Here are clips from Mr. Edwards’ letter (emphasis place by me):

“…we manufacture and distribute water products, mainly through Natural Foods Retailers across the Nation. We have been in business for over 15 years and our products offer consumers a way to live litter free and chemical free lives by filtering the water they drink,  they shower and bathe in, and a way to ease the problem with our nation’s landfills.
“There are many environmental issues facing the world today. One of which is the bottled water epidemic that is systematically helping to destroy the environment we live in. It takes 1.5 million barrels of oil — enough to fuel 100,000 cars for a year — to make the plastic bottles to meet Americans’ demand for bottled water, according to the Earth Policy Institute, a Washington, D.C., environmental think tank. Furthermore, The kind of plastic most commonly used for water bottles — polyethylene terephthalate, or PET — is recyclable. But consumers recycle just one of every five bottles they drink, with the rest ending up in landfills, said Pat Franklin, executive director of the Container Recycling Institute….we here at New Wave are trying to combat this by promoting re-usable bottles and home water filtration.

“We offer a full line of BPA free plastic bottles made out of Eastar™ resin, we were the first company to change from poly-carbonate when the BPA studies first came out….We are also proud to carry a corn resin bottle with a built in filter, the first of its kind, which is completely bio-degradable in 180 days in a commercial compost. With these products we hope to alleviate some of the problems facing us today.

“I would like to send you some samples to review, and possibly post on your site.
New Wave Enviro is based in Colorado and being in business over 15 years means we were green when green was still just a color.”

Thanks for your note and your innovation. Send a sample so we can share our analysis and shout loudly. And I look forward to that particular time when I can use your last quote!

I found this video of Jay Leno discussing his new MagLev Wind Turbine with Ken Johnson of Enviro Energies.  The turbine, technically christened “MagWind Vertical Axis Wind Turbines (MVAWT),” uses magnetism to suspend the turbine, thus providing for virtually friction free operation.  Simply put, the upside is drastically reduced maintenance cost (no bearings to wear out), and improved efficiency (little energy lost to friction).  See for yourself:

According to alternative-energy-news.info,

The Agucadoura station will open another 25 Pelamis units later on, thus generating 21MW of power. They will save 60,000 tons of CO2 per year compared to a conventional fossil fuel plant. Humankind has realized that ocean waves can prove to be good alternative energy resources.

For the Portuguese, ocean waves might end up being a GREAT alternative energy resource.  When one considers the powerful Atlantic waves that continiously lap at Portugal’s shore, it’s hard not to get excited about the potential.  Indeed, power-technology.com estimates that “wave power could make up to 30% of the country’s gross domestic product by 2050.”  And startup costs are about half that of wind power and a quarter the cost of solar startups.

Here’s an animation demonstrating the principal:

And here’s a few photos:

[Show as slideshow]

[View with PicLens]

Not content with the long-term environmental consequences associated with traditional plastic netting commonly used to control erosion around roads and waterways, Bin Abubakar sought a more responsible solution. What he came up with was a revolutionary project that forgoes plastic netting in favor of locally manufactured, biodegradable netting.  

In addition to providing employment for an entire village that manufactures the netting, the project also eases the burden on local farmers because the material used to make the nets comes from the bark of the York tree, a weed that was once a nuisance for farmers to clear.  

This weed once an expense to clear, has now been transformed into an extra source of income for these farmers.  What’s more, it’s a win-win-win situation as these mats eventually decay, returning their nutrients to the soil and thus aiding the growth of all matter of plants and grasses that will permanently hold the soil down.

Click Here to view “Jute Mats”

Click Here to view “Bin’s Garden”

“By doing smaller insulating renovations, you can improve energy consumption and you’ll definitely make a difference,” he said. “But to get to Passive House standards, you really have to either rip out the outside or the inside of the house.”

This in not new technology.  The first passive house was designed and built in 1991 by German Physicist Wolfgang Feist, and today there are an estimated 15,000 passive houses worldwide, mostly in German speaking countries.  In Darnstadt, Germany, outside of Frankfort, Berthold Kaufmann’s house, “and others of this design get all the heat and hot water they need from the amount of energy that would be needed to run a hair dryer.”

By all accounts the technology is amazingly effective, rendering year round comfortable living at a tiny fraction of what it costs to heat and cool a traditional home, with no drafts, no thermostat lag, and remarkable temperature stability.

“You don’t think about temperature — the house just adjusts,” said Mr. Kaufmann, watching his 2-year-old daughter, dressed in a T-shirt, tuck into her sausage in the spacious living room, whose glass doors open to a patio. His new home uses about one-twentieth the heating energy of his parents’ home of roughly the same size, he said.

“This is a recipe for energy that makes sense to people,” Nabih Tahan said. “Why not reuse this heat you get for free?”

Lowering heating bills while easing carbon emissions seems too good to be true.  The fact that both these ends can be met while actually improving the livability of spaces makes this a solution that builders and architects in the United States should be incorporating into all their new construction and renovations.

Many cities and municipalities offer Christmas tree recycling that can transform that little big of Christmas past into useful, earth-friendly mulch.  My extend family will all be taking their live trees to the Adams County Regional Park & Fairgrounds when they’re done with them, anytime between December 26 and January 11.  They’ll take up to 2 trees per family, so do a good deed, save some fuel, and offer to take your neighbor’s too.

You’ll need to remove all ornaments, tinsel, garlands, flocking, and nails before dropping them off, and you’ll need to get there during daylight hours as they operate only from dawn till dusk.  It’s a little something we can all do to make the planet we all share a little better.

If you’re elsewhere in Colorado you can find a tree recycling site in your area here thanks to good people at Colorado Recycles.

The NICEST biodiesel home brew facility I've seen.

Biodiesel is produced through a process called “Transesterfication,” in which fats such as restaurant greases, animal fats, vegetable oils, and even oil from algae are reacted with an alcohol, such as ethanol or methanol.  This reaction causes the liquid to separate into glycerin (about 10 percent of the starting volume) and biodiesel (about 90 percent of the starting volume).  The glycerin can be used to make soap, and the biodiesel can be blended with petroleum diesel and used in any compression-ignition (diesel) engine. The most common of these blends in the United States is “B20″ which is an 80-20 biodiesel-petroleum diesel blend.

With modification, engines can burn 100 percent biodiesel, known as “B100.”  These modifications are sometimes, but not always necessary to avoid maintenance and performance problems.

A shower head for "drying" (de-watering) the biodiesel

What’s more, this is not a “new” or “emerging” technology, but actually has its roots in the 1930s, when Henry Ford and George Washington Carver worked together to develop alternative energies.  They wanted to apply agricultural products to the growing industrial markets such as plastic and rubber.  Carver and Ford saw that petroleum depletion was inevitable, and they saw great potential for crops like soy to provide an alternative to petroleum.  In fact, Dr. Rudolph Diesel, the German scientist who invented the compression-ignition (aka diesel) engine, ran his very first engine on peanut oil.

In January 2001, the U.S. Department of Agriculture launched a program providing cost incentives for the production of 36 million gallons of biodiesel.  Since then, more than a dozen states have passed favorable biodiesel legislation, and a bill that would set a renewable standard for fuel in the United States, and another that would give biodiesel a partial fuel excise tax exemption were introduces to the U.S. Congress in 2003.

Today, biodiesel been tested well in excess of 50 million miles in every type of diesel engine. There are over 500 commercial fleets in the United States that currently operate on various blends of biodiesel, including all four major branches of the military, the federal government, and multiple municipal fleets.

Some Biodiesel Facts: