fishing, swimming, or aquatic life. That’s not surprising considering the fact that 1.2 trillion gallons of untreated sewage, storm water, and industrial waste are discharged into US waters annually. More Info »
• Food Footprint: Do you know the water footprint of your food? For example, 75 liters of water are required to make a glass of beer and 15,500 liters to make a kilogram of beef. More Info »
• Water Wars: Many scholar, researchers and political analysts attribute the conflict in Darfur at least in part to lack of access to water. In fact, a report commissioned by the UN Development Program found that in the 21st century, water scarcity will become one of the leading causes of conflict in Africa. More Info »
• Technology Footprint: On an average day, 500 billion liters of water travel through US power plants to power all the technology that we use every day. For example, that shiny new iPhone in your pocket requires half a liter of water to charge. That may not seem like much, but with approximately 6.4 million active iPhones in the US, that’s 3.2 million liters to charge those alone. More Info »
• Bottled Water: Even though people in the US have access to clean water from their taps, they drink an average of 200 bottles of water per person each year. Over 17 million barrels of oil are needed to manufacture those water bottles, 86 percent of which will never be recycled. More Info »
• Farmers vs. Animals: As water becomes scarcer in Africa, farmers not only compete with each other but also with other animals, including elephants. Forced into close contact with farmers, elephants destroy crops and wreak havoc on agriculture, causing farmers in turn to resort to violence in order to protect their crops and water sources. More Info »
• Children: Every week, nearly 38,000 children under the age of 5 die from unsafe drinking water and unhygienic living conditions. More Info »
• Fashion Footprint: That cotton t-shirt you’re wearing right now took 400 gallons of water to produce, and your jeans required an extra 1800 gallons. Not wearing cotton? The dyes and synthetic fibers used to make your clothes create waste that’s among the many contributors to water pollution. More Info »
• Water Celebrities: A number of celebrities have taken up the cause of water and water rights, including Matt Damon , Adrian Grenier , Leonardo DiCaprio , and Will & Jada Smith .

Blog Action Day is an annual event that brings bloggers together to post about a worthy cause. In its fourth year, Blog Action Day has covered environmental issues, poverty and climate change. This year, water was chosen by user vote on Change.org’s blog. It is the first year that Change.org is taking on the event from Blog Action Day co-creators Collis and Cyan Ta’eed.

Blog Action Day is very much about grassroots activism, taking the philosophy that a lot of ordinary people can make an extraordinary difference. Change.org hopes that the volume of blog posts on October 15 will create a meme around water issues, raising awareness and creating a digital, global think tank.

We encourage all readers to go take a look at some remarkably fresh approaches to powering and managing the grid. And applause to General Electric and the sponsors supporting this contest, as this is how we will advance toward the development of a saner and more sustainable world.

The joint submission from John Tuttle, president of Windpipe Corporation, and myself is as follows:

Title:

Highway & Traffic Wind Energy Recycling System Using a Bladeless Wind-to-Electricity Generation System

Summary: Heavily trafficked stretches of Interstate highway create megawatts of lost wind power daily from passing vehicles. We will capture, convert, store, and recycle wind from this traffic into usable power, feeding it back to the grid or fueling stations that can power electric or hybrid vehicles creating the bypass wind.

The Idea: If a stranded motorist has ever stood on the edge of a busy highway they recall a place where the wind gusts from passing vehicles swirled powerfully. This very roadside happens to be a reservoir of lost wind energy, which can be captured as raw energy and converted to electrical power, and then distributed to the grid. Put in practical terms for the 21st century, such a highway sporting numerous electric-powered vehicles, is capable of producing its own roadside recharging stations where motorists to take a driving break while their car gets juiced up.

The Solution: In an era of diminishing energy supplies, now is an ideal time to capture lost wind energy, by converting, or recycling that energy into useable AC power. Such captured power can be fed to utilities, homes, or fueling stations that serve some of the very vehicles creating these bypass winds.

Available technologies: There are three basic types of wind-to-electricity technologies that might be used for roadside wind capture: horizontal-axis blade-driven turbines, vertical-axis blade-driven turbines, and a newer bladeless technology that uses resonance to convert wind to electricity (Windpipe, Inc. U.S. Provisional Patent App. No. 61/226,950 filed July 20, 2009, titled “Improved methods and systems for generating electrical energy from wind energy,” and International Utility Conversion: 7062-00100).

Windpipe uses non-linear feedback to amplify the percentage of Vortex Energy from Total flow Energy, leading to surprisingly high overall conversion efficiency.

The period of Vortex generation locks to the transit time of the pressure waves in the pipe, while the vortex generation acts as a reciprocating piston, launching pressure wave fronts down the pipe, applying dynamic pressure to the flexible diaphragm at the closed end of the tube, providing mechanical motion to another dynamical system, which can be a linear alternator, fluid pump, or both.

