Solutions
Submitted by Live Earth on 10 November, 2009 - 01:39
If you don't have a tap, washing your hands in a hygienic way isn't easy. You could place a bowl of water on a table, but then you would be washing your hands in the dirty water other people left behind. You could walk to the hand pump and ask somebody else to pump while you wash your hands. But that needs two people and wastes a lot of water. Can we do better?
A Tippy Tap used in Uganda.
Enter the Tippy Tap.
Submitted by Paul Faeth on 9 November, 2009 - 10:51
Every Monday we profile a Dow Live Earth Run for Water partner organization that works toward providing solutions to the nearly 1 billion people who lack access to clean, safe water. To donate to one of these projects, visit liveearth.org/give.
In the spring of this year, I traveled to L’Esperance Orphanage in Rwanda where I found a wellspring of hope amidst the surrounding village’s poverty and water woes. It's fitting after all – "l'esperance" for all of the non-French speakers means "hope."
The homes in the village surrounding the orphanage had no clean water. This meant that local children had to make a daily trek 11 stories downhill to a pumping station and carry back-breaking jugs of water back up the hill.
Submitted by jgeeslin on 4 November, 2009 - 15:02
Al Gore's new book "Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis" is now on sale! Following up on his wildly successful 2006 book "An Inconvenient Truth," "Our Choice" goes into more detail about the solutions we can pursue to prevent the irreversible damage to our planet, as opposed to just making us aware of the problem.
Submitted by Live Earth on 2 November, 2009 - 02:09
Every Monday we profile a Dow Live Earth Run for Water partner organization that works toward providing solutions to the nearly 1 billion people who lack access to clean, safe water. To donate to one of these projects, visit liveearth.org/give.
A Child's Right (ACR) is unique in the water field as its sole focus is bringing clean, safe, purified drinking water to vulnerable children in impoverished urban and peri-urban centers – specifically to sites burdened with unsafe water quality and high concentrations of at-risk children. In the last three years alone, they have provided safe drinking water to more than 250,000 children in orphanages, street shelters, rescue homes, schools, displacement camps and children's hospitals in cities around the world.
Submitted by jgeeslin on 27 October, 2009 - 06:00
Ever wonder how water makes it up to your top floor apartment? This is something that most of us don’t think twice about because we’re lucky enough to turn on the faucet and its just there. Well not only does it takes hundreds of energy sucking pumps to get us the water we need, but it is in fact one of the highest uses of energy in the United States. According to a 2005 California Energy Commission report (pdf), about 25 % of America’s electricity goes to moving and treating water!
Submitted by Live Earth on 26 October, 2009 - 13:46
Every Monday we profile a Dow Live Earth Run for Water partner organization that works toward providing solutions to the nearly 1 billion people who lack access to clean, safe water. To donate to one of these projects, visit liveearth.org/give.
Pump Aid is an international Water and Sanitation charity that tackles poverty by working with local communities in southern Africa. Pump Aid does this by establishing sustainable supplies of clean water and safer sanitation solutions. The long-term effects of our work will ensure improved health and increased agricultural production by improving the availability and quality of water for domestic consumption; promoting the productive use of water in agriculture, tree-planting; and providing sanitation with health education.
Submitted by jgeeslin on 19 October, 2009 - 14:30
In the Mtwara region, one of the poorest in Tanzania, the health status of the people is below the national average and infant mortality is well above it. Only around 30% of the population has access to safe water and adequate sanitation.
Malaria is prevalent throughout the region, and many of diseases afflicting people are water related.
Global Water Challenge and African Medical and Research Foundation (AMREF) have partnered and are constructing rainwater harvesting systems in schools in the Mtwara region of Tanzania, Africa. This will help to implement clean water, safe sanitation and hygiene practices in this impoverished region of Tanzania.
Submitted by jgeeslin on 22 September, 2009 - 19:02
In order to reduce paper waste, connect better with residents, and ultimately save taxpayer dollars, the cities of San Francisco and Newark have gone paperless with Zumbox! It represents a more cost-effective and environmentally responsible way to send postal mail. It also represents a secure, data-rich, and spam-free alternative to commercial e-mail.
Zumbox is the world's first and only paperless postal system. The company has created a web-based platform for the delivery of paperless mail.
Submitted by admin on 18 August, 2009 - 13:24
Iowa! Wind power actually provided 5% of the state's electricity in 2006.
And 3 years later, the Hawkeye State continues to up the ante, Iowa produces between 15% and 17% of its own electricity from wind power.
The state has provided really good incentives to make this happen. Iowa's biggest utility company, MidAmerica Energy, pays farmers $3,500 a year to rent locations for wind turbines.
Click here for more info.
Submitted by admin on 18 August, 2009 - 09:53
An empty lot was all that was left after the Austin, Texas airport moved in 1999.
Naturally, ideas started bouncing around about what to do with the massive space. What it has now become is a beautiful, working art installation that serves as a metaphor for the energy-conscious city of Austin.
The field is made up of 15 flower-shaped photovoltaic solar panels that line a pedestrian and bike path on the greenbelt on Mueller, an urban village between a retail lot and Interstate 35.
