People love to get away from home, immerse themselves in a temporary, vibrant community, and get lost in the music or the stage shows or the food found at summertime festivals. And while all this merriment can be a fabulous way to escape, the planet largely bears the brunt of festivals ills:

• Too much garbage and waste
• Energy-intensive shows and displays
• Ecosystem destruction as event-goers trample local vegetation and disturb animals with higher-than average noise levels
• Junk give-aways that are neither useful or well-made so they get throw away immediately after the event
• Emissions-intensive travel to get to the events

Characteristics of green festivals:

To turn these environmental difficulties into opportunities to do better by the planet, some festivals are going green by implementing some or all of these strategies:

• Awareness and money raising: Green festivals can help to raise money and awareness about environmental projects by promoting eco-actions and donations to worthy green causes.
• Green power: As it is, outdoor festivals use a lot less energy than indoor ones, but many festivals these days are opting to power their operations using green energy, such as that derived from solar, wind, and geothermal sources. That means they purchase the equivalent amount of energy used for the festival from local utilities that supply green energy. Some even erect their own temporary solar panels to power various stages.
• Sustainable menus: Helping to expose people to eco-friendly foods is one of the aims of greener festivals. As such, many offer organic, vegetarian foods, locally-grown options, and things like that.
• Transit: Getting to festivals can add the greatest environmental burden to an event. To mitigate the greenhouse gas emissions expended by vehicles and planes, green festivals are encouraging the use of trains by placing the location of the event nearer to major stops. Others have established free, guarded bike parking areas. And still others give event-goers the option of off-setting their transportation with carbon offsets and credits.
• Minimizing trash: There are many efforts being attempted to reduce the amount of food-related waste at festivals. Some have instituted a deposit/refund for the use of bottles and cups used at beverage stands, while others are sure to compost all organics and food leftovers.
• Waste handling: All green festivals will have comprehensive recycling programs for diverting waste away from the landfill. That means collecting all glass, metal, plastic, and paper waste to be taken to a recycling facility. Some even have programs for collecting things like sleeping bags, chairs, and clothes that would otherwise be discarded after the event.
• Green vendors: One of the other perks of eco-friendly festivals is being able to advertise green products, like eco-clothing, green furniture, and the like. You never know the treasures youâ??ll find!

Here are some eco-friendly festivals you may want to check out:

• A Greener Festival listings
• Bonnaroo – Manchester, Tennessee
• Green Festival – DC or San Francisco
• Organic Planet Festival – Humboldt County, CA
• Planet Friendly listings – Canada & US
• Roskilde Festival - Denmark
• Wanderlust – Squaw Valley, CA

Guest Post: Geordie is an active blogger and has been guest blogging for a number of eco websites and tech sites. This post came out of hearing that her mates are going to v festival and wondering just how green a virgin ran festival is.

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photo via flickr

Mountaintop removal was again in the news this week after the EPA announced that it wants to overrule the Army Corps of Engineers and revoke the permit for one of Appalachia’s largest MTR sites. Arch Coal Inc.’s Spruce No. 1 in West Virginia has been at the center of controversy, but the EPA will take away the mine’s permit under the Clean Air Act, a victory for the increasingly strong movement against mountaintop removal….Read the full story on TreeHugger

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Image: Craig Simonox, Dominion Post and TVNZ

Nick Lowe, of Johnsonville, New Zealand, pulls on bike shorts and a t-shirt when he climbs on to pedal away through the city. But as soon as he hits the open road, a “change of clothes” is on the agenda. The t-shirt graces Lowe’s handlebars. The bike shorts he carefully arranges on the saddle so that the chamois seat pad still performs as point of contact. “The majority of the public…Read the full story on TreeHugger

One of the problems with the oil (kerogen) in oil shale is that it is not mature enough (i.e. close enough to being an oil) that it will easily flow through the rock. In earlier parts of this particular theme, I have written about mining the rock and then heating it in retorts as a way of transforming the kerogen and recovering it for use. I have also, somewhat tongue in cheek, discussed using nuclear weapons to heat the rock so that the transformation can take place without moving the rock, while breaking the rock at the same time, and the unlikely potential for burning some of the oil within the deposit to power the transformation of the rest. While it might work in a heavy oil sand, is not likely to be realistically practical for the finer grained shales. But there are ways of adding somewhat less heat to the rock than using a nuclear bomb, and that will be the topic for today.

