Young Farmers are Combining Politics with Pitchforks

Image credit: Good The life of a farmer is a difficult one—meaning, for most, years of hard work, little money, and even less appreciation. Maybe it is this reason that passing down the family farm has become an increasingly difficult proposition....Read the full story on TreeHugger

After Smart Grids, Smart Sewage? NoMix Toilet Gets Thumbs-Up in 7 European Countries

NoMix Toilet. Photo: Flickr Technological Innovations in the Bathroom? You Bet! Being green is all about solving problems and grabbing overlooked opportunities. It turns out that there's such a double-win in most bathrooms around the world; if we had "NoMix" toilets that separate urine from solid waste, municipal wastewater plants would have a significantly easier task (and produce more methane to generate electricity), and we could much more easily extract precious nutrients like phosphorus and nitrogen for use as fertilizer (instead of using fossil fuels). So what's stopping us from going NoMix?...Read the full story on TreeHugger

Unilever & Solazyme Working On Algae Oil Process For Soaps And Other Personal Care Products

World consumption of most common commodity triglyceride vegetable oils. Image credit:Wikipedia Certain plant oils, especially palm oil, have a reputation of being produced unsustainably. Many plant oils are low-cost commodities (see table above for recent global volumes). Certain of the commodity plant oils are used extensively in soap and personal care products; and demand for these is increasing (a growing market segment does not accept animal fat-based product). For personal care products of the future, a key challenge is to find sustainable feedstoc...Read the full story on TreeHugger