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From the monthly archives:

January 2005

Eco-Investing: SustainableBusiness.Com

January 28, 2005

The Sustainable Business web site covers news about eco-effective companies. It hosts a large list of the current stock prices of these companies, sorted by industry type (for example “Geothermal” or “Health Care”).
The web site also has a “Green Investor” section, and lists the “20 Most Sustainable Stocks of 2004″. The editor, Rona Field, starts [...]

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Book Review: Natural Capitalism

January 24, 2005

Natural Capitalism is a book which dicusses similar ideas to those we present here at MetaEfficient.
Written by Paul Hawken and Amory and Hunter Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute, the book starts off by explaining the authors’ theory of “natural capitalism”, but then it really picks up and provides a fascinating and well-referenced examination of [...]

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Solar Tubes: Very Efficient Heating

January 22, 2005

Apricus makes a unique solar hot water heater which is 30-40% more efficient than flat plate solar systems.
The secret to the performance is the use of cylindrical evacuated glass tubes to absorb the heat from the sun. Because the tubes are cylindrical, there is always a surface area that is perpendicular to the sun.

The tubes [...]

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Slow Sand Filters

January 20, 2005

Slow sand filters are perhaps the most efficient means of producing clean drinking water.
Slow sand filters rely on biological processes for their action rather than physical filtration or disinfection. They require no electricity, no chemicals and no filter changes.
How is this possible? The secret is that slow sand filters work through the formation of a [...]

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Composting Toilets: Large Scale Systems

January 12, 2005

Composting toilets can be a practical solution even for large businesses. We recently visited the Philip Merrill Environment Center, which is the headquarters for the Chesapeake Bay Foundation. It has a Platinum rating for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) from the U.S. Green Building Council.
After taking a tour of their offices (about a [...]

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Micro and Pico Hydropower

January 10, 2005

If you own property that has access to a stream or river, and want to produce your own electricity, then Hydropower should be your first choice. The cost of equipment is lower, and the kilowatt per dollar return is much better than any other alternative energy source.
The most important element to have when producing hydropower [...]

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Book Review: The Beauty of Straw Bale Homes

January 7, 2005

Straw bales are a renewable resource, and they are becoming a widely used construction material in some parts of the U.S. Many localities have specific codes for strawbale construction, and some banks are willing to lend on this technique. Bale walls can be erected quickly, even by amatuer builders.
This book, The Beauty of Straw Bale [...]

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Household Products: Health & Safety Database

January 7, 2005

What’s under your kitchen sink, in your garage and on the shelves in your laundry room?
The National Institutes of Health has a database listing the ingredients of these products, the potential health effects, and safety and handling.
Information in the Household Products Database is taken from a variety of publicly available sources, including Material Safety Data [...]

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Waterproof Digital Camera: OptioWP

January 7, 2005

Pentax is introducing a compact digital camera, called the OptioWP, that can be used to shoot underwater. The camera won’t be available until March, 2005.
The seams in the camera are protected with rubber sealant and an interlocking design to resist dust, pressure and moisture. Inside, an internal 3X optical zoom captures images as close as [...]

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Book Review: Earthbag Building

January 6, 2005

What is Earthbag Building? Well, plainly enough, it’s a method of building using bags filled with earth.
This newly released book, Earthbag Building, is the first comprehensive guide to all the tools, tricks, and techniques for building with earthbags.
Having been introduced to sandbag construction by the renowned Nader Khalili in 1993, the authors developed this “Flexible [...]

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Using Urine to Grow Plants

January 6, 2005

This book, Liquid Gold: The Lore and Logic of Using Urine to Grow Plants, by Carol Steinfeld explains how urine can be utilized as a resource! Urine contains most of the nutrients in domestic wastewater and usually carries no disease risk.
Starting with a short history of urine use — from ritual to medicinal to even [...]

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DiscHub: CD & DVD Holder

January 6, 2005

The DiscHub is useful for storing CDs and DVDs that you just don’t have time to put away back in their cases. The DiscHub has 11 storage slots protected with a soft neoprene membrane. Adjacent slots are offset from each other, so that you easily roll any disc out of its slot. No recycled materials [...]

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Lead-Free Garden Hoses

January 4, 2005

Some garden hoses leach lead and other chemicals into the water. The problem is that they are made of PVC, which uses lead as a stabilizer.
Consumer Reports tested 16 brands of garden hose sold at national chains and on the internet. In some hoses they measured 10 to 100 times more lead than the EPA [...]

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Wi-Fi HotSpotter

January 3, 2005

A new WIFI dectector has been released that not only spots Wi-Fi networks and details their signal strength, but reveals the name of each available network.
The Digital Hotspotter from Canary Wireless is also the first detector to reveal the most important piece of information of all: whether a network is encrypted. It is priced at [...]

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