Branching out from now-blasé plastic bag bans, Seattle has banned city purchases of bottled water.

Officials in Seattle say they’re motivated by economic and environmental reasons - as well as regional pride in their water supplies. Seattle’s tap water comes mainly from rainfall and melting snowpack from two protected watersheds.

Seattle predicts it will save $58,000 of public money by asking (okay - telling) city employees to drink from the tap, which costs pennies on the dollar compared to eight bucks a gallon for bottled water. In addition, the city won’t be contributing to the massive fossil fuel use in transportation of or waste disposal problems associated with plastic water bottles.

City employees don't need to worry about the safety of tap water - municipal water supplies are continuously tested against at least one hundred federal EPA standards; but standards for bottled water are merely suggested by the FDA.
San Francisco was the first to derail the Culligan-man gravy train in 2007, saving their state an estimated $500,000.

From The Seattle Times

So our government is working on making the US more environmently friendly. There have been lots of great steps and measures taken; hybrid cars, solar power, wind power.

"Although a recent bid to force electric companies to increase wind and solar power to 15% of total electrical output by 2020 failed, Congress is getting close to passing an energy bill that contains a little-known provision designed to phase out the 125-year-old incandescent light bulb in the next four to 12 years. Instead the future will be lit with next generation energy-efficient lighting" (USA Today).

This means that the normal filament style light bulbs that you so love and know, might become a technology of the past. Just like 8-Track and Records were phased out for better technology, so will light bulbs. They will be replaced by efficient, and economical CFLs (Compact Fluorescent Light)

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I think that if you have been reading my blogs, you know I am all for solar technology and the advancement of implicating it in everyday use. The sun is the greatest source of energy, and I'm glad we are finally starting to use it more. I have posted before about nanosolar technologies, and I found an update, so I wanted to share it.

After five years of product development – including aggressively pipelined science, research and development, manufacturing process development, product testing, manufacturing engineering and tool development, and factory construction – we now have shipped first product and received our first check of product revenue.

… Today we are announcing that we have begun shipping panels for freefield deployment in Eastern Germany and that the first Megawatt of our panels will go into a power plant installation there.

Cost has always been the burdening factor weighing down the mass application of solar technology at nearly $3 per watt. In order to compete with the energy produced from coal solar has been in need of finding a way to shrink its costs down to $1 per watt. Nanosolar’s cells use absolutely no silicon as is the standard for current solar production and the efficiency of the PowerSheet cells are competitive with the traditional systems as well. The golden kicker, the cost to produce these solar coatings is a mere 30 cents per watt!!