Environmental 'Green Float' Island City to Float in Equatorial Pacific Ocean | Japan for Sustainability

Environmental 'Green Float' Island City to Float in Equatorial Pacific Ocean Japan for Sustainability

Absolutely the most interesting thing I've read in a while!

Mindful Technology: Simplify Email & Reduce Inbox Stress | tinybuddha.com

I really loved the Ideas put forward by this guy to reduce the risk over OVER-COMMUNICATION!

As well as the fact that instead of the usual fast food plan…I also made this week Slow-Food week which was great!

Mindful Technology: Simplify Email & Reduce Inbox Stress | tinybuddha.com

So the suggestions they gave were

1. Close the accounts you don’t really need – Merge the rest. I noticed that Hotmail is hard to merge on outlook but if you pop into Microsoft online they have a program you attach to outlook to help with this.

2.Use alerts for special or “immediate response” people

3. Try Only check your mail at set times…like morning, lunch, an hour before leaving work?

4. Unsubscribe to spam emails and emails you don't REALLY read.

5. Try keep your emails short and to the point

6. Eliminate social media where you can? I’ve recently ditched twitter because I think its a bit useless

7. Compress social media into one program Hoot Suit is great to help with that

8. Don't forget to breathe when you reading emails….sometimes we forget!

9. Set email boundaries. Technology had made us available all day every day. Sometimes just…shut down! Weekends or nights are a good time.

Sustainibility Hawkes Bay Trust | Close to my Heart...

I have started volunteering for SHBT and they have some great info and ideas! Here is their Bio!

"Sustaining Hawkes Bay Trust's mission is to support our community to work towards a sustainable future and protect our environment for many generations to come. Through the Environment Centre we offer an extensive range of environmental information and expertise covering the following areas


Waste, Sustainable Transport, Water Conservation, Energy Efficiency, Sustainable Building, Gardening and Responsible and Sustainable Shopping

We are proud to be partners of the household sustainability campaign 'Sus'd' with the Hastings District Council."

http://www.shbt.org.nz/home 

No Forethought!

So Over this weekend...I stumbled across a rather disturbing UNFRIENDLY system!
My husband and I were cleaning the bathroom...my mom-in-laws bathroom and while cleaning it...both my husband and i started coughing and spluttering and feeling rather ill. So obviously, being the HSE freak that I am...I say "Where did you get this stuff? I'm sure its not safe for normal people!?" My mum in law then told me that it was the product they needed to buy to keep the grantee on the Shower.....??
So i googled the company....and then promptly googled the MSDS for the "Shower Gloss" Product.
The flaws I found were endless!!
On the actual product it states " Mild Acid for cleaning your shower" and then has a list of things to do in an emergency. Not any directions. No web address to say "further instructions available on the product"...no...none of that! This product is given to housewives....not people with masters or PHD's in this stuff! They wouldn't have the foggiest IDEA what an MSDS is.
So reading through the MSDS and this is what came up!

1. The mild acid is listed as "pH 2"
2. The product is listed as acutely toxic....????
3. The product is not allowed to be used in confined spaces....so what is a shower exactly? Or a bathroom for that matter of fact.
4. When heated - sunlight styles - it releases toxic fumes?
5. Now one of my favorites - is reactive with alkali's...now for those of you who aren't familiar with household alkali's....glass cleaner is one. Now if I was not in possession of the information...I would happily clean my shower with this stuff...splutter through the cleaning and then clean the glass on the inside and outside with glass cleaner....but no...it releases MORE toxic fumes!
6. To use you need to wear chemical goggles, and gloves....that wasn't mentioned on the packaging.....

So yes....all of these flaws...to KEEP a guarantee? This makes no sense!
MINUS 100 Points for Clark Products Napier

Always looking for new IDEAS!

This week is Health and Safety week in New Zealand and wow are there a lot of great advertising programs! ACC has sent out a ton of “at home” incidents that can happen and they are pretty home-hard hitting! If you have a chance go have a look!
Updates - View comments on my latest updates - Yahoo!7 Pulse

Reverse Graffiti

Just some awesome stuff I found that looked great. This guy goes around cleaning things to look like graffiti...its pretty awesome. Ive attached a link to look into at further!
http://reversegraffitiproject.com/

To certify or not ro certify!

