Vertical Farm in Singapore

Add[It's the] World’s first low carbon hydraulic water-driven, tropical vegetable urban vertical farm, using green urban solutions to achieve enhanced green sustainable production of safe, fresh and delicious vegetables, using minimal land, water and energy resources. caption

Check out this article, Vertical Farm Opens In Singapore, Sells Out Instantly, by Lloyd Alter at Treehuger.com. Singapore is using public money in a public/private partnership with Sky Greens , a local company, to help reduce the city's reliance on importing vegetables. This is an innovative idea that could be implemented in urban populations around the world. It would be another dent in the world’s use of fossil fuels not having to transport the vegetables to market and not having to use petroleum based fertilizers. It would also give the local community healthy, pesticide and chemical free vegetables and job opportunities. Sky Greens works closely with the Singapore Corporation of Rehabilitative Enterprises (SCORE) as an active participant and assists ex-offenders by giving them an opportunity to obtain gainful employment. This is an example of the types of pioneering enterprise that we need to find a way to foster. One farm at a time.

Can we call it Global Climate Change Now?

As pictures from NY City took over social media last night, I started hearing references to “Superstorm Sandy”. We have reached Superstorm Status. I looked at Fox News and even they are calling it Super, Monster, Extreme.  I am not sure how Super, Monster or Extreme the weather has to be before you absolutely have to admit the climate has changed.  Here are two articles that I thought were timely.

William Rivers Pitt is in his Op-ed from Truthout today asks why climate change is not a topic in the Presidential Campaigns;

“Remember this summer? All the insane weather everywhere that eventually caused even the most strident climate-change deniers to flee for cover and start hoarding canned goods? Remember when Greenland melted? Remember all the articles about the upside of the accelerating climate disaster happening all around us, vis a vis new shipping lanes and mining possibilities in all the places where there used to be ice?

Remember the drought?

Rivaling the Dust Bowl of the Depression era, the 2012 drought has impacted food production in America across the board, causing food prices to spike in a way that has been felt by everyone not rich enough to laugh off the price of a gallon of milk. More than anything else, it was the drought that brought home the reality of climate change to Americans this past summer.

He is one of my favorite authors btw…

Mike Tidwell writing for The Nation yesterday, proposed three major options for what we can do:

“What can we do? Three major options: (1) abandon our coastal cities and retreat inland, (2) stay put and try to adapt to the menacing new conditions or (3) stop burning planet-warming fossil fuels as fast as possible.

Retreat, of course, is no one’s first choice. But adapting means committing fully to the New Orleans model. It means potentially thousands of miles of levees and floodwalls across much of the East Coast. And that’s just to handle the rising sea. For hurricane surge tides, the only solution might be to build those major floodgates across New York Harbor, the Potomac Rivers and elsewhere. But are we truly ready to become New Orleanians, casting our lot behind ever-higher, unsustainable walls? Once we commit to fortified levees and massive floodgates, there’s no turning back. It’s an all-or-nothing proposition, as New Orleans has graphically demonstrated.

In truth, we must combine some level of adaptation with the third option: switching away from fossil fuels and onto clean energy. Clean energy is less expensive, less risky and overall much better for us. It’s the option that treats the disease of global warming, not just the symptoms. Only by dramatically reducing greenhouse gas pollution—by putting a price on carbon fuels and ushering in real gains in wind and solar power and efficiency—can we slow the sea-level rise and potentially calm the growth in hurricane intensity.”

Of course we all know why the political campaigns are not talking about climate change and why they are touting their love of oil, gas and coal.  The problem is that those who are affected the most by the change have very little voice. We all need to scream at once.

Is Your Head In The Sand?

Check out this recent addition to the Richmond Vale Academy's YouTube Channel about the Climate Compliance Conference at their home in Saint Vincent and Grenadine.

Head out of the Sand

Your clothing donation helps to fund the programs at RVASVG like Climate Compliance.

• It has Climate Change as its theme.
• It has Climate Compliance, a concept of adaptation to changes of the climate, as its aim.
• It has Richmond Vale Academy as its minor area of action.
• It has the immediate surroundings of the Academy as its major area.
• It has the whole of St. Vincent as its prime area.
• It is planned to run for ten years.
• It operates with two teams of students per year, each running for 6 months.

By forming GAIA clubs around the island, by focusing on important issues such as food security and energy production and water availability, and by preparing for warmer times with more disasters, teachers, students and people at St. Vincent will unite in common understanding and action. The future is also a part of the program. It shows as a  field of possibilities because we move to understand by knowledge, come together by understanding and act by our unity.

"Global Warming and Climate Change is running its course, with catastrophic consequences for the future of humankind and our planet, triggered by man’s burning of fossil fuels and the resulting release of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere. 

Natural resources are being exploited and stretched to their limits, species are disappearing at a rate never before seen in modern history, hunger, starvation and diseases strike down The Poor as a daily matter of course, and the powers waging never-ending wars kill people with ever more sophisticated weaponry, while millions are made refugees.