This is a continuation of the technical posts that I usually write on Sundays.

While I am largely going to bypass the use of nuclear power (apart from that of providing electrical power) in this piece, the potential use of nuclear power to heat penetrators that allow rapid drilling of weak rock has been partially demonstrated. As I have mentioned previously, Los Alamos National Lab, in looking at different methods for drilling, had come up with the idea of using a small nuclear reactor to provide sufficient heat to a ceramic probe that it would melt its way into the ground, pushing the molten rock to one side, and providing a glass lining to the resulting tunnel.

By the way, this has not been used to create the network of tunnels under this country in an idea beloved of some, it has been demonstrated. Not with a nuclear source, but with more conventional heating, Los Alamos drilled drainage holes at the Tyuoni pueblo plaza for drainage in 1973. A total of eight drainage holes were drilled at this archeological site in the Bandelier National Monument.

The first significant step in the Subterrene technology transfer program occurred when eight water drainage holes were melted with a field demonstration unit at the Rainbow House and Tyuonyi archaeological ruins at Bandelier National Monument in New Mexico in cooperation with the National Park Service. By utilizing a consolidation penetrator, the required glass-lined drainage holes were made without creating debris or endangering the ruins from mechanical vibrations.

At around the same time Dr George Clark, at what was then the University of Missouri-Rolla (now Missouri University of Science and Technology) had used ceramic electrical heaters in rock to raise rock temperatures enough to fracture and break out blocks of granite.

Field tests have therefore been able to take rock up to temperatures that are high enough to melt rock, using electrical heaters placed in holes in the rock. Which is a good introduction to the Mahogany Project in which Shell have been using electrical heaters to heat oil shale in place, to high enough temperatures that the kerogen transforms into a light oil. The investigation has been going on for some 25 years starting in the laboratory, and has progressed through an initial field trial.

Small holes are drilled down through the rock to house the electric heating coils, which slowly raise the temperature of the rock to between 600 and 750 deg F, at which temperature the kerogen will convert, depending on what is there, to a mixture of light oil and natural gas. These fuels can be recovered by drilling conventional wells into the rock, with typical depths at the test site being in the 1,000 to 2,000 ft range.

The Shell Mahogany Technology

The field trial placed heaters in a grid over a 30 ft by 40 ft test area and found that a third of the volume produced was natural gas was produced from the lower grade layers of the shale above the layers with the highest concentrations of kerogen (the Mahogany layer) which produced the light oil.

Array of heaters at a Shell test site

A total of 1,700 barrels of the light oil was recovered during the test period.

Production from the Shell test wells in oil shale

While the Bureau of Land Management has approved further sites for tests, the program is waiting to see what happens to the price of oil to determine whether or not the program will be sufficiently economically viable to move forward. At present this decision is anticipated to be in the middle of this decade, by which time it may be a little clearer whether the Cornucopians or some of the rest of us have been more accurate in our predictions on the future availability of sufficient oil to meet global demands at an affordable price. But it is the level of that affordable price that will decide whether the oil shale program is viable.

The costs of the project will not just have to cover the heating of the rock. One of the problems with the site is that there is some migration of water through the rock, and this can create two problems. The first is that it pulls heat away from the transformation process and the second is that it can interfere in the overall process itself. To stop the water flow (and concurrently the risk of transformed oil and gas migrating away from the collector wells) Shell has been looking into building an ice wall around the site to hold the water back.

Ground freezing is growing more popular as a tool for dealing with water underground. It has been used, for example, to stabilize the ground while the Boston Big Dig (the Central Artery/Tunnel project) was built and in stabilizing the ground for some of the underground stations in the London Tube network (including the collapse of one of the excavations). It has been used to hold back the water while uranium ore was mined at MacArthur River. Simply described, a dual pipe system is placed in vertical holes, and a freezing solution (usually a brine) is circulated through them, lowering the temperature of the rock to the point that the water freezes. Since the lowered temperature is distributed around the holes, there is no need to intersect any of the fractures, or voids, and the frozen water also helps to strengthen the rock where needed.

For the Mahogany Project test, which began in 2007, the freezing liquid was ammonia, and the test used a pattern of 157 holes drilled eight-feet apart, to a depth of 1,800 ft. The test removed the groundwater from within the well, but did not heat the rock to produce the oil and gas.

