Green Options

What a great new earth-friendly and stylish product!

Introducing FLOAA Dish-sposables made from sugarcane. Yet it’s not just the material that’s eco-inventive, but the design. The bowl’s cavity catches the excess incase you happen to pour too much food or water in it. Perfect to prevent messes, especially for travelers. They’re stack-able and reusable too.

Australian scientists are aiming to finish sequencing the genome for sugarcane by this time next year. Once completed, it could lead to the development of a super biofuel.

Sugarcane is already being widely harvested as a biofuel, but with the genome mapped researchers could pinpoint exactly where in its DNA specific traits are found. Those traits could then be more precisely manipulated to create “supercane”– sugarcane richer in energy and more suitable for transformation into biofuel.

Could cyanobacteria eventually become a more popular biofuel than corn, sugarcane, or even algae? Quite possibly. According to Science Daily, cyanobacteria can convert up to 10 percent of the sun’s energy into biomass.

This is a drastic improvement over the 1 percent rate of crops like corn and sugarcane, as well as the 5 percent rate of algae. With such a high conversion rate, cyanobacteria could replace a hefty amount of fossil fuels without taking up too much land.

According to the Nikkei Business Daily (via Tradingmarkets.com), Japan’s Suzuki Motor Company will begin selling cars that run completely on 100% ethanol in the US and Brazil by 2010. The company will begin the transition by first offering an E25 sedan for sale in Brazil this coming March.

Currently the most ethanol that a flex-fuel car can run on in the US is E85 — which is an 85% ethanol/15% gasoline blend. Suzuki’s move would mark a huge development in ethanol-powered vehicles, and a huge shift for Suzuki, which hasn’t had any alternative fuel-specific offerings in its lineup to this point.

Welcome to part 2 of our restaurant greening guide. If you recall from last week, I wrote about Ike’s Quarter Cafe, a restaurant that has found a great balance of quality food, sustainability in their facilities, and a wonderful experience. For those of you considering greening your restaurant, or just in search of ways to make eating a less impactful experience, this week we focus on that which goes around the food. As in the utensils, cups, bowls, plates, and even the foil.

Ike’s Quarter Cafe has been in business for seven years as of this month, and in that time has had plenty of opportunities to try out the various green options available. And, lucky you, we’re going to tell you the best of breed that they’ve found!