Super Eco

Photo credit: Julted Ballerina, creative commons, flickr

Here is a list of 10 items, or categories, that need to be cleaned regularly and are often neglected:

1. Those wonderful green, reusable shopping bags which, if we do not wash them every other month or so, can be teeming with bacteria. I throw mine in the washer on gentle with some detergent and hang dry.
2. The steering wheel, door handles, shifter and wiper and directional controls in our cars are things that get used almost every day and can get unbelievably grimy.
3. Our keys, talk about something we use every day that we often don't wash, can be easily washed in soap and water. I always remove my remote-key-fob before washing so I don't ruin it. I wipe that down with a lightly vinegared rag.
4. Our purses, briefcases and tote bags need to be regularly cleaned because more often than not they wind up on the floor or ground. We would not want to see the swab from one of these puppies under a microscope. Follow the recommended cleaning instructions--leather cleaner for leather etc.-- and do this fairly often. This goes double for kid backpacks!
5. Our vacuum cleaner and its attachments, yup that's right, get dirty beyond dirty. I wash the brushes and tools on mine about once every other month. The vacuum body itself should be wiped down as well.
6. Switch plates and doorknobs need regular wiping down for obvious reasons, we sneeze, we eat, we work in the garden, need I go on? I use a rag with diluted vinegar on mine.
7. Dog and Cat toys and beds should be cleaned regularly to help insure our pet's health. Pets need clean living and sleeping areas just as much as we do. My dog sleeps on white sheets--easier for me to spot fleas and ticks--that get washed once a week. Our pets have a much better sense of smell than we do and they do not like to be dirty. I always wash my pet's bedding and toys in fragrance-free detergent.
8. Toaster oven shelves and crumb trays, microwave ceiling, walls and trays and ye olde toaster should all be cleaned regularly according to manufacturer suggestions. They can be a wonderland of rotting, yeasty detritus. Reusing a soiled toaster oven shelf is like taking out a dirty dish and serving food on it, mine gets rinsed every time I use it.
9. Laundry baskets should be washed inside and out in order to keep them sanitary. Dirty clothes leave an invisible residue on the sides of baskets and then we dump warm clean clothes in. I wash both my plastic and natural wood and reed baskets outside in the yard with a hose and mild detergent, I then dry them in the sun.
10. And last but not least, computer keys and mouse should be cleaned often according to manufacturer suggestions.
11. OK I fibbed, here is one more: sink sponges should be tossed in a dishwasher basket and washed every time we do a load of dishes. This keeps them fresh as a daisy.

I always use natural, low impact, green cleaning alternatives around my house. There is not pretty much nothing that a little vinegar, lemon juice and baking soda can't clean. I never use antibacterial soaps, never ever! Happy green cleaning.

Photo credit: Martin Pettitt, creative commons, flickr

Statoil, Norway’s largest energy company, plans to build a demonstration site to test its “floating” offshore wind turbines. This move is based upon the success of their 2.3-megawatt prototype floating 10 kilometers offshore at Karmoy in Norway.

Company spokesman Oistein Johannessen reports that their Norwegian prototype has been working “beyond expectations” in waters 200 metres deep.

According to an article at Bloomberg, Statoil announced during a meeting with Scottish First Minister Alex Salmond, that it is considering two sites in the waters off the Scottish coast, one at Lewis and one at Aberdeenshire, to test the commercial potential of its “Hywind” project.

In 2009, Statiol had a meeting with Habib Dagher, of the University of Maine Advanced Structures and Composites Center, for a tour and business meeting at its Orono research and development facility. The state of Maine also has high hopes to be chosen to advance their dreams for a "bright future" in wind energy.

Statoil company spokesman, Oistein Johannessen, said that the company plans to decide upon a site by 2011. 

Photo credit: pinksherbet, creative commons, flickr

September is right around the corner, and the yearly ritual of back-to-school shopping has already begun. School supplies run the gamut from the utilitarian to the ridiculous and, oftentimes, the toxic. Here is some basic advice about shopping for and greening our children this fall.

