IKEA Building

That big blue building with IKEA written in yellow letters on it is trying to help the environment. It was announced last week the IKEA is going to begin charging a nickel for plastic bags. This is all part of their “bag the plastic bag” initiative. They want to discourage the use of plastic bags and donate all revenue to the nonprofit conservation group American Forests. The store is also going to let shoppers walk away with one of their iconic reusable blue bags for 59 cents. But is this how far IKEA’s contribution to the environment goes?

Thomas Bergmark, IKEA’s head of social and environmental responsibility, will answer and help one find out the details behind this unassuming approach.

• IKEA’s initiative in the U.S. with the plastic bags
  • IKEA’s strategy is to be quiet and low-key. They issue a yearly social and environmental report on the web. The “plastic bag” campaign is their first step to be more aggressive and more transparent in these issues.
• IKEA’s view of their obligation to the environment
  • They have always been about creating a better everyday life for the people. In today’s world caring about the people includes caring about the environment. Ever since their company was founded 60 years ago, they have been turning and twisting materials to use them in the best possible way, saving both on material and costs. This attitude has allowed for them to save on resources, thus saving the environment.
• IKEA trying to make their stores greener
  • In the building process the company looks into the land in order to make sure that they aren’t stepping into a protected area for biodiversity. Recently, they are beginning to consider the environmental issues when building new stores. Compared to other retailers, they do a really good job sorting waste and recycling. On an international level they are beginning to focus on energy. They have set all IKEA buildings with renewable energy, and are trying to be 25 percent more energy efficient.
• How IKEA is going to make their renewable energy goal
  • They want to produce the energy themselves with the use of solar, wind, biomass, and geothermal heating and cooling.
• Deadline to get to completely renewable energy
  • Their first deadline is in 2009. By then they want their buildings to be 60 percent renewable energy and 15 percent more energy efficient.
• IKEA’s plans to be more environmental friendly in the shipping of goods
  • Currently, they are using flat pack. This allows for the company to save volume and hopefully this extra volume allows for less shipments to be sent. They admit that transportation is a tougher challenge. Because their aren’t any groundbreaking solutions, they are hoping that biofuels will be used in the near future.
• How suppliers act when they find out about social and environmental restrictions
  • Suppliers in Europe and the Americas are positive, while Asia is more resistant.
• IKEA is going to ramp up communications and PR around environmental issues
  • They are going to continue with the blue bag campaign, but won’t do any heavy marketing. Don’t expect to see environmental campaigns on billboards from IKEA.

Thomas Bergmark’s answers about the environment seemed only to have begun taking place. Hopefully, IKEA will keep its promises and really try to improve their stores and transportation in order to make them more environmentally friendly. At least, they are taking a small step in the right direction with the “bag the plastic bag” initiative. IKEA has a good idea of what they want to do to help the environment, now let’s hope they do it.

Sources:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17385270/

http://www.ikea.com/ms/en_GB/about_ikea/social_environmental/uk_environment_and_social_responsibility.html

http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/070220/nytu069.html?.v=81

Picture Source:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/87/Ikeav%C3%A4ster%C3%A5s.JPG

Jay Austin, a Duluth professor and a researcher with the University of Minnesota-Duluth’s Large Lakes Observatory, is surprised to find the waters of Lake Superior to be warming at a such rapid pace. For a man who made a career studying decades of data on the Great Lakes, he knows it’s no mystery that there is a warming climate around Lake Superior but is surprised to see the water of the lake itself warming even more rapidly.

Through his research, Jay Austin found the water temperature rising almost twice as fast as the air temperature. His studies concluded that water temperature was rising more than 4 degrees for the average surface temperature.

The Great Lakes

This rapid increase in water temperature is having dramatic effects. “The date of what we call the spring overturn has been getting earlier in the year,” Austin said. “It’s basically the start of the summer season in the lake. It’s when you start to develop strong positive stratification: warm water sitting on top of cool water.”

In these last two decades, the spring turnover have been constantly arriving earlier. Recently the spring turnover has moved up two weeks from early July to mid-June. The reasoning behind this is due to a loss of ice cover. Since ice is reflective, when it’s not there it makes it easier for the lake to absorb heat.

Ice Cover over Lake Superior

According to Austin, in another 35 to 40 years Lake Superior will only have minimal ice covering the top of the lake. This news isn’t good for plants and animals including the lake’s native whitefish. “If there’s less ice over time, and there appears to be, there’s a chance for greater storminess in the sort of shallow water (bays) that the whitefish spawn in,” said Steve Coleman, who directs the Large Lakes Observatory.

