Green chemistry has 12 pricnciples (it can be searched on internet).
Apply one or more principles to your nearlest working to protect environment. For instance, desingation green plastic (PVC) product by using non toxic additives. But what additives are non-toxic and how is cost and product propeties if using those additives?

It is true that well constructed, energy-efficient houses save money and energy. And with suitable mechanized ventilation, they can have better indoor air quality than a leaky building. The principal factor behind this is control.

In a drafty household, outdoor air enters the home intermittently via cracks, unsealed joints and penetrations, depending mostly on the climate. Often there will be extra leakage, leading to a drafty, unpleasant home. In other buildings there won’t be enough, resulting in a stuffy home. Mechanical air flow in a properly-insulated, well-sealed home will exhaust pollution and bring in outdoor air in a controlled, premeditated process. This key fact makes a dwelling both comfortable and energy efficient.

Utilize energy efficient design. Developing tight, suitably-insulated homes reduces heating and cooling costs. Household air quality and energy efficiency walk hand in hand.

Controlling humidity in a home can help get rid of mold, mildew, and various biological growths that have been linked to a number of ill health effects. Building an energy efficient residence with good air sealing and the use of barriers and diffusers to control vapor properly are crucial. The whole building envelope, from the foundation to the roof, needs to be engineered to not just stop moisture entry, but also to permit any moisture which does enter a means to escape. Sufficient ventilation should help make sure that moisture stays within appropriate levels.

Removing or managing individual sources of pollution are essential steps in providing good indoor air quality. If you utilize the appropriate materials, isolate those which are known to cause problems, and supply sufficient ventilation, the levels of indoor pollution in your home may be greatly reduced. Suitable ventilation purges or reduces the concentration of stale air in the home, and imports fresh air from outside.

Along with other methods, selecting, installing, and integrating your home’s combustion equipment is an important component to building a house with safe indoor air quality. Because of the potential for combustion appliances to generate pollutants that can harm your health, they must be properly set up, operated and maintained correctly. Poorly or incorrectly vented appliances can greatly increase moisture in the air, introducing both biological growth and damage to the home. The good thing is, contractors can take steps to lower the risks for combustion equipment.

The way in which a home is handled, maintained, and lived in is an important factor affecting indoor air quality. Preparing for this maintenance during your home’s construction process and grasping the most important concepts will promote good indoor air quality, and even reduce potential problems with the structure of your home for years to come.

Author: Hildy Kincade
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Provided by: Digital TV, HDTV, Satellite TV

It seems that lately more and more industries are taking the initiative and going green. The shipping industry has recently taken on this initiative to become more environmentally safe and is looking into ways in which they can cut their carbon emissions like other industries. This sector is beginning to see the light just as other industries have and are now slowly beginning to change their outlook on the environment and discover ways in which they can go green. As we know, these ships travel very long distances daily to deliver what is needed to a desired destination. There are a select few large companies that are starting a trend in the industry and adapting their ships to be more environmentally friendly and reduce their carbon emissions.

One freight company that is improving their practices is the Maersk shipping line. They have set various targets in place to lower their carbon emissions and they plan to lower their emissions by 20% by 2017. This aim is in relation to all the containers that they transport and by implementing this target, they hope to become a more eco friendly brand. The company hopes that by implementing this change, they will lead by example and encourage other shipping companies to follow suit. Some ways in which they are reducing their carbon emissions and encouraging others to do the same is by the optimisation of their engines as well as renovating their vessels to be more eco friendly. They also are currently developing a very slow steaming system for all of their vessels.

When looking at reducing carbon emissions in shipping freights, the issue of biofuel is commonly highlighted. Some companies have already tested these fuels to see if they could be beneficial to their line but there hasn’t been much development recently. Biofuel is constructed from vegetable oils, animal fats and other ingredients like recycled grease. Also known as biodiesel, biofuel is made from a process called transesterification. If biofuel can be used on vessel engines there is the likelihood that it will partially replace normal fuel in the future and contribute to the cut in carbon emissions.

It is highly positive that the freight industry is taking notice and attempting to help the environment but it is obvious that more vessels need to follow this example. Experts are hoping that the advancement in the production of biofuels will aid in the wider distribution of this fuel to vessels and that they will be able to cut their carbon emissions in the future. There is still extensive testing that needs to be conducted in relation to the distribution of biofuels but hopefully there is light at the end of the tunnel.

Author: Lauren Potgieter
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Provided by: Cellphone news

In 2006 Americans spent over 10.8 billion dollars on bottled water What was that money really spent on? What is the environmental impact of billions of dollars of bottled water? Does bottled water offer any real benefits other than convenience?

