New Green ThoughtsSaving the environment one word at a time

green modular house

While a lot of people have been trying to make their cars run on cleaner fuel and with some people actually trying to make their houses less energy-dependent, there hasn’t been much chatter on how houses could be built on a more eco-friendly way.

Aside from hooking up houses to solar cells and trying to generate your own power, you may also use green materials that makes your house more energy efficient. There are recently developed materials such as Icynene that could be used as insulating material for walls. Studies show that using this material can reduce the cost of heating and cooling a house up to 50%.

Lighting is one of the things that need the most energy in a house. The modular houses that are designed to be green nowadays come in such a way that natural light can be easily used instead of electric light during the day. This makes it very Earth-friendly – not to mention economical.

A lot of the people drink coffee around the world. Naturally, millions of tons of coffee grounds end up in waste bins everywhere. If some enterprising business and scientists in Switzerland and Germany could have their way though, they would sell the grounds as a material that could potential power your car in the future.

While the technology is not exactly there yet, they have been able to produce compost material that could eventually be used to produced biodiesel. With the right amount of research and investment, you may just end up filling up your car with the same thing you drink every morning.

For decades now, scientists have known that the cattle industry is responsible for a big amount of the world’s total of carbon emissions. The animals themselves can produce over a hundred gallons of methane gas through belching or flatulence. With the global population set to increase and with meat production only expected to exponentially rise, the world is looking at a spike in carbon emissions from cows.

One farm in Vermont is trying to change that. By using cow wastes, the farm has been able to produce fuel that was able to run their generators. The wastes were kept in an anaerobic vat for three weeks to fully digest the raw material with the help of bacteria.

Carbon footrpint has fast become one of the most prominent buzzwords in the green world nowadays. This refers to the amount of carbon that your lifestyle and activities add to the global carbon load.

The Clear Standards Carbon Footprint Tracker (an application that you can download for free using the iPhone) makes the computation part a lot easier. Just input the amount of driving and flying you’ve done for the day and it will keep you posted on how close you are to your carbon footprint goal for the year. If you’re not keen on looking at your car’s mileage, you may even use the GPS to let the phone calculate your distance traveled for you.

Baby diapers take about one hundred years before they get biodegraded. In short, they stay in landfills long enough to outlive the person who once used them almost all of the time. To remove the burden on landfills and to provide with cleaner energy, the Canadian firm AMEC have been trying to extract the paper pulp from the diapers to create a cleaner form of diesel.

The firm plans to take in at least 180 million diapers from the Canadian province of Quebec. AMEC claims that it can produce a staggering 11 million liters of diesel from that load so if theycan really pull this off, it might be a big break not only for the environment but also for the Canadian consumers.

Unless you’re thinking about that ugly smudge on your car seat, it’s pretty hard to connect the concepts of cars and chocolates, right? Well, the British scientists have something up their sleeves. Instead of being happy by just eating it, they’re now trying to run cars with it – and that’s Formula 3 car no less!

While we’re not exactly talking about the really yummy stuff here – the scientists are using waste material from chocolate vats. The fats from the chocolate were being transformed to a form of diesel. It’s still in it’s experimental phase so don’t expect to have choco diesel at your gas station anytime soon.

The Philippines is a small country; but with the exploding population, the toll on the environment due to the immense amount of garbage generated has gone to very alarming levels. Thankfully, store owners and grocers have taken it upon themselves to chip in the cause of being more environmentally aware.

Most big supermarkets now use biodegradable plastic bags made from a polymer derived from the corn plant. These shopping bags look and feel similar to the regular plastic bags and are also as sturdy as the ones used before. These bags are expected to degrade within two yearsof use.

Brazil’s largest city is now going green. The city of Sao Paolo – a coastal urban community on the shores of the Atlantic — is now using a state of the art bus that runs on water. This is something that sounds like the stuff of science fiction so it’s very exciting news to everyone who’s into green technology.

Brazil isn’t exactly a newcomer when it comes to keeping things green. Aside from the hydro bus, most of the cars in the country are running on biodiesel making this country not so reliant on foreign oil. If a large country like Brazil can pull this off, hopefully it inspires other nations to do the same.

For a state that has a lot of days with sunshine, it’s a shame that California isn’t exactly harnessing the power of the sun to create energy. Well, before you become more frustrated, you should be very happy now that First Solar has a very big 550 megawatt solar farm project for the state.

If approved, this will give the state the chance to meet its goal as as a green state. The aim is to be 20% dependent on renewable forms of energy by 2010 and 33% by 2020. It does sound very lofty, but with the building of a farm in San Bernardino county and Riverside, the goals may not be that far off.

Public transportation has had its share of issues as far as greenhouse gases today is concerned and apparently, Dublin has moved forward with the use of eco-cabs. The service and the usual things are there except the oil using engines which contribute largely towards how greenhouse gases and pollution are in play today.

Also, the seating capacity may not be that many as they have been limited to a 3-passenger capacity and if you are lucky enough to get some good advertisers, you can use that to pay for the cab driver’s daily salary.

Ecocabs can be found in Dublin, Ireland, and are a new-age bicycle rickshaw with a full tilt “ad-wrap” around the back that can’t be ignored. The clever part about Ecocabs is that the advertising pays for the vehicle and the driver’s salary, so the trip is entirely free to the passengers. Up to three passengers can fit in the back of an Ecocab, but the green transportation is only available in the most congested part of Dublin.

I guess another benefit is that the fit Ecocab drivers are probably a little more fun to look at than some of the New York City cabbies that I’ve risked my life with.

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