Reusable Toilet Wipes
The Problem: America has a ravenous appetite for comfy toilet paper. The softer, the better. But what's good for the tush isn't good for the environment — soft toilet paper doesn't contain any recycled material and is often made from old-growth forests. A waste expert called soft toilet paper "a lot worse than driving a Hummer" in terms of environmental impact.
The Solution: Europeans use toilet paper with a greater proportion of recycled fiber. But for the true eco-warrior, there's an even more environmentally friendly solution — reusable toilet wipes. Made of cloth, reusable wipes offer all the comfort of the triple-ply, ultra-quilted toilet paper roll with none of the nasty tree-killing consequences. Instead, there's only the little matter of storing and washing dozens of waste-covered pieces of cloth. Every week. It's a tough sell, but one manufacturer promises they don't stink and sells wet bags to contain the dirty wipes.
Eco Craziness: 5/5. The cloth wipes are even sold in "funky and fun" combinations. We're willing to bet they're funky, especially after a week in the wet bag. Fun? Not so much.
Sustainable Love
The Problem: You're all set for an amorous evening: Candles lit, music playing, mood set. If only nagging worries over the environmental consequences of your lovemaking didn't spoil the passion! Condoms are made of latex, produced — often unsustainably — from rubber trees. Lubricants contain petroleum byproducts and chemical compounds that some say are harmful to health. Buzzkill.
The Solution: Eco-condoms and plant lubricant. The French Letter Condom Company offers several varieties of condom, each made with latex from sustainable sources. A portion of the sales of each condom also goes to benefit workers on the latex plantations in Asia. Pair that with Yes Yes Yes lubricant, which is produced from plants and is certified organic.
Eco Craziness: 2/5. Finally, guilt-free sex — at least from an environmental perspective.
Stapleless Stapler
The Problem: Staples. Everywhere. Clogging our landfills, polluting our soil, poisoning our bodies, killing the dolphins and gradually blotting out the sun ... wait. Staples? Really?
The Solution: The staple-free stapler promises, at long last, to make collation eco-friendly. Instead of using those thin metal planet-killers, the staple-free stapler "cuts out tiny strips of paper and uses the strips to stitch up to five pieces of paper together." You can even order them customized with your corporate logo so you can, you know, brag about what your company is doing to stop the staple epidemic.
Eco Craziness: 3/5. Relatively inoffensive and it probably makes for good water-cooler conversation. But aren't there bigger problems to tackle first?
Pig Urine Plates
The Problem: Many disposable plates and utensils are plastic, which is produced with fossil fuels and does not decompose easily.
The Solution: Produce them from pig urine, of course. A Denmark company called Agroplast can take urea compounds — a key component of urine — and use it to produce bioplastics that can be made into biodegradable plates and utensils. Other companies use less cringe-inducing starters like vegetable oil, but the Dutch company says pig urine, fraught with health hazards and high disposal costs unless processed, is a better environmental solution.
Eco Craziness: 5/5. There's no surer way to make your next dinner party your last.
Doin' the Electric Slide
The Problem: All the flashing strobes and pounding speakers at your favorite dance club are massive consumers of electrical power.
The Solution: Harness the energy on the dance floor. Bar Surya in London re-outfitted its floor with springs that, when compressed by dancers, produce electrical current that is stored in batteries and used to offset some of the club's electrical burden. The club's owner, Andrew Charalambous, said the dance floor can power 60 percent of the club's energy needs.
Eco Craziness: 1/5. Innovation and creativity earn this dance club a different kind of rave.
Urine Batteries
The Problems: Batteries are difficult to dispose of and contain harmful heavy-metal compounds that may leach into the soil.
The Solution: Again with the urine. This time, at least it's your own. Scientists in Singapore have figured out a way to harness human urine to create a chemical reaction that powers a rudimentary battery. Add a drop of pee to an assembly of copper chloride, magnesium and copper, and voila — it produces as much power as a AA battery. Scientist hope the small rigs can be used for medical applications like disposable at-home testing kits, but they caution more development is still needed.
Eco Craziness 2/5. Human urine is certainly not in short supply, and this could eventually lead to cheap, ultra-portable medical tests ready at a moment's notice — as long as you're properly hydrated.
The Greenest Convention Ever?
The Problem: Political conventions are a spectacle, and spectacles don't exactly lend themselves to environmental consciousness.
The Solution: Democrats promised their 2008 convention in Denver would be the "greenest convention in history." Sponsors encouraged attendees to offset their convention travel with carbon credits, while meals were made of locally-grown ingredients, reducing the environmental impact. Denver's Pepsi Center also staffed the convention floor with nearly 950 volunteers to make sure attendees tossed their trash and recyclables responsibly. Less effective, however were the wooden keycards, that replaced the standard hotel-issue plastic cards, and which reportedly splintered easily; or the billboard near Denver that reportedly asked the public to save water by wearing their underwear for four days in a row: forwards one day, backwards the next, then inside out for two more.
Eco Craziness: 4/5. When it comes to underwear, change is something we ALL can believe in.
Resomation
The Problem: So much for dust to dust — the modern American way of death isn't very environmentally friendly. A casket and embalming is clearly out — the body, stuffed full of chemicals, will linger for years. You may as well forget ashes to ashes, too: cremation creates a mournfully large carbon footprint. What's a felled eco-warrior to do?
The Solution: Submerge the body in alkali and water. Add pressure and heat. Let simmer until liquefaction. The process, called resomation, reduces the body to a fluid of biological compounds and remnant calcium from the bones. The fluid can be used as a fertilizer and the calcium discarded without environmental harm, or even put in an urn like ashes. Practitioners say the process is energy efficient, with limited carbon emissions and no harmful mercury use like burial or cremation. Heaven for the eco-conscious.
Eco Craziness: 2/5. It may never catch on with the general public, but there's no more better way for an environmentalist to go out than in an eco-conscious ooze of glory.
Bra Power
The Problem: Apparently, the world has overlooked the bra as an environmental savior.
The Solution: Perhaps its the long, lonely hours spent cooped up at the drawing board, but designers have come up with two separate proposals to harness the power of the common brassiere. The first, a Japanese proposal, is designed to cut down on the amount of chopstick waste in a country partial to the utensil. Triumph Japan has produced a bra built with a chopstick pocket for women to carry their own reusable utensils with them at all times. An added perk: the company says the chopsticks will help support the breasts and will "accentuate cleavage."
The second proposal, dreamed up by San Francisco writer Adrienne So, would use the breasts themselves as a power source. The idea is apparently feasible: a bra made of fabric interwoven with tiny wires can produce electricity from the bosom's natural bouncing motion throughout the day, enough to power a cell phone or an iPod. The larger the cup size, the more energy produced.
Eco Craziness: 3/5. While the concepts are doable, neither bra will be for sale anytime soon. The eco-friendly bra will remain a figment of lonely engineers' imaginations for a while yet.
The Tempuramobile
The Problem: The usual: cars running on fossil fuels.
The Solution: Japanese researchers developed a race car that runs on cooking oil from tempura — a popular Japanese method of frying fish and vegetables. They entered the car in the famed Paris-to-Dakar rally in 2007 as a way of raising awareness about biofuels, which researches say burns cleaner than fossil fuel and without as many harmful emissions. Tempura oil is particularly well suited to Japan — the food is hugely popular, making the cooking oil readily available.
Eco Craziness 2/5. Entering an experimental car in one of the world's most grueling and dangerous races to prove an environmental point might seem nuts, but driver Ukyo Katayama finished the race 68th out of the field of 109 who finished the arduous course. Many didn't make it the whole way, so perhaps a tempura-powered car is not so crazy after all.