Frankly Green

PiCycle - The Electric Bicycle

2009-10-15T09:27:03-07:00

Check out this LA Times video review of the PiCycle. The PiCycle is made by a company called PiMobility, based in Sausalito, Ca. Marcus, the founder, was kind enough to let me take the PiCycle for a spin one evening when we met at an event. In addition to the super cool design, the bike is rock solid, handles well and is quick! Very cool bike!! Check out the video.

World's First Sun-Powered City

2009-10-04T07:53:00-07:00

Australian Town First to Ban Bottled Water

2009-09-30T20:12:38-07:00

Kudos to Bundanoon for banning bottled water! Let's hope many more follow!

Link to Article

An Australian town pulled all bottled water from its shelves Saturday and replaced it with refillable bottles in what is believed to be a world-first ban.

Hundreds of people marched through the picturesque rural town of Bundanoon to mark the first day of its bottled water ban by unveiling a series of new public drinking fountains, said campaign spokesman John Dee. Shopkeepers ceremoniously removed the last bottles of water from their shelves and replaced them with reusable bottles that can be filled from fountains inside the town's shops or at water stations in the street.

"Every bottle today was taken off the shelf and out of the fridges so you can only now buy refillable bottles in shops in Bundanoon," Dee told AFP.

The tiny town, two hours south of Sydney, voted in July to ban bottled water after a drinks company moved to tap into a local aquifer for its bottled water business. "In the process of the campaign against that the local people became educated about the environmental impact of bottled water," said Dee. "A local retailer came up with this idea of well why don't we do something about that and actually stop selling the bottled water and it got a favourable reaction," he said.

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Activists say bottling water causes unnecessary use of plastics and fuel for transport. A New South Wales study found that in 2006, the industry was responsible for releasing 60,000 tonnes of gases blamed for global warming.

Pacific Garbage Patch Expitition Finds Plastic, Plastic Everywhere

2009-09-03T09:47:10-07:00

Thanks to Eleanor P. for this article!

By Paul Rogers, San Jose Mercury News
Link to Article

Scientists who returned to the Bay Area this week after an expedition to the "Great Pacific Garbage Patch" brought piles of plastic debris they pulled out of the ocean — soda bottles, cracked patio chairs, Styrofoam chunks, old toys, discarded fishing floats and tangled nets.

But what alarmed them most, they said Tuesday, was the nearly inconceivable amount of tiny, confetti like pieces of broken plastic. They took hundreds of water samples between the Farallon Islands near San Francisco and the notorious garbage patch 1,000 miles west of California, and every one had tiny bits of plastic floating in it. And the closer they sailed to the garbage patch, which some researchers have estimated to be twice the size of Texas, the more plastic pieces per gallon they found.

"Marine debris is the new man-made epidemic. It's that serious," said Andrea Neal, principal investigator on the Kaisei, a 151-foot research ship on the trip.

Neal, a Santa Barbara researcher who has a doctorate in molecular genetics and biochemistry, said crews on the three-week voyage discovered tiny jellyfish eating bits of the plastic debris. The jellyfish are, in turn, eaten by fish like salmon or tuna, which people eat.

Because the plastic pieces contain toxic chemicals — and are believed to be able to absorb now-banned chemicals such as DDT and PCBs, which can persist in the environment for decades — state toxicologists have taken hundreds of the objects, along with more than 300 fish, to an environmental chemistry lab in Berkeley to see if any chemicals are moving up the food chain.

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Scientists believe the trash washes down storm drains and rivers from places such as the Bay Area or Japan, eventually drifting into several large ocean vortices where currents swirl together.

Two ships embarked a month ago to study the site. The New Horizon, a 170-foot vessel, was sent by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California-San Diego. The Kaisei — whose name means "ocean planet" in Japanese — left from Richmond. It was sent by Ocean Voyages Institute, a Sausalito nonprofit that privately raised $500,000 for the voyage.

Both ships met at sea, collected water samples and took thousands of readings and photographs. Their goal: to study the patch's size, how the plastic affects wildlife and whether it may be possible to one day clean up some of it.

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The garbage patch is emerging as a major international environmental concern. Not only do its plastics pose a potential chemical threat, but birds, sea turtles and other marine life die when they eat or become entangled in floating plastic. Invasive species such as crabs, barnacles and other marine life also can attach themselves to it and float across the globe.

In the central Pacific, there are up to six pounds of marine litter for every pound of plankton, according to a 2006 report from the United Nations Environment Programme. And roughly 46,000 pieces of plastic litter are floating on every square mile of the oceans there, the report found.

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Casco Bay Islanders Embrace Bottle Return Program

2009-08-26T08:00:00-07:00

Thanks to my friend Bill H., who helped start the CLYNK program, for sending this. Word is that CLYNK is looking to expand to Massachusetts, New York, and Oregon!

