Green Options

Salvaging thousands of used disposable chopsticks from the Koriyama’s city hall cafeteria over two years, Shuhei Ogawara has built a 4-meter (13-ft) long canoe.  It took three months for Ogawara to glue 7,382 chopsticks together to form the canoe shell.

Via:  Pink Tentacle

Californians throw away millions of dollars of unclaimed bottle refunds each year when they place recycling in the garbage.

These unclaimed funds called California Redemption Value (CRV) are now being used to fund recycling projects at no expense to the state’s general fund.  California recycles more than any other state in the union.

Via: Environmental News Service

Seed banks help out farmers in times of natural disasters; however, the Global Crop Diversity Trust is preparing for such a disaster on a global scale.  The Svalbard Global Seed Vault will store and preserve 4.5 million samples from other seed banks. The vault is located on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen. Conde Nast explains the purpose of this world seed bank:

There are only two reasons a

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Former mailman Steven Padgett received probation in federal court for failing to deliver years worth of junk mail.  Although the mailman did not stop delivering junk mail based on the environmental impact of junk mail, which accounts for 30% of all US mail.  He did it because he couldn’t keep up with the volume of mail he had to deliver and still maintain [...]

Near the town of Anderson, CA, state wildlife officials discovered a four feet long, 85 pound Chinook Salmon, one of the biggest salmon ever found in the Golden State.

The giant Chinook had recently spawned and died in Battle Creek, a tributary of the Sacramento River. Due to a canceled commercial fishing season in the Pacific Ocean, this fish was able to live [...]

We know that 76 Nobel Laureates endorsed Obama.

So much for Big Science.

But what about little science? Very teeny? Elections do have consequences for every interested party in science, from the greatest Nobel Laureates to the humblest specks of nano stuff.

Looks like they went heavily Obama, too.

And no wonder, with the war on science we just survived.

The kind assistant Professor John Hart of the University of Michigan helped these tiny nanovoters [...]

The green technology boom has already begun. Perhaps the economy will recover faster than we thought.

Vestas, the world’s largest wind turbine manufacturer, is seeking 1,400 workers, all of which will be full-time positions with benefits. The company is adding facilities in Brighton, Colorado for assembly and blade manufacturing. For applications and more information, visit their job listings website.

Photo: Greenjobsnow [...]

IFAW Finds Ebay Responsible For Most Elephant Ivory Sales

EBay agreed to a global ban on the sale of all types of ivory products by January 1, 2009, after an investigation by IFAW found more than 4,000 elephant ivory listings on the online auction site.

More on the story here

Image source: exfordy on Flickr

David Letterman once thought climate change was for “treehuggers” and “kooks.” In this clip from a September episode, the Late Night show host introduces Thomas L Friedman’s new book Hot, Flat, Crowded with an emphatic reversal of this opinion. Despite Letterman’s trademark cynicism, there’s a lot of optimism here. Letterman mentions alternative energy and the crowd goes wild.

Via: TheGreenMiles.

Fine Fueling offers a pointed and ironic take on fuel prices (and takes a couple of political jabs at a couple of recognizable figures as it does so), by presenting bottled varietal fuels and offering capsule reviews of them. For example,

A zesty, full bodied, thermal cracked desert fuel, with wonderful balance. This fuel totally over-delivers on our hedonist’s meter.

This petro-oenophile’s version of fuel choice includes such [...]