Ich Liebe Liebherr!

My brand loyalty to Sub Zero refrigerators is under attack again, and this time it's from a Swiss Company called Liebherr. Liebherr has been in the refrigeration business for 50 years and showed up on my radar about three years ago. I think they've been in the US for about the last ten years and based on what I've seen of their increased efforts to tap into the US market, they are planning to stay around for a while.

Like Sub Zero, Liebherr uses dual compressors (that's a separate motor and cooling system for the refrigeration side and the freezer side). Dual compressors make for a more efficient use of electricity and better temperature control. Better temperature control equals longer-lasting food.

Liebherr is also onto something that caught my eye in their latest product bulletin an they call it their "Active Green Initiative." Active Green means that Liebherr goes above and beyond the call of EPA regulation in the manufacture of their appliances and most notably to me, they comply with something called the RoHS. From their website:

The second key element of ActiveGreen is Liebherr’s RoHS compliance. As of summer of 2007, all Liebherr appliances in North America met RoHS compliance making Liebherr the FIRST refrigeration manufacturer to comply with this practise worldwide. RoHS stands for the “Restriction of the use of certain Hazardous Substances in electrical and electronic equipment” and eliminates the use of major hazardous substances in the production of Liebherr products such as lead (Pb), mercury (Hg), cadmium (Cd) and certain types of chrome and biphenyl.

The RoHS is a directive adopted and phased into practice in the European Union in 2006. With the coming change in US administrations, look for something similar to start showing up in the US. But in the meantime, the EU has presented a pretty noble goal in reducing the amount of toxic substances that show up in households.

For the life of me, I will never understand why people have such a cavalier attitude about bad news elements such as lead or mercury in their appliances. Lead shows up in Chinese-made children's toys and people freak out and demand Congressional action. Yet at the same time, these same peoples' US-made refrigerators and dishwashers are awash in the same levels of lead, mercury and cadmium.

Anyhow, a Liebherr refrigerator will set you back anywhere from five to ten thousand dollars, placing firmly in the luxury appliance market. So for the time being unfortunately; lead-, cadmium-, mercury- and hexavalent chromium-free refrigerators aren't available to the middle and lower ends of the market. But as is always the case, upper end innovation works its way down the market until it becomes a standard. I wish it would hurry up.

Cool new appliance thing

This is a new soda maker from a British company called Soda-Club. I found this through the great website from Dwell Magazine. I stopped dead in my tracks when I came across this thing. I drink a lot of club soda, I would say that it's my beverage of choice and that would still be an understatement. Nothing satisfies my thirst like a cold seltzer. It has no calories and no foul-tasting artificial sweeteners.

I used to buy San Pellegrino, but then I realized that Pellegrino is carbonated tap water. Ditto Perrier and the rest of them. If it's not just filtered tap water, then it's filtered spring water mixed with filtered tap water and then carbonated. Yet another marketing ploy in other words. A couple of years ago I got smart and started buying less-expensive seltzer in cans. Then I started becoming aware of the amount of solid waste my club soda habit was generating so I switched to two liter bottles of the stuff. I recycle the plastic bottles, but I still don't like the idea of drinking out of plastic.

For I while, I was making my own seltzer with an old-school soda syphon. The kind that use the small, disposable CO2 cartridges like in an old movie. But that's not a workable solution either. The cartridges are hard to come by and I went through them ridiculously fast.

But now I think I've found a solution in the Soda-Club Fountain Jet. It uses no electricity, it's attractive, I fill a reusable bottle with my own filtered tap water and presto change-o, real club soda. The Fountain Jet also comes with sweetened flavors that will allow one to make alternatives to Coke or Mountain Dew or any of the rest of them, only without using high-fructose corn syrup. No high-fructose corn syrup means no diabetic obese kids.

Best of all, this thing will allow me to imbibe in my club soda habit while saving money and generating zero solid waste. That's a one-two punch that sings to me, it really sings to me!

Do something positive

I took a week off of blogging last week but I'm back. I suppose it was a dry run for the ten days off I'm taking when I go on vacation in less than three weeks. Hot Dog!