It will be interesting to see how this project turns out. It has been suggested that the technology would need a dedicated power source of some 1.2 gigawatts, in order to yield a production of 100,000 bd. Shell estimates it will yield 3-4 energy units for every unit consumed.

Layout of freezing pipes for the Shell Mahogany tests.

As usual with these technical posts, they can only briefly outline a process, if something is not clear please ask in comments, or if there is more information available, we all gain from reading of it.

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In the resource depletion soup, one ingredient looms large ? social equity. Equality is a function of population, social status aspirations and resources. With a small population, everyone can have reasonable equality. With unlimited resources, the same (although the amplitude generated by law of large numbers will exert outsized social pull from the top). But with large populations AND limits to resources, equity can only be reasonably attained if the activities that generate rank are not resource intensive. Via globalized markets, the cross border pursuit of profits has gradually morphed into a cross border pursuit of goals – money has become a global proxy for power and thus for status and money (profits) is a resource intensive international goal. Tonight’s campfire takes yet another look at one of my oft-written about oildrum topics: how we compete for social status while facing limits to growth.

“Wealth – any income that is at least one hundred dollars more a year than the income of one’s wife’s sister’s husband.”
H. L. Mencken

Between at least Jason and myself, there have been over a dozen posts on TheOilDrum relating to status, resource competition, being happier with less, and changing societal carrot away from Veblen goods and conspicuous consumption. It seems a general theme is that once basic needs are met, relative status matters much more than absolute. I apologize I can’t neatly compress all this into a concise post, but here’s an update: (and here is a primer on the Psychological Roots of Resource Overconsumption, itself in need of an update).

In a new study on the rank income hypothesis a team led by psychologist Christopher Boyce studied over 80,000 people, their incomes, and overall life satisfaction. The researchers found that the ranked position of an individual?s income predicted life satisfaction, whereas absolute income and reference income had no effect. This should be no surprise to any biologist familiar with the concept of relative fitness or sexual selection, but zero of the 30 references in the paper referenced biology or any of the evolutionary explanations of our neural penchant to compare ourselves to others.

Our study underlines concerns regarding the pursuit of economic growth. There are fixed amounts of rank in society?only one individual can be the highest earner. Thus, pursuing economic growth, although it remains a key political goal, might not make people any happier. The rank-income hypothesis may explain why increasing the incomes of all may not raise the happiness of all, even though wealth and happiness are correlated within a society at a given point in time.

Although general intuition tells us that having a good social standing makes us feel good, the idea that a good reputation is a ‘reward’ just like money has long been just an assumption. Recent neuro-imaging experiments however have shown that both reputation/rank and monetary rewards are processed in the same brain region – the striatum.

“We found that the brain reacts very strongly to the other players and specifically the status of the other players,” Zink says. “We weren’t expecting that profound a response,” she adds, noting that the subjects seemed to be concerned with the hierarchy within the game even when it was of no consequence to how much money they could make.

These types of economic studies showing that relative vs absolute levels of consumption/wealth are potent drivers have been studied for a long time, since the Easterlin Paradox became a hot topic in the 1970s. One example was economist Robert Franks simple study asking people if they would prefer living in a 4,000 square foot house where all the neighboring houses were 6,000 square feet or a 3,000 square foot house where the surrounding houses were 2,000 square feet ? the majority of people chose the latter ? smaller absolute but higher relative size. Though high perceived relative fitness is a powerful behavioral carrot for individuals, the inevitable resulting inequality has pernicious effects on societies: eroding trust, increasing anxiety and illness, and excessive consumption. Health steadily worsens as one descends the social ladder, even within the upper and middle classes. These are just some examples of the growing research highlighting not only that we care enormously about our social pecking orders but the wider the variation in rank the worse of we are.

Is it an advantage to live in a light blue state? (GINI in graphic is GINI *100)

The GINI coefficient is a measure of wealth or income equality – a GINI of 1 means one person has all the wealth and everyone else has nothing – a GINI of 0 means everyone has the same wealth. In addition to having an interest in this type of research, I also happen to experiencing it in real time. I make less money now than I have in 20 years (actually I make no money and am drawing down savings and at this pace I estimate I’ll go broke in September of 2016). But this would just be broke financially – I’m now surrounded by a social group that cares about non-pecuniary pursuits and accomplishments. Sure – none of us are starving or broke, but the day to day pressure of keeping up with the Joneses by getting on the financial/Veblen good treadmill are absent in my geographic circle. Jones lives in my neighborhood as well, but his signals are absent. (I remember sitting in a cubicle with 10 other guys at Salomon Brothers 11 hours a day cold calling billionaires. The neural correlation between ‘rank’ and ‘money’ was about 99% back then. The main lessons I learned then were a) the wealthy were no happier than the clerks processing their trades, b) status and wealth were cumulative but the dopaminergic reward pathways reset every morning and c) those who achieved power and status would not give it up without an intense fight.)

