The Plastiki Expedition

[I thought it was time to bring this post back to the surface--it was originally posted May 19, 2009--because the Plastiki has now completed its cross-Pacific journey from San Francisco to Sydney, Australia. Their website continues in their efforts to increase awareness about the massive waste stream connected with plastic bottles.]

I've written about a Japanese fellow who built a canoe out of recycled wooden chopsticks and the American dude who made a Viking ship out of popsicle sticks, but this boat (artist rendering at left) really takes the cake. (See how I distracted you with a food reference so you wouldn't notice that this post is just about boats?)

From March through August 2010, David de Rothschild (a self-styled eco-warrior and, yes, that Rothschild family) and a crew sailed 8,000 nautical miles from San Francisco to Sydney in a boat made of recycled plastic bottles (more than 12,000 of them).

Here's a part of their mission statement:

The Plastiki aims to draw attention to the rethinking of our everyday human fingerprints on the natural world and in turn capturing the world's imagination by telling a story; that of the pioneering and sustainable design process that created and built The Plastiki...

It is our aim to captivate, inspire and activate tomorrow's environmental thinkers and doers to take positive action for our Planet and to be smart with waste, ultimately we hope to inspire people to rethink waste as a valuable resource. One person's waste could be another person's treasure.

Check the voyage out on the Plastiki website or their Facebook page. Or follow @Plastiki on Twitter.

Corn Part Two: Crop diversity in Ecuador

OK, boring headline, but really cool picture. For the past decade there has been a concerted effort to record and preserve the astonishing variety of crops grown in the northern Andean highlands of Ecuador. In a survey of farms in the region, it was found that local farmers are growing a stupefyingly large variety of chile peppers, beans, squash, corn, and potatoes.

This includes 30, I say, son, 30 different kinds of corn!!

In addition to cataloging this incredible diversity, each year there is a seed-exchange fair (the photo above is from the fair) in the town of Cotacachi to help preserve varieties in danger of disappearing. And a food processing facility has been set up to provide a profitable outlet for local crops—thus encouraging farmers to keep farming. The artisanal products made in the processing plant appear to only be sold in Ecuador, but here's what they have (that I wish I could buy): Andean blackberry marmalade, dried cape gooseberries, roasted black squash seeds.

In case you've never seen a cape gooseberry, it looks like a tomatillo, to which it is in fact related. They are also called ground cherries, though they are not at all related to that fruit. Ground cherries, if they're grown in your area, might be appearing in farmers' markets about now.

Did anyone get the Foghorn Leghorn reference above? It's hard to write in a cartoon accent. If I'd said "I say, son" out loud, I'll bet you would have gotten it.

Boxed water is better

A company in Grand Rapids, Michigan, called Boxed Water Is Better has come up with a product that is part philosophical art project and part solution to the bottled water conundrum. Their idea is that bottled water should not contribute to our environmental woes, but should actively help alleviate them.

They propose to sell water in cartons, because:

• 90% of the container is from a renewable resource (when the trees are responsibly harvested, they are quick to point out).
• The cartons are shipped flat and then filled locally, thus reducing their carbon footprint (it reduces the size and number of truckloads to get the water shipped anywhere).
• Post consumer, the cartons can be recycled in most places (for more information on recycling cartons where you live, check the Carton Council's website).
  

On top of that, the company is donating portions of their profits* to the resources their product uses: 10% to world water relief foundations and 10% to reforestation foundations.

Boxed Water is currently only available in Michigan, but here's hoping the idea spreads. If I see one more plastic water bottle wash up on the beach I'm going to explode (actually no, first I'll pick up the bottle and throw it into the trash, again, and then I'll explode).

*In the name of full disclosure, the company mentions that as a young start-up, they haven't actually made any profits to donate yet. They're also looking for more suggestions on worthy foundations.

“Green” storage bowls

If you read the entry on March 18, 2009, about a company called Preserve, then you know that they make products from recycled plastic. Their line of kitchen products recently won a Green Dot Award, which recognizes businesses with high environmental standards. The line includes colanders, mixing bowls, cutting boards, measuring cups and the set of food storage bowls shown here.