Types of Bottled Water

Bottled water comes in a variety of types. Bottled waters are grouped into types by the their water source.

• Artesian – Artesian water comes from confined aquifers.
• Mineral – Mineral water comes from geologically and physically protected underground water sources. To be considered mineral water the water must contain at least 250 parts per million of total dissolved solids.
• Spring – Spring water comes from underground formations from which water flows naturally.
• Purified – Purified water is filtered municipal water or tap water Purified water can be filtered in a variety of ways such as distillation, de-ionization or reverse osmosis.

While bottled water may seem superior to tap water consider this fact – if you are drinking Aquafini or Dasani water then you are drinking filtered tap water

Is Bottled Water Safer?

According to a 1999 study conducted by the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC), bottled water in the United States was “not necessarily safer or cleaner than tap water ” To come to this conclusion the NRDC tested over 1,000 bottles of 103 different brands of bottled water The NRDC continued to state that about a quarter of brands tested had contaminants and “violated strict applicable state [California] limits for bottled water “

While our municipal water is subject to what Food & Water Watch call “rigorous testing,” over 100 or more tests are completed each and every month. In comparison bottling plants, considered low risk (by some), are inspected less than once per year.

Understanding the Environmental Cost of Bottled Water

According to SIGG, “Over 100 million plastic water bottles are dumped into America’s landfills — ever day!” Considering this fact landfill waste is an obvious concern. Sadly it isn’t the only one.

Exploitation of Water Supplies

We live in a world with diminishing resources. Water is precious commodity. As we consume rare artesian and mineral waters from developing countries we are overtaxing their water resources. Is it fair to bottle the natural resources of developing countries at the expense of their indigenous residents?

The Cost of Production and Transportation

According to Ling Li of Food & Water Watch, “the production of bottled water the bottling, and the packaging all require energy, so basically they use gas and oil. And then when you ship bottled water you consume a lot of gas and create carbon dioxide emissions.” Should we pay for bottled water when we already pay for a municipal water infrastructure?

Filling our Landfills

By throwing over 100 million plastic water bottles as a nation into the trash each day, we are filling our landfills. By years end, we will throwaway 2 million tons of plastic bottle waste. While more and more cities introduce recycling plans, plastic recycling is on the decline. Last year we recycled only 23% of our plastic bottles.

Convenience at a Price

However convenient bottled water is, we must all understand the cost of that convenience. This cost isn’t only environmental, it is also financial. The NRDC estimates that bottled water costs between 240-10,000 times as much as tap water

As a nation we need end our love affair with bottled water Once we understand the environmental cost of bottled water we can ask ourselves an important questions – Why do we chose to pay 240-10,000 times more than tap water for bottled water a convenience product, that destroys our environment?

Author: Sam Greyhawk
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Provided by: Latest trends in mobile phone

The mainstream media has got a very large portion of the population duped into believing that humans have caused some sort of climate crisis (global warming) and that paying new emissions taxes will somehow fix all that is wrong with the world. This “crisis” is actually the greatest scam of all time and is based on bad science. It is a classic Problem/Reaction/Solution that is being used to line the pockets of fat cat “environmentalists” and further enslave humanity. In this article I will explain why the so called “climate crisis” is fallacy and nothing to worry about, who is behind it, and why you should refuse to pay a tax on living/breathing.

In the mainstream media it appears as though the “global warming” debate is over. We are facing a great problem, our carbon dioxide emissions have caused Earth’s temperature to rise and if we don’t do something to stop it right now we will face great cataclysmic events. The polar ice caps will melt, our ocean levels will rise and displace hundreds of millions of people, species will go extinct, and humanity will be brought to its knees. The truth is that what is presented to us as scientifically proven fact in the mainstream is still hotly contested by tens of thousands of the world’s top scientists, and no real debate has even been done. Today you receive dumbfounded looks or worse if you even begin to question the validity of the idea that man made global warming exists and is caused by CO2 emissions. More likely you are ridiculed and possibly even considered to be suffering from a mental disorder when you present such a blasphemous question. Global warming has developed an almost religious, or cult-like following in the years since Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth was produced and marketed through the mainstream media and was sent to schools as part of a new curriculum to indoctrinate our youth into the new religion of “climate change”. Suddenly and without debate, a pseudo-scientific theory became fact almost over night. To this day Al Gore and his fellow fear-mongering “environmentalists” refuse any sort of debate on the subject and proclaim that it is just too urgent to waste time debating something so silly when what we need to do is focus on the solution. A solution which just happens to make Al Gore very rich. If global warming caused by man made carbon dioxide emissions is such a silly thing to debate, why don’t they just do the debate and get it over with? Why won’t Al Gore and other alarmists debate the issue? I suspect the reason they will not engage in the debate is because they are wrong, and debating it would prove them so. John Coleman, founder of The Weather Channel, along with over 30,000 other scientists are now trying to sue Al Gore for fraud. They feel that since the mainstream media will not cover both sides of the story, there is no other way to get the issue looked at seriously, so they are taking it to the courts.