Meanwhile, the capitalist system of society continues to promote its way of life and its view of the world as seen through the global media, as if everything, if not in the best order, is as good as it can possibly get. We cannot sit around and watch this. From our vantage point on the island of St. Vincent in the Eastern Caribbean, we have placed ourselves in the middle of action."

Stina Herberg - Headmaster 

Day in the life, IICD Massachusetts…The Garden

What is the cause of the obesity epidemic in our country, and why is the food we buy in supermarkets unhealthy and deficient in nutrients? What does it mean when giant corporations control food production with profit as their only goal?

At IICD Massachusetts, you will be educated and involved in food production on many levels. You will learn how to plan and start garden farms as an important action to healthy living and fighting poverty. You will study the issues of food consumption from local and global standpoints, and get the facts about the consequences of a malnutrition economy. 

We most urgently need to prepare ourselves for the consequences of Global Warming. Much of the crops in the Midwest have already burned up this year, and the long-term global warming phenomenon is just getting started. Anyone who eats, or hopes to in the future, should sit up and pay attention. It is long overdue that we behave more cautiously. The Natives of this country know the earth is suffering - maybe we should learn from them.

While working in the school’s garden farm you will discover how to solve obstacles such as getting water for irrigation, making compost from local waste materials, and fighting pests without using harmful poison or expensive fertilizers.

You will study and test economical ways of increasing crop yield, so farmers can prevent soil erosion and utilize scarce water supplies on their land. You will gather solutions for financing, transporting and distributing finished products. You will soon be equipped to take these tools and put them to work for the benefit of the poor. So look forward to getting your hands dirty and your brain busy on multiple fronts when it comes to food production.

Market Share

We all have seen growing conflicts over resources used for the production of goods. Without some major changes, worldwide wars over natural resources will be inevitable. This is not true for the textile recycling/reuse industry. Only 15% of unwanted or unneeded textiles are collected or donated. That leaves a whopping 85% that end up in landfills. That 85% is the amount of unclaimed resources available for industry giants like Salvation Army, St. Vincent De Paul and the 800 pound gorilla Goodwill as well as all the smaller players, both for profit and nonprofit, to grow for many years to come before there is any scarcity of resources. Yes it may necessitate some originality and imagination but the opportunity is wide open.  So we are left wondering, with all the availability of resource, why these industry giants would rather spend money sponsoring a bill like AB 1978 rather than allocating time and money toward a growth in market share.  The reasoning Goodwill uses, “The unattended collection box players have no local benefit” is weak at best. California has a 75% waste reduction goal by 2020. Working to reduce 85% of the textiles that end up in the landfills is clearly a benefit to California and its local communities. Also, despite the clear labeling, Campus California finds more than just textiles in their boxes. Canned food and books are often added in with people’s donations. These items are given to local schools and other local non-profit entities.  A more reasonable explanation for trying to regulate competitors out of the market is that these giants have become too bloated with overhead from both their growing number of facilities and store fronts as well as the cost of their CEO and upper management staff.

AB 1978

In May of this year Campus California was alerted that a bill had passed unanimously through the California Legislature sponsored by Goodwill Industries of Northern California and Northern Nevada and Assemblywoman Galgiani that had the potential to put us out of business. The short story on the bill: it would have allowed for anyone who thought unattended collection boxes were placed without permissions, or simply did not like the box for that matter, to call and have the box removed by a towing company, effectively legalizing theft of the boxes. Working in coalition with Planet Aid, USAgain, D.A.R.E, the Police Officers Association, Gaia and supporters of our organization that signed our Change.org petition, we were able to convince Governor Brown to veto AB 1978! This gives the unattended collection box industry a chance to have a voice in crafting meaningful regulation next session.

One of the largest challenges the collection box operators are currently contending with are the plethora of upcoming city regulations. Goodwill Industries, and to a lesser extent Salvation Army as well have been actively lobbying various city officials in a number of cities for some time now to paint collection boxes as something unnecessary that needs to be banned from our cities.

The donation box concept is based on convenience on one end and the ever increasing demand for used clothing on the domestic and international markets on the other end. Campus California’s donation boxes provide the public with an easy and convenient way of donating unwanted items that can be (fairly) easily delivered to various markets, effectively returning them into use as ready products (wearable clothing) or industrial feedstock (rags, shredded/unusable pieces) materials that would otherwise be landfilled. The periodically recurring complaint about “taking away” donations from other charities (read: Goodwill) is baseless once one looks on the data from the EPA and a number of waste characterization studies. These show that not only we are recycling only about 15 % of all textiles disposed in the US, but the overall volume of textiles in the waste stream is increasing as well, topping 13 million tons in 2010. 

In short, the focus should be on increasing public participation in the recycling programs that are out there to get people to recycle more since this is clearly not a zero sum game with the textile diversion numbers being where they are.

There are a few bad apples in this industry, just as in any other, but not every solar company is called Solyndra! The fact is that you can usually tell a sensible regulation by the support from all sides. Just as AB 918, setting disclosure requirements on collection boxes, had the support of all parties, despite being introduced and sponsored by Goodwill. On the other hand, the Sacramento city regulation from 2010 had the opposition of all collection box operators in the city, but the support of the Goodwill CEO and one of the highest paid lobbyists in the state presenting himself as “just a regular property owner”. As a result, there is widespread compliance with the state bill, at least amongst the honest box operators; but no legally placed boxes in Sacramento.

