• Make Your Own Costumes: Rather than buy a costume and throw away after just one use, make your own using old clothing, mom’s 80’s make-up (BOO!), and plenty of hair spray. Not only will your children enjoy masquerading in ancient heels, you’ll have a chance to critically ask yourself, “What was I thinking?”
• Use Reusable Bags: North Americans use over 420 million bags a year, littering our waste sites, killing marine life, and leaching into our soil for generations to come. Not to mention the millions of gallons of dirty fossil fuels needed to create the plastic bags in the first place. Reach instead for a durable, re-usable bag, or better yet, an old pillowcase or cloth.
• Walk, walk, walk: Kids don’t need 40 pounds of candy. Really. Instead of taking them all over town in a car, keep the car parked at home, and walk your kids around your neighbourhood, collecting candy and saving yourself the gas and emissions. Who knows, you may even lose an inch around the waist.
• Hand Out Eco-Friendly Treats: Notice I said treats, not just candy. If you are going for candy, buy locally (Wal-Mart doesn’t count), keeping in mind the smaller shops that help keep your local economy strong, and stick to organic candies as much as possible. If you’re thinking of being avant-garde, you can opt to throw in neat little gizmos, such as stickers, keychains, erasers, or a scientific calculator. Ok, maybe not the calculator.
• Keep a Trash Can by the Door: Not only can you pretend there’s a ghoul inside it, but many children will have eaten a handful of candy from door to door.  Encourage them to throw their garbage in there, versus your driveway or front lawn. If you’re a parent walking with the kids, bring a bag with you and pick up candy litter along the way.
• Use Your Pumpkins: There are a variety of pies, muffins, and desserts you can make with your leftover pumpkins. Don’t just throw them out when Halloween is over—use whatever you can, including the seeds, and toss the rest into your composter. Don’t have a composter? Now’s the perfect time to get one before the cold sets in. Contrary to popular belief, food does continue to break down in the cold.
• Lead by Example: The best way to keep the green movement growing is through leading by example. Gather some friends and neighbours, and have them join you on your Green Halloween. Tell everyone what you’re doing, and if not this year, perhaps next year they’ll decide to partake in your ghoulishly green mission.

Happy Halloween!

That’s why Beijing’s “green” considerations during the 2008 Olympics mark a significant shift reflecting the world’s growing awareness of its environmental footprint, while recognizing the need for incorporating sustainable policies in all endeavours, whether big or small. Although nobody’s quite sure if Beijing chose to incorporate sustainable practices as a mega-PR move, or out of a sincere concern for the environment (I’m holding back a laugh), it doesn’t really matter. The end result is positive, and remains the focus of this post.

If we look at the LEED-Gold Certified Olympic Village, it boasts some rather fantastic selling points, including near-zero net energy consumption. Here’s a short list of how it got there:

• Solar heat, solar electric cogeneration, and solar hot water “intelligent” devices that help consume less than 1/30 the energy of traditional buildings of similar size (as it stands, the Village has 22 six-storey buildings and 20 nine-storey buildings)
• Heat exchange systems that draw almost 8 million kilowatt hours of renewable energy from solar sources
• Geothermal heat pumps as the building’s main energy supply source
• Use of nearby sewage treatment plants to convert their energy through heat pump devices, saving an additional 40% of energy versus conventional air conditioning and heating systems
• Water-recycling programs that reclaim 200 tons of water, daily
• Lithium battery-powered buses around the Olympic Village

It’s noteworthy that Olympic Villages usually go on to house ordinary residents after the games are over, so the benefits of Beijing’s green buildings will continue to be enjoyed for future generations. Additionally, news of Beijing’s winning Olympic bid in 2001 helped spark the expansion of its public transport infrastructure, the creation of new parks, additional bus transport links, and the introduction of water recycling programs in Beijing—initiating the “green legacy” of the Olympics. Not bad for a country boasting one of the highest CO2 emission rates in the world.

The Great Wall of Waste
Despite China’s enthusiasm to portray itself as a greening-tour-de-force, its scorecard outside of the games doesn’t warrant cheers. In fact, quite the opposite; through its over-industrialization and dismal policies, China’s landscape, air pollution, and water treatment all rank as some of the worst in the developing world. With 15% of China’s yearly death rate attributed to air pollution, and concerns over its vastly polluted water (among other things), China faces some big challenges going forward.

Hoping for Change
With the games drawing to an end today, it’s up to China—its government and its residents, to decide whether they feel inspired enough to spread the green legacy throughout the rest of the country, or continue to wallow in their over-dependency on coal.

Then it hit me – hydrogen fuel cells are in fact not efficient or green when you consider their footprint over their life cycle (also known as “well to wheel” for cars). In fact, a careful analysis shows just the opposite—hydrogen fuel cells are far less efficient than conventional gasoline-based engines, and require much more energy to even make this hydrogen “usable”. Let’s see why…

Hydrogen does make an emission-less fuel cycle possible, but there’s a catch: hydrogen must be extracted from biomass or by electrolysis of water using …electricity! The statistics below are drawn from simple mathematical analysis using the known BTU of energy per barrel of oil, the energy needed to run a car, and process efficiencies for gasoline- and hydrogen-powered cars:

• Gasoline-powered cars in 2007 had an energy efficiency of about 25%, well to wheel.
• Hydrogen-powered cars, where the hydrogen is extracted by electrolysis, has an efficiency of about 12%–less than half that of gasoline-powered vehicles.