In a society with significant overall surpluses, people who actively lower their own economic and ecological footprint might get by very well, because their relative status – which is typically above average – allows them to make those reductions without reaching limits that compromise their well-being. These people have an opportunity to redefine what sort of ?capital? we compete for ? as they allocate time and resources away from financial marker capital and towards social, human, built and natural assets. These people above the median in social status can make better choices for their own lives, though in the end the odds are that what we compete for will not change by volition but by circumstances.

And, on the flip side of the ‘less-is-more’ bandwagon, is the fact that biological organisms, including and especially humans, always consume surplus resources (Maximum Power Principle and all that.) Total equality in resource use is as much of a myth as a benevolent dictator telling us our optimal allocations. We will always seek status and have social hierarchies in human society. And higher ranking males and females, on average, will have higher respect, admiration and as a consequence, higher/more mating opportunities, consistent with the evolved raison d’etre of rank.

In my career as a trader and consultant, I often witnessed that the seemingly most unacceptable solution ended up being the best. Perhaps the fact that 80% of resources are being consumed by 20% of the people would be improved in aggregate if we went towards less equality and had 90% of resources consumed by 10% of people, as long as it killed the aspiration of others towards conspicuous consumption (well, it might not kill the aspiration, but perhaps the means). Although I understand the academic arguments of both sides and the historical importance of equality, I sometimes wonder if pursuing a blanket policy of more equity would be worse for the planet. Certainly it would if economic growth continues as an objective as many more people are joining the party very late in the game. In any case, unless we first understand and then integrate demand side constraints such as the ‘rank income hypothesis’ into our policies, culture and institutions, sustainability will be another receding horizon.

Finally, the biggest aspect of ‘rank’ that concerns me now is the large swaths of demographics that are in fear of their social rank vis-a-vis their fellow Americans (or Earthlings) changing due to new political rules, bailouts, regulations etc. I don’t agree with what our government is doing right now either, but I wish people that respond to change like Tea-Partiers or health-care rioters, etc. would understand the broader backdrop of our running into exponential growth limitations will require across the board sacrifice and reduction of living standards in aggregate. Unfortunately, without this knowledge of ecological limits, all sacrifice and lower living standards, both within and between nations, are likely to be ‘perceived’ as relative rank drops for those affected. And we’re already seeing hints of the likely responses.

Our government (and others) continue to at least attempt to level the playing field via what can best be described as stealth nationalization. Increasingly the government trough is making up a larger % of the feedlot, both on the wage side and on the debt side. At each new turn however, spreading the social equality safety net wider is taking another hefty chomp out of our currency and sovereign health. What I hadn’t realized before but that is taking on increasing relevance, is that the coming debt deflation and currency reforms are likely to automatically lower the GINI, as significant paper wealth will eventually disappear. Instead of viewing currency reform and a reshuffling of claims as either inevitable and/or frightening, perhaps we can come up with a creative, not-too-disruptive plan where financial descent is paired with aspiration descent so that energy descent is more manageable.

I don’t know but am open to suggestions.

===========================================================================================
Campfire Questions

1. How can we use our increasing understanding of status, resources, and the neuroscience of human behavior to influence/create a more benign future?

2. Competition with con-specifics is part of our heritage. But so is cooperation and empathy. What level of wealth disparity would be healthy and/or tolerable for future of US society? Might less equality be a good thing?

3. How might the debt/financial crisis be an opportunity towards making headway on issues of social equity, both within the United States, and between the United States and other, less well off countries?

4. Any good ideas on how to change our status/aspiration metric away from conspicuous consumption?(this has been asked before but is important enough to throw out to this lateral thinking crew, on occasion).

5. Can you think of creative ways to downsize your own aspirations by changing social groups?

Answer any/all you’d like to. I’ll kick off the discussion by quoting from one of Herman Daly’s guest posts on theoildrum, on this same topic.

