Sometimes it’s really hard to do the right thing.
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I had to explain biochar to my editor, so this rough is a reject
Oscar explains the most eco-friendly way to be disposed of
I’ll leave it to CSIRO to define biochar:
Biochar is a stable form of charcoal produced from heating natural organic materials (crop and other waste, woodchips, manure) in a high temperature, low oxygen process known as pyrolysis. Due to its molecular structure, biochar is chemically and biologically in a more stable form than the original carbon form it comes from, making it more difficult to break down. This means that in some cases it can remain stable in soil for hundreds to thousands of years.
Tags: biochar, burial, carbon fixing, charcoal, cremation, eco, environmental, fixing carbon, green
Taste of Melbourne - Inside the Exhibition Building
The boyf won tickets for Taste of Melbourne last week. I was expecting I would get bored after the initial (very overpriced) dishes from the restaurant stalls, but it wasn’t too bad.
For starters there were a lot of chocolate and ice cream companies giving out free samples. The marshmallows dipped in Green and Black's chocolate fountain were to die for and only bettered by Gundowring Golden Syrup icecream worth going to purgatory for.
I got to chat to the guy at Bultarra Saltbush Lamb - usually they are very busy when we buy their lamb from the farmers market
I also had a good chat with Enviromeat, who raise, market and distribute beef that has a low environmental impact
I ended up being there for 2 hours (the boyf was there for nearly four – I had to repair to the adjacent Melbourne Museum and revive myself by looking at Ordician fossils and the odd dinosaur skeleton)
Some of the trilobite fossils have been painstakingly cleaned and look quite animated
Tarbosaurus - Tyranosaurus' marginally less scary cousin
When he emerged, we went on to Brunswick Street and found a great new bar with food that was just as good as what we had had at Taste of Melbourne, but waaaaay cheaper ($2 per tapas, not $8 to $12) – it was almost like being in Donostia-San Sebastian.
Plus the pipework in Naked for Satan should make a great reference for a cartoon one day...
Tags: eco, enviromeat, environmentally friendly, green, meat, melbourne museum, taste of melbourne
Today’s cartoon is part of a series that I’ll post when it has run. In the meantime, here’s a sneak peak of Sunday’s panel.
Oscar gives the Earth a hug
Great to see more posts in the blogosphere about how not having children (or limiting the number you have to one or two) can be good for the planet as well as society. This post in Grist from Lisa Hymas was a follow up to an earlier post on the subject and provided an answer to an argument I’m faced with a lot (even by fellow greenies) – “you’d be a great person to have kids, as we need more people who think like you”…
For starters, I’ll turn again to wise words from Stephanie Mills, who heard similar arguments after she announced her intention to remain childfree in 1969:
There were well-intentioned folks who told me that I was just the kind of person who should be having children. I would respond that given the presence of the then three billion people on Earth, there were already plenty of promising babies in the world, a multitude of whom could be well served by some economic and racial justice so that the privileges I had enjoyed wouldn’t be such an extraordinary qualification for motherhood.
Also, remember, as a number of commenters note: You don’t get to pick how your kids turn out. Good parents try their best to instill in their kids strong social and environmental values, but ultimately kids determine their own destinies, parents be damned.
She doesn’t mention that even trying to live more sustainably, we still have an impact on the planet and it would just be a lot better place for future generations to live in if there were less people in those generations.
Frank has joined the voluntary human extinction movement
Tags: child free, green, low impact, no children, overpopulation, population growth
Oscar and Ed discuss biodegradable bags
Biodegradable bags, takeaway cups/containers and other disposable items are only really good for the planet when they are composted effectively. As Lucy Siegle reports in The Guardian:
These products are biodegradable or compostable, made by substituting the oil-based synthetic polymers that ordinarily go into plastics for natural crop or waste resources ranging from cellulose from wood pulp to sugarcane or even potato peelings. The theory goes that you can have your cake, eat it and toss both fork and plate away without a care in the world to be absorbed by grateful Mother Earth.
Sadly, life doesn’t work like that very often. And neither does landfill, which is where most of this “biodegradable” waste ends up. Here, there is no guarantee that the air, water and heat needed by microorganisms to break down and feast on these biodegradable products will actually be provided. In fact, quite the opposite: today’s landfills are all about keeping the chemistry as stable as possible, which is why garbologists (landfill historians) can identify salad leaves years after they’ve been dumped.
I tend to use reusable bags, but sometimes I’m caught short and I’d like to know that any biodegradable bag I used would really break down in my garden and not end up as lots of tiny pieces of plastic.
Tags: bag, biodegradable, compostable, green, marketing, plastic
Read Today’s Strip
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