Terracycle or How to Turn your Trash into Gold

The first thing that jumped at me when I arrived at Terracycle was the walls.  Terracycle walls  are covered with incredible murals and graffiti. Yes, why keep this typical post World War II set of warehouse buildings in West Trenton NJ  in its standard  industrial dread style?

Check out  pictures of some Terracycle’s murals right here…

The Solar PV Philly Show Opened to the Public: What $20 million will get you AND Let your IMAGINATION run wild.

By Betsy Teusch and Jacques Sapriel

Since Solar PV Philadelphia is a trade show, much of the exhibitors supply solar manufactures and so on, up the chain.  But there are a lot of distributers and installers, and they’re making the case given programs like Sunshine PA, that solar is becoming cost effective.  And when Pennsylvania deregulates electricity prices in 2011, payback will be a helluva lot quicker….

More than 135 companies are represented in the expo hall. Since manufacturing solar cells is a precise scientific based process, a lot of  companies that are represented manufacture some of the complex machinery and measurement tools necessary to set up and run a solar cell fabrication.  This is how I found out, while chatting with the US Representative of OTB Solar from Eindhoven – Netherlands, that $20 million is the approximate cost of a brand new turnkey solar cell manufacturing line. If that sounds like a lot of money, think that a basic microchip fab similar to what Intel runs around the world cost about $2 billion a pop.  Same kind of materials, similar manufacturing process, differences in complexity and need for high accuracy account for some of the difference.

Here are some of the interesting innovations I ran into:

Neighborhood Bike Works: The Hub of the Bicyle Culture

Find out what Neighborhood Bike Works and the “Bicycle Lifestyle” is all about right here >>>

This four minutes video was filmed and edited by Greendocs:
Julia Hoff, Bunker Seyfert,Heather Craig and Kathleen Monahan.

Read on…

Where to buy Sustainable Seafood ??

A lot of people still seem to ignore the fact that most Ocean fishing areas of the planet are totally depleted.  Traditional harvest fishing has  disappeared from the New England Coast and from many formerly prized fishing areas around the planet.

Why?

Because of OVER FISHING – there is simply no more fish.

So, here is someone who decided to open a store that only supplies Fish that has been raised or harvested using sustainable practices.

Otolith Sustainable Seafood is located at 143 West Girard Avenue (between Front and Second Street). Their website address is: http://www.otolithonline.com

I would like to thank  Ian and Colin Sandberg and Kelly Ann Bethoney for sharing this precious information.

The simple things the city can do to decrease its carbon footprint

It is amply clear that Michael Nutter, the Mayor of Philadelphia is committed to moving Philadelphia and its region to be more environmentally sustainable.

The City appointed a Director of Sustainability, Van Jones has been regularly consulting and talking with city and regional leaders and the convening of a cabinet level meeting promoting Green Jobs on February 27, all underscored Mayor Nutter’s commitment to moving to a Green Economy.

Great!!

What concerns me is the low level stuff, the little things that each of us can do in our every day life to reduce our carbon footprint.

The struggle to reduce our carbon footprint will be lost or won by millions of people all over the United States who decide to make very small changes to their daily life.

Philly Compost launches

Let’s connect these 2 facts together…

1. Methane has 72 times the global warming power of carbon – per NOAA and the recent article in Grid magazine by Tanya Seaman
2. Backyard or onsite composting offers the highest environmental benefit among organics management strategies because of the decrease or elimination of transportation impacts. – per the COOL2012 website

Food scraps dumped into land fills slowly decompose while producing a lot of methane which is 72 times more damaging to our Earth climate than carbon. And, in my opinion, it is considerably easier to reduce the amount of food scrap discarded into landfills. Philly Compost proposes to help us systematically compost our food scraps.

Short Film on West Philly Pedal Coop wins National Geographic Competition

The theme of the 2009 National Geographic Society film contest was: “Preserve your Planet”.

The winner of this year national competition is a short film about the West Philly’s Pedal Co-Op.

The film was a collaboration of Bruce Pinchback, Dylan Steinberg, Bunker Seyfert, Mathew Sullivan and Brian Honniger, all students at Drexel University on an idea from Jacques Sapriel who runs PhillyEcoCity.com

See the film right > here or in the video widget that you will find in the right hand side bar, bellow the search window.

Also included are interviews with Alex Mulcahy of Grid Magazine, Tim Dunn of Books through Bars, Megan from Trophy Bikes and Challahman Michael Dolich of Four Worlds Bakery!!

PhillyEcoCity includes several posts about the Pedal Coop:

- For more details on the Pedal Coop.

- Here is a short film showing how “Four World Bakery”, a West Philadelphia commercial bakery moved its equipment using the Pedal Coop as its movers.

The Future of the Northwest Philadelphia Urban Forest

A review of Sebastián I. Varela ’s Master’s Thesis on the Northwest Urban Forrest.
By Paco Verin, B.A., PCH

This article is a summary of a large and important study of the NorthWest Philadelphia urban forest., and it offers a call to action to its inhabitants. Sebastián Varela’s study focused on trees, is complex and involved many people, and this article does not intent to address every aspect of it The author of this summary acknowledges past and present efforts by a number of individuals and organizations to care for Philadelphia’s trees and natural spaces. To receive a full copy of Sebastián Varela’s study, please contact Mr. Varela directly at:  sivarela@syr.edu

The Difference between Greenguard, Greenseal, Green Label and Green Label Plus.

This is a slightly edited version of a post that  Len Zangwill published on his blog: Sustainable Writings. His article does a great job bringing clarity to a bunch of Green Labels. Anyone interested in implementing sustainability into their purchases will find this post very informative.  Read on…

Emily’s Bike

I was a wondering what was this long bloc of plastic that Emily was carrying around while doing her grocery shopping? So I asked.

Emily took me to her new bicycle – to her new electric bike. I knew that Emily and her partner had decided to live without owning a car and the new eZee electric bike is an expression of Emily’s determination to minimize her carbon footprint. The long bloc of plastic is the Li Ion Polymer rechargable electric battery pack that Emily removes from her bike as a security measure when she parks it.