Ideaplants

Thanks for sharing on fb, gps

“Bottled water has been described as “one of the greatest cons of the 20th century” and as “marketing’s answer to the emperor’s new clothes”(1)

Rather than typing some thoughts into this post, I invite you to watch the video clip above. CINE-ONU will be screening the full film “Tapped” for free to mark the World Water Day on March 22nd. If you are in Brussels and would like to see it, register with an email until March 21st 5:30 to cine-onu@unrig.org.

Cheers,
Sylvia

(1)Quote Wikipedia & Moyes, -Jojo (September 18, 1997). “Consumers: Bottled water labelled a ‘con’”.

China is increasingly making data on air and water pollution public. Many pressure groups have been taking advantage of this data.

The Institute for Public and Environmental Affairs (IPE) has taken this opportunity and compiled a map of companies in China that do not meet the pollution requirements set by Chinese law. International companies like Nike, Wal-Mart and Siemens are increasingly using this information to check whether there are any issues in their supplier base to avoid public scandals that may damage their reputation and brand value.

It seems that Apple lacks behind with even an unwillingness to openly talk about the location of suppliers…

› Continue reading

I just listened to an entertaining iTunesU podcast on Nutrition by Berkeley University taught by Nancy Amy. The topic: Alcohol


“That men should put an enemy in their mouths to steal away their brains” is the Shakespeare quote that opens the discussion.


Nancy explains how alcohol enters your stomach and gets absorbed so quickly that it can get to your brain in less than a minute. As stated by Bert Valley, alcohol has been consumed for over 10000 years. One reason that made our ancestors drink was the fact that people knew about the contamination of water and the impacts this could have on the human body (e.g. diseases). Since not many people had access to clean water they simply used fermentation to purify the water. That is one important reason why alcoholic beverages were so popular in the Western world back in ancient times…


In Asia another method became popular to purify water and avoid diseases: cooking water and brewing tea.
As in Western Europe alcohol was consumed over generations, the gene that helps us absorb a fair part of the alcohol became a quite important feature in daily life while in the Asian world, the gene was not needed and therefore did not develop as strongly in the Asian gene pool.


Interesting that the issue of water contaminations brought us to a regular consumption of alcohol, isn’t it?


For more lectures on Nutrition by Berkeley University have a look here 

This blog post is about meat, fish and veggies and how you can easily make better choices.

Meat
Am not going to go into the environmental effects of meat production (especially red meat), but rest assured it takes a lot more energy and causes more pollution to produce. For more info, you can start reading here or here.
Against what you may expect I am not going to advertise going all vegetarian. Why? Because I believe that everybody’s body works differently and that sustainable solutions mean that they have to be a free choice.
Take me for example, I consider myself 95% vegetarian (sorry if you are a 100% vegetarian and this offended you), but this is my sustainable approach (I don’t care if my food has touched meat (makes it way easier to be invited for dinner), I eat fish (whilst recently paying attention to MSC..) and I will have duck for Christmas!)
Somebody once told me rather than buying the cheapest meat to eat every day, he now buys quality meat to eat once a week and I thought that was a great approach. As a side effect he discovered his creativity in the kitchen (and his taste butts )

Fish
According to Greenpeace “More than 70 percent of the world’s fisheries are ‘fully exploited’, ‘over exploited’ or ‘significantly depleted’ (click here for more info), but there are still fish that can be consumed with a good conscience. The Marine Stewards Council is labelling them with their MSC logo, so keep your eye out for that! But even outside the labelled items there are better and worse choices, click here for a printable overview (which by the way fits conveniently into any wallet).

Vegetables
The less vegetables (or any food for that matter) travel to get onto our plate, the better – not just because of the transport costs, chances are they will be fresher (vitamins!) as well. Here two charts (pdf, html) for which vegetables are in season (paying attention to low prices in supermarkets and Belgian product logo gives you a pretty good idea as well ). You can even order a calendar for 2011 with this info at info@bruxellesenvironnement.be (pdf version here). Alternatively there are the deliveries of organic and seasonal fruit right to your doorstep.

Bon appetit,
Sylvia

Links:
Organic food deliveries in Brussels (of course there are more.. but I don’t know them :-S):
http://www.vevyweron.be
http://www.reason2.be

Plastic – this wonderful light material, that comes in so handy in our daily lives, does not just fill up billions of landfills worldwide, where it takes 200-400 years to decompose, but is also carried out to sea via rivers where it ends up floating in collections of ever smaller getting pieces in several places in the oceans.

The biggest of those garbage accumulations at sea with “… roughly the size of Texas [one could also say France], containing approximately 3.5 million tons of trash…” (source: http://www.greatgarbagepatch.org) is known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and with this it is the biggest rubbish dump on earth. No need to go and look for it on GoogleMaps (as I did), because of it being broken into small pieces it cannot be seen via satellite..

In some areas the density of plastic particles (and sometimes toxic ones) is 7 times higher than plankton. Fish consider it as a (quite possibly not so healthy) food source and also birds eat the small plastic pieces. Some die while others are eaten and so the plastic makes its way up the food chain..

Ideally of course the whole plastic should not ever make it into the oceans in the first place and maybe one day this will be made a priority (with lots of wishing and hoping..), but until then reducing the amount of plastic bags, water bottles and other throwaway plastic gadgets is the way to go.