The CENVP program will ensure that talented, skilled and ethical environmental professionals are given due recognition in line with their professional counterparts from engineering, accounting, planning and architecture. Certification will provide a higher level of assurance to the community, employers, clients and professional associates. By certifying practitioners that meet high standards of professional and ethical conduct, the scheme is set to drive environmental practice to new levels

http://www.cenvp.org/process.php

In brief, to qualify for the CENVP, you will need:

1) an environment-related degree;

2) five years of relevant environmental experience over the past ten years;

3) three referees prepared to vouch for your skills, performance and professional conduct;

4) a signed statement of ethical conduct;

5) commitment to a minimum over two years of 50 hours of continued professional development; and

6) additional supporting evidence of claim including at least two referee reports

http://www.bcsp.org/ohst_clcs

In addition to the Certified Safety Professional certification, BCSP administers certifications in safety and health for people working in technician and technologist positions. Some examples of occupational health and safety activities are making work site assessments to determine risks, potential hazards and controls, evaluating risks and hazard control measures, investigating incidents, maintaining and evaluating incident and loss records, and preparing emergency response plans.


BCSP operates these certifications through their Council on Certification of Health, Environmental and Safety Technologists, or CCHEST division. CCHEST, formerly the ABIH/BCSP Joint Committee, was started in 1985 and has operated the Occupational Health and Safety Technologist (OHST) program for over twenty years. In 1992, the Construction Divisions of the American Society of Safety Engineers (ASSE) and the National Safety Council (NSC) sought a similar credential for construction safety positions and for first-line supervisors in construction. From this initiative, the Construction Health and Safety Technician (CHST) program was started in 1994 and the Safety Trained Supervisor (STS) program in 1995. In 2007, CCHEST began offering an experience-based certification for loss control practitioners, the Certified Loss Control Specialist (CLCS). CCHEST became a division of BCSP at the end of 2008.

These certification programs offer recognition among safety and health practitioners, demonstrate competence to employers and others, increase employee confidence in occupational health and safety programs, help improve company profitability through reduced incidents and losses, and enhance the company image. The CCHEST certifications are viewed by many in safety practice as a stepping stone toward career advancement along the path toward attaining the CSP credential.

Top 10 Uni's in the World and thier short courses!

LOVE LOVE LOVE THIS LINK! Online courses from the best uni's in the world FOR FREE!

TOP 10 UNI'S

1: Harvard Uni - USA

2: Stanford Uni - USA
   Earth Sciences Department - Geography and Earth Sciences

3: University of California - USA
    Environmental Health Science Masters
    Environmental Science, Policy and Management
    Fee's

4: Uni Cambridge - UK
    Engineering Department
   Fee's

5: MIT - USA
They have great free courses online.

6: CIT - USA
   Graduate Program

7: Columbia University - USA
   Graduate Programs
          Master of Science    
   Distance Learning
          Master Engineering

8: Princeton University - USA
    Princeton Environmental
                    Courses
    Civil and Enviro Engineering
    Fee's

9: Uni of Chicargo - USA

10: Uni of Oxford - UK
Online courses for environmental management
International Student Information

11: Yale Uni - USA
Environmental Engineering
Environmental Science
Graduate courses

UNI 94: Sydney University Australia
Graduate Certificate in Project Management
Masters of Project Mangement
Course Structure
Fee's

Environmental Jobs UK

For Environmental and Volunteering Jobs
http://www.environmentjob.co.uk/

Short Courses and Distance Learning!

I was interested to see what short courses were available and loved some of the courses I found interesting....so I thought a good Idea to share:

University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa:
Part-time courses
Short Courses List for 2010
I personally loved the idea of: Health, Safety and Environment, and Introduction to Environmental Impact Assessments, as well as Project Management Intro and level 2

University of Pretoria - South Africa:
List of Courses

Nebosh (National Examination Board for OHS) has some internationally recognised courses and centers

IIRSM - International Institute of Risk and Safety Management

Sustainability in Australia

Open University Australia
Open University UK

Mercury and its Hazards

A great article published recently outline the Hazards Associated with Mercury. As stated by a prof. who read it at the Unoversity of queensland; "it is insightful and brings home the issues regarding the hazards of mercury". ENJOY!

InnoLab - Mercury Overview

Environmentalist Careers book!

