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Waste not want not - in these times of green awareness and financial concern, it’s more important than ever that we don’t waste precious resources. Yet in the USA, the average American dumps about 14% of the food they purchase every year. In the UK, a typical family throws away £50 worth of food – every month! If this sounds familiar, here are a few simple steps you can take to reduce, and hopefully eliminate, food waste in your household.

1. After steaming (or boiling) your veggies, keep the water, let it cool and then use it to water plants. The added nutrients from the vegetables are natural plant fertilizers – and water is a precious resource too!  When rinsing fruit and veg also consider collecting this water as it might be usable in the garden as well.

2. Too many tomatoes? You can dry them in the oven, which also concentrates the flavour and makes them sweet and delicious. Just cut them in half or dice them and put them in the oven at about 150 degrees for 2-3 hours until all the moisture is gone. Ideally, you can combine this oven use with other cooking so that you’re also saving on fuel costs. Then jar them up and use any excuse to eat them! You can watch a video demo (with thanks to greenopolis.com)

3. Did you know you can freeze eggs? Just take them from their shells and use an ice tray to separate them. You can see more here.

4. Morning-after baked potatoes can be delicious, too – heat a little warm milk and butter, then slice the potatoes lengthwise and scoop out most of the inside and add it to the milk. Add sour cream, parmesan cheese, garlic salt or anything else that takes your fancy, mash or beat the mixture to whip them up, spoon the mix back into the skins, then put in a greased baking dish, maybe sprinkle a little grated cheese over them, or chives or bacon bits, then bake.

5. Pre-cycle: don’t take packaging into your home. In many places in Europe, overpackaging can be left at the store, which makes a lot of manufacturers rethink the way they package things. Precycling beats recycling hands down. Look at glass bottles, which go from green bins to recycling facilities where they get crushed and ground down and remade into bottles. Why not go back to having a deposit on bottles, so that they’re returned to the bottling plants to be cleaned and then refilled. Surely bottles should only be remelted into glass when they’re broken?

6. A great site for eco-foodies is Love Food Hate Waste. Every year in the UK £12 billion worth of good food is thrown away: Love Food Hate Waste is a campaign from WRAP (Waste & Resources Action Programme) and has lots of tasty recipes and top tips to help us all make the most of the food we buy.

7. Finally, any organic matter whatsoever (even dog poo!) can be transformed into lovely plant-loving mulch through the magical process of composting. There are many places to learn about this ancient art, here’s just one.

Imagine generating electricity with every step you take; that every time you drive or cycle, energy is sent to the national grid; and that even your workout is powering the lights and heat of the gym, replacing fossil fuel – sounds great, right?  Well, piezoelectricity is here.

Piezoelectricity is basically the use of certain materials to transform kinetic energy into electricity.  I wrote in another blog about the development of piezoelectric floor tiles that turn foot traffic into electricity; now the first practical installation of this kind is in place at a Sainsbury’s supermarket in Gloucester, England, where “kinetic road plates” are being used to produce 30 kW of electricity every hour. The company’s press release describes the process as a more physical process (plates are pushed down by passing cars to create rocking motions that turn generators) than a piezoelectrical one, but the broader concept of using transient motion to generate electricity is the same.

There’s no reason why this simple, cheap and sustainable type of energy conversion can’t be used in businesses and homes all over Ireland.  And genius scientists are also working on an even more Irish-friendly form of energy conversion: raindrops into electricity, in my next post!

By now, most people have seen the clip on YouTube or even the feature-length documentary about GM crushing its 1999 electric cars at the behest of Big Oil.   Ironically, GM are now trying to furiously claw back their initial advantage with the Volt, though the field is a lot more crowded now.

Electric cars are all the rage, as illustrated by the British Government’s announcement last week of a £25m scheme to get the public to test-drive electric cars from various manufacturers.  John Walsh of the London Independent tested several of them, including the Tesla roadster, far and away the car of choice for anyone looking for speed and style, although a US home-made drag car version is just as powerful and a little more unique.
But as I’ve written before, switching from oil to electricity is a little like switching from heroin to methadone: it’s still addictive, messy and unhealthy.  More interesting to me are complete alternatives, like the hydrogen-powered car, although refuelling for this one could be a little more complicated.  But my number one prize goes to the Japanese water powered car - who can fault water as the fuel of the future?  Well, Big Energy, maybe!  Is that why we haven’t seen any publicity about this one?  The only method that could be more innocent to the environment is the velocipede - that’s right, pure calorie-fuelled energy as you pedal – for 14,000 dollars!!!  Glass of water, anyone?

Just think – right this second, millions of people in gyms across the planet are running, stretching, lifting weights, stepping, cycling and leaping around the place, God love them.  Imagine how many units of energy are being burned – and all of it simply floating into the ether, unused, untapped and unappreciated.  Now that may all be about to change, thanks to some imaginative inventions.  The “Bike Power Generator” is a stationery bike that can directly power some DC appliances such as water pumps, but is primarily designed to charge a deep cycle, 12-Volt battery.  For those of you concerned about bingo wings you can get the irresistibly-named Human Power Generator (power from the people!).  But wait – there’s more!  The very footpaths we walk (or jog) on may soon become part of the national grid, as brilliant minds have designed “Powerleap” (as seen on the Sundance Channel) - floor tiles that emit an electrical response to impact.  If jogging isn’t exciting enough for you, jump up and down!  Dance!  Do long jump!  You’ll be doing your bit for the planet.  These inventions are all so simple one might wonder why they weren’t created sooner, but a perfect storm of climate anxiety and new technology has allowed them to come to market now.  So the next time you’re feeling a little pudgy, hook yourself up, feel the burn and see the light!

Okay, now these geniuses at MIT are starting to scare me.  They’ve figured out how to increase the charging speed of batteries by 36 times: and this time there are no bacteria involved, the Friends of Bacteria Association will be please to note.  The science is intricate, but basically by making nano grooves in batteries’ surfaces, the ions travel much faster, putting the possibility of electric cars’ acceleration matching petrol engines in the near future, and thereby attracting all those speed demons who won’t touch electric cars at the moment.  My resistance to viewing electric cars as the answer to our woes continues, however, as the power still has to come from somewhere: while the recharging technology could be integrated into the existing battery infrastructure in two years, home rechargers for electric cars would have to be redesigned to handle the rapid transfer of energy. “For cars, the speed that they can recharge at home will be limited not by the battery but by how much power can be made available to homeowners through the [electric] grid,” said Byoungwoo Kang, an MIT doctoral candidate working under engineering professor Gerbrand Ceder.  But it’s still no good having electric cars if everyone drives alone!  I read today in The Lazy Girl’s Guide to Green Living that there are 10 million empty seats every day, and if everyone took just one passenger (or2.37 passengers, but who’s counting?), congestion would be reduced by a third: more than the sum of the parts, methinks!