1. Let's begin by talking about backpacks. A backpack is usually a "must have" for kids these days. It is important to choose a non-toxic style that won't ruin their backs. Choose a small to medium-sized pack with lots of specialized, convenient compartments. The bigger the backpack, the more kids will stuff into it. Wide, padded straps will distribute the weight of the pack better as well as make it much more comfortable. Try to buy a pack made from simple natural or recycled materials. Always encouraging our children to use both straps when carrying a full load will help to safeguard their backs.
2. Greening our child's clothing can be quite easy. First off, let's talk about used clothing. Children grow so fast that they rarely get a chance to wear out their clothing. Rummage sales or second-hand shops are often really great places to find almost-new and stylish clothing. Collectives of parents who pass used clothing along are also becoming more popular, just like in the good old days. If you are in the market for something green and new, shopping locally is always a good idea, or consulting the Green Pages can be a helpful.
3. Greening our child's lunch is important on many levels. Teaching our children about sustainability and about what constitutes "real food" is crucial if we are going to teach them to be responsible stewards of the environment. Sending them off with a healthy--not overly processed--lunch is simply the right thing to do. Packing their lunches in no-waste, reusable, BPA and phthalate free wrappers and containers is best. Send them drinks in reusable bottles as well.
4. Go PVC free! Consult the Back-to-School guide to PVC-Free school supplies from The Center for Health, Environment and Justice before purchasing book bags, binders and any other school supplies.
5. Last but not least, teaching our children proper etiquette and responsible use of cell phones, computers and gaming devices that use energy guzzling vampire chargers is crucial for green minded parents everywhere.

Have fun greening your child's back-to-school.

Photo credit: ohmeaghan, creative commons, flickr

Once again, we are living in a great age for canning. Not since the "Of Course I Can!" poster days of World War II has there been such a broad nationwide campaign in favor of canning. Home canning then was a natural outgrowth of Victory Garden initiatives all across the U.S., where homemakers were encouraged to grow and "put by" as much food as possible so that the bulk of our nation's food supply would be available to feed our troops and allies.

Well, it's a new day, and though the groundswell of this current canning movement--similar to the one in the '40's and '50's--cuts across all demographics, there is nothing conventional about this group. I'm talkin' 'bout a Canvolution, and it doesn't sound like whispers. Canning Across America appeals to a very vocal nationwide collective of professional and home cooks, gardeners, farmers, socialites and foodies committed to "putting food by." Their mission is "to promote safe food preservation and the joys of community building through food."

At this time of year especially, canning parties are occurring all across the country. Neatly fitting in with the locavore and slow food movements, Canning Across America's message is simple: "Think of us as a one-stop resource for events, recipes, inspiration and safety how-to on anything under the canning, preserving and pickling umbrella that will continue throughout the year."

On the fringes of this movement are people like my sister Ceil--she has been canning from her own organic garden for more than 40 years--who is now passing on her know-how to her daughter Clare. They have been canning up a storm for months now.

Canning techniques and supplies, such as BPA free lids, are evolving based on the needs and desires of this new generation of canning enthusiasts. The time is right, the crops are ripening. Why not join in?

Here are a few more helpful links: National Center For Home Food Preservation, BPA-free Weck canning supplies, Tattler BPA-free reusable canning lids, and Putting Food By by Ruth Hertzberg, Janet Greene and Beatrice Vaughan. 

Photo credit: jurvetson creative commons, flickr

A host of tiny microbe managers have taken up the cleanup effort in the Gulf of Mexico.

According to an Article in The New York Times, hoards of heroic hydrocarbon-chewing microbes, like Alcanivorax borkumensis, are showing up on the scene. These microbes exist in the gulf because of the thousands of naturally occurring oil and gas seeps in the seabed floor. These fissures leak at fairly regular rate and have been doing so for millions of years.  Although none of these natural seeps even comes close to the magnitude of oil spilled by the Deepwater Horizon, the fact that these swarms of microbes and other creatures have learned how to live on petrochemicals gives the Gulf of Mexico some added hope for natural recuperation.

According to experts, making the oil easier to digest is the main motive for using the more than 830,000 gallons of chemical dispersants on the oil slick both above and below the surface of the sea. It seems that the microbes digest the dispersant as well, thus mitigating a portion of their troubling toxicological concerns.

Samantha B. Joye, a marine scientist at the University of Georgia, suggests that one downside to the sudden blooms of oil-hungry microbes in the Gulf of Mexico is that they might deplete the water of so much oxygen that sea floor communities of clams, mussels and tube worms, that also consume oil, might seriously suffer. It remains to be seen whether nature will take up where human efforts seem to have failed in this disaster. How lucky for the folks at BP, that a bunch of microbes seem to be better organized and equipped to clean up their mess than they are.

