Eco Kettle

The kitchen is a pretty important part of the home when it comes to using energy, since you’re using electricity for appliances as well as gas or electricity for your cooker and oven. You’re also using water for cleaning your dishes, as well as generating lots of food waste from vegetable peelings, etc. Well here are a selection of eco-friendly kitchen gadgets to make your home that little bit greener!

Do you love your cups of tea or coffee? Well the eco kettle is designed to make it as easy as possible for you to only boil the water you need. Using a special chamber of water, you release the water you need into the main kettle compartment to boil it. On average, people boils twice as much water compared to what they actually need, so this simple kettle should save energy pretty quickly!

Indoor Composter

If you live in a city apartment but you still want to compost your food waste, then an indoor composter could be for you! Using heat, airflow and moisture, food waste is broken down quickly and without nasty odours. Sure the composter does use electricity, but it only uses around 5kWh a month, which will cost you around a dollar or two each month. A great bonus is that the composter reduces methane emissions, due to the aerobic decomposition of the food waste. That means you can reduce greenhouse gas emissions too.

The U.S. citizenry is again gaining interest in what they are eating and for various reasons.  Some are interested in the financial benefits of starting your own garden, others are concerned about their health, and many are concerned about the negative impact most of our agricultural and grocery industries are having on our environment.  

So, although I have not yet seen the film, Food, Inc., which features the likes of Michael Pollan (who, by the way, I get to hear speak at the Harold Washington Library in Chicago next Monday), it seems to focus on many of the problems with our food industry, most specifically, its production.

Check out the trailer below and let me know what you think!

We've indexed ten great ways to be greener without spending much of your hard-earned green!

You may be watching as the economy threatens to turn its, “recession,” moniker into, “depression,” all while reports about the dire circumstances our environment is in continue to mount.

Need a couple of examples?  Try here and here.  Below, you can find ten great ways to green your life on the cheap and save money while you do it!

While the economy plummets, you may be asking yourself, “can I really afford to be, ‘green,’ during these economic times?”

I’m here to tell you, “Absolutely you can!”

Here I have compiled a list of ten articles from Earthascope that outline different ways to improve your envirohuman impact while saving money.  You don’t have to stop your efforts to pollute less just because of bad economic times!

Think of it as turning the recession into your own, “green session”!

Corn husk or food wrapper?

Tomales!

Why are tomales a green food?  Well, the ones I enjoyed at lunch today had green peppers inside, but that’s beside the point.

It’s the wrapping! Check out the steamed corn husk being used to wrap tomales!  While munching on my tomales today at work (yum!), I found myself admiring the continued use of corn husks to wrap food.

It seems as if this is an age-old practice that has been passed down over time (and has somehow been preserved as common practice) and, well, why not?  The husks are otherwise going to be tossed and this way they get another use before making their way back into nature — with their fully biodegradeable goodness!

We had a whole bag of tomales brought in at work, and while the bag was not biodegradeable (it was plastic) imagine any other fast food — or food from the store — coming in a bag and most likely, it would be wrapped in paper, plastic, foil, or styrofoam — all of which are not nearly

Welcome to the October 6, 2008 edition of Cirque du Vert: Circus of the Green! After another short break, we’re excited to get rolling again with some fantastic articles from some of our best writers yet. We’d like to thank everyone for all of the great submissions and congratulate our contributors who have their articles featured below!

Wesley presents Four Way to Green your Wallet (and the Environment) posted at EnviroHumanImpact.  Wesley gives his top 4 common sense tips for saving money and the environment at a time where we find ourselves in a slowing economy and tightening purse-strings.

Jeremy presents

As ordinary citizens of the United States and also citizens of other connected economies await to see what will transpire in the coming days and the fallout from the credit/subprime/overall economic decline, one might wonder what effect this might have on the environment.

While most are likely much more worried at this point whether or not their savings and investments will be worth much after this mess and still others wonder whether or not they will have food on the table or a roof over their head.  Still, even others already find themselves hungry and/or without a home.

While you may feel somewhat hopeless about the financial system at-large, there may be some small things you can do to both save money and improve your envirohuman impact simultaneously.  

