It will take some very imaginative, innovative people to come up with ways of leading us all out of the environmental jungle in which we humans have gotten ourselves lost.
But fortunately for the planet and its occupants, many very creative people have set their inventive sights on the problem and are coming up with solutions. Brilliant solutions. Oh, how I wish I could have thought of some of them.
Here are only a few of the amazing answers our best minds have come up with recently to our pressing pollution problems.
The Milk Bottle
In a Vancouver, Canada, neighbourhood, a dairy company is selling thousands of litres of milk daily in (get this), glass bottles. The bottles, when empty, go back to the dairy where they’re washed and refilled and sold again. Drinking milk in that neighbourhood means never having to say you’re sorry for sending dozens of cardboard cartons and/or plastic bags to the landfill site every year.
The Clothes Line
Researchers recently wondered whether or not wet clothing could actually dry without being placed in an electricity-consuming or gas-burning clothes dryer. To test their theory, they stretched a rope tightly between two posts outside their laboratory and hung a shirt over it. Within hours, it was dry. They tried a pair of pants, then a towel and some socks and found the drying process works almost 100 per cent of the time with any kind of textile. An exception, they found, occurs when it is raining outside. They are working on ways around this problem including hanging up wet clothing inside a building. Test results should be revealed soon but early findings seem to hold some promise.
Alternative Transportation Modes
Although research into possible alternatives to the pollution-creating, gasoline-powered automobile is only just beginning, some revolutionary methods of getting from Point A to Point B are being tested. One method involves a person systematically and repetitively placing one foot ahead of the other foot and moving in the direction he or she desires to go. Repeated enough times, this motion, scientists theorize, will eventually propel a person to his or her destination. Other methods being tested include placing people on light, two-wheeled machines with pedals and teaching them to push the pedals, which drive a chain, which, in turn, turns the wheels. Another suggestion is to place a large box on wheels and hook it up to an animal such as a horse, although this idea is having some difficulty catching on. Scientists have some doubts the horses will cooperate.
The Windmill
In the push to find ways of creating energy without generating nuclear waste we can’t dispose of or burning non-renewable fossil fuels or damming up rivers and hurting the wildlife that lives in and around them, some scientists have made the radical suggestion that the wind, which always seems to be blowing around anyway, could be harnessed to generate electricity or to pump water out of wells. According to their theory, a fan of blades, erected high in the air and pointed into the wind would turn, and that motion could turn an electric generator or a water pump. It seems crazy but also on the drawing board are ships that would be pushed along through the sea by wind catching in huge sheets erected above their decks.
The Sweater
Although many Canadians keep their houses as warm as Florida so they can walk around half naked all winter long, some scientists wonder if a human being can survive in less balmy atmospheres. Experiments are being conducted with sweaters, sweatshirts, etc., to find out if keeping the heat we all generate as close to our bodies as possible instead of artificially heating all the space around us so we can watch TV in our underwear will work. Similar experiments are being carried out with extra blankets on beds to see if house temperatures could be lowered overnight.
Startling concepts, perhaps, but where science is concerned, it seems nothing is impossible.
©1990 Jim Hagarty