Portland, ME - A returnable bottle program called CLYNK is making it easier for islanders to recycle. Many people on Casco Bay islands who might have wanted to recycle bottles and cans often tossed them in the trash instead. But the Casco Bay Ferry crews now pick up the special green plastic bags filled with returnables. CLYNK is in nearly two dozen Hannaford Supermarkets in Maine. People sign up for an account, buy the special bags, fill them up, drop them off at the stores and get their deposit refunds from their account. Island residents leave the bags at the end of their driveways and they are collected with the trash on Monday mornings. By making it easier for islanders to recycle it's expected that the waste stream on the islands will be reduced by at least 15 percent.

Link to Article

World's Ocean Temps Warmest Recorded

2009-08-23T07:23:00-07:00

At 62.6 degrees in July, that's a full degree above 20th Century average

Link to Article

WASHINGTON - Steve Kramer spent an hour and a half swimming in the ocean Sunday — in Maine.

The water temperature was 72 degrees — more like Ocean City, Md., this time of year. And Ocean City's water temp hit 88 degrees this week, toasty even by Miami Beach standards.

Kramer, 26, who lives in the seaside town of Scarborough, said it was the first time he's ever swam so long in Maine's coastal waters. "Usually, you're in five minutes and you're out," he said.

It's not just the ocean off the Northeast coast that is super-warm this summer. July was the hottest the world's oceans have been in almost 130 years of record-keeping.

The average water temperature worldwide was 62.6 degrees, according to the National Climatic Data Center, the branch of the U.S. government that keeps world weather records. June was only slightly cooler, while August could set another record, scientists say. The previous record was set in July 1998 during a powerful El Nino weather pattern.

At a full degree above the 20th century average of 61.5 degrees, "the global ocean surface temperature for July 2009 was the warmest on record," the center said.

Large portions of many continents had substantially warmer-than-average temperatures, the center stated.

"The greatest departures from the long-term average were evident in Europe, northern Africa, and much of western North America," according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which oversees the center. "Broadly, across these regions, temperatures were about 4-7 degrees F above average."

El Nino, emissions as factors
Meteorologists said there's a combination of forces at work: A natural El Nino system just getting started on top of worsening man-made carbon emissions tied to global warming, and a dash of random weather variations. The resulting ocean heat is already harming threatened coral reefs. It could also hasten the melting of Arctic sea ice and help hurricanes strengthen.

"Arctic sea ice covered an average of 3.4 million square miles during July," the center said. "This is 12.7 percent below the 1979-2000 average extent and the third lowest July sea ice extent on record, behind 2007 and 2006."

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Breaking heat records in water is more ominous as a sign of global warming than breaking temperature marks on land, because water takes longer to heat up and does not cool off as easily as land.

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The effects of that warm water are already being seen in coral reefs, said C. Mark Eakin, coordinator of NOAA's coral reef watch. Long-term excessive heat bleaches colorful coral reefs white and sometimes kills them.

Bleaching has started to crop up in the Florida Keys, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands — much earlier than usual. Typically, bleaching occurs after weeks or months of prolonged high water temperatures. That usually means September or October in the Caribbean, said Eakin. He found bleaching in Guam Wednesday. It's too early to know if the coral will recover or die. Experts are "bracing for another bad year," he said.

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We're Ready!

2009-08-20T19:17:14-07:00

Frank Gerber

Ship of Plastic Bottles to Send Eco-Message

2009-06-27T08:06:56-07:00

Trek across Pacific will be atop 10,000 empties and dome with shower
Link to Article

SAN FRANCISCO - You've heard of a ship in a bottle. How about a ship made of plastic bottles? That would be the Plastiki, designed to sail the Pacific on an 11,000-mile voyage highlighting the dangers of living in a throwaway world.

"Waste is fundamentally a design flaw. We wanted to design a vessel that would epitomize waste being used as a resource," said expedition leader David de Rothschild.

The boat is named in honor of the 1947 Kon-Tiki raft sailed across the Pacific by explorer Thor Heyerdahl, an ocean adventure that inspired de Rothschild.

There's a bit more of a tie-in. One of the Plastiki team members is Josian Heyerdahl, the explorer's granddaughter.

An environmental scientist who works on business sustainability issues, Heyerdahl, 25, became part of the project after reading about it and introducing herself to de Rothschild.

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Plans are for skipper Jo Royle and de Rothschild to sail the whole way from California to Australia, while other crew members will rotate. Heyerdahl plans to join the boat for the last leg of the journey as the Plastiki heads toward Sydney Harbor.

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Turning thousands of reclaimed 2-liter bottles into a sailing vessel isn't a simple task. The launch date, which had been scheduled earlier this year, had to be pushed back to late this year because of the challenges of working with a new material.

The Plastiki is planned as a 60-foot catamaran with the hulls made of a rigid plastic structure forming compartments in which about 10,000 empty bottles are flattened and stacked to make it float.

