How to repel mosquitoes naturally
We’ll help you take back your summer with eco-friendly tips for how to control mosquito problems in the yard.
New Study: Recycling May Cause People to Consume More
Doug Rice of Marketing Mediator reports:
Jesse Catlin of Washington State University Tri-Cities and Yitong Wang of Tsinghua University suggest that the option of recycling may lead consumers to use more resources than they would otherwise use when there is no option of recycling available. Their proposition is the result of two experiments conducted at a university in the western United States–one a laboratory experiment and the other a field experiment
…
The authors conclude that the findings agree with much other research on the unintended consequences of recycling programs. Other studies have shown that people engage in “green” behaviors to alleviate guilt and justify subsequent non–”green” behaviors. For example, someone who recycles may rationalize taking a higher-pollution mode of transportation. The authors conclude that consumers use recycling as a “get-out-of-jail-free card,” enabling them to use as many resources they please as long as they recycle the waste.
REAL-WORLD IMPLICATIONS This study has major implications for consumers, policy makers, and “green” marketers. Recycling may not be as harmless of an environmentally-friendly endeavor as we may think. Because we subconsciously justify using more materials when recycling options are available, we end up demanding more energy usage in the production of those additional resources. The additional production of materials we feel justified in using indiscreetly takes a toll on the environment as well.
“Green” marketers, it would seem, have the upper hand on this one. As long as consumers use recycling as a justification to use more resources, producers of “recyclable” products are likely to sell more of those products.
As consumers, if we truly want to have a positive impact on the environment, we need to recognize that recycling should not be used as a license for greater and more careless consumption. If we want to save the planet, we will pay just as much attention to how much materials we are using in total as we do to the amount that we are recycling.
Policy makers need to be aware of the negative unintended consequences of recycling in the form of increased resource usage. In addition to recycling programs, initiatives related to reducing total usage of resources might also be worth considering.
The study was published in January 2013 in the Journal of Consumer Psychology.
This Soccer Ball Generates Energy While You Play, And You Can Buy It Now
The Soccket is designed to replace kerosene lights in the developing world by converting games to electricity.
The Soccket, a soccer ball that generates and stores electricity during game play, was born in 2009. The ball was immediately a hit. For every 30 minutes of play, the ball can juice up an LED lamp for three hours, cutting down on toxic kerosene lamp use. Just plug an LED lamp into the light, and voila, free energy.
Uncharted Play has made some changes to the ball since it was first developed. The first iteration could be inflated and deflated, but it didn’t last long. The second ball was really heavy. The third ball wasn’t that heavy, but it was rigid and had a full-size gyroscope inside. The version available on Kickstarter (a standard Soccket and lamp goes for $99) is dense, water-resistant, made with a super light foam, and contains a fist-sized gyroscope.
“This version is significantly lighter and more efficient in terms of power generation. The only thing we couldn’t replicate in terms of a normal ball is the bounce. It was a tradeoff between wanting it to be hard or light with no bounce,” says Matthews.
In addition to the standard ball, Uncharted Play is offering tricked-out upgrades for backers if it reaches certain stretch goals in the Kickstarter campaign. One version has emergency cell phone charging capability, so users can charge their iPhones instead of a lamp. Another features a revision to the circuit board that tells players how much energy they have generated.
(via fastcompany)
Peel-and-stick solar panels can be integrated into everyday objects
Capturing solar energy efficiently and inconspicuously is something that the Solaroad cycle path has attempted in the Netherlands. Now scientists at Stanford University have developed peel-and-stick solar panels, which can be attached to any surface. READ MORE…
(via thenextweb)
Here are a few photos from our trip to the Cal Academy of Sciences. One of our favorite features of the museum is its living rooftop, which is home to 1.7 million native plants.
Typical black tar roofs tend to trap heat and add to what is known as the urban heat island effect. The Academy’s green rooftop keeps the building’s interior an average of 10° cooler than a standard roof would (which really helps with energy costs — one-sixth of all electricity consumed in the U.S. goes to cool buildings).