Why the pronounced difference? After all, isn’t hydrogen supposed to be a “green” fuel? In theory, hydrogen is a clean fuel. It’s the extraction of hydrogen that makes it dirty. Here’s why:

• Electrolysis, used to extract hydrogen, is a 70% efficient process.
• Within the fuel cell itself, some of that energy is converted into non-usable water vapour, and the potential energy yield drops by another 15%.
• The best fuel cell we have is also about 70% efficient, lowering the potential energy yield by another 30%.
• Because hydrogen is a gas, it takes up 3107 times the space of its gasoline equivalent. The energy needed in compressing it to fit in a tank is huge and further reduces the potential energy yield by another 27.4%
• The U.S. relies on its supply of coal and coal-fired stations, which run at only 40% efficiency, to produce the electricity needed to extract the hydrogen.

Taking all the factors into consideration, it takes twice the energy that was used for gasoline-powered cars and one third that of the entire energy consumption of the U.S. to produce the hydrogen used in cars. Not to mention the little fact of increased CO2 emissions of about 270% from the coal-powered plants to produce hydrogen.

Even if we were to scrap the coal-fired stations, and go for renewable resources to muster up the huge energy (think 1.53 trillion kwh) needed to fuel this hydrogen production “process”, we wouldn’t be able to achieve it. It would take the entire area of the U.S. covered with solar panels to make a dent in the amount of energy needed to produce hydrogen for its cars. In such high numbers, wind power and solar would show the carbon payback and GHG contribution from the manufacturing process to be counterproductive and extremely high.

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So there you have it—half the efficiency of gasoline-powered cars, and much higher carbon footprint once life cycle considerations are taken into account. I guess it’s back to skateboards for everyone!

If you’re interested in reading a more in-depth analysis of the numbers presented above, the New Atlantic Journal of Technology & Society has a great article titled, The Hydrogen Hoax.

Let’s just think for a moment how Canada could set an example. We could erect wind turbines in the moderate-north, where no human wants to live, but energy sources abound. We could plaster our suburban and rural lands with field after field, or roof after roof, of solar panels. We could make it mandatory to install rain barrels outside our 2000 sq ft, homogeneous, suburban row housing. We could mandate the use of water efficient products in our residential and commercial communities, and demand to see green roofs on our buildings, instead of ugly concrete facades and HVAC devices.

The truth is, our government is still very much devoted to oil and fossil fuels, no matter what Mr. Harper dictates in his speeches to the world. We are dependent on oil, and sadly, will continue to be until we see every acre of our environment completely destroyed, or Mr. Suzuki develops an aneurism—whichever comes first. But there is hope!

Sustainability is a growing grassroots movement, and it will continue to grow in leaps and bounds as people like you and I become more educated about sustainable practices and our impact on the world. This is why we need to act now, from the ground up, and not wait for the government to tell us what’s “good” or “bad”, especially since so many government “policies” are aimed at helping corporate cronies make more money (check this out), and are not necessarily based on sound, logical principles (ethanol, anyone?).

This brings me to GreenPeace, and a rather tongue-in-cheek Tourism site they’ve created, aptly titled “Explore Alberta”. Watch and marvel at today’s bustling Albertan skyline, and relish in the thought of taking your next trip out to Alberta instead of sunny Punta Cana or Florida. Bon Voyage!

• Higher-income households and those with children were most likely to drink bottled water.
• The higher bottled water consumption among high-income households was driven by households where no one completed a university degree.
• Households where at least one member had completed a university degree drank less bottled water than their counterparts who had no post-secondary education.

Surprising? I think so. As a university-graduate myself, I never would have thought to correlate education with bottled-water consumption, but it does provide me with some relief. I always wondered whether I was just a nagging “logicalist” or perhaps a perturbed environmentalist—and now, I can claim neither. I’m simply a university graduate. Yippee!

In all seriousness, bottled water just doesn’t seem to make sense. It costs over 1000 times more than its municipally-treated counterpart from the tap, is regulated and tested far less (read: in some cases, never), and is leaving an environmental disaster in its wake. With hundreds of tons of plastic basking in our landfills, and now reports about the plastic additives leaching into the bottled water, why are we still apprehensive to switch to the tap?

Leave it up to the marketing gurus and today’s age of overconsumption, and you have a match made in the French Alps. Consumers believe that bottled water is cleaner, tastes better, and even looks better. Why? Because it’s being sold in brightly lit, clean supermarkets, has a crisp, colourful label on it, AND they’re paying more for it—feeding into their appetite for exclusivity and luxury. The marketing hype convinces consumers that this stuff is better for you than good ol’ tap water. With social thinking dictating that “we get what we pay for”, it’s no wonder consumers believe that bottled water is “better” than the infinitely cheaper municipal tap water.

Check out this rather telling (and somewhat potty-mouthed) video comparing people’s perception of tap vs. bottled water. Then come back with a tall glass of water (I won’t tell you which), and give me your thoughts on the subject.