53 East Tips to Use Less Water

Fantastic blog post by Ecotrekker on how to use less water. Check it out!

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Learn how to refill your Brita filter without buying another Brita filter!

We all know that buying Brita filters to replace old ones can be expensive, but here is a site that gives you advice on a home-made replacement.

click here

Ways to save energy when doing laundry

In inspiration from my previous post, here are some easy ways for you to save energy, save money, and also help save the environment…

1. Wash your clothes in cold water

2. Use biodegradable detergents

3. Try to avoid doing small loads of laundry, or washing one item. Be efficient and use the full capacity of your washing machine each time you use it.

Tips for drying:

1. Avoid using your dryer as much as possible! Hang out your clothes to dry on either a laundry line or on a laundry rack.

Why do this? Well first, dryers use an incredible amount of energy, so you will be decreasing your energy used and your household energy bill. Second, air drying your clothes will actually cause them to last longer. You know all that lint that collects in your dryer? That’s your clothing being slowly worn away at! So if you want to save some money by not having to buy new clothes and make your favorite items last longer, air dry!

But what about socks and underwear? Okay, I can understand that some may feel like there are some items that just need to be done in a dryer because it would be weird to having on a laundry line outside for the neighbors to view. If you feel this way, go ahead and dry them, but try to make sure you efficiently use it. Let me clarify. Do you usually run the dryer for your whites and then later for your darks? Because you will be using less space in your dryer because of air drying, don’t run your dryer until you’ve done all your load of laundry and combine them all those pieces you don’t want to air dry in one dryer load.

Props to the UK

It is my great pleasure to be able to say that the UK is developing a waterless washing machine. From Reuters:

A washing machine using as little as a cup of water for each washing cycle could go on sale to environmentally conscious Britons next year.

Xeros Ltd, which has been spun out of the University of Leeds to commercialize the technology, said on Monday the new machines would use less than 2 percent of the water and energy of a conventional washing machine.

Plastic chips are used to remove dirt and stains from clothes, leaving them dry and reducing energy consumption as there is no need to use a dryer after the washing cycle, Xeros said in a statement.

The firm, which recently secured investment of almost 500,000 pounds ($984,400) from IP Group Plc, told Reuters the price of the new machines was “not expected to be dramatically different from (conventional) washing machines.”

Washing machine usage has risen by 23 percent in the past 15 years. The average UK household uses almost 21 liters of water daily on clothes washing, 13 percent of daily household water consumption, according to Waterwise, a non-government organization focused on decreasing water wastage in Britain.

A typical washing machine uses about 35 kilograms of water for every kilogram of clothes, in addition to the power needed to heat the water and dry the clothes

There are more than two million washing machines sold in Britain annually, with a value of about 1 billion pounds, Xeros said. 1.

1. “UK to give waterless washing machine a spin.” Reuters. 9 June 2008. 9 June 2008 <http://www.reuters.com/article/environmentNews/idUSL0967346220080609>.

Sad day for the US climate bill

Unfortunately, the US climate bill failed to make it through the senate.

For the full article I read http://www.reuters.com/article/environmentNews/idUSWAT00961120080606?sp=true

BTW- As a side note, I’m sorry for the overload of news articles for you to read; today I’ve been particularly interested in the Environment section of the newspaper.

Solar Power, Politics, and America looking for cleaner energy

I love reading the news. I find it an important part of being an environmentally-conscious citizen. Stayed informed on issues, so that you can help spread the word to others. Here’s an interesting article that I found on Reuters by reporter Jason Szep about solar energy…

Apple Inc is considering harnessing the sun to power its iPod music players. California’s Ironwood prison is installing more than 6,000 solar panels, and Boston’s Fenway Park is tapping solar power for Red Sox baseball games.

After decades on the fringe, solar power is closing in on America’s mainstream as surging fossil fuel prices and mounting concern over climate change spur states, businesses and homeowners into a quickening embrace with alternative energy.