Limit the range of inequality in income distribution?a minimum income and a maximum income. Without aggregate growth poverty reduction requires redistribution. Complete equality is unfair; unlimited inequality is unfair. Seek fair limits to the range of inequality. The civil service, the military, and the university manage with a range of inequality of a factor of 15 or 20. Corporate America has a range of 500 or more. Many industrial nations are below 25. Could we not limit the range to, say, 100, and see how it works? People who have reached the limit could either work for nothing at the margin if they enjoy their work, or devote their extra time to hobbies or public service. The demand left unmet by those at the top will be filled by those who are below the maximum. A sense of community necessary for democracy is hard to maintain across the vast income differences current in the US. Rich and poor separated by a factor of 500 become almost different species. The main justification for such differences has been that they stimulate growth, which will one day make everyone rich. This may have had superficial plausibility in an empty world, but in our full world it is a fairy tale.

We all want to live in an equitable world where everyone has the same opportunities to achieve happiness and freedom. But unfortunately, many governments fail to protect their citizens, allowing big corporations to set up shop without proper guidelines to ensure fair wages, benefits, and basic human rights.

The practice of fair trade works to help communities being taken advantage of by corporate greed. It aims to fight for fair wages, humane labour conditions, and environmental sustainability. Some of the industries most affected by unfair labour practices are coffee, tea, chocolate, cut flowers, fruit, jewelry, and apparel.

Garstang fairtrade town

There are many organizations fighting for fair trade practices around the world, but mostly in Latin America, Asia, and Africa:
â?¢ Equal Exchange: Certifies chocolate, tea, almonds, pecans, cranberries, and sugar
â?¢ Fair Trade Federation: Covers almost any imaginable product, including food, flowers, jewelry, clothing, and more
â?¢ TransFairUSA: Certifies coffee, tea, cocoa, sugar, fruit, rice, flowers, and wine
â?¢ VeriFlora: Certifies cut flowers that are also sustainably grown
â?¢ World Fair Trade Organization: Certifies a very wide range of products, including clothing, food, beverages, jewelry, and so on

Unfortunately, not all is crystal clear in the world of fair trade. Fair Trade Certified coffee in particular has been attacked by some who suggest that coffeeâ??s low price is a result of overproduction and not unfair labour practices. They claim that by focusing on fair trade rather than finding other crops for farmers to grow, fair trade organizations are perpetuating a broken system. Itâ??s hard to say whether these problems are true. Most still believe that purchasing fair trade at least means their personal dollars are going to support ethical companies. Weâ??ll leave it to you to decide for yourself.

Want one source for all of your Fair Trade goods? Check out the Fair Trade Online Store that sells coffee, chocolate, tea, food, clothing and accessories, jewelry, and more, all from various fair trade organizations. And for more information on fair trade labels, go to the Fairtrade Labelling Organizations International site.

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A look at the offline and online offering of Vbites

I popped down to the opening of Heather Mills Vegan cafe ‘Vbites‘ on Saturday as Iâ??d heard whispers of its opening for a few months and fancied seeing what she had done with the old fish eatery that used to be there before. Another think that I wanted to see was how ‘Vbites’ was promoting itself, being interested in media and the way ethical ventures make that leap from hippy idealism (something I have struggled with myself) to cool rich media and an understanding of social capitol.

The opening itself was as my actor friend pointed out “a little frayed around its vegan edges”, with a very loud Glenn Miller band for the old folks, a dodgy microphone for Heathers opening speech and more ‘old media’ journalists that you could shake a stick at.

Heather however looks superb and I was at the front cheering her on as she appeared on top of the building relaxing against the ‘Vbites’ diner style sign. I’ve been an admirer of Heather for years, ever since she appeared on the Big Breakfast and described how she lost her leg by being hit by a police motorcycle. The fact that she was married to a pop star bla bla, doesnâ??t really interest me and I much prefer to read about her animal welfare exploits.

As I was leaving I collared one of their PR girls and said that Iâ??d like her to guest blog and that she needed some advice on her website. I was tempted to grab Heather as she popped out the back of Vbites and beg her to get a new developer, but she was on the phone so I thought Iâ??d leave it.