This is a GREAT resource for deciding on an environmental Career as well as information you may need for Australia as well as links to jobs!

http://www.environmentaljobs.com.au/sites/environmentaljobs.com.au/files/TheGuide2010.pdf

The Guide 2010

Putting a VALUE on the Earth - Environment

A DISCUSSION TOPIC FROM THE UNIVERSITY OF QUEENSLAND ENVIRONMENTAL MANAGEMENT DEPARTMENT:
Willingness-to-pay (WTP) underpins many environmental valuation techniques (Munasinghe 1994). However, people often make choices which are clearly detrimental to their wellbeing in the longer term, such as smoking, or spending income rather than saving for retirement. These decisions are often regretted with the benefit of hindsight. Given what these examples seem to reveal about human behaviour, how accurately can we expect people to reveal their true WTP for environmental values which might not immediately affect them, but which might in the future, or will perhaps only affect future generations? How might uncertainty about the full environmental effects of a decision affect apparent WTP? What do you think are the biggest challenges in valuing non-market priced environmental goods and services?

http://www.csu.edu.au/research/ilws/researchers/climatechangeworkingpaper.pdf
http://www.sni-hueting.info/EN/Publications/1998-The-concept-of-env-function.pdf

Costanza's View on the World. A discussion for 2010

Costanza's Home Page
Costanza CV and other articles written
Costanza, R. 2000. Visions of alternative (unpredictable) futures and their use in policy analysis. Conservation Ecology 4(1): 5.

I took slightly alternative approach to the Costanza article where I thought it would be interesting to see what the lay-may thought of the 4 possible futures that were available to us in this article. I approached my family and friends to see what they would like to see and what path they feel we are heading.


My parents who are extremely well educated and worldly and who also have zero faith in the Y-Gen felt that if the future is left up to the Y-Gen that everything would fall to pieces and probably end up in a Mad/Max scenario and very doomsday, they pointed out though that they feel things are heading more into a Big Government scenario where many more laws will be put in place to prevent the abuse of the environment in the future and maybe eventually leading to a relief for the population and environment.

My partner who is also well educated and well travelled felt that they way things are heading at the moment was towards Mad Max and the doomsday approach and that a disease killing off a lot of the population would be inevitable because we all live on top of each other in high density situations. He wishes though, that things will head towards Ectopia and back to a day where people are more self reliant and less reliant on technology as he feels that as a culture we have lost that ability to be self reliant and community based.

Our flat mates, who are not well travelled and moderately educated, felt that the human race is heading towards the Star Trek Theory. That as they already have 4 kids they would like to see a world where four kids were the norm and that technology would probably end up saving us. They felt that Ectopia was unreachable and their lack of respect for the government lead me to believe that Big Government was out of the question.

When I sat down to look at the possibilities and the question posed it dawned on me that I was a definite pessimist when it came to the 4 futures. I would really like us to head towards Ectopia as that’s what I would love to see for future generations. But where would the motivation come from? If there is no money and no employment.....what would people work towards? What would motivate them? If there were no trades like engineering because we are all living in small communities...what would we teach kids at school? I felt that (although I love the show) the Star Trek approach was just unrealistic. The logistics of moving people to space would be insane. And what would we do with all the waste? Put it in space? Let it float around? Fill up the voids in space till we have destroyed that environment too? I think if we wanted to move towards a more modern “Star Trek” ideal....lets rather call it the “Avatar Ideal”

I feel that big government is achievable if we could all just co-operate, but the wars and problems cause from ignorance might make that a very hard situation to solve. But i really do feel that it could be achievable.

Aaaa....finally the mad max approach. When I got to thinking this one through i really wanted to keep telling myself that this wasn’t possible. By I couldn’t. I really feel realistically, this is where we are heading as a society. We already have out breaks of diseases and HIV/AIDS is a pandemic. There are already societies which have crumbled and are on the brink of destruction because of poverty and exponential population growth. Just living in South Africa and Thailand, it’s like night and day compared to Australia. South Africa has SO much poverty and societies which are at each other all the time. Orphans because of parents with aids and then the kids have aids and it’s just a shambles and how, realistically, are we going to fix this without doing something really drastic? Which makes me think that this is route we are heading, and pretty quickly to which for me is a MAJOR concern. It’s really made me rethink having kids if this is the future.
XXX Nicola

Building sustainable homes - Brisbane City Council

Building sustainable homes - Brisbane City Council


Sustainable homes have three main design elements that provide benefits during construction and for the lifetime of the house:

1.Environmental sustainability: the home is designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, save water and energy usage, and reduce waste.
2.Social sustainability: the home has built-in safety features to prevent injuries, as well as security features to reduce crime and improve the occupants’ sense of security. Universal design features are used so everyone, including children or people with limited mobility, will be comfortable.
3.Economic sustainability: the home is designed to save money and avoids the need for major renovations. Costs of energy use, water use and maintenance will be reduced.
Brisbane City Council is encouraging people who are building or buying a new home to discuss their home’s sustainability features with architects and builders.