Your tapwater drinking,
Sylvia

Nature is pretty to look at, nature is an inspiration for science, nature provides a lot of things that would cost us dearly to do by ourselves or would frankly be impossible to do at all.
Think about the bats that eat mosquitoes (up to their own body weight each day), worms and slugs that recycle organic waste and loosen the ground or bees that fertilize our crops..

Now, some of them are in a bit of trouble, the bats in Belgium have troubles finding caves to hibernate over winter and the bees are globally on a very steep incline because of use of pesticides. They are pollinating 90% of our plants! And “Multiple scientific studies blame one group of toxic pesticides for their rapid demise..”

As for the bees there is something you can do for them.. Avaaz, a global web movement, which helps enforcing environment friendly policies through petitions, is currently collecting signatures to hopefully provoke a global ban on pesticides. I signed already, why don’t you sign it as well? http://www.avaaz.org/en/save_the_bees/

thanks,
Sylvia

PS: Avaaz also deals with human rights issues.

I just read this article on BBC and thought it might be worth sharing.


In Glasgow, Scotland, Professor Andrew Mills and his team are developing a smart wrapping developed to detect ‘off food’. The wrapping changes colour when food goes bad. The team hopes to be able to avoid the enormous amounts off food we waste every day of which great parts could in fact still be eaten.


It sounds quite amazing, doesn’t it? >>> You check your fridge and within seconds you can tell what food you need to throw out. >>> No more off food in supermarkets that accidentally finds its way into your shopping basket… almost too good to be true.


Then there’s only to question what additives are actually being added to the wrapping. …and I wonder whether this also works in places like China, where especially meat contains chemicals, colour enhancers & sometimes even medication that has been given to animals to make them grow faster (ever heard about a chicken that can grow up in only 21 days?). I am very curious to see this invention hit the market.

I feel a bit blown away during my first weeks in Shijiazhuang / China from an environmental point of view. Environmental issues is what we are all aware to a certain extend. But once you get to live in a place where they become so obvious like the air you breathe and the water you drink, it changes your perception on things.

Shijiazhuang is such a place. Pollution and dust are part of the environment we now live in. Many people on the street wear masks and believe this could help them filter the air they breathe. However, most of them are out of cotton which makes me doubtful on how much it actually helps.


I’m not surprised to see that my new city scored highest on air pollution on the world bank index in 2007 and that “Epidemiological research has found consistent and coherent associations between air pollution and various health endpoints, or health effects.” these range from “reduced lung function, respiratory symptoms, chronic bronchitis” all the way down to “premature death”.



The water that comes out of our pipes at home leaves white slick if you cook it. So I even hesitate to wash our dishes tap water. This is what we take showers with and wash our face. Now living a ‘common people & student life’ here, I realise more than during my last stay in China how much luxury we actually have in Europe where in most places tab water has a better reputation than bottled water from supermarkets.


If you go to a restaurant here, you cannot tell whether the oil that is used for cooking has been changed recently … and even whether it was bought in a supermarkets or whether it comes out of the underground pipes where organic rubbish is used to extract the remaining oil and reused as cooking oil. There is very little quality control for restaurants except to some extend in student restaurants.



See here a comparison between oil from the pipes (left) and fresh cooking oil (right):

Safety, health and environmental issues are so clearly linked together here. But what solutions are there that help on one hand to raise awareness for environmental safety and on he other hand secures jobs and a way to get to work for the masses of people that live here?


In a place where skyscrapers have an average lifetime of 10 years which shows that development has a clear priority, the answer does not seem as evident and I understand it will take some time…

All the best,

Mira

PS: to all Facebook users, please note that Facebook is blocked in China, so if you have a comment, please reply via www.ideaplants.org.

Somebody at the ecovillage, I visited in summer, said to me:

“It’s sad how we take nutrients from the earth and
rather than giving them back we waste precious drinking water (see toilets) or fill dump sites.”

Good point, I thought.

Shortly after that I got introduced to wormeries and decided that this was my chance of giving back (a little).. What is a wormery?

“A Wormery is a box system that contains composting worms .. [and] .. is an easy, convenient, environmentally-friendly and efficient way of turning your waste kitchen scraps into high quality super-rich compost all the year round.”

For a normal compost one would need a garden, but the good thing about a wormery is, that it can be done indoors as well, in fact the worms work best at temperatures between 14-25° Celcius. I don’t really need all that earth, but some friends already expressed an interest in it and I bet the trees on my street will be happy takers as well.

So how do you get started?

1. Get 2 opaque boxes and a lid (In my case I use another box as the lid). Of course you can also buy wormeries in stores, but they are rather expensive (over 100EUR I was told)
2. Punch holes into one of the boxes and the lid. The box with no holes will be at the bottom, this is where very nutritious water (leachate) released in the process will be collected. The lid needs to have holes, so the worms can breathe.
3. Fill the box with the holes with a mix of 2-3cm shredded newspaper and cardboard. (I just teared it into small pieces.)
4. Get some worms and place them on top of the shredded paper mix. (Worms come with the compost they currently live in and can be picked up here for free)
5. Add some organic waste, approximately the amount of the compost with the worms. (Do not use orange peels or anything cooked.)
6. Cover with a sheet of wet newspaper (this will keep flies from enjoying the waste)
7. Leave the compost to itself for 1-2weeks. The worms have to get used to their new environment.
8. Now you can start adding more organic waste. Remember to always cover it to keep out flies (If you don’t like the newspaper approach a cotton towel can be used as well.)

Questions? Check out this FAQ or comment on this post.

Cheers,
Sylvia