garbage electricity

The world produces so much garbage. The Environmental Protection Agency states that in the US, 220 million tons of garbage are produced each year. This is equal to 6-feet deep 82,000 football fields full of compacted garbage. One thing's for sure, trash is the one thing we'll never run out of.

So it's really great that people are putting this unlimited resource to good use. Aside from recycling, some companies are using garbage as an alternative power source. When trash decays, there's a bacteria that breaks down the trash and produces methane gas. This methane gas is harmful when released in the atmosphere, but when controlled, it could power the world.

Today, there are some cities that harness this gas for electricity. Landfills in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut are already being harvested for methane. The Brookhaven Town landfill on Long Island has been supplying around 350,000 megawatt-hours of electricity into the power grid for the past 30 years. In Guatemala, they created a electric turbine that runs on methane gas extracted from the city dump. The same thing is happening on our country. Last year, a landfill gas power plant was opened in Laguna. It will utilize the methane from the San Pedro landfill to power gas engines. The new plant is expected to generate 4 megawatts of electricity and it will be for sale to the local grid.

Garbage are those things that are useless to us-- but if we put in a little thought, a little creativity and resourcefulness, all the trash in the world could possibly be a treasure.

Sources:
http://www.genewscenter.com/
http://www.nytimes.com/
http://wiki.answers.com/
http://www.usaid.gov/

in bloom

My mom bought these flowers made of recycled materials at a bazaar. They look better than plastic flowers. I'm trying to find out who made these. My sister said they came from Baguio but she didn't know the actual name of the shop that sold them. I found a blog entry here; it's about paper roses created by Women’s Livelihood Organization of Imelda Village in Baguio but I wasn't sure it was them, but still, kudos to them as well!

If anyone out there knows please tell me, so I can give them proper credit and an award! Very creative!

phone cords, styrofoam
and magazines

vase made of recycled paper

paper hibiscus

straw roses

flowers made of Coke, Royal
and Sprite wrappers

loofah

Before writing this entry, I had always associated the word "loofah" with the scrubber used for cleaning the body.  I never thought it's the actual english name of a vegetable, and it's a vegetable I'm very familiar with.  We call it "patola" here in the Philippines. I always associate it with the yummy dish, "patola with miswa".

In Paraguay, the loofah is improving lives. In a project headed by social activist, Elsa Zaldívar, local women in Caaguazú started planting and processing the vegetable. They made products like mats, slippers and insoles out of dried loofahs. It was a successful venture and they were even able to export it to Europe. It gave the women a steady source of income.

However, a lot of raw material were still wasted, so Elsa got the help of industrial engineer, Pedro Padrós, to see if they can use it to build houses for the people.

“We want to find sustainable housing alternatives for the poor, while also discovering new markets for their agricultural products, particularly the loofah. This is a perfect combination,” she says.

Pedro was able to create a machine that melts plastic, and he mixed the result with loofah and other vegetable fibres. After lots of experimentation, they produced a sturdy material that's lightweight, safe and recyclable. They also received a grant from Inter-American Development Bank for the development of another machine that can produce the housing panels.

“Because we’re using fibres that are completely renewable, we can stop using lumber for construction. That’s very important in Paraguay because we’ve already reduced our original forest to less than ten per cent of Paraguay’s territory,” Elsa said. “We’re running out of trees.”

As a result of her work, Elsa was awarded the Rolex Award for Enterprise last 2008. They will be using the money to fund the creation of a promotion centre, three model houses that showcases the loofah panels and a video that details the project for other interested groups.

Sources:
http://rolexawards.com/en/the-laureates/elsazaldivar-the-project.jsp
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luffa
http://keetsa.com/blog/recycle/paraguay-homes-built-out-of-loofah-and-corn-husks/
http://earthfirst.com/low-cost-housing-made-from-loofahs/
http://www.resnicowschroeder.com

like death warmed over

Crematoriums in Sweden found a sustainable way to cut costs and be environmentally-friendly. After cremating a body, they will be reusing the exhaust produced to keep their building warm, instead of releasing it out into the air. They are also planning to expand and use the energy for homes as well, making them a crematorium power station. It's a controversial idea but certainly not a bad one (for me at least!).

Aside from human corpses, they have also turned on stray rabbits as energy source.  These animals overpopulate some their parks and destroy plants and trees.  Thousands are killed each year.  So what they do is they bring these dead rabbits to a heating plant to be cremated.  The heat is then redirected to the homes in Värmland, Sweden.

