Making progress! (?)

So I checked on my carbon footprint again.. And either I turned into Ghandi over the last month or I over or underestimated many of the questions on one of the two quizzes. I'm not using up just over 4 Earths now as opposed to 7 at the beginning of the quarter. Hmm...

http://www.myfootprint.org/en/your_results/?id=711652

To be fair, all of the goals I said that I would be trying to achieve have made it there. I have changed the vast majority of my light bulbs to eco-friendly ones, I've gotten really good about turning off lights and computers and televisions when I leave a room, and I've been recycling at home as much as possible. Of course, this is all relative to my roommate here, who I can't seem to get on the bandwagon with the whole recycling thing. Oh well, he's moving to Hawaii in about two weeks.

SC Johnson Takes a Step in the Right Direction

Companies who produce cleaning or air freshening products are not required by the EPA or anyone else to list the ingredients they use. For a long time, it has been a common and understandable assumption that anything capable of dissolving three month's worth of grease and nastiness from the inside of your oven can't be too great for your health.

While this probably remains true, SC Johnson has taken the brilliant step of listing online everything that they use to produce their products, from active ingredients to those that create fragrance. You can check it out here. The site offers not just the ingredients, but also a layman's explanation of what the ingredients are and why they are used in the product.

On the downside, SC Johnson is obviously not going to explain to their customers how bad these ingredients are to their personal health, only how bad they are to the health of their various household clogs, stains, and odors. Still, it' s a step in the right direction.

Turns out being sustainable is a whole lot easier when your roommate is out of town.

I've been doing a pretty good job of trying to correct many of my detrimental habits lately; I'm recycling at home, taking shorter showers, and much to my chagrin, even eating less meat. No telling how long that last bit is going to keep up. I love meat.

But speaking of my walking ecodisaster of a roommate being out of town, I happened to stumble upon an interesting experiment that Japan-based Nippon Airlines is taking up.

While strictly a cost-saving measure with little concern about the environmental impact of the project, its a laughably simple way to lower their jets' impact as far as carbon emissions. The whole idea is, to put it in eloquent terms, "please take a dump before you get on the plane. You'll save us some gas."

Nippon's research suggests that, assuming each passenger does their business before hopping on one of their jets, they can cut down on 5 TONS (yes, as in 10,000 lbs.) of CO2 emissions per month simply due to the reduction in weight that each plane would be carrying. Also, each flush of the on-board toilet supposedly costs the airplane a liter of fuel. Not sure where they came up with that figure, but I'll play along.

Obviously, the Japanese are known for their interesting theories and concepts (see right), but this one may actually, on the long term at least, pay dividends to investors and environmentalists alike. Stay tuned.

Rickshaw Run

I'm not one of those people that operates well without some sort of a plan. Be it the choice of restaurant for dinner or where I want to move after school and start a career, I typically function much better when I have at least a preliminary idea of where I'm going, how long I'm going to be there, and so on.

This I why I have a hard time understanding people like my friend Alex.

Alex is a traveler. He is the kid that, after graduating from college, simply decided that he was going to move to Australia. On the way, he visited most of southeast Asia over the course of about three months, bouncing from country to country in no particular order and on no particular schedule. Unfortunately, three days after finally arriving in Melbourne, poor Alex managed to break his neck while wrestling around with some of his travelling buddies.

After spending six months in Boise with his family while wearing a hellish device called a halo, he had the itch to get out of the country. He and a friend of his, Ollie, soon stumbled across an intriguing option in India: The Rickshaw Run.

This crazy adventure essentially involves taking a series of those little three-wheeled taxis across the subcontinent of India, with the whole journey planned to take two weeks, stopping only for food, sleep, and likely the occasional drink.

The big idea behind this whole thing is that each team of two must raise $1600 U.S. for a charity of their choice, and Alex and Ollie settled on a good one. FRANK water.

FRANK water is a charity that operates on a water-for-water basis. They sell bottled water in the developed nations, and as a non-profit charity, with each dollar they make above of their operating costs, they fund sustainable clean water projects in Indian villages. Since its conception in 2005, FRANK water has already funded 30 sustainable clean water plants!

Definitely a cool charity, and big props to Alex and Ollie for supporting them. They still need help though. If you can donate even a little bit of money to their cause, I'm sure they would appreciate it endlessly. If they don't raise the $1600 by December, the whole thing falls apart for them. If you would like to make a donation to Alex and Ollie and to FRANK water, click here!