Hippy Green

I was recently contacted by Christina, who is setting up GreenFestPhilly to help spread the world. I am not sure yet if I will be around that weekend, but if so I think I might come on down. Anyway, here are some short and sweet details about GreenFestPhilly.

GreenFestPhilly, a subsidiary of Urban Green Partnership, is organizing a huge green street festival on Sept. 9, 2007. The festival will take place on South Street in Center City Philadelphia, and run from 11am until 6pm. Featuring more than 130+ exhibitors, a number of green events including an on-site green wedding, a sustainable fashion show, an eco poetry project, and a MusicEcology concert, this event is all about “serious fun”. Various activities for adults and children alike! Save the planet. Save money. Save the date.

Website: www.greenfestphilly.org
Email: GreenFest@UrbanGreenPartnership.org.

Being a Geek Guru I buy lots of electronics and prolly properly dispose of even more. This past weekend I had lots of BBQs and helped my mom move lots of her “stuff” from her house to the curb. Each year the town sponsors a day for any person to throw out almost any and it only costs $68 dollars. This year we decided to clean up the basement and the attic as well as put out some of the furniture we have not used. Once we started to put stuff out, trucks would slowly drive by looking at what we had. Every now and again someone would stop and take something. By the end of the day, we had almost nothing left. It was funny, we even saw someone take a A/C unit we put out only to put it back on our lawn the next day, luckily someone else took it! This just proves that one mans junk is another mans treasure.

Keeping with that statement and ewaste I started to think about how much electronic parts I have lying around as well as interesting parts that people would love to have their hands on. Did you know that Americans throw away over 125 million cell phones a year and even have 500 million used cell phones that are waiting to be thrown away. We need a better way to recylce some of our stuff, much like how people drive by and take the stuff we put out.

Luckily people are already doing a swapfest and we need to get the word out! If you have electronics that are lying around, like most technowhores, we should try and either donate them or give them to someone would might use/play with them. As a society we need to start thinking more about our ewaste and how we can cut down not only on the crap we buy, but also the crap we through away. Living in New Jersey, you get to see lots of it, ha! Anyway, if you are a geek or have electronic equipment you are thinking about throwing away, at least post it up on craigslist and give it away. You might not only cut down on your ewaste, but also enrich the life of some gadgeteer!

One of the popular tourist attraction is the Circle Line boat that laps the waters around NYC. The Circle Line aka a 3 hour tour, serves as a ferry that shows off the status of liberty as well as ellis island. Circle Line has unveiled their solar/wind power hybrid electric ferry. It looks pretty futuristic and I have not done the Circle Line (even thought I have lived less then 20 miles from NYC almost all my life!). So whey they release this, I am so down, who’s with me?

Yes, you heard right, the Vatican is going solar! The Paul VI audience hall will be installing 1,000 solar panels to power the entire heat,cooling,lighting of the entire building YEAR AROUND! The extra power will be fed back to the Vatican grid. This is great news for Catholics around the world and I hope to see a calling for Catholics to start a movement towards a “greener earth”? I know I have a need to go green, as you can see from this blog, but I have only begun to post about the technology and hacks that let you go green. I slowed down for the past two weeks because I was switching jobs, but I am hoping to start a posting frenzy and get Hippy Green off the ground!

Mayor Michael Bloomberg has given orders to have every taxi in New York City will be a hybrid by 2012. This is great news that a city with this much traffic is leaning towards going green. Currently there are about 13,000 licensed taxis and only 375 of them are hybrids. Seeing these numbers it almost makes me think, why not say 2010 or even 2009? 2012 is what 5 years away, buy then gas might be $10 a gallon! We need to make drastic changes rather then just putting a hybrid Ford Escape on the road that gets 32 mpg for a AWD SUV. These “hybrids” SUV have horrible miles per gallon compared to other sedan vehicles such as the Volkswagon Golf which gets 38 in the city. If the taxi companies just need “hybrids” the 2007 GMC Sierra Classic 1500 Hybrid Extended Cab SLE2 Standard Box 2WD gets 18 mpg city / 21 mpg hwy which is HORRIBLE! We need to set standards rather then just saying go get a hybrid. A hybrid can have WORST gas miles then another more FUEL EFFICIENT car.