Aside from rabbits, other animal carcasses and wastes are used to produce energy.  They call this fuel, Biomal.  Here's a simple chart I got from treehugger that shows the process:

From Biomal.com: "..The raw material is just crushed and grinded and then pumped to a fluidised bed boiler where it is co-combusted together with a base fuel such as wood chips, peat or municipal waste. Energy is recovered from the animal by-products by producing renewable heat and electricity and the net outcome of energy is considerably increased."

Recently, Taiwan also adopted the cremation idea.  Instead of heating though, Taipei Mortuary Services Office will be using it to power the air-conditioning system of their receiving area and possibly the lighting system of their building.

Sources:
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/house-and-home/cremated-bodies-to-power-aircon-in-taiwan-1801115.html
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2010/05/cow-carcasses-heat-swedish-homes.php
http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/0,1518,654916,00.html
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2156917/posts

slick solution

On Aug. 11, 2006, M/T Solar I, an oil tanker, sank near one of the provinces here in the Philippines.  500,000 liters of fuel leaked out of it and into Guimaras Strait.  It damaged marine sanctuaries and reserves, and affected the provinces' fishing industry.  It was the worst oil spill of our country.

One of the surprising material they used in cleaning up the oil is human hair. Oil sticks to hair, as observed when a person hadn't shampooed for days.  A strand of hair has tiny scales that can hold small amounts of oil.  It's a process known as "adsorption".  A pound of hair can adsorb a quart of oil, and hair filled booms can be reused up to a hundred times.  And once they're all used up, the oily hair can be burned as fuel or be made into fertilizer, with the help of worms.

This clever idea came from Philipp McCrory, a hairdresser from Alabama.  He was watching a news segment about the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill and saw how difficult it was to remove oil from an otter's fur.  He did a little experiment, filled a nylon stocking with human hair, dumped a gallon of motor oil on his son's plastic pool and dipped the stocking in it.  Two minutes later, the water was clean.  He patented the idea.

The government started a "Stop the Oil Spill" drive and about 15,000 inmates from a maximum security prison donated their hair.  Five hundred salons and schools around the country also participated in the activity.

Today, the same thing is being done to help clean up the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.  Matter of Trust, is a nonprofit organization participating in the campaign.  They contacted salons, pet groomers, wool farmers and others to solicit donations for hair, fur, wool or nylon pantyhose.  For those interested, you can click on their link above to sign up.  As stated by BBC News, donations of around 450,000 pounds of hair and fur are now arriving each day.  Some people even provided warehouse spaces near the area of the oil spill to house the hair.

Sources:
http://www.gi.alaska.edu/ScienceForum/ASF14/1401.html
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14584306/
http://cbs4denver.com/local/hair.oil.spill.2.1680495.html
http://www.greenvilleonline.com/
http://www.matteroftrust.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guimaras_oil_spill

levi & leaf

by walter villa

Out of a single unremarkable leaf came beautiful music.  I remember seeing him on TV back when I was still a kid. Days after that we were trying to do the same thing with Stork candy wrappers. All I was able to play was one single note. It's a lot like whistling but it's hard to get a melody going. Besides it's really embarrassing to have other kids watch you spit all over yourself.

We did try using leaves but they tend to fall apart and we always end up having these bugs in our mouth.  (Amateurs! There goes our chance for the Guinness Book of World Records.)

He composed the lyrics of one of the beautiful, saddest songs I heard.  "Sa Ugoy ng Duyan" is a song of someone longing for his childhood, back when his mother would sing lullabies while gently swaying him to sleep.  I don't know why but I always associate this song to the story of Sisa in Rizal's Noli Me Tangere, a caring mother who lost her mind when her two sons were accused of stealing and were captured by the authorities.

In this age of remakes and rock bands, Levi Celerio's original compositions are diamonds, classics that I hope will never get lost in time.

Levi Celerio
(April 30, 1910 - April 2, 2002)

seeing beauty

There's a kind of beauty that's obvious to everyone, like the beauty of a rose or the sunrise. I think it's a rare thing, because it manages to be appealing to most of us. It manages to shine through anything blurring our vision: race, culture, background, mood swings. It's plain to see, usually belonging to the most common and simple things.

I saw a documentary in Discovery channel that says we are drawn to symmetry. The more symmetrical the face, the more beautiful it is for most of us, so maybe that's the key. Then they did an interesting experiment where they took a bunch of unique faces and combined them into one composite image. The resulting image looked better than the other faces. So the more common the face, the more beautiful it is. They call it the "averageness-effect".

There's another type of beauty that can only be seen through the eyes of a select few. Members of the Padaung tribe from Myanmar find long necks attractive. Women wear neck rings that push their shoulders down and stretch their neck. In China, bound feet were considered erotic. Some tribes in Africa put on lip plates and in Mauritania, women are forced to be fat, both are a mark of beauty and status.