The engine is based on a principle from Fluid Dynamics: Bluff Object Vortex Induced Vibration (VIV) with Coupled Mode Flutter to a Second Order System – in WindPipe’s case, a standing wave tube where the resulting mechanical motion at the closed end is converted to electricity, pump action, explosion or both.

Because horizontal and vertical wind turbines are large, noisy and potentially dangerous in locales where people travel, we believe the Windpipe technology provides the soundest technology to test multiple applications of wind-to-energy in developing a viable and cost-effective wind to electricity capture and distribution infrastructure.

Bladeless system advantages:

• Uses an array of lightweight horizontal pipes, reducing transportation costs
• Harvests wind power at higher wind speeds (Regions 3 and 4)
• Is harmless to birds & bats
• Linear motor motion has a lifetime of over 60 yrs, with minimal bearing wear
• Produces power at a cost of 0.5¢ to 1¢/kWh
• Equipment easy to access & maintain

Control of highway wind turbulence: We believe the use of attractively designed chutes and foils will be important in the system design in order to best manage potential wind turbulence.

Collaborators:  Glenn Meyers, storyteller and founder of Green Streets, envisioned a wind recycling system that could convert displaced highway wind energy to electricity. John Tuttle, a leading patent holder in the RFID space, invented the Windpipe, a bladeless wind-to-electricity generation system.

It has been an honor working with John Tuttle on this endeavor. Congratulations, also, to the many worthy entrants in the Challenge.

Buckminster Fuller, designer of the geodesic dome Source: BFI

For those still considering creating one of this world’s next great solutions, there are but 15 days left to prepare and submit applications for the 2011 Buckminster Fuller Challenge. Those standing on the sidelines should run onto the plying field; our world needs the help.

This important global event is considered by some to be one of socially responsible design’s highest awards. This premier international prize program awards $100,000 to support the development and implementation of a solution that, broadly stated, “has significant potential to solve humanity’s most pressing problems.”

According to the BFI Challenge, entering creates “an opportunity to become part of a network that is advancing and accelerating the practice of whole systems thinking and design to develop the kind of high impact global solutions we so desperately need.”

The Buckminster Fuller Institute, named after Buckminster Fuller, creator of the geodesic dome, was created to share and advance imaginative work that might lead the way to solving problems for global housing and infrastructure requirements.

15 days remain to enter the 2011 BFI Challenge. SOURCE: BFI Challenge

According to BFI’s press release, “Past entries included bold, visionary strategies, from a radical solution to urban mobility in the world’s largest cities to a strategy to dramatically increase crop yields and economic development in the grasslands and savannahs of Africa. While the entries cover a broad range of topics, the common thread among them is a highly integrated approach to design— one that is simultaneously comprehensive, anticipatory and aligned with nature’s fundamental principles. This focus on integrated design strategies is what distinguishes the Challenge from all other prize programs. “

The jury for this year’s challenge will include “systems thinkers and design pioneers across a wide spectrum of human endeavor are invited from all over the world.”

Past jury members have included Janine Benyus, Sir Nicholas Grimshaw, Helena Norberg-Hodge, John Thackara, Hazel Henderson, Danny Hillis, Alan Kay, Hunter Lovins, Bill Browning, José Zaglul, William McDonough, Adam Bly, Greg Watson and Vandana Shiva.

For those wanting to review the criteria that drive the selection of the winning solution click these links:

Challenge Criteria Video http://challenge.bfi.org/Challenge_Criteria

Challenge Criteria Webpage http://challenge.bfi.org/criteria

IDE's water technologies have had an important impact on poor rural farmers in developing countries. Photo: IDE

In Denver, an important art exhibition from developing countries opens in Denver, along with another feature concerning sustainability and affordable water technologies. The exhibition, titled, The Art of Dirt, has been organized by Denver-based IDE The exhibition takes place at the EventGallery 910 Arts and will run through September 25.

According to IDE, The Art of Dirt allows visitors to learn how simple, affordable technology design has improved the incomes and lives of the millions of people at the base of the economic pyramid. The exhibition includes photographs, videos and a tomato garden growing in the gallery that has been irrigated using IDE water technology.

IDE drip irrigation system in use. Photo: IDE

IDE, founded in 1982, strives to create income opportunities for poor, rural households in the developing world. This exhibition showcases some simple, pattern-changing technologies, such as IDE’s foot-powered treadle pump, and low-pressure micro-sprinkler and affordable drip irrigation that IDE has made available in developing countries.  This technologies have helped poor, rural families gain control over their water supply and opening up a new world of income-generating possibilities.

Dealing with water technologies like these started when IDE worked in Bangladesh in the 1980s, where the lack of access to water in rural villages was a widespread problem. IDE personnel believed that manually powered irrigation pumps could solve some of the water problem and allow farmers to increase productivity. As a result, IDE increased annual sales of manual irrigation pumps from 14,000 to 75,000 in a five-year period. After that initial success, IDE found a better solution in the treadle pump, which is more efficient and easier to operate than manual pumps. To date, more than 1.5 million treadle pumps have been sold in Bangladesh, creating 1.4 billion dollars in net additional income per year.

