This is a really interesting documentary about working toward no waste, making products that are truly recyclable or compostable, buildings that respect the occupants and the land, and doing it in a way that is beneficial to business.

Man is the only creature that produces landfills. Natural resources are being depleted on a rapid scale while production and consumption are rising in na­tions like China and India. The waste production world wide is enormous and if we do not do anything we will soon have turned all our resources into one big messy landfill. But there is hope. The German chemist, Michael Braungart, and the American designer-architect William McDonough are fundamentally changing the way we produce and build. If waste would become food for the biosphere or the technosphere (all the technical products we make), produc­tion and consumption could become beneficial for the planet.

http://www.vpro.nl/

Mark Edwards, PhD, Arizona State University

Burning 100 million tons of our primary food for fuel is unsustainable and wastes non-renewable resources, especially water. Growing massive amounts of corn represents ecological suicide as it drains trillions of gallons of non-replenishable groundwater, spikes food and fuel prices, decimates food exports and threatens millions with starvation from a food cascade.

Biowar I inflicts costs, casualties and catastrophe in a magnitude far greater than a conventional war. Taxpayers are forced to pay $43 B annually to subsidize erosion and pollution of our air and water for a tiny, 2.4%, replacement of foreign oil. America has insufficient disposable cropland, water or energy to waste on a policy that fails its objectives.

Compared with biofuel alternatives:

• Corn requires more water, land, fertilizer, herbicides and pesticides

• Severely pollutes air, soils, rivers, lakes and well-water

• Degrades and erodes soils at the rate of 6 tons per acre

• Grows slowly and produces a low energy biomass yield, 3%

Corn ethanol is not sustainable. It consumes too much water, land, fertilizer and energy. The direct and indirect costs of the ethanol industry are neither sustainable nor sensible for farmers, consumers, taxpayers or food support recipients.

Biowar І offers sustainable alternative to corn ethanol, algae which does not compete for food cropland, uses 0.001 as much water and creates an ecologically positive footprint. Algae is over 30 times more productive than corn and can be made into higher value products such as jet fuel and green diesel. The coproducts from algae, proteins and carbohydrates, may have more value for food, medicines, animal feed and low energy input fertilizers than the oils used for making jet fuel. See more about Biowar І at www.biowar1.com .

• Biowar I Summary and FAQ

We all like stuff, gadgets, gizmos, tools, whatever, but whenever we buy something new it’s creating demand for more stuff to be produced. Why create this demand when you can get lots of great stuff for free? Many of us also have quite a bit of old junk (to us) that we need to get rid of. Most of it isn’t anything we’re going to sell, but we still hold on to it. Turns out there are some great websites out there to help us find free stuff and to give us a place to give away our stuff.

Freecycle is a great website to go to find free stuff and to give stuff away for free. Once there you just search for a group near you and get signed up on the mailing list. The lists are Yahoo groups so they’re very easy and probably somewhat familiar to a lot of people. Once you’re signed up you can receive emails with all the stuff people are giving away or you can just check the group whenever there is something specific you need. The Phoenix group connects you to over 13,000 people and Tucson over 9,000 people, so there a lot of people giving away free stuff and looking for free stuff in Arizona.

Paper Back Swap - No need to buy new books, you can swap books with someone else. All you have to do is pay for postage.

Swap a CD - Similar to Paper Back Swap, but you pay .50 cents for each CD you order.

Re Use AZ is much like Freecycle except geared more towards business and construction. There you will find construction, landscaping materials, and much more. Unlike Freecycle everything is listed on the website, so no need to sign on to a group list.

What other sites are out there to help with this? Lets us know!

What’s your Earthscore? This 36 page, $5 guide is a great read to help you determine what your impact on the environment is. It does this by asking you questions about 14 areas such as energy usage, transportation, and consumerism and assigns impact and action points. Along the way it gives great tidbits of information about these different areas to help you understand what actions you take can hurt or help the environment. A lot of the tips were very helpful to me. In the end you fill out a chart and come up with a final score of your impacts and actions. It’s meant to give you an idea on areas you can improve on and not to tell you how many Earths your using or how bad you are. The author encourages you to take the Earthscore again after a year to see how you’re doing after the initial audit. I only tried it out for the first time a month or so ago so it’ll be interesting to see how I do in a year. The ultimate goal of this guide is to help people become more aware of how they live and how that affects the environment.

If you want to get a copy of this book the only place you’ll find in Arizona is The Student Book center on College just north of the ASU campus. You can also buy it online at Amazon.com or from the publisher Morning Sun Press. The publisher offers discounts if you buy in volume for a class.

Who doesn’t love taking a dip!? Maybe you like to take a refreshing swim in the backyard or or perhaps a nice relaxing bath before bed. Ever wonder which uses more water a year? This is my totally unscientific battle of Bath VS Pool! In this battle we’ll figure out on average which of these uses the most amount of water a year here in the desert.

After poking around the internet very unscientifically I found that most sites say the average size bath is 40 - 60 gallons (1/2 filled) and that the average sized residential swimming pool holds around 20,000 gallons.

Lets assume the pool is already filled and not count the 20,000 gallons it took to fill it the first time. Being that it’s so hot and dry here a pool loses almost it’s entire volume of water a year to evaporation. Not looking good for Pool because that’s 20,000 gallons of water a year so far.

The battle isn’t over yet though because bath likes to slow down and unwind every night which means bath is using 50 gallons of water a night times 365 days a year equals a whopping 18250 gallons! Uh oh, all of a sudden it’s a tight contest.

I don’t know, do we have a winer here? Bath wins by a slight 1,750 gallons, but since this isn’t very precise.

Winner: Bath

Considering we should all bathe and having a pool is a luxury it was a unfair contest to start. I was curious how many gallons of water each might take a year, so I found out and thought I’d share. I’d probably say not having a pool would be best and instead head down to the local community or public pool. If you do have one installing a pool cover significantly reduces the amount of water that evaporates especially in the summer. You also don’t need to use as many chemicals if all your water isn’t evaporating.

As far as baths you can take fewer of them or substitute in a shower with a low flow shower head.

Here’s some water saving tips from the Arizona Department of Water Resources.