Tracking Water Use in Real Time

Smart energy meters can help us conserve energy, sure, but what about water? As anyone suffering through a heat wave knows, water conservation can be just a crucial as power to keeping a city running. Beginning this week, residents of the Bronx will have detailed access to the minutiae of their water use courtesy of a real-time, online water use and bill tracking system.

The tool is available thanks to a $252 million citywide upgrade of the water-meter system. The upgrade also includes a switch to wireless water meters that provide more precise readings. So far 834,000 customers have the wireless meters, and the city expects to have its online water use tool available to all of them by September, according to The New York Times.

NYC’s tool will help customers track water consumption more effectively, but it won’t reward customers for using water at certain times. Although tiered water pricing plans are already being used in some cities, including Seattle and Tampa, and Mayor Bloomberg says such plans aren’t outside the realm of possibility for NYC, it’s not going to be part of this program.

The smart water industry isn’t nearly as developed as the smart energy sector, where a slew of companies are scrambling to grab a piece of the market. Still, as anyone who has been stuck in an area without fresh water can tell you, water use is just as important as energy consumption. And eventually, startups and established companies alike will start paying attention.

Original Post @ http://bit.ly/byT457

Why Does Sustainable Development Depend on Individual Acts of Heroism?

The Sustainable Agriculture Farmer Joel Salatin wrote a book titled Everything I want to do is Illegal. The opposite question that seems to come up again and again in sustainable development is, namely, why isn’t everything that’s harmful illegal?

No, this isn’t about bringing back prohibition or wading into the waters regarding America’s drug policy. This is not about big brother or government interference regarding what an adult knowingly chooses to do to his or her own body. This is far more banal. From the routine feeding of antibiotics to farm animals, to the piles of plastic currently adrift in the world’s oceans it seems as though we’ve erected a system that not only allows us to behave in unsustainable ways, rather we’ve developed one that actually encourages us to act in unsustainable ways.

Take for example, vinyl.

Vinyl, officially known as Polyvinyl chloride is an unbelievably toxic thermoplastic polymer. Every stage in its life cycle - production, use, and disposal - is a never ending assault on human health and the planet. The chemicals in vinyl are linked to the development of brain cancer, leukemia, liver diseases, birth defects, impaired neurological development, immune suppression and many, many other disorders. Dioxin which leaches from vinyl factories is bioaccumulative, which means that as it enters the environment it concentrates from simple organisms to more complex organisms becoming ever more toxic as it moves up the food chain.

Vinyl is also not recyclable.

And yet, vinyl is everywhere. It’s used in clothes, upholstery, vinyl siding, children’s toys, vegan shoes, shower curtains (that ‘new’ smell is actually volatile organic compounds off gassing). Unless one is both aware of the problems associated with vinyl and makes a concerted effort not to purchase vinyl products they become a complicit actor in harming both the environment and their own health.

And it’s not just vinyl.

From the food we eat to the clothes we wear, unless one is knowledgeable and informed each represents a mine field of socially, economically, and environmentally unsustainable practices that even the most ardent sustainability activist can’t wade through without completely opting out of society.

It boggles the mind.

In short, why is it that the most toxic aspects of our culture are opt-out instead of opt in?

Original Post @ http://bit.ly/cftYpJ

Baking bread, saving the planet.

Baking your own bread eliminates the plastic waste which wholesale and pre-packed bread automatically generates.

When you bake your own bread you also have FRESH YUMMY SCRUMMY bread in the house every day. The smell of fresh bread. Mmmm nothing beats that! :-)  
Did you know that let alone in the UK, 7mn slices of bread are thrown away every day. Not only would baking your own bread mean you would avoid the plastic waste which bread purchased in the super market generates, having day fresh and home made bread would also result in less waste.

Start baking! :-)

- Kristina. @disruptiveplay