Sustainable Ballard

Building on the posts from yesterday, this is about Sustainable Ballard, another local organization focused on sustainability within their community. Sustainable Ballard also wrote some of the pieces that I read in the West Seattle Green Book. The topic areas on their site are called guilds and there are several of them including Food & Health, Community, Garden & Natural Environment, Home & Built Environment, and Transportation.

Here is a little more information about their organization.

Sustainable West Seattle

While I was reading the West Seattle Green Book, I saw a page about Sustainable West Seattle so I wanted to share what I have found about this organization.
I am excited about this as a new resource for me because it is local where I now live and because of the breadth of interest and topic areas that are represented. Here are some of the areas of their site: Events, News, Education, Energy and Energy Blog, Food, Transportation and Water.

West Seattle Green Guide

Last night as I stopped at the grocery store on my way home I saw this little green book on a stand with the store ads. It said " The West Seattle Green Book" on the front with a big recycling symbol. I ended up grabbing one of them as I left the store and there is the story behind this post.

The West Seattle Green Book has a umber of advertisements for green or sustainable products and services offered in West Seattle. There are also several editorial pieces. I also enjoyed the green tips, one was on upcycling and another was on community gardening.

Biodegradable Products

Building on yesterday's post, I found a website that was creatively named "Biodegradable Products" and thought this would be a good site to post about. Here is the link to the products that they sell, the most useful for me would be the pet poop bags but I already have a bundle of them.
It was an interesting little collection of products.

Biodegradable Products Institute

To follow up on yesterday's post, here is a little information about the Biodegradable Products Institute.

Their website is pretty dry and not exciting but it does have a lot of resources if you are looking to find certified compostable products in their directory of products. I found the All About Composting section of the site most interesting.

What is compost? Here is the answer they have - Composting is a natural process that turns organic materials into a dark, rich substance. This substance, called compost or humus, is a wonderful conditioner for your soil. As an organic-matter resource, compost has the unique ability to improve the chemical, physical, and biological characteristics of soils or growing media. And while compost or humus contains plant nutrients, it is typically not characterized as a fertilizer.

I also read their History of "Biodegadation" page. You can explore and see more of what they offer on this site.

Biodegradable

What is biodegradable? I think this is something I feel like I know but am still a little fuzzy about so I will post about it this week. For this initial post I will begin with the definition.

The definition is: capable of being broken down especially into innocuous products by the action of living things (as microorganisms).

The word was first used in 1961. It was also interesting that on the Merriam-Webster dictionary site they tell you what the word that comes before and after it is and they are - biodefense and biodeterioration.

Biodegradation can be done aerobically or anaroebically and it can also be measured in both of these ways. To measure aerobic biodegradation the amount of oxygen that microbes use or the carbon dioxide they produce is what is counted and to measure anaerobic biodegradation the amount of methane or alloy that is produced is measured.

The Impact of Seafood

There won't be much substance in this post but the link is rich in material. In my "The Green Guide to go" newsletter from National Geographic today, there was a great piece about seafood, the marine food chain, sustainable seafood and the world's seafood footprint. I really hope that you follow this link and explore more about this topic. There is a lot of multimedia at this site and it is very interesting. Here is a teaser statistc for you - Every year, over 170 billion pounds of wild fish and shellfish are caught in the world's oceans!