Today, IDE uses a market oriented development model to increase the income of the rural poor by improving market access, increasing agricultural production, and creating sustainable local businesses. IDE’s projects are country specific, aimed at increasing income for those living on less than a dollar a day in the most efficient and viable manner possible according to each region’s unique opportunities.

Over the last 28 years we have worked with more than 3.8 million families, increasing their aggregate income by over one billion dollars. Kudos!

“Nature Communications differs in being multidisciplinary,” reports the Nature announcement. “It aims not to compete with the established Nature journals, but to publish rigorous and comprehensive papers that represent advances of significance to specialists within each field. In addition, it welcomes submissions in fields that are not represented by a dedicated Nature research journal — for example, developmental biology, plant science, microbiology, ecology and evolution, palaeontology, astronomy and high-energy physics. ”

Using nanotube wires for hybrid fuel cells has renewed promise Source: Nature Communications

One current article discusses hybrid nanotubes as a part of miniaturizing fuel cells for biological applications.

“Now Gao and coworkers show that electrodes made with porous microfibers composed of oriented carbon nanotubes are capable of delivering fast mass transport of the reagents and greatly enhanced currents,” the magazine reports.

Many readers may find much of these works from Nature to be highly academic in nature — even heady sometimes — but such information provides a solid barometer for scientific research and development trends.

Safeway has become a founding member of the Sustainability Consortium, the group launched in support of Wal-Mart’s Sustainability Index.

The goal of the consortium is to develop guidelines and promote innovations as the supply chain seeks to reduce its energy use, emissions and packaging. The consortium made headlines in January when Wal-Mart and Best Buy, together with electronics suppliers Dell, HP, Intel and Toshiba, officially launched the effort.

The consortium is administered by Arizona State University and the University of Arkansas, with financial support from Wal-Mart.

The consortium has courted Safeway, in hopes that it would become involved in what could be an industry wide sustainability metric system.

Safeway made its involvement in the initiative public March 1, reports Supermarket News. Safeway is the first grocer to join the group, according to a press release.

The retailer will use life cycle assessment data to create a company-wide supply chain policy encouraging sustainable purchasing and manufacturing practices throughout the organization’s direct and indirect buying.

Colorado Carbon Fund Advisory Committee Meeting

The Colorado Carbon Fund’s Advisory Committee meets Monday, March 1 from 2-4 pm at the GEO office.

The Agenda includes:

• An update on Colorado Carbon Fund marketing and plans for 2010.
• An introduction to Ben Vitale, the new president of The Climate Trust, our partners in managing the Fund and finding high quality projects.
• An Executive Session review of proposals received during the RFP for solar hot water systems. This portion of the meeting will be closed to the public.

If you’d like to listen in by webinar, please register online.

To attend in person, please contact
Susan Innis

Don’t miss this opportunity to network and share resources and best practices with industry leaders and experts, and your peers.
For more information visit:
www.awea.org/events/supplychain4

Paul Hawken, keynote speaker Source: http://paulhawken.com

Santa Monica, CA – The Sustainable Industries Economic Forum, scheduled Jan. 14, will feature environmental economist, Paul Hawken, and The Huffington Post co-founder, Arianna Huffington.

Paul Hawken, CEO of Pax Engineering Group and author of “Ecology of Commerce” and “Natural Capitalism,” will address the opportunities created by a triple-bottom-line approach (people, planet, profit) in the midst of the current business climate.

Arianna Huffington, the co-founder and editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post , will give a presentation and serve as moderator for a question-and-answer session with Hawken.

The event will also feature an informational panel of local business leaders which will be moderated by Lewis Perkins, Sustainable Strategist at New House, LLC.

Business leaders across the country recognize that being committed to sustainability and corporate responsibility is not a passing trend, but rather a fundamental component of successful business. A 2008 survey by The Economist

found that “most executives (57 percent) say the benefits of pursuing sustainable practices outweigh the costs…Specifically, sustainable practices can help reduce costs (particularly energy expenditure), open up new markets and improve the company’s reputation.”

“In a down economy it is easy to ask the question ‘is sustainability still relevant’?” said Brian Back, Founding Editor & Publisher of Sustainable Industries. “Many people think it’s the first thing that goes, but in reality most cutting-edge companies see it as their way out of the downturn.”

Sustainable Industries is an independent business magazine, Web site, event and media company serving sustainable business leaders on the West Coast, with offices in San Francisco, Portland and Seattle.

For further information, contact Laura Christiansen, Sustainable Industries, laura@sustainableindustries.com (970) 471-6587, or Kathleen Warren, Parsons Public Relations, kathleen@parsonspr.com O: (206) 789-5668 / M: (206) 778-6695