I don't understand how these can be beautiful. But I guess beauty is also a matter of perspective, and our perspectives can always change. I've been fat my whole life and I always saw my body as ugly. Then, while I was researching for this article, I came across the Adipositivity Project - "a visual display of fat physicality. The sort that's normally unseen." and it's amazing, the photos are gorgeous!

Finally, I think the most elusive beauty is the one that people grow into. Some people go through hardships and come out of it wiser and stronger than ever, and that makes them beautiful to everyone they meet. Or it could be that as we get to know someone more, they gradually become the loveliest people we know.

I was watching Avatar yesterday and (SPOILERS!) there was a scene in the end where the girl alien meets the human form of the guy she loves. They look at each other and they just didn't care that they were so different. I loved that moment. They're seeing it, the beauty in each of us that not everyone will catch a glimpse of.

Be that as it may, beauty will always be there.

Sources:
http://library.thinkquest.org/J0111742/neckstretching.htm
http://www.funtasticus.com/2008/10/30/african-beauty-lip-plates
http://adipositivity.my-expressions.com
http://7uncle.wordpress.com/2009/01/29/cinderella-was-born-as-yeh-hsien/

concrete alternatives

Aside from shipping containers, people are continually finding other eco-friendly alternatives in building houses.  With all that has been happening-- extreme changes in the weather, earthquakes, tsunamis, oil shortage, I think there's an increased awareness in everyone about the dismal state of our planet.

Ever seen the movie Back to the Future?  There's a scene where Doc arrives in his DeLorean and he's running low on fuel, but instead of filling it up with gas, he fills it with trash.  A car running on garbage-- that's pure genius.  Well, we may not have that yet (this looks bogus) but people are looking into using garbage for building houses.  The use of plastic as an aggregate for cement is one of the alternatives for concrete.  One of the cities here in the Manila have bought a pulverizing machine to try this out.  Another company in Massachusetts, Conigliaro Industries, already have several projects made with their Plas-Crete.

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="250" caption="salt building, http://www.conigliaro.com"][/caption]Aside from plastic, other waste products can be used as fillers.  GigaCrete™, the brainchild of British architect Andrew Dennis, uses waste paper, recycled cardboard, recycled polystyrene, agricultural waste fibers, and paper sludge as fillers.  About 80% (by volume) of GigaCrete™ products can be composed of these waste materials.

Bitublock, from Dr. John Forth of the University of Leeds, is not yet market ready but it has potential. It's also made from waste products like recycled glass, metal slag, sewage sludge and incinerator ash.  These are mixed with bitumen, a sticky binder used in road paving. The end result, is a "high-performance product that is about six times stronger than the traditional concrete block".

There's a lot of promise in all these efforts.  One thing though, from some of the comments I've read, there are still some people that would rather spend their money on something that's been proven to last-- and proven to be safe.  They may think it's great that we're doing all these for the environment, but there's still some hesitation on using these products.  I hate to end this negatively but I've been trying to search for a high-profile project that uses these materials and I wasn't able to find any.  I don't know, I guess it's all relatively new and it may take some time to catch on.


Sources:
http://www.americanrecycler.com/07used02.html
http://www.inhabitat.com/2007/11/15/bitublock-concrete-will-be-obsolete/
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2007/06/gigacrete_an_al.php
http://www.conigliaro.com
http://www.inhabitat.com/2009/09/21/plastic-concrete-repurposes-landfill-waste-into-building-bricks/#

container houses

As everyone knows, a huge flood happened here in Manila about a week ago (and there's another storm up north this week). There were several municipalities hit by typhoon Ketsana: Marikina, Rizal, Pasig and Laguna.  I'm not sure how accurate this is but I heard that people living in those places are now moving out and selling their PhP 15 million houses for only PhP 5 million. It's a big discount but I don't know if anyone's buying.  Most people are now going for real estate situated on higher ground.

Here's an idea, how about getting one of those houses made out of shipping containers? If you want to move, you can simply have your house transported to another lot. It's durable-- designed to withstand tough conditions, as well as cheap and environment friendly.

port-a-bach.com

You need to have it insulated though and I'm not sure what will happen if lightning strikes.  Also, you should bolt it down so it doesn't get stolen or displaced when a big flood comes, like what happened here:

shipping container displaced by the flood, stuck on road divider
from PinoyExchange.com - '40 ft. shipping container as a house'
posted by KuyaDanny

For those interested to learn more about this topic, you can visit http://www.shipping-container-housing.com/.  It contains tips, links to companies that build container houses, background info on the industry and even a history of shipping containers.   According to them, "shipping container housing can represent a real solution to social and ecological problems".  I agree.  Who knew that inside that cold hard steel lies a warm cozy crib?