ISO NEWS

ISO has published a new, updated brochure providing a basic introduction, as its title indicates, to Environmental management – The ISO 14000 family of International Standards.


The 12-page, colour brochure is the latest edition of a successful publication first released in 1998, two years after the launching of the first standards in the ISO 14000 family. Since then, the ISO 14000 standards have achieved a worldwide impact and the brochure gives a concise idea of how the family has evolved to provide comprehensive solutions to the range of environmental challenges facing business, government and society today.

The brochure was authored by experts from ISO technical committee ISO/TC 207, Environmental management, which is responsible for the the ISO 14000 family. They point out that the ISO 14000 standards not only provide environmental benefits, but also significant tangible economic benefits, including the following:

■Reduced raw material/resource use

■Reduced energy consumption

■Improved process efficiency

■Reduced waste generation and disposal costs

■Utilization of recoverable resources.

The brochure includes an overview of the standards making up the ISO 14000 family. The best known standard is ISO 14001:2004. By end of December 2008, the standard was being used by organizations in 155 countries as a framework for environmental management systems (EMS) to manage better the impact of their activities on the environment and to demonstrate sound environmental management. Other published standards, which can be used independently or in combination with ISO 14001 and with each other, address the following topics:

■Environmental performance

■Environmental labels and declarations

■Life-cycle assessment

■Greenhouse gas (GHG) accounting, verification and accreditation

■Environmental communication

■Environmental aspects in product standards.

Further documents now under development provide tools for the following activities:

■Eco-efficiency assessment

■Material flow cost accounting

■Carbon footprint of products (and its calculation)

■Phased implementation of an EMS

■Eco-design

■Quantitative environmental evaluation

■Competence requirements for GHG validators and verifiers.

The ISO 14000 family is designed to be implemented according to the same Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA) cycle underlying all ISO management systems standards. A table in the brochure classifies the ISO 14000 standards according their optimal place in the PDCA cycle. Other sections cover the following aspects:

■ISO's overall contribution to the environment, which goes beyond the work ISO/TC 207

■Environmental management and sustainability

■An introduction to ISO/TC 207, including its origins and the global participation in its work.Because the work of ISO/TC 207 is constantly evolving, the committee's section on the ISO Web site should be consulted for the latest information on its work programme and membership. However, the new edition of the ISO 14000 brochure answers a need for a basic, but comprehensive introduction for distribution at conferences, or requested by potential users of the standards, and by students.

Environmental management – The ISO 14000 family of International Standards, which is published in English and French paper editions, is available free of charge (fee for postage and handling of bulk orders) from the ISO Central Secretariat through the ISO Store or by contacting the Marketing, Communication & Information department (see right-hand column). It can also be obtained from ISO national member institutes (see the complete list with contact details). The brochure is also available as a PDF file on the ISO Web site.

The ISO14000 family 2009

Island Hopping......

Today I was interested by the plight of Christmas Island. Being environmentally inclined i automattically looked for thier environmental issues etc. This lead me to some other equally interesting islands! Below are some of the islands I reseached.

Christmas Island
Banaba Island

Green Pages

One of my personal favorite sites and endless (well....to its limitations) source of information.
You can find info/news/blogs etc from almost any country in the world!
ECO WEB! - Green Pages

What does Environmental Management Consist of?

Question Posed By Nadia Storm; Johannesburg; South Africa

Environmental management is not, as the phrase could suggest, the management of the environment as such, but rather the management of interaction by the modern human societies with, and impact upon the environment. The three main issues that affect managers are those involving politics (networking), programs (projects), and resources (money, facilities, etc.). The need for environmental management can be viewed from a variety of perspectives. A more common philosophy and impetus behind environmental management is the concept of carrying capacity. Simply put, carrying capacity refers to the maximum number of organisms a particular resource can sustain. The concept of carrying capacity, whilst understood by many cultures over history, has its roots in Malthusian theory. Environmental management is therefore not the conservation of the environment solely for the environment's sake, but rather the conservation of the environment for humankind's sake.

Environmental management involves the management of all components of the bio-physical environment, both living (biotic) and non-living (abiotic). This is due to the interconnected and network of relationships amongst all living species and their habitats. The environment also involves the relationships of the human environment, such as the social, cultural and economic environment with the bio-physical environment.


