BDPollution

iPic Theaters is organizing a Film Festival Contest themed under “Earth Preservation“.   The winning video will have their  chance to get their video premiered at iPic Theaters  for a month. The winning contestant will also receive $4000.

How to get involved?

Create a short film on the theme of Earth Preservation with a timeline of two to six minutes. Submissions will be accepted from Jan 7th,2012 – Feb 10th,2012. Results will be published on Earth Day, April 22nd 2012. Time is running out as the deadline approaches. To know more about the event go over to the facebook event here.

*All applicants must be 21 years or older

When going green started out couple of years back, businesses were very reluctant not to go towards that. There was a myth that going green was a waste of money and just a business-killer. However over time becoming more environmental-friendly became an investment to companies in the long run.

 I worked on some technical aspects on green investments for businesses/industries in Dhaka and found certain things why it’s worth it

When it came to energy auditing, generally the entire energy flow would be mapped. Then after mapping that, you know where you are losing extra energy. So if you plug that portion of energy down, you save energy. So what’s the benefit of saving energy? Firstly you spend less fuel (with fuel prices increasing, you would be definitely glad if fuel was saved), you save electricity are just some places where you save. However the strongest motivation is money, and trust me you save a lot of money. For businesses

Saving Money    =    Profits.

Anyways I got an article from The Economist on as to why firms go green.

Link courtesy Julika Niehaus- Global Campaign Manager at 10:10

As UK leads one of the largest coordinated global event 10:10:10, the Global day of Doing, this news sounds great. UK embraces renewable energy to a whole new level.

Details, basically this wind farm is one of the world’s largest offshore wind farm situated off the Thanet in Kent. The project was at a cost of £780m ,and is expected to generate enough electricity to power 240,000 homes.

Read more about it.

Mr. David Sandalow served in the State Department and at the National Security Council during the Clinton administration. Mr.Sandalow also have helped the Obama administration to up speed the development of electric cars and offer incentives for consumers and communities to begin taking steps to make transitions off conventional vehicles.

He travels on a Prius, which he converted to the latter models which allows you to plug it at an electric outlet and charges the battery. He fills his Prius will gasoline only once or twice a month. Just imagine the amount of CO2 emissions he saves!

Hats off and its great that officials like him are setting the example.

Get the full article here.

Yamaha has announced, actually last month that it has added a zero-emission electric scooter to its arsenal. The scooter is a 50cc and apparently can travel five times farther than its gasoline counterpart.

The scooter, EC-03, can travel 43 kilometers on a single 6-hour charge from a normal household power outlet .The model will be launched in September 1st,2010 with a price tag of $2,800.

Courtesy of Physorg.com

In my last post, I mentioned about the campaign on PutSolarOn.it, a campaign targeted towards world leaders, so that they also start by getting to work. The objective, placing a solar panel on top of all head buildings.

Bangladesh and India have recently powered their head buildings with solar power. Bangladesh Prime Minister office was lighted by solar power something earlier this year. Soon after the Prime Minister’s office, the Bangladesh Bank was also powered by solar. Looks like in Bangladesh, the politicians are a bit ahead in fighting climate change compared to the West but there a still a lot of work that needs to be done.

Governor of West Bengal in India, Gopal Krishna Gandhi, installed solar panels on the Kolkata Raj Bhavan, the Governor’s Residence, in December of 2009.

Even before the PutSolarOn, leaders have taken action and this shows that you too as an individual can do so much without waiting for someone do it for you. Anyways, the people at 350.org were quite excited when they found out. Get it here.

As countries make strong decisions on cutting their CO2 emissions, I came across a list of the top 10 countries using solar power and to tell you the truth, its quite fantastic.

1. Germany (9,785 MW)
2. Spain (3,386 MW)
3. Japan (2,633 MW)
4. United States (1,650 MW)
5. Italy (1,167 MW)
6. Czech Republic (465 MW)
7. Belgium (363 MW)
8. China (305 MW)
9. France (272 MW)
10. India (120 MW)

Courtesy of 1bog.org

Now with March 27th 2010 just round the corner, preparations for Earth Hour are in full swing. Over the last couple of days, I have been conversing with WWF Australia to get Bangladesh aboard as another country to the list of 88 countries who have signed for celebrating Earth Hour. I am still in discussions however in the mean time, IEEE AIUB Student Branch and I have organized a Seminar on Energy Savings, keeping that the theme.

Event Details

Day: Thursday, 25th 2010
Time: 12:30pm
Venue: AIUB Auditorium, Campus 1&5
Address: 58/B, Road-21, Kemal Ataturk Avenue, Banani,Dhaka

Event Speakers

!) Engr. A.H.M Mohiuddin
Chairman of Power & Energy Society

2) Engr.M.Omar Faruq
CEO & Consultant
Faruq M&E Consultant

3) Syed M.S. Zafar
Managing Director
TERM Magazine- A business monthly

4) Muhammad Faheem Faruq
Local Supporter of Earth Hour

Becoming a Computer Technician, compiled a list of Green tweets. As I saw the under-ending list, I noticed that I only follow only a few of the tweets and came across some that I never heard off. Anyways if you follow green tweets then check this post out. Thanks to Carolyn Friedman for sending me the post.

A team of scientists have been researching on a new technique where orange peels and newspapers could be used to run your vehicles in the near future. Now it is based on the concept of bio-fuel like using these to produce ethanol as fuel. However the ethanol produced by food causes more CO2 emissions.

This technique not only reduces the CO2 emissions compared to ethanol but it would not require food-based products to produce it unlike bio-fuel. This will benefit cause there are no chances of global food shortages or spiraling food costs.Food-based products are not used for this process such as sugarcane, corn, starch etc. It basically reuses waste products. Although research is still been done to verify the findings.