So in conclusion I think what Mr. Bloomberg is doing is great, lets think green in NYC. I just have a problem when we think lets just go “hybrid” and it will lower our carbon footprint and save money on gas. We need to think smart when it comes to alternative energy and understand that all hybrids are not necessarily amazing fuel efficient cars/trucks. We also need to think out of the box and try and plan for the short term as well as the long term. I think the 5 year plan is great, but in all honestly we SHOULD do this in 3 years!

It seems everyday that I receive a Don’t Pump Gas Email so the major Gasoline Companies can feel a hit, but its a short run experiment. It’s a 1 day event that will NOT have an impact on major companies, if anything it will hurt the little mom and pop gas stops. These gas stops that have the HUGE food/Dunkin Donuts chain are the ones that might get hit if you don’t stop there, most of them can’t even change your oil let alone your tire. I feel that if we are going to plan a massive “attack” against the BIG oil companies the best way is to go out, get a hybrid or electric vehicle, and stop paying them every time you fill up your car. Better yet, write to your congress man, senator, and/or your governor and tell them to stop subsiding the oil companies. Yes, oil companies get money from the governments to find other places to drill for oil. I even posted about how much money oil companies are making. So if you want to take action, post this story to digg and lets get people out there selling their gasoline cars and replacing them with hybrids or full electrics.

It looks like Apple has been getting a lot of flak over the issue of proper disposal of toxic chemicals that are part of their products. Apple normally only speaks of their doing as it happens and not tell of a bright future of all these various products that they are working on.

Apple recently posted a A Greener Apple on their website explaining the various chemicals that are in computers,ipods, etc and how they have dealt with them over the years. Apple also posted some numbers and pretty graphs showing how much e-waste they recycle. Along with recycling Apple is looking at their overall carbon footprint. You can also read the PDF Version of this document if you want to pass it around.

For US and Canada readers you can easily recycle our old computers by calling 888-638-2761. You can even get 10% off the purchase of a new ipod while recycling your old ipod. Apple is dedicated to the environment and shows a history of their plan

The German town of Dardesheim will soon be running completely on renewable energy. Most of the town has solar roofs installed as well as some huge wind turbines, like the 6 megawatt turbine, the E112. This turbine produces 12 to 15 million kWH per year!

The 1,000 residents of Dardesheim want to attach tourist who are interested in renewable energy. The town has organized a monthly newsletter, the Dardesheimer Windletter, to inform the population of the latest project progress.

The town does not completely run on wind, there are 9 different solar PV plants that generate about 250,000 kWh or able 1/3 of the Dardsheim’s domestic electricity.

via Wind Works

Plan NYC has some green plans and ideas, but will they pan out?

NYC mayor, Michael Bloomberg is talking green, but will he take stick with it. Many major cities are “going green” with bans of plastic bags like San Fransisco. More recenly Mr. Bloomberg has been going green and generating ideas with Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, but now its time for him to walk the walk. New York City has laid down the plan but with the mayor only having about 2 1/2 years left in office will it pan out, or just fail. Mr. Bloomberg plans to keep with this plan long after his office term ends.

I know the past 10 to 15 years that has been some major changes in New York City. New York city now has the lowest crime rate among the ten largest cities in the US, seeing a 75% drop in violent crimes. Going green would be the next step for New York City and I hope to see it happen! Although the plan does not mention Skyscraper Farms, but it does mention other concepts that would be beneficial to the people of New York City.

This article raises some good points. I have only started to grapple with the implications of having CF bulbs in our home. I have to think that the average american is going to toss burnt out CF bulbs in the trash rather than disposing of them properly (if you don’t believe me ask yourself where you throw your alkaline batteries). The batteries in hybrid cars aren’t exactly good for the environment either. Does it make sense to put dangerous materials in the general public’s hands or keep them in the big factories? The latter is easier to regulate but the former allows people to give up very little while significantly reducing their energy footprint.

Via Canada posted by antics

*note* I have started Hippy Green and want to see more come from it. I have been pretty busy with changing my contract work and working on some side projects because of this I am looking for writers to post interesting articles/finds on Hippy Green. This article above is written by antics of tears of fire. I will be changing the template a bit so you can see whos posting the stories, please contact me if you want to write for Hippy Green. (Right now its all for fun, but we might change that to a for profit that gives back to the community.)