Friday, April 24, 2015

Ban The Micro-beads.

Stiv Wilson (info@storyofstuff.org)
 
 
4/22/15
 
 Newsletters
To: Joseph Raglione
It only takes two seconds to make a difference! 
Dear Joseph,
Small plastic is a big problem.
Across the world, the issue of polluting plastic microbeads is gaining attention and we need your help to ban the bead. These tiny plastic beads, employed as exfoliants in personal care products, like body wash, cosmetics, and toothpaste, are designed to go down the drain, escape wastewater treatment and are found in lakes, rivers, and the ocean in incomprehensible quantities. We are literally plasticizing our planet!
Take action now and send a letter to your elected officials to ban plastic microbeads.
A very conservative estimate of how prolific the problem is suggests that in North America alone, we’re discharging about 700,000 pounds (380,000 kilos) of plastic microbeads the size of a grain of sand every year! Resembling fish eggs, animals ingest these plastics that act like sponges for concentrating toxins in the waste water stream. Beyond absorbing toxins, plastic microbeads also leach their toxic ‘trade secret’ additives into the environment. After an animal ingests these poison pills, those toxins can transfer to their tissue and make it all the way to your plate through the fish you eat! The microbeads that don’t get discharged in wastewater get stuck in the solids waste from wastewater treatment which is often used as fertilizer and spread on our farm fields.
Let’s put a stop to this toxic fish food!
The Story of Stuff Project is calling on our Community to work together to ban products that use plastic microbeads and we’re leading the charge to get corporations to stop this practice. In the United States, we’re working in several key states and at the federal level to pass good legislation to stop pollution from plastic microbeads at the source. But industry is trying to pull a ‘bait and switch’ and supporting legislation that sounds good, but leaves a loophole for these plastic microbeads to be replaced with more plastic. Soon, this same bad legislation will be introduced in Canada, Australia and Europe, too.
We want to make sure we adopt responsible legislation and tell our elected officials loud and clear that we don’t want plastic on our face, in our teeth, on our lips, or in our sushi. It’s not just bad for the environment, it’s gross.
Send a letter to your elected officials supporting a good policy that doesn’t swap out plastic for plastic.
If there isn’t legislation where you live, you can sign a petition to tell manufacturers to stop their polluting practice. Take a minute to make a difference today and let’s secure a victory for clean water and a world with less plastic.
Be the “U” in Community and let’s win this!
Thank You!
Stiv J. Wilson
Campaigns Director (and lead plastic microbead fighter)
The Story of Stuff Project
 
 
 
 
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Wednesday, April 22, 2015

California is running dry. Serious drought continues.


Nestlé

Kaytee Riek, SumOfUs.org


4/19/15


 Newsletters
To: Joseph Raglione

NASA just gave California a dire warning: it only has one year’s worth of water left. Meanwhile, Nestlé is bottling huge amounts of water from the parched desert to sell for profit.

Tell Nestlé to stop selling water from drought-stricken regions.
Click here to sign the Petition
Joseph,
California will run out of water very soon.
According to NASA’s new report, California only has enough water to get it through the next year. People are under strict water-saving measures; farmers are struggling to keep their crops alive.
Yet, Nestlé is bottling water from at least ten natural springs throughout California, including from some of the most drought-stricken areas of the state, and selling it for profit. In places like Sacramento, it’s paying less than $0.14 per gallon. This is bananas.
We can stop this. Nestlé’s already feeling pressure in Canada -- last month, we hit front page news for our campaign to stop the giant corporation from withdrawing Canadians’ groundwater at dirt cheap rates, and political parties in Canada are debating the policy. If we're to stop Nestlé from sucking California dry, we have to keep up the pressure.
As California's water supplies dry up, Nestlé continues to make millions selling bottled water. Nestlé's Sacramento water plant is sucking water at a rate of 50 million gallons of water each year from the city's water reserves, and that's just one of the billion dollar company's five bottling plants in California. And Nestlé isn't even following the rules -- a new investigation shows that Nestlé Water's permit to transport water across the San Bernardino National Forest for bottling expired 27 years ago.
The biggest victims of this unprecedented drought are California's food crops and the minimum-wage workers who grow them. More than 80% of the world's almonds and nearly half of the USA's fruits and vegetables come from California. As crops sit withering on the vine and tens of thousands of farm workers lose their livelihoods, it's a travesty that precious water is being bottled and sold for profit instead of feeding our crops. 
SumOfUs members have stood up to Nestlé exploiting our natural resources for profits, and the company has heard us loud and clear. After hundreds of thousands of us called on Nestlé to stop exploiting Pakistan's water supply, we took the message straight to the company's annual meeting. And now we are making front pages in Canada. We can stop Nestlé's water-guzzling ways in California, but we need to speak out before the state completely runs out of water. 
Thanks for all you do,
Kaytee, Kat, Angus, and the rest of the SumOfUs team

**********
More information:
Nestlé called out for bottling, selling California water during drought, Reuters, April 2 2015
California only has one year’s worth of its water supply left, NASA scientist warns, Raw Story, March 13 2015

How to make drinkable water out of thin air

CLEAN TECHNOLOGY
Special to The Globe and Mail
Published 
Last updated 
California is drying up. Its current drought is ringing alarm bells across the state and the country, but it is far from being alone globally in facing water shortages.
Developed economies such as California already rely on sophisticated irrigation systems to utilize what sources it has. But what’s needed now are even smarter, 21st-century solutions.
One constantly evolving technology is desalination, which is being deployed successfully around the world, even as engineers work toward better systems that will use less energy.