Now, the Vbites website:

Vbites website

Whatâ??s wrong with the website:

• The menu does not contain keywords specific to the campaign
• The content has not real direction on any of the pages
• No specific menu pages
• Their are no social networking links on the homepage
• No RSS feed for subscriptions to the newsletter
• No real calls to action
• No SEO across the site based on the lack on title tags, keyword inclusion etc
• Lack of pages on the site, if the sitemap is to be trusted
• The press and media page has no rich media or any real content
• The lack of humanity on the site is frightening – add some images of the place, the workers, heather, kids eating lunches, the skaters outside
• There are so many opportunities here for some great social media, so many aspects to the cafe that can be drawn upon to make it both an on and offline success.
• No internal linking
• More inbound links from relevant sources

I do find it unfortunate that allot of vegan and ethical sites are missing the basics of good design and SEO, it doesnâ??t seam important in the grand scheme of things but it does make a profound difference as to how users see you. Any site, no matter what it is saying needs to be making a media statement about its efforts, services or products… it is the fundamentals of it being a website and with all the competition out there, sites like Vbites need to stand out from the crowd or risk just becoming a dead weight online page that tarnishes the offline appeal of a great concept.

I’ll think of a few nice little ideas for Vbites social media and see if we canâ??t get it moving.

One last thing that I think would be nice for Vbites to is to add ‘deliveries’ to its offerings, swift deliveries of ‘Mrs. swirly’ vegan ice cream for example.

I did have difficulty finding any articles to add below this, as it seams most of the press that turned up were only there to slag her off, a bit pathetic on a sunny day to head down there just for that, but … who am i to judge.

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For just the price of a weekly shop … you can protect an area of Rainforest from deforestation

Why do we need to save rainforests?

Because in the next 24 hours, deforestation will release as much CO₂ into the atmosphere as 8 million people flying from London to New York. Thatâ??s about 100 acres cleared every minute to create farmland for crops such as soya or palm oil, or for cattle ranching.

By buying up an affordable piece of land, you are securing 130 tons of CO2 within the trees that would otherwise be cut down by illegal loggers. You will also be protecting the local wildlife such as, the puma, the brown toed sloth and the jaguar.

The Peruvian Amazon is experiencing rapid deforestation. As you read, illegal loggers are devastating the rainforest resources of many tribal communities. Cool Earth’s project with the Ashaninka tribe at Cutivireni prevents loggers from entering the community’s forests and the neighbouring Ashaninka Communal Reserve which form a buffer zone for Otishi National Park. In collaboration with our local partners Ecotribal, the Ashaninka chiefs at Cutivireni have offered their land for sponsorship through Cool Earth, allowing them to keep their forests in tact and continue to live sustainably from their own land.

All you have to do is donate to www.coolearth.org and select which area of rainforest you would like to preserve. I chose the Ashaninka region, where people from Coolearth are helping the Ashaninka trabe to protect their forests with bio-diversity management, giving them and the animals around them a brighter future.

Here is our little piece of the Peruvian Amazon saved rainforest:

If you want to read about the work that these guys do out there, go to their amazon rainforest projects or call them on 0800 093 0624.

Cool Earth is a UK based international charity that is super-charging everyone’s efforts to halt climate change. By donating funds you give us the tools to protect the world’s most endangered pieces of rainforest, acre by acre we will help to halt climate change.

Buy some land… its worth it and it helps the people of the rainforest get their lives back as well as protecting the planet.

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Leather and environmental issues

I’m sitting here in my leather office chair and in my leather workboots with my leather wallet in my back pocket – comfy chair, Internet, comfy boots; what more could a guy want aside from a never-ending pizza?

I started thinking more about leather the other day after seeing the most horrible video of an animal that was skinned alive for the fur/skin trade.

I can’t relay in mere words how horrific it was to see this animal after the process – the poor creature seemed fully conscious and the look on its face was just incredibly heartbreaking. Without its skin, I couldn’t even recognize what sort of animal it was. It looked so forlorn, confused and in so much pain, I nearly cried.

It’s incidents like these that really make me question the concept of we humans as evolved and “superior” beings.

The practices of some in the fur and skin trade have gained a lot of media coverage to the point that wearing of fur as a fashion statement is generally frowned upon these days.

Leather is another story – I guess that most of us like to think that the leather goods we buy – shoes, furnishing, clothing, bags etc. – have come from animals that have been humanely slaughtered and that the leather is more of a by-product rather than the focus; i.e. from animals used for meat.

Even if that is the case, and the term “humane” when it comes to slaughter is subject to a lot of controversy, what about the other environmental impacts from our desire for leather?

Leather’s chemical cocktail

As leather is basically just skin, the base component (rawhide) is fully biodegradable. Without some form of treatment, known as tanning, it would simply fall apart.