Panels bolted to roofs to convert sunlight into electricity are still too expensive in most regions to compete with cheaper, less environmentally friendly fuels like coal without generous subsidies. Solar’s high costs have kept the resource out of reach for many residences and businesses,.

But not for long, industry analysts and scientists say.

The tipping point at which the world’s cleanest, most renewable resource is cost-competitive with other sources of energy on electricity grids could happen within two to five years in some U.S. regions and countries if the price of fossil fuels continues to rise at its current pace, they add.

“In the long run — as in two to three years — you should see competitiveness especially with the grid in a number of regions in the world,” said Vishal Shah, an analyst who tracks the industry at U.S. investment bank Lehman Brothers.

Tom Werner, chief executive of SunPower Corp, the largest North American solar company by sales, sees such “grid parity” for solar power in the United States and elsewhere happening in about five years, or possibly as soon as 2010.

“That’s actually more aggressive than what we would say previously, and that’s because the cost of electricity is going up faster than we had ever modeled,” Werner said an interview at the Reuters Global Energy Summit on June 3.

“It is becoming more and more clear it is a real possibility, and we believe, a reality,” he said.

Richard Feldt, chief executive of U.S. solar panel maker Evergreen Solar Inc, calls grid parity the industry’s “Holy Grail” and sees it happening in about five years. “It’s not far away,” he said in an interview.

Suntech Power Holdings Co Ltd, one of the largest of a growing number of Chinese solar companies, sees the same five-year timeline, thanks to increasing supplies of silicon that will help drive down costs.

In the United States, much depends on November’s U.S. presidential and congressional elections.

A Democratic win of the White House, and possibly greater Democratic control of Congress, could spur aggressive U.S. measures to limit climate-warming emissions of carbon dioxide — including legislation opposed by President George W. Bush that would cap emissions from 86 percent of U.S. facilities.

If passed, such cap-and-trade provisions would make it costlier to emit carbon into the atmosphere and discourage the burning of fossil fuels. The economics of solar and other cleaner energy sources would be more competitive.

Democrat Barack Obama wants to require U.S. utilities to generate 25 percent of their electricity from renewable sources like solar by 2025. Republican John McCain has campaigned on his support for alternative energy sources but Democrats have questioned his voting record on those issues in Congress.

“Obama or McCain would be better than Bush,” said Feldt.

BOOM TO BUST?

Although solar power is easily installed, building solar panels is expensive because of tight supplies of silicon, their costliest element. Most industry analysts expect a constraint on silicon supplies to end within two years. But they are divided on whether this would help or harm the industry.

Some say a drop in silicon prices would tip the scales from boom to bust by dramatically boosting supply of photovoltaic panels that make up 90 percent of sales in the industry.

Such panels use refined crystalline silicon. But rival technologies are emerging such as thin-film panels that require almost no silicon, raising the possibility of a costly battle in the industry over which type of solar power will dominate.

“The solar industry will look very different just two years from now,” said Ted Sullivan, a senior analyst at Lux Research, a New York market consultancy.

He said he expects “a shake-out among companies that aren’t prepared to thrive in this new environment — particularly crystalline silicon players that haven’t invested in new thin-film technologies.”

Those concerns have helped to cool red-hot solar panel stocks, a volatile sector that also faces uncertainty over whether the U.S. Congress will renew tax incentives that expire at the end of the year.

Shares in California-based SunPower Corp are down nearly 60 percent this year, Colorado-based Ascent Solar Technologies Inc has shed 50 percent and Evergreen has lost about 40 percent of its value this year.

That compares to a heady 2007 when industry leader SunPower rose 253 percent from the start of last year to the end, Ascent surged 785 percent and Evergreen shot up 134 percent.

Some analysts urge investors to look beyond volatility in the near term to a promising future for solar in energy-thirsty nations such as the United States, which could overtake Germany as the world’s top solar market within four years, according to the European Photovoltaic Industry Association, a lobby body.

