As wind farms become more and more common across the rural landscape, urban areas are also going to want to take advantage of the power of the wind. As anyone who has visited the windy City, the possibility of using wind turbines is unlimited.
This new type of propeller-less windmill, the Windspire uses technology that the Egyptians used for grinding wheat over 3000 years ago.
The Windspire is manufactured by Mariah Power. I was reading their blog and see that they have a Windspire at a Vineyard in New York. I just might have to take a trip up to NY and check the Windspire out for myself.
I would love to get one of these for my house, which is on top of a hill and usually gets a pretty good breeze on most days.
How about you? How would you like to get your electricity from a Windspire?
This months featured site is a local company I discovered one day while out doing errands. Mybarebags.com is a site that sells reusable canvas shopping bags. The issue of plastic shopping bags has been covered in previous posts. Plastic bags are something that I believe we need to learn to live without, and adopting a mentality of reusing instead of a disposable mentality is a really good step in the direction of drastically reducing plastic bag use.
I have actually bought and started using the reusable bags that you see at the grocery store. However, according to the owner of Mybarebags.com, Joyce Weand, these bags are made out of “non-woven polypropylene which is an oil-based product (more oil dependency…)” and the bags are only good for so many uses, and will not biodegrade in our lifetime.
Canvas shopping bags like the ones sold by Mybarebags.com are made out of cotton and are 100% biodegradable.
Have you heard about Neil Young’s Electric Car? I just read the blog post on The Huffington Post blog about the making of Neil’s electric car. How cool would that have been to here Neil creating some new songs or playing something from his Harvest album while you were working on his car. Neil also has some advice about saving the the automobile industry. Check out these posts as well as any of Neil’s other Huffington Post articles.
A $19,000 electric car similar to the smart car is to be released in the US in 2009. This electric car is only to be a low speed vehicle(LSV) so nothing for those of you with a lead foot. Links in this article then lead me to several other electric car articles:
From Treehugger, 30 Different Ways to Put a Roof Over Your Head…with all the layoffs and the way the economy is people are going to be needing this type of housing…a better class of Hoovervilles?
Speaking of shelter, I came across this site which sells Earth Shelter Technologies…these look like some pretty sweet
Earth friendly homes.
DailyTech has a post about “60 Minutes” Catching a Tech Firm Red Handed by exporting tech garbage to China…this article really makes me think about all the computers and cell phones that I have had within the last decade…I wonder were they all are now? Sadly, it also makes me realize that my spending habits do affect others.
I was sent a message from Kim to check out the Mixx thread about the post Wine and The Ecosystem on Nature.org. Check out the post to find some great articles about the environmental concerns facing the wine industry. This post reminded me of the August environmental post which had a reference to a Treehugger article about boxed wines which according to the article, is more environmentally friendly because the materials used for boxed wines are so much lighter than bottles. I am not exactly sure how many different wines are available in the boxed form, but I am guessing we should be seeing a greater variety as the industry gains respectability. Maybe Gary over at Wine Library TV will do a boxed wine video to let us know if any quality boxed wines are available.
If boxed wine isn’t something you are willing to try, try buying wines that are made locally instead of buying the imports which must be transported over a long distances. For a few more tip on buying more environmentally friendly wines, check out he article “What’s your wines carbon footprint?”
How does your favorite wine stack up?
Other Environmental Info
Kim also has a post that poses the old question Am I my brothers keeper? With the brother being the Earth.
Wow, I just found out about William Yuan, a twelve year old inventor who invented a new type of solar cell that absorbs 500 times the amount of energy current cells absorb. Wow…that is some kid.
From the http://www.onehundredmonths.org/ newsletter, came this creative video Wake Up, “Freak Out – then Get a Grip” , which I found to be a bit depressing, however its ending has a hopeful message.
The issue of 
reminded me of the 
My StumbleUpon Page
