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Entries Tagged as 'sustainability'

gorgeous buddhist beer-bottle temple

November 26th, 2008 · 1 Comment

Knowing that this story combines three of my favourite things — beer, Eastern philosophy and neat-o whatnot — a buddy of mine sent me some info about this most postworthy endeavour.

Lloyd Alter at Treehugger reports:

Fifty years ago the Heineken Beer company looked at reshaping its beer bottle to be useful as a building block. It […]

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Tags: art · asia · beautiful · curio · design · images · neato · religion · sustainability · whatnot

recipe for disaster: 2 nuclear-armed countries, 1 water crisis, 1 cup shallots

November 24th, 2008 · No Comments

Why shallots? Why not shallots?
From the Times of India:

India would make Pakistan a barren land in the next six years by blocking its water through construction of dams in violation of the Indus Water Treaty, Pakistan Indus Water Commissioner Jamaat Ali Shah said on Monday.
[…] Dismissing India’s claim that it had stopped Pakistan’s water […]

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Tags: asia · energy · history · holy crap · india · news · opinion · scary · sustainability · war

student-built car gets 420 miles to the gallon

October 20th, 2008 · 3 Comments

Incidentally, 420 miles is the distance from New York to Boston and back again. In (an admittedly unfair) comparison, Toyota advertises 45mpg (highway) for its Prius.
And the engineering students, by the way, don’t attend classes at M.I.T., Stanford or Cambridge, but rather at the Rashtreeya Vidhyalaya College of Engineering, Bangalore.
From the Times of India:

The […]

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Tags: design · energy · environment · india · invention · neato · sustainability · tech · transport

“drill baby drill” vs. “new energy for america”

September 5th, 2008 · 3 Comments

Not to be a jerk or anything, but it kind of seems like a stupid question: should we find new ways to feed and maintain our addiction to oil, or decrease our reliance on the fossil fuels that are empoverishing our people and altering our fragile climate?
These folks think they have the answer:

I work in […]

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Tags: americas · darn tootin' · dumb · election · energy · environment · government · mccain · movies/tv/video · news · obama · opinion · politics · sustainability · usa

indian buses cut speed, gas and emissions

September 3rd, 2008 · No Comments

Gas prices through the roof? Trust a practical country to come up with a practical solution.

From the Times of India:

The engines of the buses have been tuned to allow a maximum speed of 60 km only, an official said here on Wednesday.
The tuning of the engines would give 0.40 km mileage per litre. “The […]

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Tags: energy · environment · india · neato · sustainability · transport

10,000-year clock billed as “world’s slowest computer”

July 22nd, 2008 · No Comments

For the last little while, vacation time, jet lag and three weeks worth of e-mail/voice mail have joined their sinister forces to create a great sucking whirlpool of unproductiveness and exhaustion — one that pulled my desire to post down to the deepest darkest abysses of the undersea. As of today, I’ve returned home, […]

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Tags: art · beautiful · design · neato · sustainability · tech

microfibre rag makes household cleaners obsolete

June 2nd, 2008 · No Comments

According to BusinessWeek, microfibre rags can remove both dirt and germs, and clean “surfaces mechanically, not chemically, by scraping them with microscopic precision.” In fact, they completely eliminate the need for harsh chemicals like Tilex, Clorox, Windex, Ajax and all those other nasty cleaners that end in “x.” So why are the cabinets […]

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Tags: consumer · environment · neato · sustainability

zero emission no noise (zenn) car

May 31st, 2008 · 4 Comments

On October 26, 2007, the CBC ran a story on the ZENN, a clean, silent, fully electric car made in Quebec. The award-winning car was being sold in the U.S., Mexico and Europe, but had been waiting a staggering 18 months for Canadian safety approvals to come through. Two weeks after the CBC […]

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Tags: canada · consumer · design · environment · sustainability · transport

world’s first wave power plant taking shape

March 27th, 2008 · No Comments

We’ve been hearing a lot lately about alternative energies — particularly biofuels of questionable value like ethanol — but in December a really neat pilot project seems to have passed, for the most part, under the radar.
Pacific Gas & Electric, a major player in California’s energy industry, is backing a Canadian-made power plant prototype that […]

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Tags: news · sustainability

pope: new “deadly sins” include pollution, wealth, social injustice

March 10th, 2008 · 5 Comments

The Vatican has doubled the number of “deadly sins” from 7 to 14, expanding the 6th-century list to include pollution, genetic engineering, accumulating enormous wealth, dealing drugs, abortion, pedophilia and “social injustice.” The move comes as a surprise, and opens up all kinds of movie sequel possibilities for Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman.
From the […]

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Tags: darn tootin' · news · religion · sustainability