Car batteries sent for recycling are increasingly being sent to Mexico where their lead is often extracted by crude methods that are illegal in America, exposing plant workers and local residents to the toxic metal. Just goes to show another imperfection in the recycling system.

An interesting article related to overfishing of sharks and the progress of their conservation. Animal club lobbied this past spring to pass a ban on shark fins in Oregon, and it's nice to see that legislators are getting on board to protect a portion of ocean biodiversity.

Understandably, at first glance one would be skeptical because this article seems to have greenwashing written all over it. Still, it is an important step in the right direction, and as the Super Bowl isn't going anywhere we might as well applaud efforts to be aware of it's footprint.

A design professor at Berkeley near where I live built one of these for less than a hundred thousand. An interesting concept in the whole "sustainable living" realm of things. Attractive to me at this point in my life but I have a feeling you'd have a hard time marketing something like this on a larger level. See it for yourself in the link!

This is a really great site and the video graphs life expectancy and average incomes. Its a nice hopeful trend in many respects but you can look at it in any number of ways. Healthy people and higher incomes are good things in general but obviously require more resources to create. A lot of good information on the website in general, have fun with it!

Interesting to those of us that use toilet paper. I think this is a great idea cause it's not something that people are gonna stop using as long as it's available. Next step the plastic wrap around it! What do you guys think?

This is potentially a huge project to bring wind energy to the East Coast. A lot of interesting issues were brought up like the potential spike in energy costs and the bureaucracy that such an initiative would have to get through to even be a reality. Its going to be a big deal if it follows through, so worth knowing about.