“While silicon oversupply in mid-2009 is likely to pressure companies’ margins, we believe investors at some point will become comfortable with solar’s improving costs,” said Ronan Wolfsdorf, a solar and renewable energy analyst at consultants Macroenergy Monitor in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

“The solar market needs to cross this great divide, and a lot of that has to do with cost. But one thing to remember is that tougher regulations on emissions of carbon into the atmosphere are going to translate into higher prices for electricity produced by conventional sources,” he said.

“That will make solar more competitive in the long run.”

Under laws in 25 U.S. states and Washington D.C., solar and other clean energy sources such as wind must constitute up to 30 percent of a utility’s energy portfolio in five to 15 years. Just 10 states had such requirements in 2003.

And some businesses are bringing solar to the masses. Engineers at computer maker Apple applied for a patent for solar panels that would power mobile devices like its popular iPod digital media player without plugging them in.

The 2007 World Series-winning Red Sox baseball club last month became the first professional sports team to go solar, installing solar hot water panels that will replace a third of the gas used to heat water at Boston’s historic Fenway Park.

The United States — the world’s fourth-largest solar power market after Germany, Japan and Spain — saw nearly 150 megawatts of solar capacity come online in 2007, up 45 percent from 2006, for a total of 750 megawatts, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association, a U.S. trade group.

That is about enough to power about 550,000 homes.

If its subsidies continue, the United States could generate as much power from solar panels as two-and-a-half typical nuclear reactors in four years — or about 2.55 gigawatts, according to the European Photovoltaic Industry Association’s data.

That association sees global nuclear capacity reaching 44 gigawatts in four years — the equivalent to the power capacity of 44 nuclear reactors.

See the article for yourself at http://www.reuters.com/article/environmentNews/idUSN0342345720080606?sp=true

Perspective on the World Bank and the Climate Fund

Although the idea of loaning funds to encourage clean energy development in third world nations may appear to be a solution to solving global environmental issues, here is what environmental groups have to say about World Bank’s Climate Fund…

Some 121 environment and development groups on Thursday questioned the credibility of proposed World Bank funds to help the poor fight global warming, but the U.N.’s climate change agency broadly welcomed them.

Last month 40 developing and industrialized countries agreed on two separate multi-billion dollar funds, managed by the World Bank and regional development banks, one to help developing countries cut their contribution to climate change and the other to help them prepare better for more storms and floods.

The developing world blames industrialized nations for climate change after decades of emitting planet-warming gases such as carbon dioxide from burning oil and coal.

The NGOs doubted the World Bank’s qualifications to fund projects which curb carbon emissions given its history of loans to coal plants, including one this year to an Indian plant which will use the latest, cleanest boilers.

“Clean must mean ‘clean’, not ‘slightly less dirty’,” said a statement from the groups including Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and ActionAid, on the fringes of a U.N. climate conference in Germany.

The Bank rejected that criticism, saying that such projects had “a largely beneficial impact on the environment by shifting production from small polluting installations to larger, cleaner, more efficient energy plants”.

The U.N.-led Kyoto Protocol also supports such cleaner coal projects and U.N. climate chief Yvo de Boer repeated that support.

“I think given the pace at which coal-fired power plants are being built every delay means more sub-optimal plants.”

“I think it’s great,” he said of the funds.

The NGOs also complained that some of the new funds would be in loans instead of grants, risking indebting poorer nations.

“It is highly inappropriate to issue loans for adaptation, given that rich countries are overwhelmingly responsible for climate change,” their statement said.

De Boer agreed that the funds must not re-direct general overseas aid. “It’s important not to re-label ODA (overseas development assistance) and turn it into loans,” he said.

The World Bank said last month that “donor contributions to the Climate Investment Funds will be new and additional to existing aid commitments”. 1.

1. Wynn, Gerard. “Greens criticize World Bank Climate Fund.” Reuters. 5 June 2008. 1 <http://www.reuters.com/article/environmentNews/idUSL0584234620080605?sp=true>.