UWW310 Technology & Sustainability

Wastesavers began life in 1986 as an environmental, interest group promoting the importance of reuse and recycling. In the mid 90’s it became more proactive and began picking up old newspapers from peoples doorsteps for recycling, and hand sorting these at the local paper mill. In 1995 Wastesavers collected and recycled 22 tonnes of paper. Today Wastesavers recycles more than 15,000 tonnes of material a year and can’t imagine hand sorting the 5000 tonnes of paper it collects! That’s more than 85,000 trees per year! Progress has certainly been made in Newport with residents now receiving a weekly kerbside recycling collection of not just paper, but cans, plastics, glass, textiles, mobile phones and toner cartridges as well food waste and small electrical items.

ware of intensifying world challenges and the basic need of people to feed themselves, we have been working for 40 years to develop an elegant, small-scale agricultural system — GROW BIOINTENSIVE® Sustainable Mini-Farming — that when practiced correctly, nurtures healthy soil fertility, produces high yields, conserves resources and can be used successfully by almost everyone. Our goal is to help this system be known and used locally...on a worldwide basis.

ohn Jeavons spoke at Google in Mountain View on April 12, 2012 about his four decades pioneering biointensive farming and what we can do for food security in the future.

FDA Seeks Public Comment UPDATE:  The FDA has extended the comment deadline to April 26!FDA poised to approve genetically engineered salmon despite unknown risks to human health.  Inevitable accidental release of transgenic fish into the wild could devastate native fish populations and ecosystems!

How bad is the revolving door between Monsanto and government? This handy chart (from geke.us) pretty much sums it up.

Molten salt is used as an energy transfer and distribution medium for the project. The concentrated sunlight is used to heat the molten salt from 500 degrees Fahrenheit to more than 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit. The salt then moves through a series of alloy tubes and is used to set water supplies to boil. The steam created is used to power turbines that generate electrical power. SolarReserve notes that this is one of the most efficient ways to make use of solar energy.

nspired by the vision of Inquiries into the Nature of Slow Money: Investing As If Food, Farms and Fertility Mattered, published in 2009, the Slow Money Alliance is bringing people together around a new conversation about money that is too fast, about finance that is disconnected from people and place, about how we can begin fixing our economy from the ground up... starting with food.

“Combine poisonous factory-farm tomatoes with disgraced investment banker Bernard Madoff. Throw in a stock market disaster. You get a public spooked by the dangers of industrial food production and investors wary of risky business. This may be the recipe for a Slow Money revolution.” – David Gutnick, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation 

Third is no antibiotics are allowed, and if a cow does need to be treated it will not be returned to the herd for a year to make sure the antibiotics are out of its system.