The rooftop reminded us of a recent video we shot about cool pavement technology that is being developed at Berkeley Lab to help counteract the heat island effect in our cities.
good:
Infographic: How to Recycle Your Christmas Tree
- Column Five contributed in Environment, Culture and ChristmasThe tinsel is undraped and the ornaments carefully stores away. All that is left is a dry, majestic, 6-foot-tall Douglas Fir in the corner of your living room. Every year, an estimated 30 million of these fragrant, fresh, Christmas trees are sold in the United States, but as much as 10% of them go straight to landfills—never to be recycled.
What can you do to keep your Yuletide centerpiece from going to waste while also helping your community? For more ways you can help conserve, visit our Environment hub.
nybg:
Happy stories about the Bronx River make me happy! This is a nice look at a new study of amphibians and reptiles being undertaken by our colleagues at the Wildlife Conservation Society (aka, the Bronx Zoo) who are situated just down the river from us. The WCS team are looking at the health of the river’s amphibians as proxy for the health of the river. It is a prelude to next year’s building of a fish ladder by the Bronx River Alliance that will allow the native fish, alewife, to spawn again in the Bronx River. And it’s all thanks to Congressman Jose Serrano, namesake of Jose Beaver (and friend of Justin Beaver) who undertook the restoration of the river many years ago. Like I said, happy stories make me happy! ~AR
Going green when it’s your time to go
From biodegradable coffins to tree-sprouting urns, eco-friendly burials offer a way for those who live green to also die green.
If tumblr can in any way count as a will & testament, I’d like to state for the record that I want a tree-sprouting urn. Unless y’all want to pay to have my ashes shot into space, because space.
tedx:
Technology of The City 2.0: Power by footsteps
In his talk at TEDxBerlin, industrial design engineer Laurence Kemball-Cook discussed his invention, the Pavegen, a paving tile made of recycled car tires that converts the kinetic energy of footsteps into electrical power:I’m fascinated by the built environment—and how to make our cities more sustainable...I used to work for one of Europe’s largest energy companies, and I was looking at how to create a new form of power in our cities that was a renewable source of energy…so I thought, what about a power source that was literally under our feet? That every step people make—if we could capture that? And I thought, think of all the millions of people in the world; think of all the hundreds of cities; and think about what could be created by it.
So I created…a flexible paving slab that converts the kinetic energy of your footstep into electrical power…it stores the energy from many people walking—throughout the day, throughout the night—in our cities.A set of Pavegen is currently installed in a school in the UK, where the foot traffic of the 1,100 students is used to power school lighting systems. Tiles were also installed in the West Ham tube station during the London Olympics. According to an article on Efergy about the installation, “[during] the 2 weeks of the games the 12 tiles produced 72m joules of energy or 20 kilowatt-hours..sufficient to keep the walkway streetlamps illuminated at full power through the night, and at half power during the day, with plenty of back-up energy left over to spare.”
(Photos: Top, Shell LiveWIRE; Bottom, inhabitat)
TEDxCity2.0 day is October 13. For more City 2.0 technology and innovation, check out our City 2.0 TEDxTalks playlist.
Giant Marble Harvests Energy from Sun and Moon
It looks like a giant, glass marble. But this globe is no game. It’s a sun-tracking, solar energy concentrator.
This sun-tracking glass globe is able to concentrate sunlight and moonlight up to 10,000 times and that the system is 35 percent more efficient than traditional photovoltaic designs that track the sun.
Next, construction beings on a giant Hungry, Hungry Hippo. /Robert
© Matthieu Raffard
While many of us are struggling with where lawns should fit into the big picture (as in, maybe they shouldn’t), in Lives of Grass, Roussel uses grass to make a statement about food.
In the installations, human form armatures are seeded with wheat grass in a nod to Egyptian Mythology and Osiris, the God of renewal, says the artist. Osiris is also the personification of the fertile land and the natural cycles: death and rebirth, dryness and fertility.
See more: Beautiful Human Sculptures Float and Sprout With Grass
