Tomorrow Starts Today

"There's no magical way to get rid of your garbage and recycling, but Toronto's new searchable "wizard" database will tell you what to put where. The "Waste Wizard," similar to a website tool Peel Region residents have been using for a couple of years, will allow residents to search for more than 1,500 items and learn how to dispose of them according to Toronto's rules. It offers "one-stop shopping," says the city's solid waste manager, Geoff Rathbone, who - while talking to the Star - is on the website searching for "televisions," an item that the wizard will tell him was added, along with computers and monitors, to curbside pick up in Toronto just this month. Next month, the list of electronics that can be picked up on garbage day will grow to include scanners, telephones, cameras, copiers and audiovisual equipment. The items are part of the provincially mandated waste diversion program, which requires manufacturers to fund municipal programs to recycle electronics."

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Philips Unveils World's First 60 Watt LED Bulb
May 13, 2010

A Light Emitting Diode (LED) have an efficiency of approximately 90% as opposed to an incandescent light bulb which has an efficiency of 5% or so. This means an incandescent light bulb outputs more heat than it does light! "Yesterday at the Lightfair International tradeshow in Las Vegas, Royal Philips Electronics unveiled its breakthrough EnduraLED light bulb. This bulb will be the world's first LED replacement for the 60 watt incandescent light bulb, which represents about half of all domestic incandescent light bulbs sold on the market."

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Calories, carbon footprint: Do we get too much information about food we order?
May 13, 2010

"Walk into a restaurant these days and you might be able to check the calorie count of your enchilada, the salt content of your fries, the "heart healthy" status of your Asiago peppercorn steak and - in at least one pioneering place - the carbon footprint of your vegetable lasagna. Welcome to the era of the menu as a spreadsheet. More restaurants, either by mandate or by choice, are bombarding diners with calorie counts and other information. The disclosures on menus, menu boards and pamphlets are a victory for health advocates who believe informed consumers will make better food choices. But the profusion of numbers makes one wonder: Is it possible to give diners too much information about their food?"

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Shifting rivers threaten India's top tea region
May 19, 2010

As global temperature increases, floods as well as droughts will become more and more severe. This is not eventual, we have been witnessing some of these recently. "Shifting rivers in India's largest tea producing state and abnormally high rainfall this year is destroying hundreds of acres of tea gardens and could cut output in the world's second-largest tea grower. More than a tenth of the 18,000 hectares of plantations, or tea gardens, in India's northeast state of Assam could be washed away as the mighty Himalaya-born Brahmaputra and other smaller rivers flood the region where century-old operations grow over half of India's tea. "

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G8: Canada 6th in low-carbon economy
May 20, 2010

"OTTAWA - When it comes to efforts to transition to a low-carbon economy and prepare for the impacts of global warming, Canada ranks sixth in the G8, a new report says. The National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy report created an index that ranks the G8 countries according to six separate categories. Overall, France took the top spot followed by Germany and the U.K. Japan came fourth and the U.S. finished just ahead of Canada in fifth. Only Italy and Russia fared worse than Canada, which did rank first in the skills category and third in the innovation category. "To succeed and prosper in this global low-carbon transition, we must first know how we stand against others," the report says. "As the world moves to a low-carbon economy, Canada can win or lose. The choice is ours." Most climate scientists believe the burning of fossil fuels such as oil and gas releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere in such quantities that it traps heat and causes global warming. The less carbon countries emit, say these scientists, the less rapidly the Earth will warm."

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