Guardian: looming biofuel-based food crisis

The Guardian has a fascinating article about a possible food crisis looming, as a result of food crops being turned over to biofuels.

There really is a boom in the industry, it notes for example that 20% of America’s maize crop last year went to ethanol–which managed to power just 2% of the country’s cars.

Greenbang has noted before that this is causing food prices to rise, threats to the water supply more and more. But as the article points out, the sheer scale of the change is ‘boggling’:

The Indian government says it wants to plant 35m acres (140,000 sq km) of biofuel crops, Brazil as much as 300m acres (1.2m sq km). Southern Africa is being touted as the future Middle East of biofuels, with as much as 1bn acres (4m sq km) of land ready to be converted to crops such as Jatropha curcas (physic nut), a tough shrub that can be grown on poor land. Indonesia has said it intends to overtake Malaysia and increase its palm oil production from 16m acres (64,000 sq km) now to 65m acres (260,000 sq km) in 2025.

Wine into fuel: surely this is going too far?

I mean, converting poo, algae and all sorts of other things into fuel is absolutely great, but wine? Yes, the EU plans to sell off unwanted wine to make bioethanol. Surely this is a step too far. I mean, who are these people that aren’t drinking the stuff?

France, the world’s largest wine producer, would offer 239,995 hectoliters of wine alcohol for distillation, while Italy and Spain would offer 200,000 hectoliters apiece. The balance of roughly 53,381 hectoliters will come from Greece.

Notice how the UK isn’t on the list? Hmm, interesting.

A guide to the biofuel economy

Greenbang has been covering a bunch of different biofuel sources lately, everything from confiscated booze to poo to milk. In fact, it makes us wonder what can’t be turned into a biofuel.

To answer the question, Earth2Tech has helpfully put together a guide to the biofuel economy, giving an A to Z of alternative fuels, from apples and beer (why, we ask) to Xylose and Zeolite. Read on…

Coffee: Starbucks brand biofuels? Well, maybe. Apparently, coffee grains have enough sugar content to be turned into ethanol. Research paid for by Columbia’s Federación Nacional de Cafeteros (National Coffee producers Federation, Federcafé) found that coffee has an even higher sugar content per bushel than corn. If accurate, coffee prices could soar, and Starbucks might be in trouble.

Japanese turn chopsticks into biofuels

Japanese sure like their chopsticks (as does Greenbang, for that matter). In fact, they like them so much that they get through some 90,000 tons of sticks every year — about 200 pairs per person, every year.

But now, rather than binning the lot, they’re going to start collecting them in separate bins, which will be collected and converted into wooden pellets to be used as a high-energy fuel.

As travel-blog Gadling reports:

Typically, wooden pellets are formed using heat and pressure to compact sawdust and paper, though disposable chopsticks are clearly a more abundant resource. There is also hope that disposable chopsticks can be converted into ethanol, which is becoming an increasingly important additive to gasoline. Currently, there are approximately thirty facilities producing wooden pellets across the country, as well as ethanol-producing facilities in Osaka and Okayama.

New site: Ethical product reviews

Greenbang has been told about a new site on the scene, Ethical product reviews. It’s just gotten started, so it’s a little lite on the user feedback that it aims to get on board, but check it out.

As the blurb they sent us describes:

One of the greatest challenges facing ethical consumers today is which green products to shop for. It is very easy to end up with a cupboard full of stuff you don’t want simply because you’ve bought it ‘because it was Fairtrade…‘ or ‘organic‘, or ‘single mothers in India made it‘!

www.ethicalproductreview.co.uk is an impartial website whose product reviews are supplied by its users. It exists so consumers can look for product recommendations and air their own views about ethical and green products.

Norway converts prisoners into concerned environmentalists

Not content with topping the rankings on everything from quality of life to broadband access, those pesky Nordics are at it again, this time turning their prisoners into eco-friendly types. One of Norway’s lock-ups has become the world’s first “ecological prison”, it claims.

This story from the IHT:

The prison, without locked gates or barbed wire, has often been compared to a summer camp, and now operates with solar panels, wood-fire heating instead of oil, strict recycling and ecological food production.

The idea is to help the roughly 115 prisoners learn important values, such as protecting the environment and respecting others, before they return to society.

“Our job is to create the best possible development opportunities for the individual, and lay the foundation for possible changes,” said Prison Director Oeyvind Alnaes.

The green entrepreneur’s toolbox

Bootstrapper has put a handy guide to 100 networking resources, guides and links for entrepreneurs.

Check it all out here (the only shame being that Greenbang is absent from the list, but we’re dealing with it). It’s got some handy stuff, such as:

Tools

If you’re working green, you probably want to make your office paperless. Check out these tools that make it possible to do most of your work on your computer or even online.

26. Backpack: Instead of using lots of paper for to-do lists, ideas, and notes, put them all online with Backpack.
27. FreshBooks: Fresh Books makes it easy to do all of your billing online, even offering the option to email bills to your customers.
28. Breeze: Forget about sending out bulk snail mail. Send out a top-notch email campaign using Breeze.
29. Project Stat.us: Keep your customers informed about where you are on their project. Project Stat.us makes it easy to get everyone in the loop online.

In the bag: Walmart switches to cotton

CHINA WATCH  Walmart is working with Unilever to promote its reusable grocery bag made of cotton, calling customers to use this green bag instead of plastic bag.

In all Walmart’s Beijing outlets Greenbang found the promotion posters for this bag everywhere, and this Walmart green bag is selling for about 3 yuan (about $0.38).

Beijing: for Olympics’ sake, for face’s sake

CHINA WATCH “Face-saving” (爱面子 ai mian zi) is typically Chinese. When it comes to the 2008 Olympic Game, Beijingers would definitely assure you a successful one for the sake of Chinese people’s face.

Athletes and coaches complained about Beijing’s polluted air a lot on the foreign media, but none of them can be seen on a Chinese media, so the majority of Chinese don’t know about it. If they do, believe me, they will do everything to save the face. “It is a matter of face of the Chinese people,” one Beijinger told me.

Like the four-day car-banning practice earlier this month, even though it caused some inconvenience for most car owners, and some people thought “it is ridiculous”, they will still do it when it is for the Olympics’ sake, as we were all brought up to take the nation’s honour above our individual interest.

The state media applauded it: according to the Beijing Environment Protection Monitoring Center, Beijing’s overall air quality improved during the four-day test period, and it is said that the government may make it a long-term practice in Beijing. “Air quality is not only a matter for Beijing’s image, but also a matter concerning the health of athletes and the general public,” an official from the Beijing organizing committee said.

But, to be honest, Greenbang China doesn’t see any blue skies as the media claimed to see during those four days.
…

Calculating your green debt

A handy little website has sprung up that helps people calculate their ‘green debt’ and then offers ways to pay it back.

My Green Debt (best viewed in IE, not Firefox, as Greenbang discovered) allows you to enter the details of how profligate you are with your carbon and then calculates your total debt. From here, it suggests a huge array of possible solutions (from sharing with more people to switching energy suppliers), shows offset providers and allows you to calculate how you’ve cut your debt over time. (See how it works here).

This Greenbanger nervously entered his details and waited for it to be tallied up. Fortunately he scraped in a measly 3% below the UK average. More work to be done, clearly!

Greenbang tracks the explosion of the environmental industry, reporting on news of green innovation and thought leadership.

We blog on this rather than the environmental problems of the world because we are interested in the answers to climate change.