recycling plastic bottle caps

“Like cigarette butts, people toss aside bottle caps because they’re small and seem insignificant,” says Suzanne Frazer, co-founder of Beach Environmental Awareness Campaign Hawaii (B.E.A.C.H.).

B.E.A.C.H. launched a new campaign on Earth Day raising awareness of the impact plastic bottle caps have on marine life. Volunteers say plastic bottle caps are one of the top 10 items found during beach cleanups and are the second most-littered item after cigarette butts.

“In just three events since launching this new campaign we’ve collected more than 2,000 bottle caps,” says Frazer. “It’s going really well and those caps won’t end up in our landfills or harm marine life. It’s an ongoing problem. At one cleanup at Kokololio Beach in 2008, volunteers found 1,232 caps and lids.”

“This activity has brought to light what’s recyclable and what’s not,” says Frazer. “A lot of people with blue bins are not sure what to put in them. Many don’t even know why they’re asked to remove caps and lids from the bottles, and when they do, they don’t know what to do with them.”

Frazer recalls a recent incident at Hanauma Bay that highlights the confusion.

“I picked up 20 bottle caps in a just a few minutes then noticed a guy with a bag bulging with plastic bottles,” she recalls. “Turns out he was just throwing caps on the shoreline. People go through garbage cans and take recycled bottles and dropping bottle caps because they know they don’t get money for the caps.”

Frazer says caps are made from a different type of plastic from the bottles and have a different melting point. Any twist-on plastic cap or lid that is made of rigid polypropylene plastic (recycle symbol No. 5) is accepted for recycling, including caps from beverage, shampoo and food product bottles. However, pump, sprayers, plastic lids from margarine containers and any caps that are made of multi layers of plastic resins or metal are not accepted. “In just three events we found more than 3,000 caps, but about 1,000 of them could not be counted,” says Frazer. “It can get confusing, but we’re happy we’re off to a great start and pleased schools are asking how they can help.”

unconventional global health research

Can tomatoes be taught to make antiviral drugs for people who eat them? Would zapping your skin with a laser make your vaccination work better? Could malaria-carrying mosquitoes be given a teensy head cold that would prevent them from sniffing out a human snack bar?

These are among 81 projects awarded $100,000 grants Monday by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in a bid to support innovative, unconventional global health research.

The five-year health research grants are designed to encourage scientists to pursue bold ideas that could lead to breakthroughs, focusing on ways to prevent and treat infectious diseases, such as HIV, malaria, tuberculosis, pneumonia and diarrheal diseases.

reduce your environmental impact

Reduce Your Environmental Impact

Yes, you can save money, energy and help save our planet in just one month - without giving up modern conveniences. Just make one of these following small (and easy!) eco-changes each day this month for major environment-friendly results. Feel free to share your progress and ideas for ways to make a difference in the fight to save our planet at countryliving.com/gogreen.

~~Fluorescent Lightbulbs

Use soft-white compact fluorescent lightbulbs (CFLs), not traditional incandescents.

BECAUSE: If every American household replaced one standard bulb with a CFL, we could save enough energy to power 3 million homes a year.

~~Place potted plants (like Boston ferns, peace lilies, or English ivy) on windowsills and tables.

BECAUSE: Fifteen plants can absorb most of the average home's airborne toxins within 24 hours.

~~Switch your computer display to go to sleep mode after five minutes of inactivity.

BECAUSE: Sleep mode consumes 90 percent less energy than an animated screen saver - which requires as much energy as normal use.

~~Return wire hangers to the dry cleaner.

BECAUSE: More than 3.5 billion hangers reach landfills each year, amounting to 200 million tons of steel that could be put to new use.

photo credit: kemie/istock

Keywords:

~~Tighten your gas cap until it clicks three times.

BECAUSE: Each year in the United States , 147 million gallons of gasoline literally evaporate into the atmosphere because of loose, damaged, or missing caps.

~~Register to get your name off junk-mail lists.

BECAUSE: Printing junk mail wastes 100 million trees a year. Canceling can reduce your intake by 35 pounds a year. Sign up at proquo.com or at dmachoice.org.

~~Choose natural soy candles over petroleum-based paraffin.

BECAUSE: Paraffin emits 11 toxins; soy doesn't.

~~Scrub down your wheels at a car wash, not at home.

BECAUSE: A drive-through uses less than half the water per car than the typical do-it-yourselfer - and many establishments recycle their soap water.

~~Build a fire with an artificial, petroleum-free log made from wood fibers and biowaxes.

BECAUSE: Man-made logs, surprisingly, burn longer than wood and emit 75 percent less carbon monoxide.

~~Drive with cruise control on the highway.

BECAUSE: Keeping a steady pace burns gas at a constant rate, which lets you drive as much as 10 percent farther on a single tank.

~~Keep your freezer's temperature at 0 degrees F and your refrigerator between 35 degrees and 38 degrees.

BECAUSE: Adjusting a too-cold freezer by five degrees can cut its energy use by 20 percent.

~~Eat meat-free once a week.

BECAUSE: Producing a pound of beef consumes 145 times more fossil fuels than a pound of potatoes.

~~Bar Soap

Leave bar soap by the sink.

BECAUSE: Most liquid soap comes in nonrenewable plastic packaging. Substituting one bottle with a bar in each U.S. home would keep 2.5 million pounds of plastic out of landfills.

~~Organic Cotton Clothes

Wear organic cotton clothes.

BECAUSE: Organic cotton's low-impact production methods - which employ fewer pesticides - generate less than a fifth as much greenhouse gas as standard cotton.

~~Stash a pitcher of water in your fridge.

