July 15th, 2008, 15 Comments »
About a month ago, we bought a NatureMill indoor composter. It’s a pretty cool device. You load all your food waste (pretty much everything, excepting bones, citrus and fruit pits), it churns it up, and in about a month, you get compost. All for about 50 cents of power a month, according to their website. Here’s a two-and-a-half minute introductory video.
This is obviously a pricier option than the bucket-plus-worms option, but that’s not viable in our current residence. Plus, we’re much better composters when the device is within easy reach. And this thing has an air filter, so it doesn’t smell up the house.
The irony is that we have limited use for the loamy compost that the machine generates. We’ve got some plants, but once they’re filled up, we’re left with only one option: illegal dumping. Of dirt.
I remember talking to Vancouver’s deputy mayor a couple of years ago, and he mentioned that half of all of the city’s waste in landfills is organic. It’s shocking how little garbage we now remove from our apartment. We’re down to, like, one grocery bag’s worth of garbage a week. So, thus far, the experiment is working. Plus, it’s kind of fascinating to watch stuff decompose.
Over-Packaged CFLs and Compostable Cups
Some of that garbage featured the destroyed remnants of some plastic packaging. I thought it was ironic that these eco-friendly CFL bulbs came in this irritating, impossible-to-open, non-recyclable blister pack:
Speaking of plastic and composting, I’ve been spending a lot of time working in the new Serious Coffee location in Cook Street Village. They have some tasty flavoured iced teas. The other day, I noticed some fine print on the ‘plastic’ cup (much like this one). Like a number of cafes and restaurants, they’re using containers made of a corn resin which, while not recyclable, are compostable (not a word, but it should be). I didn’t ask the staff whether they separate the cups out for composting. Instead, I took mine home, cut it into strips and stuck it in our composter. We’ll see if it still looks like bits of plastic in a month.
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September 28th, 2007, No Comments »
Speaking of the Canadian Football League…I was looking for some Vancouver Canucks news today, and accidentally learned that Joost users will be able to watch CFL content on the Internet TV startup’s network this winter.
I tried out Joost a couple of months back, and literally found nothing in their video network to interest me. Hopefully that’ll change, or I’ll develop an interest in Peruvian rugby.
In any case, I wanted to point out a hilarious quote from Stephen McCormack, CEO of Wildwave in the associated press release:
“There is a huge pent up demand for Canadian Sports and the CFL in particular, across the World and with the launch of Wildcard Sports Network on Joost, with the CFL as our featured launch partner, we can now provide this compelling League’s most hard-hitting content to a worldwide audience on today’s most advanced Internet TV platform.”
Really? A “huge pent up demand” for the CFL “across the World”? That just struck me as downright amusing. I see that Wildwave is based in Dublin (ah, Dame Street), where I never heard anyone mention Canadian football for the two years I lived there. And I’m Canadian. Maybe they’ve tapped into some hidden enclave of Roughriders fans in Kilkenny?
We’re not big fans of the press release, and we learned a long time ago not to write absurdly effusive quotes for CEOs. It’s unlikely that Mr. McCormack actually wrote that himself.
Also, I know I’m writing from a grammatical glass house here, but that release shows symptoms of that common marketer’s disease, Over Capitalization Syndrome. It’s a scourge across our industry.
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September 27th, 2007, 6 Comments »
Lee and Sachi have made another great video. This one makes a very strong economic and environmental case for switching to compact fluorescent light bulbs:
Like our apartment in Vancouver, our house here in Malta is wired with halogen lamps. They last longer than incandescents, but they’re power-hungry. I did a quick search, and couldn’t find any CFL replacements for halogen bulbs. I did find some far more efficient and longer lasting versions of the standard halogen bulb, though.
Incidentally, NFL fans should also convert to the Canadian Football League. It, too, is far superior.
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