Another potential problem is that warming speeds up the growth of fish and the plants they feed on. If warming continues to increase, it can create big problems. The lake will have a reduction in the flow of nutrients into the system across that temperature gradient. The Duluth scientists’ next project is trying to prove their suspicion that diminishing ice is contributing to falling lake levels. Hopefully, there will be resolution soon found to keep the water temperatures in Lake Superior from rising. There needs to be a resolution found in order to keep the environment living and the plants and living organisms from dying.

Sources:

http://www.epa.gov/glnpo/

http://www.enn.com/today.html?id=12293

Photo Source:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8e/Great_Lakes_1.PNG

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/3/3e/LakeSuperior_arf.JPG

On the nightfall of March 3rd a rare opportunity presents itself. In the eastern United States, Canada, and South America one will have the opportunity to see a total eclipse of the moon around dusk. This eclipse should be especially easy to see in Africa and western Europe because the event will take place at night when the sky is completely black. Western Asia may get a chance to see the eclipse just as the moon is setting and the sky begins to appear.

The eclipse is said to begin at 5:44 p.m. eastern time and end a little over an hour later.

Lunar Eclipse

Here are some answered questions about lunar eclipses:

• What should I expect?
  • The moon won’t turn black, but instead should turn a reddish-orange color.
• Do I need protective eye-wear?
  • No protective eye-wear is needed.
• How exactly does a total lunar eclipse happen?
  • A total lunar eclipse occurs when a full moon passes entirely through the Earth’s umbra or commonly known as Earth’s dark inner shadow.
• What’s the difference between a partial eclipse and total lunar eclipse?
  • A partial eclipse is when part of the moon is in the Earth’s outer shadow, or penum, which is not as dark.

  

Sources:

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/03/070302-lunar-eclipse.html

http://sunearth.gsfc.nasa.gov/eclipse/OH/OH2007.html#2007Mar03T

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_eclipse

Picture Sources:

http://www.raftermranch.com/Lunar%20Eclipse%20second_102704/Lunar_Eclipse_color_cropped_922PM.jpg

http://www.space.com/spacewatch/041022_eclipse_series.html

As spring break arrives just around the corner, thousands of tourists will be boarding cruise ships and heading off to an exotic destination. With the ocean being the Earth’s greatest abundance of biodiversity, how exactly will these cruise lines keep the Earth in mind?

With nearly 3 million passengers each year boarding vessels and heading off to Cozumel, Mexico, the Caribbean tourism industry is starting to recognize the potential damage that they might be causing on the environment. These effects include: the spectacular coasts and marine life that are the region’s main attractions.

Carnival Cruise Ship

Starting this April, change will happen. Representatives from cruise lines, trade associations, international and local nongovernmental organizations, and government agencies will get together and examine the Caribbean’s primary environmental concerns and what can be done to change and improve them.

The Center for Environmental Leadership in Business (CELB) is a year-long program designed to help businesses identify and implement sustainable operating practices. These operating practices include voluntarily designating areas to avoid discharging waste-water. The programs also aims in collaborating more effectively with the cruise tourism industry so that it can assist governments in minimizing environmental impacts. Currently, there are plans underway to expand the initiative to ports in Honduras and Belize.

Seleni Matus of CELB’s Mesoamerican Reef Tourism Initiative says that “It will be the first time dialogue of this kind has happened between all key actors on such a large scale in the region.” The cruise industry is working aggressively with partners to educate crew and passengers, develop new business practices, and most importantly to protect habitats that are rich in biological diversity, like the ocean.

BP is moving in the right direction. Last fall in Indonesia, BP announced that due to environmental sensitivites, the corporation will reroute its tankers away from Indones’s fragile Sagewin Strait. This new route adds 550 kilometers to the tankers’ route. BP is willing to pay a little extra and spend a little more time in order to perserve the Sagewin Strait.

It’s nice to see that BP’s decision ensures that tankers do not harm the Sagewin Strait’s unique underwater species, including certain dolphin and whale populations considered threatened by the World Conservation Union (IUCN). It’s a move in the right direction that corporations are starting to see the effects that their companies are having on the environment and what specific routes they need to take in order to improve the Earth we live on. If every company soon realized they need to change, then their would be a big improvement in the environment.

Sources:

http://www.conservation.org/xp/frontlines/2007/02260701.xml

http://www.celb.org/xp/CELB/partners/com/bp.xml

Picture Sources:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/de/Carnival_Victory_St_Thomas.jpg

A collaboration of more than 50,000 scientists from 63 nations all turned their attention to the world’s poles. The reason these scientists came together was to measure the effects of climate change through the use of icebreakers, satellites and submarines. They wanted to study everything from exotic marine life swimming and living beneath the Antarctic ice to the effect that solar radiation has on the polar atmosphere.