Sources:
http://www.pinoyexchange.com

a diamond in the rough

lifegem.com

Did you know that a part of us can be physically transformed into a diamond? Diamonds are created from Carbon and about 18% of our mass is made up of that stuff. It can be extracted from a lock of our hair or from a deceased person's ashes. Once extracted, it needs to be subjected to extreme heat and pressure, the same process that authentic diamonds go through. This will convert the Carbon into diamond crystals. The crystals can then be cut and designed and the resulting gem is set in a ring or a necklace or whatever piece you'd like.

It's amazing to realize that we can produce something so beautiful. Last week, I was having lunch with some people and I accidentally drooled on myself. The saliva spilled out of my mouth and sort of yo-yo'd down my shirt. One of them saw it, pointed and laughed at me. It would've been easier if everybody laughed but they didn't. So I just looked down on my shirt and wiped it off, and then I remained quiet the whole time. I just get so disgusted with myself sometimes.

I'm sure I'm not the only one with this kind of experience. It's hilarious when it happens to other people but when it's us, sometimes it's hard to get over the embarassment. Sure it will be funny when we look back on it, but when you're in that moment, you just want to die. It just makes your self-hatred turn up a notch.

There's no way around it, these things just happen out of the blue. There are even people who laugh at us even if we didn't do anything embarassing. One thing I hate about myself is I make people laugh at me to get them to like me. I humiliate myself and clown around. It's a habit I'm trying to break-- and I'm still working on loving myself enough to stop it. I know it will take a long time, building your self-respect and coming to terms with yourself, learning, getting back up, reflecting and improving.

However painful, I think these things that we're ashamed of are part of the whole process of becoming better, some sort of baptism by fire. We'll just have to suck it up and cope with the pressure as well as we can-- without letting it harden us. Hopefully, we'll come out of it wiser and radiant, beautiful like diamonds.

di5vwkgcx6

Sources:
http://www.lifegem.com

birds on the wires

Are there gifts in hiding around us?  Or do we take what we see and create a gift out of it?  Do we find them or make them?  In this picture, Jarbas Agnelli saw music instead of birds.  He translated it into a tune, using the birds as notes and sent the music to Paulo Pinto, the photographer.  This led to an interview in the same newspaper where the photo was printed.

Sources:
http://www.vimeo.com/6428069

John Baldessari's Throwing four balls in the air to get a square (best of 36 tries)

desordre.net

In this series of pictures, Baldessari attempted to get a square.  He selected 8 of the best out of 36 tries (36 tries is the standard number of shots on a roll of 35mm film).

It seems that none of them look like a perfect square though, the shape is random and the thrower doesn't have full control of the outcome-- but that's only because they're seen from a single point of view.  The shape's perfection actually depends on how we view the ball formation.  Shift the angle a little and soon we'll see a perfect square for each of the photos.

We can't always control how things turn out but we can always control how we look at it.   :)

silly string

We're in the middle of a battlefield. Suddenly, a Humvee shows up. It's covered with scrap metal and it has an old bulletproof windshield at the top. We get a glimpse of what's inside. A group of soldiers with a can of Silly String on their vest. They're carrying rifles with muzzles sealed with a condom and a rubber band. The injured ones have tampons plugged on their wounds.

It paints a funny picture but it also shows just how fiercely ingenious people can be.  The silly string is used to check for tripwires; condoms protect the rifles from sand; the scrap metal and bulletproof windshield acts as defense against enemy fire.. and tampons are just the perfect absorbent.  They even come in different sizes-- ideal for any kind of bullet wound.

Read the complete article here-  A Serious Use For Silly String

afloat

In one of the beaches in Mexico, a strange island can be seen floating nearby. A man-made place created from thousands of empty plastic bottles. This is the Spiral Island.

It was built through good old-fashioned hard work. Richie Sowa, the owner of Spiral Island, got all the empty bottles he can find and put them all in one big net. Once he had the base in place, he put plywood, bamboo, white sand and plants on top of it.

Construction started in 1998 and since then Richie never stopped. Even when Hurricane Emily came and destroyed most of it. He rebuilt it again and until now he is always adding something new. It currently measures 20 meters in diameter. It has beaches, a house, 2 ponds, a solar-powered waterfall/river, and solar panels. His source of food are the plants in the island, cooks them using a solar cooker, and his water comes from the rain. Amazing.

Here's a kid on her own island.  She can't swim and we weren't able to bring any floaties.




Sources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiral_Island
http://greenupgrader.com/1821/spiral-island-constructed-from-recycled-bottles/