Project manager Matthew Grey said the hulls are partially completed and the next step is bonding the various elements of the boat together.

Just how much longer it will take to complete the catamaran is uncertain, he said, because "we are dealing on a daily basis with so many unknowns."

On Friday, the Plastiki team plans to announce a partnership with Hewlett-Packard Co., which is providing technology for the voyage as well as the Plastiki Mission Control Center at Pier 45.

At the center, there will be a number of interactive displays and exhibits, including computer screens that visitors can touch to track the Plastiki's progress and send text messages.

"We see it as really a great educational opportunity and a very interactive place where people are coming to learn and enjoy and kind of get a taste of what Plastiki's all about," said Steven Hoffman, HP's director of worldwide marketing.

Geodesic dome for housing
The crew will be housed in a geodesic dome, topped by solar panels, and will have such creature comforts as bunks, solar shower and compost toilet.

The boat is fully recyclable, part of the mission to find ways to reuse plastics.

"What we have to do is realign our understanding of the material," said de Rothschild, a descendant of the well-known British banking family, who founded Adventure Ecology, which stages expeditions to raise awareness of environmental issues.

During the Plastiki voyage, the crew plans to document planetary pollution, from huge patches of floating ocean debris to fallout from nuclear testing at Bikini Atoll to the effects of climate change.

They'll keep in touch and get their navigational and meteorological data through HP laptops as well as a satellite phone. Power will come from 12-volt batteries charged by wind turbines and solar panels.

The Plastiki isn't the only vessel highlighting the perils of plastic.

Last summer, Marcus Eriksen and Joel Paschal sailed from Long Beach to Hawaii on a raft made of 15,000 plastic bottles and the fuselage of a Cessna 310, part of the Long Beach-based Algalita Marine Research Foundation's project called "JUNK."

California to Require Climate Friendly Car Windows

2009-06-27T08:02:29-07:00

While I support the idea of reducing emissions, I think there are better ways to do it than to make mandates like this. Rather, I would prefer to see incentives for the automakers to address all aspects of emissions (not just glass). How about simply tightening overall emission requirements and let the auto makers figure out how to accomplish it. Glass may be one approach but there are certainly others. Sad thing is that most automakers, especially U.S. automakers, have been reactive, not proactive. Companies like Toyota have eaten their lunch. And companies like Tesla have gained real traction. Innovate or die!

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Carmakers, cell phone firms complained about sun-reflecting glass
Link to Article

California air regulators voted unanimously Thursday for a mandate requiring auto manufacturers to include sun-reflecting glass on all vehicles sold within the state by 2014.

The move by the California Air Resources Board was intended to keep cars, pickup trucks and sport utility vehicles cooler during hot weather, reducing the use of air conditioning.

That was expected to improve fuel efficiency and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

"The end result of it is the customer gets a car that's more comfortable to ride in, air conditioners don't have to work as hard, and the atmosphere will be happier because we won't be emitting as much carbon dioxide," said board chairwoman Mary Nichols.

The auto industry complained about the expense but won an extra year to comply with the first phase of the regulation. Automakers also will be allowed to find other ways to cool down cars to avoid a tougher window standard to be phased in after 2014.

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Beginning with the 2012 model year, a quarter of passenger vehicles sold in California must have specially coated windshields that block 50 percent of the sun's heat from a parked car. All vehicles must have those windshields within two more years.

In 2016, windshields must block 60 percent of the sun's heat unless car makers can demonstrate other ways to keep cars cool.

The regulation is projected to prevent 700,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide from entering the atmosphere in 2020, the equivalent of taking 140,000 vehicles off the road for a year. There were nearly 22 million passenger vehicles registered last year in California.

The new windows would cool a sedan's interior by an estimated 14 degrees Fahrenheit or 12 degrees for a pickup or SUV.

Toyota's Plug-in Hybrid

2009-06-23T06:58:41-07:00

-- we may start seeing them by the end of the year.
Link to Article

More than 10 years ago, Toyota took a look at the alternatives to gasoline-powered vehicles -- battery electrics, fuel cell, hybrids, diesel -- and made a decision that, for now, at least, hybrids was the way to go.

They built the Prius, now in its third generation, and we know the wild success that car has had. But it's still not enough. Even though the 2010 Prius is rated at 50 mpg on the highway, the nascent plug-in hybrid electric vehicle (PHEV) industry has shown that you can get the equivalent of 100 mpg.

Now Toyota says it's making its own PHEV and it will available for lease by the end of 2009.

But don't get out the checkbook and run down to your local dealer just yet. According to a report on the Treehugger.com Web site, Toyota says it will lease 500 of these gas-sippers, "primarily to fleet customers," which means government agencies and the like.

Nonetheless, it's a start. I would look for them in showrooms before the end of 2010.