Sensible regulations governing the operating of textile collection boxes can be helpful for a city. Small enough permit fees and simple rules encourage compliance, help the city to maintain oversight and make enforcement easier. Drop off locations can get registered, so if any complaint from the public comes in, the code enforcement knows exactly who does the box belong to. In fact one of the sources of frustration for operators that try to do the right thing is that all boxes just get thrown into the same bag, when there are a number of players on the field and not all of them care the same way for the boxes or any regulations for that matter.

Understandably the cities are also looking at boxes as a possible revenue stream in the form of permit and other fees, but sometimes they get a little carried away. Imposing a $2-3 000 fee for a single location, as some places require, and a sufficiently complicated approval process to back the fee up (sometimes with public hearings and planning commission approvals) makes it impossible for the operator to actually comply with the rules and make any surplus at the same time. The result is that the unscrupulous companies will drop their boxes anyway, the city has to pay for enforcement from other sources or not enforce the violations (just ask Richmond how much luck they had in getting rid of the blue clothing boxes) and the people who wanted to comply with the rules lose out on the market.

Clothing donation boxes are one of the few recycling activities that thrives only in full public view. This causes unease in some public officials; zoning administrators and others who wish to design every aspect of our cities to the last minute detail. A drop off box that “pops up” from one day to another (well, what does it take to place one? Put it on a truck and place it on a site, done. Really not a big project!) and can be moved away just as easily introduces almost an element of chaos, or life, or change. Cities often consider recycling to be dirty and unsightly and something to be hidden, tucked away in industrial parks, or maybe in the back parking lots of large shopping centers where many of the bottle-and-can buy-back centers are being pushed. 

We believe for the ideas of reuse and recycling to be firmly sitting on people’s minds and not slipping to the back burner; recycling activities must remain visible, right in front of our eyes as well, not hidden away.

Earth Day 2012

Campus California was pleased to participate in Berkeley`s Earth Day on the 21st of April, 2012

A lot of people were interested to learn about our activities and in finding the nearest location to them

It was a very succesful event with all kinds of diffrent enviromental focus and people. Campus California was happy to be a part of it.

New school program for San Fransico Bay Area

Campus California is pleased to announce a start of a new program for public schools in San Fransico Bay Area, California.

The students will have a chance to learn about textile reuse and earn community service hours, and in the same time we are offering different fundraising opportunities for the schools as well. 

These fundraising opportunities could involve a clothing drive where the whole school would bring as much clothes as possible and earn money depending on the poundage or simply just host a donation box at the school. In the second case, the school will also earn money depending on the donated amount.

Campus California believes that this is a great way for students and schools to participate in an environmental program in the community and raise funds for the schools.

We all can make a diffrence! Don`t forget to reduce/reuse/recycle!

The BBQ Spot and a donation box?

Every week Campus California gets all different kinds of phone calls - some of them are exciting and some can be less exciting such as a request for removal of one of our donation boxes. But even such requests can have a happy ending and an interesting story behind it.
Visiting The BBQ Spot in Santa Rosa and meeting Rob was definitely one of these good stories.

Rob has a cozy Restaurant and is hosting one of our donation boxes; Unfortunately, Rob didn`t like the exact spot where our box had been placed, so he called us and requested it to be removed.

Coming to Santa Rosa, visiting Rob and his business and having a business discussion turned out to be very interesting for both sides. Rob was very curious about the non-profit world and the volunteers who do important sustainable development in Africa; He was also very eager to tell his story on how “building” the BBQ Spot has been a dream coming true for him. He liked the idea of how Campus California financially supports the fight against poverty and ended up understanding how important it is to keep the collection box at his restaurant.
We have, however, decided to relocate the box to the side of his business, where it would work best for Rob.

Been able to meet Rob, hear his story and also to keep our donation box at his place made this visit definitely worth it.

Thank you Rob for your great support!

CAMPUS CALIFORNIA ANNOUNCES 2011 RESULTS; over 8,000,000 pounds of clothing were collected and $320,000 donated through grants to support organizations fighting against poverty in the U.S. and abroad

Campus California, a Richmond, CA based non-profit organization, has announced its end of the year results. The organization collected over 8,000,000 pounds (3500 tons) of clothing in 2011 for reuse and recycling. Based on the EPA's Green House Gas Equivalencies Calculator, this is equivalent to preventing the release of 12,600 tons of CO2 in the air, or taking 2200 cars off the road for a year.
Campus California operates the largest clothing donation box program in the San Francisco Bay Area and continues to expand. Most recently new donation boxes were placed in Bakersfield, CA. Donations of clothing, shoes, books, toys, and DVD or other media items are accepted 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
The proceeds Campus California raised from the sale of donated goods in 2011 allowed them to donate $320,000 in grants to support the training and placement of volunteers in development projects in Africa, Central, and South America. Volunteers work with impoverished communities to improve living conditions in many different ways; projects include creating small community gardens to promote sustainable growing practices and increase local food security.

Read more about the environmental impacts here