Category Archives: Awareness and Hype
Having become an active member of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) Climate Savers program, Fairmont Hotels & Resorts recently unveiled its master plan to reduce its carbon footprint. The hospitality big-shot has put in some pretty green thoughts into lightening its carbon footprint, pledging to reduce operational CO2 emissions by 20 percent below 2006 levels by 2013. Currently, the hotel company is already 8% cleaner, and is more than half-way from its goal. The hotel currently is channeling its efforts to improve energy efficiency, increase conversion to low carbon technologies and solutions and is promoting conservation practices among 30,000 employees worldwide!
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Shortly before, Tesco decided to cut the use of its environment-friendly degradable bags, given that these were well, not as green as they were expected to be. The supermarket chain recently swung open its doors at Somersham, a village in Cambridgeshire, and has decided to stick to the green policies of the little habitation. Instead, the Tesco store will have “bag for life”, plastic bags that aren’t meant to be disposed but used repeatedly. Also, Tesco will keep an ear open for customer feedback, and will decide if continuing with these will be appropriate for the future.
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In a bid to turn the roadways of U.K. greener than ever before, Ecotricity plans to install green-energy-powered electric vehicle (EV) charging points at selected motorway service stations across the United Kingdom. Ecotricity is putting every effort into promoting the use of EVs with these charging posts that will be set up at Welcome Break service stations. The charging posts will power up with either solar energy or wind energy, making them truly green, without hooking on to the grid all the time. The charging posts have 7-pin 400v/32A supply capable of charging cars in 20 minutes to a couple of hours, depending on how much charge you require!
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A few solar panels on your roof can change your life and better the environment. An entire village choosing to do so is a green feat like never before! Take the German village of Wildpoldsried for instance. Located in Bavaria, the village has turned greener than ever, producing a whopping 321% more energy than it needs! And with that, the village also generates about $5.7 million in annual revenue from renewable energy! The village first went green in 1997, and has now come a long way with solar panels, four biogas digesters, seven windmills, and two more under construction. That’s not all. The little residence with a population of just 2,600 also uses three small hydro power plants, ecological flood control, and a natural waste water system!
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We’ve got wind of PepsiCo’s efforts to go green with the EcoGreen bottles that showed up a while ago. These bottles are completely recyclable unlike the regular PET bottles, and could help keep tons of plastic waste away from landfill sites. Now, PepsiCo Beverages Canada unveiled the 7UP EcoGreen bottle. Using these bottles will help keep 6 million pounds of virgin plastic from ending up in landfills on an annual basis, reducing 30% in greenhouse gas emissions and over 55% in energy use at the same time.
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To make paper, millions of trees lose their life; we all know that by now. The world today is on a look out for paper solutions, and we’ve seen quite a few innovative ways to reduce paper waste, including recycling and reusing paper, and a printer that wipes pages clean of ink for reuse. South Korea has come up with an idea that could just make paper textbooks obsolete soon! The country plans to spend over $2 billion developing digital textbooks that could probably be used by almost every school in the nation by 2015. With an access to paper-free learning materials directly via a cloud-based database, South Korean students will soon pursue their academics, in greener ways, without using textbooks made from paper.
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We’ve been waving the electric-bike flag for long now. These seem to be a pretty inexpensive way for personal transport that not only remains easy to maintain and use, but also keeps the air clean, with zero emissions. China however, thinks otherwise. In a country with about 500,000 e-bike owners, these clean machines on a pair of wheels are slowly turning into a menace, leading to an astounding number of deaths on a yearly basis. Shenzhen, fed up with e-bikers cutting lanes and leading to road accidents, has banned the use of e-bikes in the province on a trial basis for 6 months, a move that might just inspire other areas in China to adopt the same.
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We’ve been waving the electric-bike flag for long now. These seem to be a pretty inexpensive way for personal transport that not only remains easy to maintain and use, but also keeps the air clean, with zero emissions. China however, thinks otherwise. In a country with about 500,000 e-bike owners, these clean machines on a pair of wheels are slowly turning into a menace, leading to an astounding number of deaths on a yearly basis. Shenzhen, fed up with e-bikers cutting lanes and leading to road accidents, has banned the use of e-bikes in the province on a trial basis for 6 months, a move that might just inspire other areas in China to adopt the same.
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A while ago, we’d got wind of Coca-Cola and Pepsi turning to greener plant-based bottles and pretty much applauded the companies for their initiatives. It so turns out, that these bottles aren’t all that dark green either, and have shades of environment-damage to them too. Though the cola manufacturers have been bragging of these bottles being green, all they’ve really done is replaced the fossil fuels (petroleum and natural gas) with ethanol from renewable sources, churning out chemically identical plastics to polyethylene terephthalate.
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Selling off a chilled bottle of cola in areas disconnected regularly from the grid thanks to overload grids and indecent electricity supply can be a downright pain in the backside, especially in rural India and similar places dotting the earth. So, Coca-Cola came up with a brilliant way to keep its colas cool and chilly to sooth the parched throats of rural India, with a solar-powered refrigerating system! Called the eKOCool, this chest cooler by Coca-Cola India will be sent out the the farthest and most rural parts of the country where the sun shines well enough to power it up. Capable of storing two crates of cola bottles (about 48 glass bottles each), the eKOCool can also use excess energy to charge mobile phones and LED lights in homes!
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