What can be done? Ban the plastic bottle! San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom signed an executive order last June which bars the San Fran city government from using city money to supply municipal workers with bottled water.

New York City residents consume nearly 28 gallons of bottled water each year. The city government launched an ad campaign to encourage residents and tourists to use the city’s tap rather than buy bottled water. New York City water is considered some of the best quality in the country. Classy restaurants in Boston, New York and San Francisco have taken bottled water off of the menu, offering rather filtered tap water.

Not only does bottled water contribute to excessive waste, but it costs us a thousand times more than water from our faucet at home, and it is, in fact, no safer or cleaner. A 1999 Natural Resources Defense Council study found that tap water may even be of a higher quality than bottled.

So why not make the switch? It is yet another win/win situation for person and environmental health!

This is also especially useful in drought-stricken areas like Israel, where watering your garden these days will cost you about $5 for every cubic meter you use beyond your quota. I hear things are getting bad in California as well.

But why biodegradable? I found out why yesterday, when I absentmindedly suggested to my wife that we pull the laundry hose out of the drain in the floor and put it in my giant empty bucket which I normally use for the primary fermentation stage of home brewing beer. (More on that later.) “Why?” she asked me, as wives often do. “So we can water the garden with the runoff and all the neighbors can be in awe of our giant and firm vegetables,” I answered proudly. Granted, the only thing we have in the garden right now is a budding tomato plant we accidentally planted there after burying compost, most likely including a tomato, in a hole 3 months ago.

I figured the replumbing operation was a good idea, until she informed me that toxic heavily-chlorinated, non-biodegradable detergent doesn’t do well for plants, contaminating groundwater, or keeping DNA generally unmutated, and do you want our accidental tomato plant to die in a hell storm of detergent chemicals?

I said no. And that’s when I knew, somewhere deep inside me, that purchasing an organic biodegradable detergent would solve the entire problem. So pick one up. Do some plumbing. Save some water. Grow a garden. Laugh at your neighbors in contempt for not being as thrifty and environmentally conscious as you. Revel in your victory.

His love for plant earth and concern for its environment has resulted in his launching of what appears to be his most harrowing feat of adventure to date. And that feat entails sailing a homemade craft made almost entirely of discarded plastic bottles, tied together by web mesh.
His destination: the gigantic “plastic island”, located in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and made up of waste plastic and other material – and said to be almost twice the size of the American state of Texas.

His voyage, a journey of nearly 11,000 nautical miles, will begin off the State of California, continue until reaching the “island” now floating in an area known as the Great Pacific Gyre (southwest of Hawaii) and finally ending in Sydney Australia. The improbable voyage, on a craft made up of the same type of flotsam that the “Plastic Island“ is said to be made of, is to make people aware that our oceans, the giver of much of our planet’s food and oxygen sources, are in danger to being turned into nothing but floating garbage dumps; and as a result will make life on earth even more threatened.

The journey, which was to have begun in March, 2009, was delayed until mid-summer, which could make de Rothschild’s trip even more perilous due to the occurrence of typhoons and other serve storms which are more prevalent during the summer and autumn months.

Following his journeys to both geometrical polar regions, David led an expedition to the Ecuadorian rain forest in South America, in order to monitor the effects that oil drilling and other man-created ecological endeavors are having on one of the last remaining virgin rain forest regions on earth. The damage that this drilling is having on this region, in order to obtain more greenhouse gas creating fossil fuels, is most disturbing, he notes.

The 60 ft catamaran craft, made out of 12,000 plastic bottles and other recycled plastic material woven into self-reinforcing polyethylene terephthalate (PET), a very strong webbing material , will be his home and that of his crew during the voyage, which he says will take about three months. “The only worry I have (concerning the voyage) is that I get sea-sick in a bath tub. But when one is as committed as I am to do such a thing, it will be done” he says. The craft that he and the small crew of scientists and ecologists will sail on has been named Kon Tiki, after the primitive raft that Norwegian adventurer and writer Thor Hayerdahl used to cross the Pacific Ocean in 1947. The main difference now is that the gigantic plastic island they are sailing to was much smaller then – if it existed at all.

The tenderness of the delicate American buttock is causing more environmental devastation than the country’s love of gas-guzzling cars, fast food or McMansions, according to green campaigners. At fault, they say, is the US public’s insistence on extra-soft, quilted and multi-ply products when they use the bathroom.

Apparently, “assforestation“, which stands for ass-related deforestation, is a very serious problem!

More than 98% of the toilet roll sold in America comes from virgin wood, said Hershkowitz. In Europe and Latin America, up to 40% of toilet paper comes from recycled products. Greenpeace this week launched a cut-out-and-keep ecological ranking of toilet paper products.

“We have this myth in the US that recycled is just so low quality, it’s like cardboard and is impossible to use,” said Lindsey Allen, the forestry campaigner of Greenpeace.

Think twice before you wipe! Because it’s more than your ass you’re wiping; it’s the only rain forests we’ve got you’re wiping!

It seem like a marvelous enterprise, and I want to feature a line of products made by these teens, titled “ReVision furniture“.

This table is actually made of reclaimed magazines, and aside from being a fully functional piece of furniture, it’s extremely beautiful… and I can just imagine some indie band players sitting at the local coffee shop on old-style sofas, on both sides of this hip-and-green signature table.
No sugar please.