Back in the old, old days, smoke was often used to cure leather as were vegetable tannins, salt, urine and animal faeces or animal brains – it was a rather smelly and messy affair, so most tanneries were situated outside towns.

These days, here’s how most tanning occurs:

- Hides are first prepared by by curing them with salt

- The hides are then soaked in clean water to remove the salt

- The hides are treated with one or more of the following as part of the de-hairing process:

* Sodium sulfide
* Sodium hydroxide
* Sodium hydrosulfite
* Arsenic sulfide
* Calcium hydrosulfide
* Dimethyl amine
* Sodium sulphydrate

- Once the hair is removed, the hides are then treated with a mixture salt and sulphuric acid if mineral tanning is to be done.

- The hides are soaked in water once again and biocides such as pentachlorophenol may be used to prevent bacterial growth.

- Tanning can be performed, and usually this is via mineral methods that uses chromium in the form of basic chromium sulfate

Modern tanning is still a messy and smelly affair with a ton of extra energy, water and toxic chemicals thrown in. The process is so toxic that many old tannery sites cannot be used for agriculture. Tanneries not only often poison the land they are situated on, but also the waterways into which they discharge effluent.

Given all that, I’m left wondering if modern leather tanning processes are just as environmentally damaging as some of the plastics we use in clothing and furnishings such as polyester and nylon.

Imported leather

But surely if the toxicity of the process is well known, our governments have taken steps to address it, right? Yes, that’s often the case in places like the USA, Australia, Canada and the UK – but here’s a quote in regards to a tannery in Australia fined for environmental issues that sums up where the problem lies:

“…told the court the business would not operate as a tannery in the future, but would move to importing sheepskins”

Our desire for cheap leather coupled with tightening local government regulations is not solving the problem, but simply moving the environmental issues overseas to countries where controls are more lax – not only on the pollution side of things, but in relation to animal welfare.

So, even if the boots or coat you buy says “Made in Australia” or “Made in the USA”; there’s a very real possibility that the actual leather used in the product was imported from overseas.

So what’s a leather lover to do?

Firstly, we need to look at our consumption – do we really need 10 pairs of leather shoes, 5 wallets or 8 handbags? Every leather item you don’t buy mean less toxic waste entering into the environment and perhaps an animal not killed – you’ll save some cash as well.

We can also reduce our associated impact by asking companies where they source their leather – if it’s outside “developed” countries, assume the worst.

Additionally, if you’re prepared to spend a few more bucks, consider organic leather. Organic leather comes from animals that have been raised and slaughtered humanely and the tanning uses more environmentally friendly processes such as smoke and plant based tannins. You can find these products simply by typing: organic leather X into your favorite search engine, where X is the type of product you are wanting.

Leather alternatives

After you watch a few videos and read a bit more about the treatment of animals destined to become leather products, it does tend to work away at your conscience; but the alternatives also present a minefield for the environmentally conscious consumer.

You could just turn your back on leather altogether, but so many of our fabrics are petro-chemical based or use incredibly environmentally destructive and energy intensive processes.

This is where we need to start looking more towards organic cotton, soy, hemp, bamboo and other forms of organic clothing. Most of these are still terribly expensive and I must admit I’m guilty of leaning towards cheaper and very non-green clothes – even if I do manage to squeeze a decade out of a t-shirt . It’s a habit I’m trying to kick.

If you just love the look and feel of leather, consider pleather, which is just a slang term for synthetic leather made out of plastic; but just be aware of the associated impacts – not all pleather is created equal and some plastics will be worse than others. These range from calico coated with boiled linseed oil mixed with dryers and pigments to fabric bases coated with plastic, to 100% plastic substitutes.

Unfortunately for the leather lover – it’s a case of abstinence or choosing the lesser of the environmental and humanitarian “evils”; but a reduction in impact is certainly better than taking no action at all.

Article written by Michael Bloch of Green Living Tips.com

Michael has been active in green business for 6 years and currently work for an Australian company that sells solar and wind power equipment energymatters

Flickr image by Barnaby

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If your concerned about the environment and you need to move house which we all do from time to time, you don’t have to break your carbon foot print to do so.

A removal company in London now offer carbon free removals, they have a fleet of electric vans ready to move your house hold goods at any time.

The company have been recently appeared in the news if you fancy reading up on them, so anyway.. hope this helped