March madness is over and our beloved Spartans came up short. As we bleed green, we can no longer blame basketball, or ski season, or classes for being derelict in our duty to update Greenrapper.com.

What has been on my head has also been on my mind. I got a lot of sheet for wearing my Gilligan style MSU hat circa 1996 to the tournament watching party in San Francisco this week. I hid my ancient head gear even though it is a perfectly good hat. After the semifinal game, I went home and watched this amazing video called “The Story of Stuff” and started to rethink my embarrassment. Though the Story of Stuff might be great for kids, it is also a great reminder for us adults who get wrapped up in our own champagne wishes and caviar dreams. Check it out!

There will probably be not be one cure-all solution to reliance on foreign energy and carbon emissions. Luckily, there are numerous people thinking creatively to harness energy from unlikely sources. Syngas is a process in which heat is used to convert a solid material such as coal or municipal waste into a gas. “Gasification” of biomass can reduce waste and carbon emissions since the source material is renewable and organic.

The Boston Globe did a story about one company, Ze-Gen, that heats scrap metal and captures the gases for combustion. Like many of the “new” energy propositions being developed these days, this idea is not new at all. A similar process was used to extract gasses from coal in order to light street lamps in the pre-electric days. (Via Nigel)

If you’re like me, you receive a white pages and yellow pages at least once a year and never use them. I think the last time I used the yellow pages, I was 6 years old and I tried to steal my mom’s car by sitting on a stack of them. These days, I’m too internet-connected to be bothered to flip through these huge books. For better or for worse, I’m much more likely to use Yelp or Google when trying to find a business or service in my community. Now there is an organization that gives you the option to discontinue your Yellow Page delivery. Yellow Pages Goes Green has a sign-up section that allows you to stop getting these deliveries. I haven’t heard any feedback on how well this works, but it’s definitely a good idea.

Proquo is a new service that claims it can remove you from unwanted mailing lists and let you opt in to those you want to receive. I would be a little weary that signing up for such a service might lead to more junk mail. Nothing in the world is free and for Proquo to be a viable business, they must have partnered with marketing companies in order to make the service work. That being said, they do have a very explicit privacy promise that agrees to hold your personal data sacred.

Further Reading

In her new book, Elizabeth Royte tells the story of how bottled water became the drink of choice for America. Bottlemania explains how a country with excellent, free, public tap water was persuaded to buy water in plastic bottles. Anyone who feels good about recycling their plastic water bottle will learn that they’re bottle is actually “downcycled” into other materials that are then thrown out. Bottlemania explores how water has become business and the effects this is having on a global scale. So sorry Aquapodmoms, even if I am fooled by the 6-8 glasses wives’ tale, I’ll still be using my sweet metal water bottle filled with FREE tap water.

I recently got back from a trip in the South. We took the easy, cheap route and flew Southwest, a no-frills airline that puts its employee’s first. Our flight attendant told us that a week earlier she counted Al Gore among the all-coach passengers. Much has been made by Al Gore’s political enemies of his energy consumption (in the name of environmental awareness), but no one can doubt his thrift.

This got me thinking about how the airline industry could become more green. There were some definite misgivings when Richard Branson’s Virgin Atlantic flew a plane on biofuel. Changing out jetfuel is a large step, but I think airports and airlines could take some very small steps to improve their environmental record. The TSA has made a lot of cash by picking up coins dropped from the security screening process. How much have they made from recycling all those water bottles they confiscate from folks at the gate?

Here’s a quick idea I drew out for making the refreshments on planes a little more environmentally-friendly, safer, and less staff-intensive. Each seat in the plane would have a magnetic valve projecting from the armrest that would act as a cup holder. A metal-bottomed cup could be passed out by flight attendants and cups would be filled from the bottom with pressurized refreshments stored in the back of the plane. Obviously, the planes would have to be fitted with piping for the drinks, but the system would cut down work for staff and would eliminate the waste of disposable cups, cans, and bottles.

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