I’ll admit it, I pee in the shower. I don’t pee on myself and I do it down the drain so it’s not all gross. And the reason I do? Because cute Brazilian children sang me a song.
Okay, I can see you’re confused. Once upon a time, I saw a link to this ad and it made me giggle. The Brazilians put together the advertisement to encourage people to pee in the shower. You see, if you can cut down the amount of water wasted in flushing the toilet once a day for most of the population, that’s a dramatic amount of water saved. It doesn’t seem like much, but it’s one of those small things you can do to save resources.
It works on the same principal as when you were a kid and working in a fast food restaurant. If you ever make the mistake of putting more than one napkin per sandwich or one straw per drink in the bag, your manager will be right there yelling at you with something that sounds a bit like “Each napkin costs five cents. If every McDonalds order had an extra napkin in it, that would translate to an extra cost of $9.2 million per year!” Of course, those numbers aren’t accurate, I was illustrating the point.
So do it, people. Pee in the shower. Be proud of the little things we can do to save the environment.
Jim
I was just sitting back, enjoying some wine and watching a little Rick Mercer Report. A commercial break starts and I see that Sunchip’s has just released a 100% biodegradable chip bag.
Someone finally got it right! I’m not saying this is going to solve our environmental problems , but it’s the kind of commercially available product I’m very happy to see.
So way to go Sunchip’s. I already liked ya, but now i love ya.
I just read a couple of interesting articles from Science Daily about energy and thought I’d share them.
The first article is about a group of researchers who have managed to find a much more efficient means of generating hydrogen through photosynthesis. Hydrogen as a gas is very intriguing in terms of the war on greenhouse gasses, but there have been technical difficulties in finding a way to generate it efficiently. However:
Bruce and his colleagues found that by starting with a thermophilic blue-green algae, which favors warmer temperatures, they could sustain the reaction at temperatures as high as 55 degrees C, or 131 degrees F. That is roughly the temperature in arid deserts with high solar irradiation, where the process would be most productive. They also found the process was more than 10 times more efficient as the temperature increased.
Read more…
We’ve all heard the spiel about the GDP (I got it in high school first and the media later) and how it’s the measure of a country’s economic blahblahblah, and how it’s the primary scorecard that policymakers, economists, international agencies and the media use to show how well we’re doing… but personally, I never did trust suits, so I decided to look a little further.¬† 
Read more…
Oh, man. I know you’ll be loving this article from Science Daily, Boy Infidel.
The title alone says it all: Sustainable Fertilizer: Urine And Wood Ash Produce Large Harvest. This is a legitimate science news site telling people to piss on their crops! The good news is that this isn’t actually insane. The study shows that urine on it’s own is a great source of nitrogen and as such a good replacement for chemical fertilizer, but adding in the wood ash just sweetens the proverbial piss-and-tomato pie because wood ash is high in minerals and reduces acidity.
Holy crap! I’ve been wasting mine! Read more…
When I was a nerdy little boy-infidel I devoured sci-fi novels like petrol-eating microbes in a oil-sands pit! Those novels were full of awe-inspiring technologies like a world-wide satellite network, hand-held information devices and autonomous robots. Flash-forward to the 21st century and now these technologies exist, and they are used in ways even Issac Asimov couldn’t have imagined!
And it’s happening again.
Mitsubishi and IHI Corp are working with the Japanese government to develop a massive 1Gigawatt Solar collector … in space. The idea is simple. Collect solar energy that is unobstructed by our atmosphere and then beam it down to the surface as concentrated micro-waves. If it sounds a lot like a Death Ray you’re not alone, but those involved assure us that the energy would be even less harmful than regular old solar radiation.
Plans are to have the solar station up and running in 3 decades … which will give them time to save up the estimated $21 Billion cost of the project.
TreeHugger Article
The future’s so bright!
Many years ago, I read Clive Barker’s The Books Of Blood on a road trip across Canada with my family. I remember enjoying most of the stories in the books; they appealed to my teenaged dark side and my irritation at the everyday. I was putting the banal horror stories of Stephen King by the wayside and moving on to an author who made more unique and original stories.
In The Hills, The Citieswas one of those stories. In it, the protagonists accidentally stumble across two towns in Yugoslavia locked in a brutal battle. Each town has roped their citizenry together into a collective person (or “superdude”, as I like to call them) and the superdudes are bashing away at one another.
Read more…