This is one occasion where we at Super Eco feel inclined to cheer for the  "the greedy little opportunist",  "Hip hip hurrah!"

Photo credit: jodelli, creative commons, flickr

On the fringes of what was once touted as the "Paris of the West," "Motor City" and "Motown," Detroit's outlying areas have long suffered from profound vacancy issues.  Contrasted with the city's burgeoning downtown renaissance, this vast patchwork of abandoned parking lots--approximately the size of the entire city of San Francisco--has consistently evaded redemption.

According to our friends at Change.org.'s Sustainable food blog, some 33,000 abandoned lots are now being primed to form a beautiful chain of new urban farms. Not-for-profit groups, such as Earthworks Urban Farm and Urban Farming, seek to un-pave and recreate these eyesores into a viable, sustainable farming model.

This growing trend of urban farming has the power to transform and reprocess our urban nightmares into really sweet green dreams. The emergence of city farmers along with homegrown efforts, such as Spin Gardening, and Guerrilla Gardening are the culmination of the reformation begun by the wartime Victory Garden.

Feeding our cities from within is an idea that is sweeping the world like a sustainable green wave, bringing us one step closer to solving some of the world's most pressing hunger issues.

I think Thomas Kuhn, the father of the "paradigm shift," would not mind my using his term to celebrate this series of peaceful green vicissitudes punctuated by sustainable green revolts as "one conceptual world view being replaced by another."

Photo credit: kevindooley, creative commons, flickr

These are some mighty dark days for oil. In the wake of the still unfolding BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, news of another massive oil spill in the U.S. is mighty bad news indeed--bad news for residents, bad news for wildlife, bad news for air quality and bad news for Lake Michigan should efforts to control this spill go awry.

According to an article in The Michigan Messenger, a state of emergency has been declared by Gov. Jennifer Granholm in southwest Michigan's Calhoun county, as more than 800,000 gallons of oil accidentally released into Talmadge Creek began making its way downstream into the Kalamazoo River.

The spill, resulting from a leaking pipeline owned by Enbridge Energy of Canada, has caused a massive environmental catastrophe along the Kalamazoo River. The oil slick has traveled more than 16 miles downstream. Hopes were that booms placed in the water just outside Fort Custer State Park near Battle Creek would prevent the slick from progressing any further. Gov. Granholm has criticized the EPA and Enbridge for a "completely inadequate" response to the spill, which has now reached Morrow Lake, stating that only eight of the 20 boom sites promised by the EPA have actually been set up.

As begins the clean up so begins the complicated unraveling of exactly what went wrong here. Congressman Mark Schauer has accused Enbridge Energy officials of not being quick to report and respond to this massive release of crude oil into Talmadge Creek, indicting Enbridge for under-reporting the magnitude of the spill and for not reporting it in a timely manner. There was apparently a lag-time of some three hours between the discovery of the leak and the first official reporting of the event.  As the tooth-pulling of facts begins in Michigan, you can bet that this is going to be a long, painful process for all parties involved, though not as painful as it probably should be or as painful as it already is for affected wildlife, citizenry and the environment.

Catastrophic events such as these, happening worldwide, are like a persistent bell that keeps knelling. The time is ripe for a change from business as usual. Here's hoping that we can muster the strength as a nation and as a world community to plot a better, cleaner course forward.

Photo credit: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service - Northeast Region

My neighbor's barn loft was once host to more than 3,000 bats. At dusk they would swarm out in a great river, riding low over the fields to feed, then disperse upward to capture high flying insects. It was always an awesome sight. Bats are such beautiful, nimble fliers. Local conservationists have been monitoring bat populations at this site, along with many others across the state of N.J. When the bats returned to the loft this spring, their population count was about 300. The evening skies are eerily still without them.

Bats are a keystone species. Just as a keystone is the stone at the top of an arch that holds the structure together, so do bats perform a number of essential functions in our environment, with pollination and insect control being the top two. A single bat can consume its weight in insects in just one night. Bats also eat insects that are plant pathogens. It is estimated that millions of dollars' worth of crops are saved from insect damage each year by bats that eat plant pathogenic insects. More than 300 species of fruit including--mangoes, bananas and guavas--depend on bats for pollination.

The culprit devastating U.S. populations is Geomyces destructans or White-nose syndrome (WNS), so named because of the white fungus that grows on infected bats noses and wings. WNS was discovered in 2006 in a cave near Albany, N.Y., that is visited by tens of thousands of tourists each year. The disease has since spread outward from that site, extending northward to Ontario, Canada, and southward to Tennessee. More than a million bats have died in just four years.