Anyhow, I took a week off to think deep, design-related thoughts. Part of that process is coming up ways to position myself as a part of the solution to the global challenges of environmental degradation, climate change, efficient use of natural resources ad infinitum. Seriously, I urge people to use water filters for their drinking water to get them off the bottled water to cite an example. It's funny how snowed most people have become by the bottled water industry and it's happened so quickly it's downright shocking when you think about it. Seriously, think about how exotic and indulgent Evian seemed ten years ago. Now they sell the stuff a quickee marts along with 30 other brands of bottled water. Most of those brands are filtered tap water, all of 'em cost more than a buck, and all of 'em are bottled in pseudo-estrogen-leaching future solid waste. STOP USING BOTTLED WATER PLEASE.

Vestergaard Frandsen has developed a personal water filter called a Life Straw. Life Straw is an over sized drinking straw with an on board water filter. A single Life Straw can provide safe drinking water for an individual for a year-and-a-half. They cost two dollars. For two dollars, already crapped-upon people in the developing world won't die from waterborne diseases. That's a little more than cost of a single bottle of Fiji. Vestergaard Frandsen has also developed a larger version of the Life Straw that can purify the water for a whole family for the same period of time. The whole-family version costs $25 --that's less than I paid for my Brita and I have safe drinking water to begin with

Project H is a humanitarian, non-profit organization dedicated to improving the lives of the impoverished by distributing products such as Life Straw. Project H is now running an initiative to distribute Life Straw Family filters in Mumbai. For $25 dollars, you can provide safe drinking water to a family in India. And all you have to do is charge it through their website. So rather than buying cases of water at Publix this week, why not pass on it and make a donation to Project H instead? I did it this afternoon, sponsored a Life Straw Family that is. Think about it.

I love a solution!!!

I love a solution and I hate writing bitter and complaining blog entries. To redeem myself for my last slide into bitch mode, I just found this:



This is the Quench shower system from a plumbing company in Australia called Quench Showers, easily enough. The Quench is a dual mode shower system made for an Australian market suffering from water use restrictions most American can't imagine but will have to live with sooner rather than later. The dual mode of the Quench allows one to shower normally and then after rinsing off, the user can then switch the shower to recirculating mode and stay in there for the rest of the day without using any more water. Brilliant! Watch the video and then hatch a plan to bring them to the US and make millions in the process. Who says responsibility has to involve sacrifice and penury?!

Enough with the bottled water already!

If you need another reason to stop using bottled water, this weeks' finding that Bisphenol A (an ingredient in polycarbonate plastics) is of "some concern" regarding its harm to human health is one more to add to the pile. So not only is bottled water a scam to sell over priced, filtered tap water to a gullible public; a way to use up even more increasingly expensive and scarce petroleum on packaging; and a way to generate even more solid waste. Bottled water will make your daughters hit puberty at age nine and cause who knows what else in everybody.

From the LA Times,

A controversial, estrogen-like chemical in plastic could be harming the development of children's brains and reproductive organs, a federal health agency concluded in a report released Tuesday.

The National Toxicology Program, part of the National Institutes of Health, concluded that there was "some concern" that fetuses, babies and children were in danger because bisphenol A, or BPA, harmed animals at low levels found in nearly all human bodies.

Read the article, and others like it and pretty soon you'll see that this research is the first official finding that wasn't bought and paid for by the plastics industry. This is not news, I've been reading about pseudo estrogens in plastics for at least the last ten years. I had no idea of their omnipresence until this week though. "BPA is found in nearly all human bodies," the report said. Think about that. In yet another example of industries' complete inability to police themselves, chemicals like BPA are swimming around unseen and unknown in all of us and it's only now that someone raises a red flag. What other harmful substances am I harboring and don't know about? Wait a minute, I don't want to know.

This is not solely a concern of the granola-eaters and fringe elements of the environmental movement. This is another glowing example of the unsustainability of life as we've come to know it in the last 50 years. The move to plastic packaging happened because it was supposedly cheaper, and cheaper was supposed to mean better. As with just about anything, looking for cheaper is a short term goal that always carries with it a host of unintended consequences. All I can say is please give me back my glass bottles.