This Sunday, Minneapolis (home to Utne Reader HQ) will play host to the traveling circus that is the Urban Assault Ride, an event that annually graces 13 cities across the country by pitting pairs of cyclists against bizarre obstacles in a manner reminiscent of a scavenger hunt.

It's an event with an eye towards environmental responsibility. All sponsors organize their businesses around sustainable practices, they compost or recycle 95% of the junk left over after the race, and as much as possible they use biodeisel fuel to power the vehicles that take their gear from city to city. Have a look:

Source: Urban Assault Ride 

The average car tire is roughly one part natural rubber (thank you, rubber tree) and four parts synthetic material (thank you, petroleum industry). It turns out you just can’t make a good tire without at least a little bit of the real thing thrown in there—and while rubber trees aren’t exactly a finite resource, chopping them down takes the form of clear cutting rainforest and they are slow to grow back.

Enter the lowly dandelion. It turns out that one species of the weed, Taraxacum kok-saghyz (TKS), produces rubber molecules.  Conservation Magazine reports that scientists in Germany “have identified the genes that allow TKS to produce usable rubber.”

Meanwhile, Matthew Kleinhenz of Ohio State University is working on increasing the yield of rubber from TKS. Kleinhenz is doing things the old-fashioned way, growing different strains of TKS, grinding up the roots (where sap is found) to see which have the highest rubber content, and cross-breeding the winners. His aim is to create a plant that is high-yielding and has roots chunky enough to be harvested mechanically.

Combining the two approaches—high-tech bioengineering and low-tech plant breeding—may produce a whole new crop species. It would also mark a step on a journey that some see as the way forward: a return to the use of plant-based products that have been overshadowed by the availability of cheap oil.

I can’t help myself—this effort needs a theme song…

Source: Conservation Magazine

Image by jurvetson, licensed under Creative Commons.

"Globally, the IT industry produces about the same volume of greenhouse gasses as the world’s airlines do,” writes Jason Stamper in Standpoint. That’s somewhere in the neighborhood of two percent of the modern civilization’s CO2 emissions.

Even your Google searches have a carbon footprint:

A Google search can leak between 0.2 and 7.0 grams of CO2, depending on how many attempts are needed to get the "right" answer. At the upper end of the scale, two searches create roughly the same emissions as boiling a kettle.

To deliver results to its users quickly, Google has to maintain vast data centres around the world, packed with powerful computers. As well as producing large quantities of CO2, these computers emit a great deal of heat, so the centres need to be well air-conditioned - which uses even more energy.

So here’s something funny: According to Google’s search trends database roughly 368,000 people search “carbon footprint” every month.  You get where I’m going with this, right? Even the words “carbon footprint” have a carbon footprint!  Ugh.

Source: Standpoint

Image by GuenterHH, licensed under Creative Commons.