As with all management functions, effective management tools, standards and systems are required. An 'environmental management standard or system or protocol attempts to reduce environmental impact as measured by some objective criteria. The ISO 14001 standard is the most widely used standard for environmental risk management and is closely aligned to the European Eco-Management and Audit Scheme (EMAS). As a common auditing standard, the ISO 19011 standard explains how to combine this with quality management.

It really is a little bit of everything. I enjoy EVERY moment and Love every aspect. You need to know something and a lot about so many different fields. Legislation; Climate; Management; Logistics; Chemicals; Microbiology; Biochemistry; Human Nature; Public Particiaption. You need to be good at maths. It brings in elements of statistics; and one minute you are spending 5 days straight writing a report and the nest week you are flying off to some country whos name you cant even pronounce to make sure they arent contaminating the water. You get to deal with farmers and get your boots muddy then wash up and walk into an executive meeting where you need to tell someone how NOT to loose millions of dollars while saving the environment. 
 
I really love my career and I WOULD NEVER trade it for anything. I would only develop it.

The UnQuanifiable Environment

Question Posed By: Douglas Britz, Johannesburg South Africa

Question: Is the Environment Quatifiable?

Answer: No; no completely. There are to many slight influncing factors for each item in the environment. the environment is unquantifiable and thus one needs to manage that accordingly. Its called cummulative environmental management which takes into mind all the different aspects and risks associated with the environment to be able to manage it effectively.Its like controlling the climate one cant do that. One also cant control / manage the ... Read moreenvironment so this is why we have to have standerdised systems to achieve maximum and effective management in a state of continuous chaos. Its based on Fuzzy logic and the Chaos theory of mathamatics and statistics.

Douglas Britz:. i agree with everything above (for it is what i basically said ...) except for one thing the environment is quantifiable, we may not be able to detect everything but classification is possible.

Couple of Extracts from a couple of Journal Articals:.

Environment, security and the question of quantification - Joseph Alcamo.

The link between environmental change and human security brings together two important issues having to do with nature and society. In the last ten years, great progress has been made in understanding this link, but this new knowledge has been mostly in a descriptive and qualitative form. But now there are some compelling reasons to move from qualitative to quantitative analysis. Quantifying this issue could help researchers to better understand the historical record of environmental change and security threats. It could also help to harmonise the assessment of different global environmental threats, and provide a quantitative foundation to future scenarios of the impact of environmental change on human security. To carry out this quantification, at least three measures of environmental change and human security need to be elaborated:''environmental stress'',''state susceptibility'', and''crisis''. The concept of''transient environmental stress''is introduced to describe an undesirable short-term departure from''normal''conditions. The concept''state susceptibility''(in the context of environment and security) is suggested as the degree to which a state can resist and recover from crisis brought on by environmental stress; and''crisis''is defined as an unstable time. brought on by environmental stress that requires extraordinary emergency measures to counteract. Various methods are possible for quantifying these measures. For example, for transient environmental stress, newly developed global environmental models can be used. For state susceptibility, it may be possible to build on existing quantitative indices of political capacity and the level of democracy. For quantifying the occurrence of crises, researchers may be able to draw on various compilations of disasters and related events. Finally, a method called a''security diagram''is suggested for tying all of these measures together quantitatively. This and other methods may prove to be successful in quantifying the concept of environmental security, if the methodological challenges can be overcome.

http://www.inderscience.com/search/index.php?action=record&rec_id=1551&prevQuery=&ps=10&m=or

http://www.apsnet.org/pd/PDFS/1985/PlantDisease69n06_461.PDF.

Not only in doing environmental management do we deal with the environment but people and sustainablity of the future environment and the human being and culture is so unique and complex that those too are completely un quantifiable.

Increasingly, environmental agencies are engaged in public participation activities. Unfortunately, the limited evaluation of public participation programmes also makes improvement of such programmes more difficult. To encourage further thinking about the evaluation of environmental public participation programmes, this article discusses some of the basic issues raised by evaluators of social programmes (e.g. unemployment and housing, etc.) that have served as methodological proving grounds for evaluation. These issues include why evaluate and what and how to evaluate, as well as questions concerning the role of evaluators. To illustrate ways in which evaluators of environmental public participation programmes have grappled with these issues, examples of different methodological approaches are included. Finally, based on this review, recommendations are made to improve evaluations of environmental public participation programmes, such as increasing evaluation aimed at making mid-course corrections, which includes involving participants in evaluation and assessing a variety of participatory goals.