The worlds first sustainable performance running shoe! When it comes to sustainability, it's time for running gear to lead the way, not follow.
This running shoe was made by BioMoGo and utilizes recycled and other earth-friendly components. Constructed with roughly half as many parts as comparable shoes, the
Green Silence requires less petroleum and energy to make. Of course, the
shoe manages all of this while delivering the premium performance
expected from Brooks.
image: brooks
The Key Green Features Are:
BioMoGo, the world's first-ever biodegradable midsole for running shoes
75% of the shoe's materials are post-consumer recycled
Biodegradable insole and collar foams
Packaging is 100% post-consumer recycled
Laces, gillies, and reinforced webbing are 100% post-consumer recycled
You may think twice this summer before buying that tub of your favorite vanilla ice cream. Wholesale prices have risen by around 20 per cent in just two months – an
increase which will hit thousands of food and drink manufactures, including
ice cream makers.
“The stocks in the world are being run down and we are getting to a point now
where we are likely to see the price suddenly shoot upwards,” said Nick
Peksa, business development director at market analysts Mintec.
Many people don't know that there is a major vanilla shortage occurring around the world. According to Mintec, the production of vanilla in Mexico alone has fallen by 90% in the past year. As a result, panic buying has begun driving up stock prices. In fact, widespread stockpiling of Madagascan black-vanilla has pushed up the prices up even further because of a recent rush order which entailed around 40% of the world supply of black vanilla (~1000 tonnes). Note that Indonesia also produces black-vanilla, alongside India and Mexico, but these countries have been experiencing a massive reduction in production.
So what is "black-vanilla" you ask? Black-vanilla is just a fancy name for "food grade vanilla". It is called black-vanilla because of the color of the dried pods harvested from the orchids. As previously mentioned, it is only grown in a small handful of countries and as a result its price is susceptible to poor harvest.
As global warming is taking effect and the population continues to escalate, we are seeing more and more how precious our resources are; especially vanilla. In fact, vanilla is the second most expensive spice in the world – after saffron – because
it is so labor intensive.
According to Mr. Peksa from Mintec “Vanilla is the most expensive ingredient in ice cream production per
kilogram, so it is highly likely that some producers will not be able to
absorb the extra cost. This could push the price of ice cream up by around 10 per cent.”
When you think of 3D printed objects, the last thing that comes to mind is something as small as a grain of sand. Well, you better believe it because researchers in Austria at the University of Vienna have set a new world speed record for the fastest 3D-printed nano-objects.
Their latest task was to get the printer to make a race car model the size of a grain of sand. The race car was 0.285mm in length and created in just over four minutes. Incredible! To get an even better perspective, in order to produce this car approximately 100 layers had to be overlapped of nano-size sand, each consisting of 200 single printed lines.
So what is this good for? Well, the scientists say that the technique could be used to make small biomedical parts.
The problem in the past was the time taken to do this. In fact, the technology itself is not novel in science, but what is novel is how fast they were able to accomplish the given task using their set-up and materials. In an interview with the BBC, the scientist said that "they can speed up the original process by a factor of 500 or in some cases 1,000 times."
What is this special process that is able to do create such mind-blowing things? The formal name for the process is called "two-photon lithography." What happens here, is a laser beam is focused onto a liquid resin. This laser focusing, immediately hardens the resin, leaving behind a line of solid polymer just a few nanometers wide. Generally, 3-D printing techniques build up objects by adding layers to the surface, but what makes this process different is that the laser can create solid material anywhere within the liquid material.
Specifically, the researchers breakthrough entailed improving the control mechanism for mirrors used to focus the laser, and developing the special type of resin involved in the process.
Even more amazing is that the researchers are now going to develop bio-compatible resins so that the objects they create can be used by doctors. An example application is to create scaffolds which cells could use to build new biological tissues.
So many companies today won't switch their packaging to make it more sustainable (compostable, biodegradable). Often this comes down to cost as industry has to pay x-dollars annually to recycle or dispose of their packaging.
Yes, recycling plastic is better than throwing it away and it being sent to a landfill but the process uses a lot of energy (manufacturing, sorting, shipping) and the plastics have to be incinerated which often releases toxins into the atmosphere. In fact, last year, of the 28.9 million tons
of plastic packaging generated, only 5.7% was recycled or reused in some way,
and 94.3% was sent to a landfill and discarded or combusted into the
environment.[i]
If companies and citizens do not take
responsibility and an interest in this matter soon, the amount of waste
generated is going to reach an incredible high, and result in unforgivable
damage to the ecosystem. Datamonitor.com, a world-leading provider of premium global business information, is
already predicting market production for containers and packaging to reach to
8.7 million tonnes by the end of 2013, representing a current annual growth
rate (CAGR) of 1.6% for the 2008-2013 period.
Since it is difficult to completely eliminate the whole incineration process involved when companies recycle their plastics, Sato America has come up with a solution to reduce the impact on the environment while adapting these existing practices. They have created an ECONANO® series of labels that absorb and reduce the carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere when the labels are incinerated.
So how is it possible for a label to absorb carbon dioxide? Well, Sato America Inc., a leader in barcode printing, has created a special carbon dioxide absorbent to the label's adhesive that reduces the amount of carbon dioxide released at the point of incineration by more than 20% compared with conventional labels. Even better, than when this technology is combined with their SATO’s NONSEPA®liner-less label series, it is possible to achieve an approximate 50% reduction in carbon dioxide emissions at the time of incineration, the company claims.
To better understand the scope of SATO's environmental claims, they provide an example on their website that put these statistics into perspective...
"If you were to replace 1 million 50mm x 85mm standard labels used over the course of one year with ECONANO® labels, the CO2 released at incineration would be reduced by 224kg. This is equivalent to the amount of CO2 released during the manufacture, treatment and incineration of 4,814 plastic bags."
Note that this ECONANO® lable was developed by the SATO Group in collaboration with Professor
Masahiko Abe of the Tokyo University of Science, and the University’s
venture company, ACTiiVE.
In a recent interview, found on SatoAmerica's website they had all but good things to say about ECONANO and their company objectives...
"Reducing carbon emissions is a challenge for all businesses today,”
said Etsuo Fujii, President of SATO CORPORATION. But the cutting-edge
technology SATO employs in its ECONANO® series labels offers our
customers a helping-hand in achieving their environmental targets, and
provides them with solutions beneficial to all levels of consumer goods
product identification and supply chain labeling."
What's most intriguing about this new product is how SATO is working with the current system set in place for disposing of plastics, instead of inventing something completely new that countries don't have the proper infrastructure to support.
References
[i] Ruixiang, Z.,
Torley, P., Halley, P. (2008) Emerging biodegradable materials: starch- and
protein-based bio-nanocomposites. Journal
of Material Science, 43, 3058-3071.