Over the course of the winter, healthy bats rouse periodically, during which periods they burn precious calories. For an unknown reason, infected bats, wake up more frequently, hastening the depletion of precious energy stores. This, in turn, leads to starvation. It is still a mystery why infected bats are waking up more frequently. The truth is there is so much about this devastating disease that still remains a complete mystery.

The fungus has recently been discovered in Oklahoma in Cave myotis bats (Myotis velifer), which is the farthest west it has been detected and which is particularly worrisome because bats in Oklahoma share caves with Mexican free-tailed bats (Tadarida brasiliensis). If Mexican free-tailed bats come in contact with the fungus, they could spread it widely when they migrate, sometimes deep into Mexico. In an article published in PhysOrg., Nina Fascione, executive director of Texas-based Bat Conservation International, speculates that because the fungus thrives in cooler climes, bats in milder areas with shorter winters may find a reprieve, she says that "Everyone's crossing their fingers that there's a climate barrier."

One bit of good news is that even though WNS is present in Europe's bat populations, the bats there do not seem to be dying from it. The speculation is that about 200 years ago there was a major die-off of bats in Europe as a result of WNS. Rebounded bat populations may have acquired an immunity to the disease. One hopes that the bat populations here may be able to build immunity over time and rebound as well.

If you would like to learn more about these exceptional mammals, please visit Bat Conservation International's website.

Photo credit: ms.lume flickr

If there was ever an element that needed defending, it is the element of water.

These days, our oceans are particularly at risk. For too long we have functioned under the "out of sight, out of mind" principle, dumping and polluting their vastness with impunity. The recent BP oil spill has shifted our attention, as a nation, to the untenable plight of our beleaguered seas.

In particular, the current BP disaster--there have been many--functions as a non-stop, catastrophic wake-up call, an alarm that just won't stop ringing. Be assured that this is one call we desperately need to answer. We are compelled as a nation to vigorously support reform that safeguards and prevents these types of assaults on our oceans and all the myriad life sustained within their borders.

In a watershed effort to begin to protect the rich diversity of our nation's oceans, President Obama has set in motion a policy that will unify our efforts to tackle the challenges facing our marine resources. According to the NRDC staff blog, Switchboard, this policy will help to:

1. Rehabilitate and rebuild our struggling fisheries and protect the endangered species therein.
2. Preserve and restore vulnerable and compromised habitats from further industrial harm.
3. Stop storm water runoff from contaminating our beach water.
4. Stop the introduction and spread of invasive species.
5. Safeguard against the impact of ocean acidification and rising sea temperatures.

By protecting our oceans' diversity we are in essence protecting ourselves. It is altogether too bad that it takes a disaster of this magnitude to unify and compel us as a nation to come to the defense of our environment. We need to stop sawing off limbs that we are standing on and recognize that there is no place on earth that deserves to be polluted and destroyed for the sake of expediency or profit. Better late, come we to this realization, than never.

We here at Super Eco applaud the President for spurring the creation of a National Ocean Council designed to protect our seas. Hallelujah! It's about time.

Photo credit: mlinksva, creative commons, flickr

It seems that light-colored rooftops and roads really can curb carbon emissions and combat global climate change, according to a study by researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Radiative forcing and temperature response to changes in urban albedos and associated CO2 offset, by Surabi Menon, Hashem Akbari, Sarith Mahanama, Igor Sednev and Ronnen Levinson.

This particular study employs a global model to extrapolate on the supposition that cool roofs and cool pavements, in cities around the world, not only keep them cooler but can also help to cool the world.

The potential of cool roofing and paving to help cancel the heat-island effect of densely populated cities and suburbs is very exciting. A fellow researcher at Berkley, Art Rosenfeld, explains it simply, “If all eligible urban flat roofs in the tropics and temperate regions were gradually converted to white (and sloped roofs to cool colors), they would offset the heating effect of the emission of roughly 24 gigatons of CO2, but one time only. However, if we assume that roofs have a service life of 20 years, we can think of an equivalent annual rate of 1.2 Gt per year. That offsets the emissions of roughly 300 million cars for 20 years!”

According to Yale environment 360, U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu has directed all department offices to install cool roofs on any new buildings or when replacing old ones.

There are some very helpful links at the U.S Department Of Energy's Cool Roof Resources for Federal Agencies.