The storage bowls, which are both literally and figuratively green, come in two sizes: 19 and 25 ounces. The feature that really caught my attention, though, were the tops: They screw on instead of snapping on. Shouldn't all storage bowls be that way?

You can buy the bowls directly from Preserve ($2.79 for the small bowl and $2.99 for the larger one) or you can use their Store Locator.

And as with all Preserve products, you can recycle the bowls at a Gimme 5 or by mailing them in (see the March 18 entry for the details).

Gimme 5 from Preserve

Preserve is a company that manufactures products made from 100% recycled plastics and 100% post-consumer paper.

The specific type of plastic Preserve uses is #5 plastic, which gets recycled by very, very few communites. So the company has stepped up with a program called Gimme 5.

Gimme 5 has drop-off bins in select Whole Foods stores (click here for a list of locations) where you can drop off: Clean plastic containers with #5 stamped on it (think of yogurt pots and other tub-shaped food containers), any Preserve product (more on this in a later post) and Brita filters (!).

And if there is no convenient Gimme 5 bin (OK, Whole Foods may seem like it's everywhere, but it's not), Preserve will also accept any of the above items by mail: Preserve Gimme 5, 823 NYS Rte 13, Cortland, NY 13045.

Energy from food waste

There seems to be a minitrend that I hope is as good as it sounds. Some food companies are exploring ways to take the waste that's produced in the course of their manufacturing and convert it to energy.

A recent such announcement comes from the Philadelphia Cream Cheese division of Kraft. Two of their plants in upstate New York plan to convert the whey (a byproduct of cheesemaking) into biogas, thus reducing their gas energy purchases by about one-third.

Another food company looking for similar solutions is Heinz. At their production facility in Oregon, there are plans to produce biofuels from potato peels.

If they joined forces, they might also have a fine potato chowder.

Noble juices

The name of the company that makes these juices is Noble with a capital N, but it turns out the company is also noble, small n. They claim the honor of being the first national, premium juice brand to package their juices in PLA bottles, which are eco-friendly and biodegradable. PLA stands for plastic polylactide, a natural polymer made from corn.

At first I had this image of juice bottles all over the land self-destructing on supermarket shelves. Well as it turns out, the biodegradability of these "E-Bottles" depends on being composted in an industrial composting facility, where they will "return to nature" in just over 3 months.

But enough of this palaver about the container...the juice inside is delicious. It's fresh, 100% pure and deeply flavored. The newest juices are Blood Orange (yum) and Tangerine-Cranberry, but they also have Tangerine-Clementine, Guava-Mango (double yum), Ruby Red Grapefruit and plain Tangerine.

To check on retail availability, go to the Noble Juices website.

Eat local

I'm so happy about the recent groundswell of interest in eating food that's been grown locally. It has a threefold impact on our lives: 1) the food you buy will be fresher because it's picked closer to actual ripeness and has to travel shorter distances to get to market, 2) because it travels a shorter distance there is less fuel expended to get the food to you, and 3) it helps support local farmers.

So here is a cool little tool to help you if you decide to jump on this bandwagon. A website called Local Harvest has an interactive map of the United States with local farms and farmer's markets (plus other food sources such as CSAs and online stores). There is a Search that lets you plug in an ingredient and then a zip code, city or state. When I plugged in Strawberries and Nevada, I got 14 matches.

Keep in mind that the map relies on the individual farmer's markets and other food vendors for the information in the map, so there may possibly be some inaccuracies. For example, it told me that I could buy artichokes at a farmer's market in New Jersey. My guess is that if they have them, they come from California, so not local. But who knows, maybe there is an enterprising farmer in New Jersey who has decided to grow artichokes. That would be cool.

Save Our Earth glasses

There are plenty of companies out there making objects out of recycled materials, but I just happened to like these glasses better than most.

Made in Wisconsin from recycled Bordeaux bottles, the glasses have been etched with the phrase "Protect Our Earth" in four languages: English, Spanish, Afrikaans and French.

A set of four 11-ounce glasses is $45 from Uncommon Goods.

Clean graffiti

Vindict, a wine company in Amsterdam, has come up with one of the greenest advertising campaigns imaginable. Using a big metal stencil and a power-washer, they blast dirt off sidewalks and streets and walls to leave behind the company logo. It may be the first graffiti that actually cleans up instead of messing up.

