Green Options

In a sudden reversal, Transport Canada announced on Tuesday that it would release the results of hundreds of tests on child car seats conducted since 2003.

Prior to Tuesday, they were refusing to publicly release the six years’ worth of tests — paid for with the public dollar — because “there may be a potential for unfair material damage to the private sector without cause.”

On Monday, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation reported on this issue.  They learned that these tests were similar to ones carried out by the NHTSA in 2008, which revealed problems with some seats, such as failures in side impact crashes and numerous cases of infant seats detaching from their bases. These results led to recalls and changes in car seat safety policies.

As you might expect, this news prompted considerable backlash.

World class adventurer, National Geographic Emerging Explorer, and a descendant of the legendary Rothschild banking family, David de Rothschild, will attempt to do what no one has done before, sail half-way around the world from California to Australia on a catamaran made 90% of recycled plastic waste powered only by the wind and the sun.

However this is not the first journey to be made across the Pacific using plastic waste. Last year a raft made of 15,000 bottles called the Junk successfully made a similar journey from California to Hawaii in 87 days in order to promote awareness of the global plastic waste problem.

While not a radical approach, One Million Acts of Green is encouraging website viewers (and Canadians in general) to take the small steps, the small actions, that cumulatively add up to something significant.