Another path to drinkable water

Desalination takes undrinkable seawater and removes the salt to provide potable water. It works by pushing salt water at high pressure through a superfine membrane, which blocks salt molecules and lets the water through.
Africa’s first desalination plant was built by GE in Algiers, Algeria in 2008. The plant supplies 53 million gallons of freshwater every day, a quarter of the city’s needs. 
Netherlands-based Dutch Rainmaker BV has come up with an alternative, and novel, solution to water shortages. The company, with partners in Canada and other countries, has developed a technology that can deliver water out of thin air. Its technology uses wind turbines to conjure up H20, in some cases with no access to any inflowing sources.
The company’s air-to-water system, called AW75, is already operating in extreme desert conditions in Kuwait and in the cooler Netherlands. It works without access to the power grid, with minimal operation and maintenance and no waste.
“We combine technologies that are already known,” says Piet Oosterling, Rainmaker’s founder and Chief Technology Officer. The system deploys the wind via a turbine, but instead of generating electricity it creates thermal energy to cause condensation. It works because air always contains a certain amount of water, though this varies according to temperatures and humidity. When it’s 20 degrees Celsius and the relative humidity is at 50 per cent, the air contains about seven grams of water per cubic metre of air. If the temperature climbs to 30 at the same humidity, the amount of water doubles.
“The air-to-condensation process effectively heats and cools the air to the dew point. It basically creates condensation and makes it rain,” says Michael O’Connor, Rainmaker Worldwide’s Peterborough, Ont.-based CEO. The condensed droplets are collected into a storage compartment.
The heart of the air-to-water unit is the device’s wind-fed power unit. Inside the nacelle at the top of the tower there’s a proprietary compressor (heat pump). The system converts wind energy to thermal power, which, in turn, feeds the water production unit attached to the tower. The turbine forces air through a heat exchanger, cooling the air and forming condensation. When the temperature falls below its dew-point, water droplets will form. These are collected in a water storage compartment.
The company’s prototypes in Kuwait and the Netherlands each produce an average 7,000 litres per day of water. The unit in Kuwait has managed to produce 8,700 litres a day at temperatures of 28 degrees and 40 per cent relative humidity.
The company will not say where else it is testing the technology – there is a French company testing a rival system - but says it has potential in countries such as Saudi Arabia, China, Indonesia and India.
Prototypes of the air-to-water system are installed in both Kuwait and the Netherlands. (DUTCH RAINMAKER)
Air-to-water technology is not viable for colder climes, such as remote communities in Canada’s North, some of which have suffered from polluted supplies or have to truck in water via ice roads. For such climates, Oosterling says Rainmaker has another technology that the company calls water-to-water.
This unit also uses wind to produce thermal energy, but rather than pull moisture from the air it heats water from existing supplies and sends it through a membrane. It’s different than conventional reverse osmosis (RO) membrane filtration because it only allows water vapour to pass through, by varying the pressure on each side of the membrane.
The water-to-water unit can be used to desalinate and to filter brackish water; the first model can produce up to 95,000 litres of water per day, enough for a town of between 1,800 and 4,000 people.
Oosterling says he is discovering that producing clean water from the wind may be useful in ways he didn’t anticipate, for example in the mining sector. “It’s something I never envisioned,” he says.
But for now, he is focused on trying to serve the needs of the 783 million people who don’t have regular access to clean water (according to the United Nations). “It can be used where the infrastructure is not tremendous,” he says. “It has to be simple and people have to be able to understand it.”
To enlarge image click here
For more innovation insights, visit www.gereports.ca
This content was produced by The Globe and Mail's advertising department, in consultation with GE. The Globe's editorial department was not involved in its creation.

MORE RELATED TO THIS STORY

 
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Tuesday, April 21, 2015

Our wonderful international web site index.


  This week I recommend you visit: 

18. = http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FhLa6O1OP0Y
30.= http://www.iTooch.com  How to greatly improve our school systems.
49.  http://eol.org/
50. http://www.seedsavers.org/onlinestore/
51. http://www.human4us.net/
53. http://www.popsci.com/chiles-calbuco-volcano-erupts-spectacularly
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Gentle People:

 We need to strengthen the United Nations and allow that organization to create a world wide peace force. Such a force, when created, must be deployed quickly to stop cruel dictators and blood thirsty anarchists from murdering innocent human beings. A world peace force based on protecting human rights and the environment and comprised of peace keepers from every nation on earth. They would not only be trained for fighting but they would also have medical training and would be utilized for emergency disaster relief anywhere on the planet.
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Dear Mr. Nelson Raglione

We have received your request for media accreditation and have provided you with ID Number 35329. 

Please retain the ID Number for your records as it will be required to check on the status of your accreditation and to complete the accreditation process.

If you have not already done so, please forward your duly signed letter of assignment by fax to 1-212-963-4642 or as a scanned document in jpeg format or as a PDF to malu@un.org.

You will be notified by email of your accreditation status as soon as possible.

You can check your accreditation status online, or review or modify the information you provided in the online registration form. Go to Url www.un.org/en/media/accreditation/form/renewal.shtml#login), where you can log in to your personal accreditation account. To log in, please enter the e-mail address you gave us and the password you selected.

Kind regards,
The Media Accreditation and Liaison Unit team
United Nations Headquarters
Room S-250
New York, NY 10017
 
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