It is evident that the climate on earth is indeed changing, but the climate on earth is always changing and humans have very little influence over it. A professor by the name of Nir Shaviv from the Institute of Physics at the University of Jerusalem discovered that there have been periods in earth’s history where there was up to ten times as much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere as there is now, yet it had next to no impact on earth’s temperature. Professer Ian Clark of the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Ottowa is quoted saying “If we look at climate from the geological timeframe we would never suspect CO2 as a major climate driver. You can’t say that CO2 will drive climate, it certainly never did in the past”. Dr. Piers Corbyn, a weather forecaster who uses sunspots to predict weather patterns, said that CO2 does not explain any past weather patterns. Professor Patrick Michaels of the Department of Environmental Sciences at the University of Virginia has said that “anyone who goes around and says that carbon dioxide is responsible for most of the warming of the 20th century hasn’t looked at the basic numbers”. One main reason that some people believe CO2 causes warming is the results of ice core surveys that can measure earth temperatures over hundreds of thousands of years. In Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth it is said that for 650,000 years the ice core surveys show correlation between CO2 and temperature. “When there is more carbon dioxide, the temperature gets warmer”. While the ice core surveys certainly do show that CO2 and warming seem to go together, Al Gore and his team make an incorrect assumption when they state that it is the CO2 that causes the warming. Professor Ian Clark says that Al Gore’s team got it backwards, and that the warming actually causes the CO2. The ice core samples show that the warming leads the CO2 by about 800 years which means it could not possibly be the CO2 causing the temperature to change. Clark says that carbon dioxide is a product of temperature, not the other way around, and that completely destroys the fundamentals of the theory behind “global warming”.

If it’s not CO2 that’s behind climate change, then what is causing all this apparent warming (we are actually in a cooling period, more on that later) that is melting the polar ice caps and raising sea levels? I know this might sound crazy so I’m just going to throw this idea out there for you to chew on for a bit… Could it possibly be the sun? When Dr. Sami Solanki, director of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Germany analyzed sunspot cycles and compared them to temperatures on earth, he found it stunningly obvious that when there are more solar flares, also known as sunspots, the temperature goes up to reflect the increase in solar activity. It’s not only more heat from the sun that causes warming, cosmic rays interacting with water vapour create clouds which effect the temperature of earth. When there is strong solar radiation (more sunspots), fewer solar ray particles get through to the earth, resulting in fewer clouds. When there are fewer clouds, more solar heat is able to get through. When studying cosmic ray and temperature records going back up to six million years, you will find that when there is less solar radiation there are more cloud-forming cosmic rays, and temperatures go down. When solar radiation increases you will find that the temperature goes up, every single time. I have included a graph on my blog which shows the relationship between cosmic-rays and cloud cover, and another graph showing the relationship between sunspots and global temperature. Anyone with half a brain should be able to see that the sun is obviously the driving factor when it comes to the temperature on earth.

Often we are told that our planet is warmer now than ever before in recorded history. What they forget to mention is that “recorded history” means somewhere between 1860 and 1914. Our planet has been through many cycles, some lasting tens or hundreds of thousands of years, so are records from only 150 years ago really all that meaningful? Research by a study team at Harvard University showed that we have had much higher temperatures in the last thousand years, and we are not at an extreme at either end of the spectrum. Between the 9th and 14th centuries the temperatures were much warmer than today and in the 15th century there was the beginning of the “Little Ice Age” during which many rivers and waterways iced over and people had to adapt to the cooler temperatures. We are currently not even in a warm period when compared to the last 60 years or so we are actually in a cooling phase. Below is a graph which shows the current cooling trend. Recent news reports show that 2008 was the coldest year in the last century, with many countries reporting record amounts of snow in places that don’t normally get any. You might find it funny to know that The International Organization for Global Warming had to postpone last years conference due to an unexpected blizzard and record breaking cold weather. These climate changes are natural, ever-present, and are nothing to be afraid of.