Occassionally, I get to combine two things I enjoy and care strongly for.   Today is one of those days!  I came across a very interesting website while browsing the web called Portable Farms.  Basically, it’s a commercial site selling these mini-greenhouses made for growing plants, flowers, vegetables, and even fish!  I was especially interested in this idea as I am an avid aquarium hobbyist and have done my own breeding of tropical fish.

So the whole idea here is obviously reduce our dependence on food sources that are heavily processed, travel far and wide, and use significant amounts of energy to end up in your stomach (or garbage can – didn’t your mother ever tell you that there are starving children in Africa?).  Now, I’m not a vegetarian and regular gardening can only get me so far; I need a little meat in my diet!

Add Tilapia to the mix now!  It’s not my favorite fish in the sea but it is versatile, you can do a lot of different things with this light, white fish.

They call it “Aquaponics” and focus on creating a closed system that fosters both the growth of plants and fish (much like a planted aquarium).  Fish waste is siphoned from the tanks into the plants and used as a fertilizer.  The excess water is then drained back into the tanks after having been cleaned and reoxygenated.  As they describe it:

Aquaponics is the growing of fish, or other water-based animals, along with land plants in a controlled environment, to maximize the use of the energy and nutrients in the system in order to harvest the greatest amount of vegetables and fish protein from the system.

At the very least, I think the Portable Farms site is worth checking out, if not just to get you thinking about how you can grow more of the things you use and eat every day.

Many have done it — you’re out, far away from a modern toilet, and yeah, you decide that you’re going to have to go, “ancient school” and urinate right there on a bush.  In a modern society, this is not the best option (obviously) but if one uses discretion, it is unlikely to cause much of a stir before or after the, “evacuation complete” voice is heard (yeah, the one from Austin Powers).

Of course, you don’t want to go in the middle of a parking garage as Jerry Seinfeld did in an episode (as did George, both of whom were caught and used the same, “uromisitisis” excuse if my memory serves).

But I digress.  What if the bush you were peeing on were a blueberry bush or a few stalks of corn?  It might seem rather disgusting to us to think that people would be eating the harvest and that they had been “irrigated” in such a manner.  People actually do this and many have no other, or very little, choice.

In fact, a report shows that that is happening on a large scale in many developing countries/regions, with about 200 million farmers in China, India, Vietnam, sub-Saharan Africa, and Latin America partaking in the “pee party” (yet another reference to a Seinfeld episode; George decides to use Jerry’s bathroom, but doesn’t close the door — Jerry protests, “It’s a pee party!”).

According to the article in National Geographic:

Facing water shortages and escalating fertilizer costs, farmers in developing countries are using raw sewage to irrigate and fertilize nearly 49 million acres (20 million hectares) of cropland, according to a new report—and it may not be a bad thing.

Wow!  Really?  Yeah, really!  But like they said, it may not be a bad thing, because the alternative is hungry (or starving) people, or using what would be drinking water to irrigate crops.

The article continues:

When this water is used for agricultural irrigation, farmers risk absorbing disease-causing bacteria, as do consumers who eat the produce raw and unwashed. Nearly 2.2 million people die each year because of diarrhea-related diseases, including cholera, according to WHO statistics. More than 80 percent of those cases can be attributed to contact with contaminated water and a lack of proper sanitation. But Pay Drechsel, an IWMI environmental scientist, argues that the social and economic benefits of using untreated human waste to grow food outweigh the health risks.

And what’s more:

Agriculture is a water-intensive business, accounting for nearly 70 percent of global fresh water consumption.

So this of course is not without risk, but often the farmers see little or no other option, in fact breaking into sewage pipes to divert the needed waste product for use as fertilizer and irrigation.

With fertilizer prices jumping nearly 50 percent per metric ton over the last year in some places, human waste is an attractive, and often necessary, alternative, Redwood said.

In cases where sewage sludge is used, expensive chemical fertilizer use can be avoided, he said. The sludge contains the same critical nutrients—nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium.

While it may sound disgusting to those not in that position, using untreated human waste in this manner is a way of life for many.  Still, there may be examples of methods these people could be educated about to reduce the chances of illness spreading because of food-borne bacteria.

There are also low-tech solutions for “treating” human waste. IWMI suggests employing appropriate and time-tested indigenous practices.

