Carbon footprint

The carbon footprint, sum of the greenhouse gas emissions that one produces, is for an average Finn somewhere around 10 tons of CO2 per year. I did a test on the internet to measure what is the size of my footprint and got a result of over 13 tons a year.

The average test is divided into food, living, vehicles and garbage disposal. Driving and flying frequently, eating meat, heavy usage of consumer electronics and neglecting recycling are big evils on the tests.

This got me thinking that it would be interesting to have a real-time calculator which would help visualize day to day consuming habits. It would track home energy and water consumption, travel distances by car, public transport and flying as well as follow the buying habits of food, clothes etc. The application could
give out reports of recent consumption and tips on how to reduce ones environmental impact.

But then again, it would have to be quite well integrated into the home, car and credit card so that the user would not have to enter all information by hand. So this idea isn’t that practical for the time being.

Earth Hour Tonight

As you may have heard, today takes place an event called Earth Hour. The idea is quite simple - turn off all the lights at 20.30 local time for one hour. Even though this doesn’t have a significant impact on our emissions, it’s supposed to send a message which will be presented to the Global Climate Change Conference which takes place later this year. 

I’m personally going to go with it. It might be a nice time to get out and go for an evening’s walk to see how many households/industrial buildings/etc. are playing along and wag your finger to those who haven’t even heard of the thing.

(Un)Sustainable Energy

Sustainable energy is a subject much discussed and a topic that bumps up in some of our posts as well. New Scientist has an interesting article on ‘Why sustainable power is unsustainable’. (See also the one on top 7 alternative energies). One good example that the article brings out is the fact that the most efficient solar panels use materials that are rare and less abundant on our planet. And if you want to use solar power as a real energy source, you will need a lot of surface area but using panel materials that are abundant and thus inefficient will increase the area even more. A similar problem is with hydrogen fuel cells for our greener transport. The sustainable solutions are still years away from the mass markets.

The dilemma with some of our current green and environmentally friendly product alternatives is besides the fact that everyone can’t afford them is that as the article points out - they aren’t always as sustainable as we imagine. But if we buy these semi-solutions we are at least putting our money into the development of real viable alternatives right? Bit of a brain-teaser, I’m going to have to think about this over a glass of whiskey (or three).

Art Meets Ice - Ice Sculpting at Helsinki Zoo

Photo by Jakke Nikkarinen/STT Info Kuva

Due to our server problems, this is now old news. I think it may still interest a few people, and you can always check out the action in the photos.

There was a great opportunity to see the world’s greatest ice sculptors live at the Helsinki Zoo in Korkeasaari. The event was between 30.1. - 1.2. and the first day winner was Mongolia with their work “Escape”, and Russia won the second day event with “Don’t shoot”, which is depicted above.

I’m really disappointed that I missed this event, as I think it’s really interesting to make art from a material that will almost certainly disappear after a short while. Not all art is made to last for centuries, and the background idea was that ice as a material is a metaphor for the fragility of nature. I have to applaud the sculptors for their effort, as the sculptures are really stunning.

Check out more pictures in the results section.

The impeccable polishing qualities of a banana peel remain a mystery…for now

I’m not trying to yank our rudder and steer this blog into the how-to direction (yesterday’s post was of that taste), but this is something I’ll a) have to try out myself and b) want to share with you. Polishing one’s shoes with a banana sounds pretty quirky and I guess it ultimately is.

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However, I if you want to save on shoe polish (there are alleged environmental and health reasons against using the turpentine-laden, poison-rich goo) here’s how to do it. Voilá, a questionably funny video that reeks of information.
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Clean Green:How To Polish Shoes With A Banana

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Come to think of it, this thing can justify it’s existence here because designers come up with all kinds of new solutions to problems all the time…and…oh well.

Save Money.. err Energy

Seems like the economic downturn has made people reduce their home energy consumption in hopes of saving in electric bills. I can’t back it up with a source but sounds very probable.

Even though it’s a positive thing that people put thought into their energy usage, it might be better if it didn’t depend on the economic situation but if you’re thinking about going greener good for you and here’s a few tips.

1. Rainwater catching system.

If you catch rainwater it can be used for various purposes; toilet, plants, shower, laundry etc. (but not in that particular order). Just remember to get a good filtering system and watch out for the acid rain.

2. Geothermal or air source heat pump.

Let’s face it, we’re sitting on molten hot rock, so why not take advantage of the fact when heating your house. If drilling a pipe closer to the center of the Earth is too much, for cheaper installation you can have an air source pump to either heat or cool your home depending on the weather. It’s ridiculous that a product as refined as “electricity” is being used to heat homes. Thankfully more and more Finns are using air source heat pumps in their homes.

3. Insulation

This is easier to take into consideration when designing a house and can seem like a poke in the eye if you lost your job and currently reside in a cardboard box. Nevertheless, changing your windows into better ones and thinking about replacing what ever insulation there is inside your walls and attic can save you big bucks in the long run.

4. Lighting.  

Switch to a LED lighting system and stop illuminating the rooms that aren’t habited. Well while the residential LED lighting is still developed at least use something else than incandescent bulbs.

Those are just a few ideas. Investing in solar and wind power are also viable options. Just remember to pack enough battery power to store it all in case of a dead calm or a nuclear winter.

Intelligent lighting

It’s not a bad idea to change lighting methods into ones that save energy, but am I the only one who is perplexed at offices and factories plenty to go around which have lights (and why not machines and appliances also) on basically 24/7. This despite the fact that everyone is home and the machines are redundant.

A study was recently done at HUT (Helsinki University of Technology) which concludes that an intelligent control system of road lighting can lead up to 40% energy savings. Liping Guo’s doctoral thesis studied a system where sensors were place alongside roads to sense light levels on the surface of the road and register traffic amount and weather conditions. The effort was to save energy and maintenance costs with the use of the sensor data without reducing road safety.

An interesting conclusion was that the construction costs of this type of system was 16% less than that of a traditional road lighting system. The researcg research was part of a project funded by Tekes and Philips.

via [HUT]

Dispensable of the year

Suomen Luonto (a publication of The Finnish Association for Nature Conservation) gives a prize annually to the most unnecessary thing of the year dubbed ‘Vuoden Turhake’ (’dispensable of the year’ is the best translation I could come up with).

This year the winners are non-refundable bottles. In Finland quite a large number of bottled products that are sold in stores - are part of a recycling program. Unfortunately many foreign (and domestic) brands use bottle types and materials which are not part of this program. See posting on Plup bottled waters for an example of such a product.

There’s obviously room for improvement in the area of material selections when designing a new mass-product. But I guess the recycling program itself could be extended to include other plastics as well as PET, coudn’t it?

via [Suomen Luonto] (sorry, only in Finnish)