See for yourself

Wait, this might be the best recycling project ever

A canoe made out of 7,382 used chopsticks (see blog entry from April 24, 2008) is mere child's play compared with a 50-foot Viking ship made from 15 million recycled popsicle sticks.

The ship--named Thor after the Norse god of thunder--was built in the Netherlands by an American-born stuntman, Robert McDonald, with the help of his son and over 5,000 kids. He has sailed the ship locally in Europe, but he has plans to retrace the original (supposed) route the Vikings took to get to North America. The trip would eventually land him in Key West, Florida.

McDonald has spent his life proving that you can do anything you put your mind to. As a child, he was badly injured in a gas explosion (which killed his entire family) and was told that he would never regain the use of his right arm. He proved the doctors wrong and then went on to make a career of doing impossible things...like building a Viking ship out of 15 million popsicle sticks.

As McDonald puts it: "I'm out to show that I'm not disabled, look what I've done, look what we have done, look what the kids can do. It's not only a ship of ice-cream sticks, it's also the world's largest recycled object."

Chopstick canoe

You know those disposable wooden chopsticks you get in Japanese restaurants? The ones attached at the top end that you have to break apart? Well, as you can imagine, in Japan they are used (and thrown away) in great quantity.

Shuhei Ogawara, a former municipal employee in the Japanese city of Koriyama, had been working with the local forestry industry, and it disturbed him to see so much wood going to waste. So he spent two years rescuing thousands of used waribashi (as they are called). He glued 7,382 of them together to form a canoe shell, which he then made watertight with a polyester resin.

The canoe will be launched (Ogawara is confident it will float) in May 2008 at Lake Inawashiro, not far from Koriyama.

Norwegian Global Seed Vault

Sort of like a giant time capsule for plants, the Global Seed Vault in Norway officially opened for business on February 26, 2008. The seed vault will ultimately house and preserve the seeds from hundreds of thousands of plants (at the moment the count is around 730,000). The purpose is to "store duplicates of seeds from collections around the globe. If seeds are lost for any reason--natural disasters, war or power failure--the seed collections could be reestablished using seeds from [the seed vault]."

The seed vault is built into a mountainside in Svalbard (a group of islands in the Arctic Ocean off the coast of Norway) and looks for all the world like something straight out of a Sean Connery-era Bond movie.

To read more about the efforts of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, check out the Global Seed Vault website.

Saving the planet with smart design

I hate, hate, hate plastic bags. (I'm glad to see that there are some places that are considering making them a thing of the past in grocery stores.) And ever since I lived in France, I've loved, loved, loved the concept of carrying a small shopping bag to hold the ingredients for dinner that night.

So I always like to carry a small, folded-up bag with me in my purse. This is why I was really pleased to discover the 24/7 bag from a little company called flip & tumble.

The bag was designed by two graduates of Stanford University's Product Design program. It's made of ripstop nylon, which makes it very strong and--best of all--very light. It comes stuffed into a stretchy nylon sack and is about the size of a baseball. When you deploy the bag, the stretchy sack (which is actually attached to the bag) ends up on the inside of the bag as a handy little pocket for keys and whatnot.

It's really an extremely clever design, and the color combinations available are very modern and attractive. You can buy the bag from the flip & tumble website for $12 plus $4 flat shipping for up to 4 bags.

Australian finger limes

Australian finger limes are just the coolest fruits. They are rainforest fruits that grow in certain subtropical regions on the Australian continent. They look like 3- to 5-inch-long sausages with a green-to-brown rind. Their flesh can range in color from pale green to pale pink to a deep red, depending on the variety.

But here's the cool part. When you cut them open, the individual flavor cells come out as separate jewel-like beads that look for all the world like caviar. And when you eat them, they "pop" in your mouth, also like caviar.

Unfortunately, the finger lime is not exported to this country. You can read about it on the website of the Australian Finger Lime Company. Or, if you're planning a trip to Australia, you can taste finger limes (and other native Australian foods) at Banrock Station Wine & Wetland Centre. Banrock Station is devoting much money and time to protecting wetlands worldwide. When you buy one of their wines, a certain portion of the proceeds goes toward funding their wetland conservation efforts.