BECAUSE: A faucet releases a gallon a minute. Letting the tap run while the water cools wastes a resource that's often in limited supply.

~~Submit your taxes electronically.

BECAUSE: We would save 660 million sheets of paper - almost 80,000 trees - if every taxpayer filed electronically. Internal Revenue Service: irs.gov.

~~Donate your old cell phone to charity, or return it to the manufacturer for recycling.

BECAUSE: Electronic trash amounts to 70 percent of America 's toxic waste.

Information on donating can be found at sharetechnology.org and recycling at mygreenelectronics.com.

~~Plug your devices into power strips, and turn off the strips when you're not using them.

BECAUSE: Some plugged-in appliances and strips use electricity even when they're turned off. But one 6-outlet strip, when shut down, uses 87 percent less energy than devices left in six individual outlets.

~~Place a recycling bin next to the wastebasket in your home office, to make conserving paper as easy as discarding it.

BECAUSE: Producing one ton of paper from recycled pulp saves 7,000 gallons of water (and 17 trees).

~~Check the water meter. Then wait an hour, without using your faucets or toilets. Now check again. If the number rises during that time, call a plumber.

BECAUSE: A dripping tap wastes five gallons of water a day. Fixing a leak can save at least $50 a year.

~~Use your dishwasher's air-dry cycle, or switch the machine off after the final rinse and crack open the door.

BECAUSE: Skipping the heated-dry cycle can cut your per-wash energy use by up to 50 percent.

~~Use Reusable Shopping Bags

Stow a reusable bag in your car for errands.

BECAUSE: If every American stuck with cloth totes, we'd waste 380 billion fewer plastic bags this year.

~~Car Maintenance

Have your car's air filters cleaned and tires inflated.

BECAUSE: A yearly tune-up can improve your car's efficiency by 15 percent and keep more than one ton of carbon dioxide out of the air.

~~High-Efficiency Showerheads

Replace traditional showerheads with high-efficiency, 2.5-gallon-a-minute models.

BECAUSE: Your shower will consume 30 percent fewer gallons of water every time you wash.

~~Wash with Cold Water

Wash laundry in cold water, or use warm-wash and cold-rinse cycles.

BECAUSE: Most detergents work equally well regardless of water temperature. Using cold washes in every U.S. household would save the equivalent of 100,000 barrels of oil a day.

~~Use a toaster oven for simple baking tasks.

BECAUSE: The countertop appliances consume half as much energy as electric ovens (and keep the whole kitchen cooler)

With Many Thanks,

Mother Earth [forwarded from Donna]

saving flv files

I saw there were some episodes of Quantum Canine at the Fact TV Media Gallery.

The video files are in flv format and at first I couldn't figure out how to save them. Keepvid didn't work. But I finally was able to do it in IE using these instructions. Though I had to increase the space allocated to the temporary internet files. I tried uploading to youtube, but the file was too big. They only take video 10 minutes long and these are 30 minutes.

The next problem was how to play it from my computer. Apparently I didn't have any program on my computer that could play flv files. Windows Media Player didn't work. So I tried flvplayer and vlcplayer both among the most popular video players on download.com. I liked vlcplayer better.

[via kimodog]

a giant gulp for mankind

HOUSTON (AP) — At the international space station, it was one small sip for man and a giant gulp of recycled urine for mankind.

Astronauts aboard the space station celebrated a space first on Wednesday by drinking water that had been recycled from their urine, sweat and water that condenses from exhaled air. They said "cheers," clicked drinking bags and toasted NASA workers on the ground who were sipping their own version of recycled drinking water.

"The taste is great," American astronaut Michael Barratt said.

Earth 2100

It's an idea that most of us would rather not face -- that within the next century, life as we know it could come to an end. Our civilization could crumble, leaving only traces of modern human existence behind.

It seems outlandish, extreme -- even impossible. But according to cutting edge scientific research, it is a very real possibility. And unless we make drastic changes now, it could very well happen.

Experts have a stark warning: that unless we change course, the "perfect storm" of population growth, dwindling resources and climate change has the potential to converge in the next century with catastrophic results.

In order to plan for the worst, we must anticipate it. In that spirit, guided by some of the world's experts, ABC News' "Earth 2100," hosted by Bob Woodruff, will journey through the next century and explore what might be our worst-case scenario.

But no one can predict the future, so how do we address the possibilities that lie ahead? Our solution is Lucy, a fictional character devised by the producers at ABC to guide us through the twists and turns of what the next 100 years could look like. It is through her eyes and experiences that we can truly imagine the experts' worst-case scenario -- and be inspired to make changes for the better.

...

In the history of Earth, there have been five mass extinctions in which at least half the species on the planet disappeared. Scientists believe the extinctions were brought on by natural disasters -- massive volcanic eruptions, rapid climate changes and meteors hitting Earth.

Today, scientists say we are in the middle of a "sixth extinction" -- and for the first time, it's being caused by one species -- us. It seems inconceivable that we could do so much damage to our planet that we actually cause society as we know it to collapse. But historical precedent shows that it is, in fact, a very real possibility.

"Every society that collapsed thought it couldn't happen to them," says Joseph Tainter, an expert in anthropology and societal collapse. "The Roman Empire thought it couldn't happen. The Maya civilization thought it couldn't happen. Everyone thought it couldn't happen to them. But it did."

These populations grew too much and exhausted their resources -- and their climate suddenly changed. People were forced to fight each other for what little was left or face starvation. Entire societies broke down.

"Civilizations in the past have lost the fight," says climatologist Heidi Cullen. "They have collapsed as a result of the inability to deal with several different events going on at once. I think the takeaway is that honestly, we are not that special."