Even if carbon dioxide was causing warming of our earth, carbon taxes would not be a solution to the problem. Paying carbon taxes to fight carbon dioxide emissions would be about as effective as trying to fix a car that won’t start by changing the rear wheel. Carbon taxes are a sick trick being played on the public by a group of greedy scam artists. Paying a tax makes the environment better? Since when? Even if that tax money went to pay people to plant trees or invest in renewable energy research and development (which it doesn’t) it would not likely make a noticeable or substantial difference to the betterment of our environment or our ability to sustain a non-changing climate. But since CO2 is not behind climate change at all, there is absolutely no reason that anybody should pay taxes on carbon emissions. If such carbon tax legislation ever does pass, I hope that everyone will stand together in protest of them and refuse to pay such ludicrous fees.

Many will accuse people who have done research into the global warming scam to be anti-environment, encouraging pollution, supporting big oil, or a plethora of other things. I personally have been accused of “enjoying toxic air pollution and supporting the scourge of cancer” after speaking out about the truth behind the whole man made climate change scam. For some reason, which I suspect might be television and mainstream media mind programming, people make a connection that links people who are skeptical of man made global warming (“climate change deniers”) to encouraging pollution. To make this perfectly clear, there is no such connection. CO2 isn’t causing temperature changes but that doesn’t mean you should run your car more often or quit recycling. I am in full support of exploring new clean renewable energy sources and better waste management and disposal.

Author: Mitch T
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Provided by: Digital Camera Information

If we tallied up all the water we have stored, outside the water cycle, in the millions of places we hold it, dams, tanks, in toilets, car radiators, refrigerators, pipes, most of the products in our supermarkets, hot water systems, etc etc, the list would be huge. How much water in total would there be in these places? (how much water is in Coke cans at the moment?)

And, hypotheticaly, if all this water was returned to the water cycle, would it have any impact on the worlds current water crisis?

I’m doing a science project about water pollution and i have to discuss any actions or conservation efforts because of water pollution. And i really dont understand this question. So somebody that understands it , can they please help me? Mmm, thanks, oh please ANSWER this A.S.A.P because this project is due TOMORROW!

What forms of water recyling are there and is desaliantion safe? what are the advantages of desalination and what could be done before we have to turn to desaliantion?

thanks, if you could answer any of these questions =]

If Abraham Lincoln’s house can go green, anyone’s can. President Lincoln’s Cottage, his family’s summer retreat during the Civil War, has been completely renovated during preparation for the compound just a few miles from the White House to be opened as a national monument. But it wasn’t done as just any restoration of an old house, it was kept as green as possible.

To that end, Time magazine recently reported that renovators kept 98 percent of the existing structures and used recycled material for the rest. The buildings earned a gold rating from the U.S. Green Building Council, thus proving that going green doesn’t mean it has to be a completely new house. In fact, greening an existing home is far more environmentally viable.

The Austin real estate market ranks in the top ten nationwide for building green homes. According to a recent Austin-American Statesman article, more than 20 percent of the homes built in Austin are rated green by Austin Energy’s Green Building Program. And that’s not expensive homes. “One of the interesting things that’s happening in Austin is, early on back in the 1990s, everybody assumed green building would be for high-end custom homes, but now probably about 90 percent of what we rate are built by production builders. In most places, it’s the custom builders doing green, but here, the production builders have really adopted green. And that is something that’s unique to Austin,” said Richard Morgan, manager of Austin Energy’s program.

Of course not everyone is going to go out and buy a newly built green home. While a new home is more energy efficient than an older home, those who own an older home don’t have to give up on being green. As reported in Time, homes built before 2000 generally use 50 percent more energy per square foot, largely do to all the heating and cooling that escapes through the multitude of tiny cracks and crevices in older homes. A good place to start being green, as well as saving some green, is by getting out the caulking gun.

If it’s time to replace any bathroom fixtures, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has a WaterSense certification system, which can help consumers choose toilets and other products with better water efficiency. The Energy Star program helps consumers choose energy-efficient appliances and other products.

Both green building and green renovations have the potential to create thousands of jobs. The Obama administration included $8 billion in the stimulus package for weatherization of low income homes. That will only scratch the surface of covering the costs for greening a homes across the country. The National Trust is working with members of Congress to create legislation that would offer rebates and incentives for things like installing better insulation or energy efficient windows.

However, if you don’t want to wait on Congress, there are small things homeowners can do now to make houses more energy efficient. A good place to start is a home energy audit. The website energysavers.gov offers do-it-yourself tips.

Author: Ki Gray
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Provided by: Digital Camera News