The International Polar Year creates 228 similar research projects that have an aim of monitoring the health of the Earth’s polar region and what kind of impact global warming has on it. This research project officially began March 1st and will end in 2009, allowing each separate pole to run through a full season of summer and winter. Britain’s chief scientific adviser, Sir David King, called the melting of polar ice “the canary in the coal mine for global warming.”

Antarctic Ice Sheet

This year’s research is being sponsored by the International Council for Science and United Nation’s Meteorological Organization. Most of the $1.5 billion donations has come from pre-existing polar research budgets. British scientists believe that this research project has the potential of revealing the threat the polar world is currently facing. “What’s different this year is not so much the volume of research funding, but more the coordination of research,” said Eric Wolff, a British Antarctic survey scientist.

Other than global warming, the scientists will try the challenge of trying to quantify the amount of fresh water than is currently leaking out from underneath the ice sheets in Antarctica. Because the melting is taking place beneath the ice it is going to make it hard for the scientists to measure. The only way they could succeed in measuring the leakage is if they are going to get a large amount of ships to do the same thing at the same time so that one could get a snapshot of the whole Antarctic.

The scientists are also going to install an Arctic Ocean monitoring system and a census of the deep-sea creatures which populate the bottom of Antarctica’s Southern Ocean. With the use of their telescopes, balloons, and spacecraft, scientists are going to investigate plasma and magnetic fields kicked up by the sun. The dry and clear air found in the polar region is perfect for astronomy. Also, anthropologists are planning to study the culture and politics of the Arctic’s 4 million inhabitants.

Even though there are a lot of different research projects going on they all resort to the same fear that the ice sheet will someday melt away. “We are now on an unsustainable path,” said Corinne Le Quere, a professor at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England. “By seeing the changes as they occur in the region where they will be occurring the fastest, the International Polar Year will provide blinding evidence of the human impact on this planet.”

Hopefully, what these scientists prove will be solid evidence of the kind of terrible effect human impact has on the Antarctic ice sheets. If the International Polar Year proves that global warming is taking place and that the ice sheets are slowly melting away, maybe humans will look and see what kind of impact they have on the world and maybe…just maybe…they will want to change their ways and benefit the world instead of harm it.

Sources:

http://classic.ipy.org/about/

http://www.enn.com/today.html?id=12298

Photo Source:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/98/Antarctica_satellite_orthographic.jpg

After all this talk about global warming I began too think about the changes occurring to office buildings to make them environmentally friendly. Some good news is that next year in New York , the 54-story Bank of America Tower in New York will be opened. This building is the most environmentally friendly office building in the United States. Some of its features are:

• It will produce most of its energy at an on-site co-generation plant
• It will capture and reuse waste water and rainwater
• It uses recycled materials in its construction

This latest trend toward office buildings is being held back by insufficient government support. Only 17 states and 59 cities including Chicago either offer incentives from green buildings or require certification under the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED).

Bank of America Tower Construction Site

The new Bank of America building in Midtown Manhattan is the first building to receive a platinum LEED Certificate, the council’s highest. The building features six trading floors and has 2.1 million square feet. This building wouldn’t have been built if it weren’t for the $650 million in bonds. These bonds were intended to rebuild Lower Manhattan after the attacks that happened on September 11, 2001.

The chief executive of ProLogis, Jeffrey Schwartz, states that the U.S. government isn’t doing enough to help create greener buildings. But the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency argues that “federal tax breaks of up to $1.80 per square foot and programs to promote energy conservation provide enough support.”

The need to support green building has sky rocketed. Why? Because green projects have sky rocketed in recent years. The U.S. Green Building Council has issued 546 LEED certificates. Today, these certificates cover 59 million square feet. In 2002, 38 certificates were issued, covering 5 million square feet. The amount of green buildings being created in these last 5 years has gone up 14 times since 2002.

New Bank of America Tower in New York

Currently, there is a 60-story $450 million downtown Chicago office building being created says, project manager, Brad Soderwall. This building will be gold LEED certified. Some of its features that make it gold are:

• It will pump river water over water pipes in the basement to cool the building instead of using a conventional rooftop colling system
• It will also have a green roof. This green roof will be covered with plants to improve air quality, conserve energy and reduce runoff.

This building is said to save $800,000 annually on energy bills. The main tenant, Chicago-based law firm Kirkland & Ellis LLP, required a gold LEED certificate in the lease.

Going green is the new trend. If you don’t according to Dale Anne Reiss, a global real estate director, you could lower the value of the building. So… go green or go home!

Sources:

http://www.enn.com/today.html?id=12222

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank_of_America_Tower_at_One_Bryant_Park

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leadership_in_Energy_and_Environmental_Design

Picture Source:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/8/8b/Ecotower.jpg

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a2/BankOfAmericaTowerSite.jpg