The report cites examples in Indonesia, Nepal, and Vietnam. There, farmers store wastewater in ponds to allow solid feces and worm eggs to settle, possibly reducing bacterial content in the residual water.

Composting, in which heat kills much of the bacteria, is another option, according to the report.

What can you do?

For one, stop wasting your food!  A recent report (pdf) From the Stockholm International Water Institute states that about one-third of the food that is produced in the United States is thrown away each year.  The cost?  About $48 billion, wasting about ten trillion gallons of water, used in the production of said food.  Let us not forget the wasted efforts and carbon emissions due to farming and transportation, either.  Furthermore, half of all food worldwide is wasted, according to the report.

So, you can help put a stop to that waste.  Stop buying food that you don’t end up eating.  Plan your meals out around what you have on the shelf, to reduce the chances of spoilage, and also include leftovers in your family’s meals.  This saves money and helps to reduce the problem here at home, so that potentially, more food could be exported to countries where it is needed (of course, in a manner that does not to undermine the efforts of the farmers in those countries).

Part of the solution also is to help those countries’ people to learn ways to cheaply and effectively treat human waste.  Also, methods such as this free refrigeration method, highlighted by Matthew Phillip, could help reduce the amount of food wasted in developing countries.  Also, look to continue reading sites such as this blog, or read a Big News Page on The Huffington Post, such as: Green Living.

Last week, Wesley wrote an article about using the upcoming cold weather of winter for some of your refrigeration needs.  But what about during the dog days of summer when the weather is anything but winter?

Well, thanks to Mohammed Bah Abba of Nigera, you have free refrigeration that uses zero energy!  Bah Abba is the adward-winning inventor of the Pot-in-Pot system for refrigeration.  The invention was born out of the need for increasing the life of fresh produce that spoils quickly in the intense African heat.

How does it work? Basically, his design involves a small clay pot within a larger one.  The smaller pot is separated from the large one with wet sand and covered with a wet towel or cover.  Now, as the water evaporates from the sand between the posts, the temperature within the small pot decreases due to the law of thermodynamics (evaporation is a cooling process).  

Bah Abba was awarded the Rolex Award for Enterprise and is featured on their site:  Rolex Awards for Enterprise.  They have a great site which explains everything much better than I could here.  Anyways, I guess my point for posting this is to ask, “How can we take this concept and apply it to our modern lives?”

EHI There!  Tell us how you’d use Bah Abba’s ideas to reduce your carbon footprint!

Welcome to the August 22, 2008 edition of Cirque du Vert: Circus of the Green! Thank you for all of the submissions, unfortunately this will be a shortened edition due to BlogCarnival.com being down the last couple of days, preventing more submissions from being accepted.  Look for CdV to return to its normal form with Volume 4 in 2 weeks!

Wesley Joseph presents Once you go Black, you might still go Back… to Google posted at EnviroHumanImpact.  He says “There’s been a lot of debate concerning ways to reduce the carbon footprints of our PCs.  We take a “Mythbusters” approach to finding out if you really can save energy by using websites with black backgrounds.  We also look at some other ways to save energy and money while using your computer.”

Louise Manning presents How sustainable is the global food supply model? posted at The Human Imprint.  Louise discusses the long term viability of the global food chain, specifically looking at the poultry supply chain model which has been under growing pressure lately due to rising grain costs.  Check out her extensive article and paper on the topic.

Ena Clewes presents Dealing With Garden Pests the Organic Way posted at Organic Gardening. Ena has a great article on organic gardening.  She details ways to lower your consumption (read: use) of insect repellants and eliminate harsh insecticides. Probably best of all, she gives multiple recipes for making your own home-made bug sprays (to kill bugs) and pest repellents (for keeping them away in the first place).

AdmirableIndia.com presents Lalbagh Botanical Garden, Bangalore: Part 1: Ancient Watch Tower and Organic Cultivation posted at AdmirableIndia.com.  Finally, this is a neat little article with pictures of a Botanical garden in India that is partially dedicated to organic cultivation!

That concludes this edition.  Submit your blog article to the next edition of Cirque du Vert: Circus of the Green using our carnival submission form. Past posts and future hosts can be found on our blog carnival index page.