Companies trying to be green are coming up with enough colorful comparisons to cover the Amazon River basin-twice. In November, Xerox announced that since 1991 it had reused or recycled a total of 2 billion pounds of spent toner cartridges, outmoded printers and such - enough waste, it said, to fill more than 160,000 garbage trucks, stretching more than 1,000 miles, from Seattle to the Mexican border. The Environmental Protection Agency says that, in 2006, the electronics manufacturers and retailers that have joined its ‘Plug into eCycling’ program had, by collecting and recycling ink cartridges and machines, saved enough electricity to power more than 7,000 homes. And today Hewlett-Packard said that in 2007 alone it recycled 250 million pounds of hardware and printer cartridges - the equivalent of ‘more than double the weight of the Titanic.’ It makes one almost nostalgic for the hackneyed ‘the length of ten football fields’ comparison. But behind the descriptions is a real race among electronics companies to how how serious they are about going green. It has never been easy. The design tricks printer companies have used to make it harder for outsiders to refill their cartridges has also […]
Until this year, there were different EcoLogo standards for photocopiers, fax machines and laser printers. The criteria for these standards, first instituted in 1998, are now being combined into one updated standard along with requirements for multifunctional devices and mailing machines. The standard will go into effect at the end of March. So what does it take to make a green office machine? And how has EcoLogo’s criteria changed in ten years? You can read the full documentation on the standard here, but I thought I’d highlight a few items specifically that are new in 2008. First, there are new chemical requirements. For example, the new EcoLogo standard mandates compliance with the RoHS directive with regard to restrictions on certain hazardous substances in electrical and electronic equipment. It also includes criteria for the plastic casing parts on any office machine. To win EcoLogo certification, casings must not be manufactured with the following flame retardants: * Poly-brominated biphenyls (PBBs) * Polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs) * Chloroparaffin flame retardents with chain length 10 to 17 carbon atoms, and chlorine content greater than 50% by weight These […]
Lowering blood sugar to near-normal levels is a proven treatment for Type 1 diabetics, but it may not be the best treatment for those with Type 2 diabetes, particularly those with heart disease or multiple risk factors for heart disease, government scientists said today. Researchers had to curtail a major clinical trial of intensive treatment for such patients after concluding that patients with the lowest blood sugar levels had an increased risk of dying compared to those with a more modest reduction of sugar levels. The findings were a surprise to researchers, who expected to see a clear benefit from the lower sugar levels, and their source remains a mystery. Analysis has been unable to link the increased death rate to episodes of hypoglycemia — low blood sugar — or to any drug or combination of drugs used in the study. In particular, they did not find any link to the diabetes drug rosiglitazone, trade-named Avandia, which has previously been linked to deaths from heart disease among those taking it. Dr. William T. Friedewald of Columbia University, who led the study, cautioned that most diabetes patients are not aiming to achieve such low blood sugar levels, […]
OSLO — Global warming this century could trigger a runaway thaw of Greenland’s ice sheet and other abrupt shifts such as a dieback of the Amazon rainforest, scientists said on Monday. They urged governments to be more aware of ‘tipping points’ in nature, tiny shifts that can bring big and almost always damaging changes such as a melt of Arctic summer sea ice or a collapse of the Indian monsoon. ‘Society may be lulled into a false sense of security by smooth projections of global change,’ the scientists at British, German and U.S. institutes wrote in a report saying there were many little-understood thresholds in nature. ‘The greatest and clearest threat is to the Arctic with summer sea ice loss likely to occur long before, and potentially contribute to, Greenland ice sheet melt,’ they wrote in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. ‘Tipping elements in the tropics, the boreal zone, and west Antarctica are surrounded by large uncertainty,’ they wrote, pointing to more potential abrupt shifts than seen in a 2007 report by the U.N. Climate Panel. A projected drying of the Amazon basin, linked both to logging and to global warming, […]
TORTONA, Italy — Italian chemical group Mossi & Ghisolfi, M&G, plans to build a 200,000-tonne bioethanol plant and convert it to using cellulose feedstock as pressure mounts on the sector to make more environment-friendly biofuels. Traditional biofuels — produced from grains, vegetable oils and sugar cane — are facing strong criticism for driving food prices up and for limited contribution to cuts in heat-trapping gas emissions. M&G Vice President Guido Ghisolfi said his group with partners would invest about 100 million euros ($148.1 million) to build the biggest bioethanol plant in Italy by 2009 and 120 million euros more in research to convert it to cellulose feedstock later on. The plant in the north Italian region of Piedmont would produce 200,000 tons, or about 2.5 million hectoliters of bioethanol to help Italy meet its bioethanol target of about 1 million tons by 2010, Ghisolfi said. ‘Our goal is to be competitive with Brazilian ethanol even without subsidies,’ Ghisolfi said on the sidelines of a biofuels conference, brushing off sector concerns that Italian bioethanol producers have been hit by limited fiscal brakes. The new plant would initially use 600,000 tons of maize as feedstock and Tortona-based […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
