planet
Eating Sustainably This Year
Even if you don’t stay up to date on current affairs, you can’t have missed the focusing in on environmental issues lately. Going back a couple of decades, not many people worried about where their grub tableware or other products were sourced from. It was a case of what do I want and where do I get it. This attitude is not sustainable however, and a shift in thinking is needed especially in these times of weak economy and global warming. Here are some ideas to help save the planet and local economies when having a simple meal.
Shop Local. We take it for granted these days that we can pop down the local shop and buy some fruits from exotic shores and wines from the other side of the world for example. The fact that products such as these are having to be transported over many hundreds, if not thousands of miles has large ramifications. Not only does the transport release vast amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere, due to burning fuel and having to use a food and wine cooler to keep the produce chilled all the way, but also local food suppliers struggle to compete with low foreign costs. By doing as much of your shopping in local stores as you can and buying local produce, you will secure your communities future and help save the planet at them same time.
Less Packaging. It is staggering just how much packaging is used to make modern food attractive and increase their life-span. A single cake might be singly wrapped, inside a little box with a plastic place-holder, which is cloaked in cellophane and transported within a cardboard box, with the other cake boxes. More often than not this packaging is unnecessary, so try and avoid those products that go over the top with it.
Green Accessories. Ensuring your meal times do not cost the planet means thinking about more than just your food. All sorts of things from which cutlery is used to which wine gifts you buy others can have an impact and you should think carefully before making a choice. Ask yourself where this product has come from, is it something that could be made from a more sustainable material, and is this a disposable product when I could be buying a reusable one? Disposable chopsticks for example cause thousands of trees to be cut down every day, when a good reusable pair can last a lifetime.
Will algae oil save us?
Can oil made by algae save us?
In our green real estate section, you can usually read articles on green tips for our homes. However, this time it will be about some intriguing research, which can help us to get rid of the feelings of guilt connected with driving our oil guzzling cars. One of the essential parts of our everyday lives is oil. Almost everyone in the developed countries has a car, which is a fundamental part of everyday life, and so do I, as most of the realtors who have to drive around their neighbourhoods on a daily basis. Life would just be difficult without our beloved car. The prices of oil are driven up and down by the unsure oil supplies and our nature is suffering from carbon dioxide emissions and fuel burning. These are the well-known basic problems of driving.
Craig Venter is an American biologist and also a successful businessman who founded The Institute for Genomic Research. Genetic engineering is the main topic of his work, that has caused a great deal of heated debate by his most recent project.
Algae are known for creating natural oil, which is already part of some experiments with biofuels. But Venter has more ambitions than that. He is trying to find out if it’s possible to adjust the genomic make-up of algae in order to make them produce oil of almost the same structure as the traditional crude oil. If that works out, we would be able to use the current refineries and other oil industry infrastructure already available. Also plastics could be made the same way as from crude oil refining, using the existing production plants. As Exxon Mobile, being one of the largest oil producers in the world, heard of all this, they gave Venter a $600 million grant to go on with his research.
Now your concern might be, where is the ecological benefit? Well, right here. The oil created by algae might well contribute to coping with one of the most difficult problems of our world. The carbon dioxide from the atmosphere is used by plants in the photosynthesis process, turned into oil which is then burned and turned into oxalates. Of course, this prodigious solution won’t be available this or next year, but apparently it is a good way to go. The team of Craig Venter are trying to succeed where others have tried and failed, but this time there is a good chance of success. There are many people in Canada and elsewhere that would love to go easy on the environment, but due to their occupation, it is very difficult for them to stop using cars, just like my Toronto real estate colleagues can’t.
