Blogs & Ecology

ECONA, not to be confused with the Econo or the ECO Showerdrop, is a water-saving device that could change the way you view (literally!) your water consumption at home. This gadget won the Concurso Nuevo Diseño 2008 (New Design Competition) in the ecodesign category.

SA's water quality had some bad press earlier this year and now it appears that a leading water researcher is about to be axed for lifting the lid on what is really going on.

Reading on environment.co.za the CSIR has suspended Dr Anthony Turton over a presentation he was to deliver about South Africa's water crisis at a high level conference last week.

The Greens, Coalition & independents have come together to unite in the need for immediate action on the Murray Darling Basin.

Senator Rachel Siewert (Greens spokesperson on water), Greg Hunt MP (opposition Environment Minister) & Senator Nick Xenophon (Independent) joined GetUp! National Director Simon Sheik in Canberra yesterday to call for Government action on the Water Bill and save the Murray Darling.

GetUp! presented the politicians with a petition signed by almost 50,000 Australians concerned about the Murray's future.

Two years ago, TreeHugger Christine called the AQUS Watersaver:

"the epitomy of American ingenuity. Bothered from a young age by the tragic waste of water flowing down the sink drain, Mark Sanders repeatedly dreamed of a system to collect that water and reuse it."

We met Mark Sanders at Greenbuild, with what is now known as the Sloan AQUS Watersaver. This is the kind of progress we like to see; an guy with a dream and a glue gun but limited distribution gets to tie up with a major....

at Wikipedia), there is still a proper place in the countryside for a well-designed outhouse. For a small cabin or prefab in the woods, especially with a dwelling occupied a few weeks each year by only a handful of people, it's a cheap solution to a human problem as old as civilization.

For a long time this TreeHugger has been promoting the idea of residential composting toilets, saying that " If we are truly going to develop a zero waste society and protect our water resources, we are going to have to start thinking about dealing with all of our wastes and not keep flushing some of them down the pipe."

There are two fundamental problems with the current approach to reform in the Murray Darling Basin:

1. Basin communities have not been part of the consultation and negotiation process for the new arrangements. The only key stakeholders from the Rudd Government's point of view have been the State Governments.
2. Commonwealth investment in water buyback, infrastructure improvements and structural adjustment are being rolled out slowly in an ad hoc fashion, with no consideration for the social, economic, environmental or structural impacts of where water is bought, or irrigation infrastructure investments are located.

What we need is a targeted and integrated approach.

TreeHugger loves the idea of rainwater harvesting and has shown quite a few solutions for storing it; they are usually big tanks that are either buried or quite visible above grade. They are also as big when they are empty as they are when filled.

Jim Harrington takes another approach; he invented the rainwater pillow, a flexible bladder that expands to hold rainwater. It is available in sizes from 1,000 to 40,000 gallons. ...

Ancient Israelites collected morning dew from stones. There are prayers for dew in the Bible, and the recipe for the traditional Jewish bread –– challah –– includes how much dew to use in the batzhek (the dough). So it’s not a far-fetched idea that clean technology developers in Israel look to this ancient method of water extraction to solve water scarcity problems around the globe.

Civilizations have collapsed from water becoming too salty: to the point where foods can no longer be grown and where drinking water is either unpalatable or dangerous. Farmland and water salinization risk is greatest where annual natural evaporation and transpiration are high compared to precipitation, water consumption is high, and where prolonged drought is severe . Remind you of California?

One California community, facing increased water salinization, targeted domestic and commercial water softeners for removal. An existing voluntary removal program succeeded in getting rid of roughly half the residential softeners. Now. following a ball...

This just in from the Take Back the Filter campaign:

Brita is going to announce a recycling program for its water filter cartridges on Tuesday.

The brand manager from Brita contacted the Take Back The Filter campaign yesterday and gave us the word.

We can't reveal the details until Monday night. But I can say that their plan includes almost all of the things we asked for on our petition and during the campaign.

Despite having written at length (some might say excessively) about the sorry fate of Yosemite's dwindling glaciers and the Sierra snowpack, I've always felt as though my posts were missing something -- a certain audio/visual oomph, you might say. Though I'm much too busy to visit Yosemite in person these days (I intend to do over the coming months, however), the fine folks at KQED have provided the ...

Courtesy Energy Island