The problem solver

From the May 27th Waterloo Record:

"Getting ordinary plastic bags to rot away like banana peels would be an environmental dream come true.

Now a Waterloo teenager has found a way to make plastic bags degrade faster – in three months, he figures. His idea is to collect and concentrate the microorganisms that eat plastic, and then set them loose on discarded plastic.

Daniel Burd's project won the top prize at the Canada-Wide Science Fair in Ottawa. "Almost every week I have to do chores and when I open the closet door, I have this avalanche of plastic bags falling on top of me," he said. "One day, I got tired of it and I wanted to know what other people are doing with these plastic bags."

Burd knew plastic does eventually degrade, and figured microorganisms must be behind it. His goal was to isolate the microorganisms that can break down plastic -- not an easy task because they don't exist in high numbers in nature."

How did he do it? Read on.
     

Hard times at General Motors

How do you like GM's new logos?

As Bob Dylan sang, you don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. These days, a dire breeze for General Motors is picking up, and, although it's coming from different places, and at different velocities, it's all blowing the same way. Um, down.

As James Surowiecki reports in last week's New Yorker, for the first time in history (the history of the automobile, anyway), GM is not the top seller of cars in the world. Toyota is, and Surowiecki credits their success to their distinctively Japanese approach, which hews to the ideal of kaizen—continuous improvement.

That bad news for GM dovetails with the company's announcement that it will close its Windsor transmission plant, a move that brings to 4000 its total Ontario layoffs in the past two years. Ontario premier Dalton McGuinty chose an odd metaphor to describe the shutdown.

"GM has a massive footprint in the province," he said. "In an ideal world, we could have said, 'We're prepared to partner with you on condition that you don't reduce any part of that footprint.' But no auto manufacturer was prepared to do that."

One primary reason that Toyota has surpassed GM: it's producing high-mileage and hybrid cars at a time when consumers, worried about their carbon footprint, are bringing ecological concerns to bear on their automobiling.

Now, of course "automobiling" and "ecological concerns" are uneasy bedfellows, but that doesn't seem to slow down the public relations exercises. In this morning's Globe and Mail is an insert entitled "The Greening of the Auto Industry." On the cover, certainly to GM's chagrin, are two large images of the hybrid Prius, the car that put Toyota over the top. GM is having a hard time getting itself on the cover of a corporate pamphlet, it seems.

GM does have an ad on the front of advertising insert, and it features their new lineup of "green" logos. Even if research and development have been flagging at the former number-one, people are staying up late in the public relations department. And for that they deserve commendation. Well done, GM—the logos are really nice.

[More reading at GM: Green by Design.]    

"Green" hair removal

Preserving a mental distinction between "green" and merely green

I know, it's starting to seem overcorrect to put the quotation marks around "green," but they're still needed to distinguish eco-friendly products from those that are just, you know, green. LIke the Nalgene bottle I'm still warily using.

When ecology is the subject, clarity is getting harder to come by. That's one reason we should preserve a mental distinction between the "green" and the merely green. Treehugger.com, a fine clearing house for information about the environment, today has a cipher from Ben Harper across the top of its homepage: "I represent what TreeHugger represents," says the singer. Wait a second—isn't that trying to define "round" as "something that has some roundness to it"? They told us not to do that in elementary school. The site, though, is clear and effusive about Moom, an organic depilatory creme made in Canada. Moom's site, which has photos of daisies, a rock, tree branches, and a dew-slickened lemon, also has a long list of testimonials from people who apparently didn't want to part with their last name. "Jenny USA," for example, feels "beautiful again" on account of the fact she can "remove unwanted hair" from her chin and "sculpt a perfect pair eyebrows."    

Is Nalgene a publicly-traded company?

If so, it could be time to unloooaaad. The New York Times is reporting that Canadian government may be ready to declare as toxic a chemical widely used in plastics for baby bottles and beverage containers.

The compound is called bisphenol-a, or BPA, and it's found in polycarbonate plastics—very much like, um, the bottle your correspondent was drinking from five minutes ago (at right). BPA makes the plastic rigid and transparent but very unlikely to shatter.    

A question of scruples

Years ago, my parents had a board game called A Question of Scruples. In it, you drew a card and were presented with one of many difficult choices—if you found that the only thing that calmed your colicky baby was dipping a handkerchief in brandy and letting him suck on it, would you?—while others bet on how you would answer.

My sisters and I found the game on a shelf in the spare room and had great fun one afternoon, reading all the cards and imagining that these were the essential questions—firings, breakups, found money, and alcoholic, newspaper-stealing neighbours—that occupied adults.