BuilderScrap found this funny compelation of accidents on a variety of building sites, leave your comments.

Here at BuilderScrap we came across this funny video on YouTube, let us know what you think.

Today something entirely different and I’m afraid not really BuilderScrap related. I saw a rather disturbing report in The Guardian regarding how to reduce my carbon footprint once dead! Should I really be concerned how much carbon is expended whilst they dispose of my body?

It transpires that cremation creates a large carbon footprint, whilst burial is equally damaging to the environment and is also too space consuming. Again I am still not sure that this is something that will concern many including myself, after all the carbon footprint of the dead is always going to be less than even the most eco minded living person.

However, one man has devoted his life to providing a low carbon solution to death. Scottish biochemist Sandy Sullivan has undertaken research in order to provide a solution which achieves what cremation can without the high carbon and mercury emissions, it is called Resomation.

He has developed a pressurised chamber which accelerates body decomposition as it would be in nature, the body is placed in the chamber with an alkaline solution which when heated will leave human remains as white ash within 3 hours. He claims that the method reduces the carbon footprint by four times that of cremation and even more disturbingly suggests that medical parts such as false hips will be left in pristine reusable condition. I think I will leave going to the doctors about that sore hip now.

Surely this is a step too far on ethical living….or dying as it is? I think I will leave it down to friends and family to decide my fate once dead, whether they choose burial, cremation or resomation is fine by me.

The BuilderScrap team have come up with a fun construction/environment related quiz, see how you get on, answers will be published on the site next week!

1) For every tonne of household waste how much do commercial, industrial and construction businesses produce?
a. Another 2 tonnes
b. Another 6 tonnes
c. Another 15 tonnes

2) What are the most environmentally unfriendly construction materials?
a. Concrete
b. PVC based products
c. Bricks

3) How many lego bricks were needed for James May’s full lego house?
a. 6.7 million
b. 5.4 million
c. 3.2 million

4) Which animals have been discovered to predict earthquakes?
a. Cats
b. Toads
c. Rats

5) How many tonnes of ice are falling into the sea every year?
a. 2 ½ million
b. 250 million
c. 250 billion

6) What building material did the Romans invent?
a. Bricks
b. Copper Piping
c. Concrete

7) WWF estimated that how many people switched their lights off as part of their campaign during Earth Hour?
a. 600,000
b. 4 Million
c. 1 Billion

8 ) Match the following famous architectural landmarks with the correct names

i. Kuwait Towers
ii. Arc de Triomph
iii. Petronas Towers
iiii. Constantine’s Arch

9) What radical idea have the Chinese planned for their landfill sites?
a. Spraying landfill sites with deodorant
b. Giant fans pointing away from the cities
c. Face masks to be given out free of charge

10) What legendary computer game character was spotted on Saturn’s moon Minas?
a. Lara Croft
b. Mario
c. Pac-Man

Have fun and keep an eye out for the answers next week!

Want to know more about BuilderScrap.com… visit our Youtube Channel

As I’m sure you all know we’re a completely free website for the construction trade, set up by builders for builders, that aims to facilitate contact between different trades people and help them to use up surplus in the supply chain. BuilderScrap.com provides an outlet to encourage reuse of material that would otherwise be thrown away. It’s a way for the industry to work together to reduce the amount of builders’ waste sent to landfill.

Lets have a look at some of our more interesting available items…. with a water theme.

Executive Restrooms

A Swimming Pool Slide

Stainless Steel Urinal Trough

We do have a wide and varied range of items available

We’re always looking for fantastic posts and this from Suzanne Goldenberg, Guardian, February 18th was no exception.

Circuit boards from trashed computers in Belgium recycled to provide tiny amounts of metal to make winter olympic medals

The gold, silver and bronze medallions slung around winning athletes’ necks as they step on to the winners’ podium at the Vancouver Winter Olympic Games could well be made from the guts of an old Belgian computer.

The manufacturer of medals for this Olympics is for the first time incorporating token amounts of recycled material into the medals. Medals historically have been made of freshly mines ores.

The innovation – though largely symbolic – was directed by an Olympic organising committee which had vowed to put on the greenest games ever, raising the bar for London in 2012.

Organisers aimed to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 15% from business as usual. The nine new buildings constructed for the games set a new green standard for any complex of buildings in North America, drawing heat from the ocean and exhaust systems, incorporating green roofs and solar panels. The village for the athletes will be converted into housing when the games are over.

However, efforts to put on a green games were undermined by unseasonably warm conditions, which forced organisers to fly and truck in snow for the freestyle skiiing and snowboarding venue.

Teck, the Canadian-based mining and metallurgical company charged with making the medals, said on its website that it had developed a process to recover metals from unwanted cathode ray tube glass, computer circuit and keyboards, cables and other e-waste.

“The process involves shredding, separating and heating of the various electronic components to recover a variety of metals,” the company said. It said the gold, silver and copper used in the medals was recovered from trashed circuit boards collected and processed in Belgium.

The company has touted the innovation as a means of avoiding some of the hundreds of thousands of tons of e-waste that would otherwise end up in landfills – although not all that much, even by Teck’s own admission.

Third-place finishers will get a medal that has just 1.11% recycled material when they go home with a bronze. Silver medals contain barely 0.12% recycled material. And for the gold, which is gold plate, the figure is 1.52%.

guardian.co.uk/environment/recycling

Another post from the newest member of the BuilderScrap Team – Mike Close.  This blog looks at the effects of vegetarianism on the planet!  

 
It has long been thought that giving up meat and turning to a vegetarian diet is not only the key to a healthy lifestyle but also a great way of reducing your carbon footprint and helping your planet. New research from the Cranford University however, has suggested that vegetarian diets that include a large number of processed meat substitutes such as Tofu might in fact be worse for the environment than eating a “meat diet”.

Past reports have made some strong claims that a vegetarian diet drastically reduces the amount of greenhouse gases that go into the environment. Farming livestock are blamed for a quarter of “man made” methane emissions and 8 % of all UK emissions. According to the University of Chicago switching to a vegetarian diet can shrink your carbon footprint by up to 1.5 tonnes of carbon.

The new research has suggested though that the benefits are heavily reliant on the types of vegetarian foods consumed, Tofu and other processed meat substitutes containing soy, chickpeas and lentils may be resulting in a higher emissions output than eating locally sourced meat. These crops are being grown overseas and imported; this is resulting in higher transport emissions and increased destruction of forests due to a high demand for arable land.

This is a very convenient report for someone like me who enjoys a nice steak every now and then but generally considers himself to be fairly “environmentally friendly”, but of course it is a simplistic view. What if I eat imported meats, what about the increased water productions in meat production, what if I eat meat from a cow which has abnormal levels of flatulence, what if I import an individual lemur steak on a 1000 tonne steamboat powered on coal, mined by children in developing countries?

So what should I be eating to do “my bit”? Just vegetables, just locally sourced meat, or maybe grass cuttings from my garden? Well I am not going to cut out meat, or vegetables; maybe one day packaging will let me know how much carbon is used in the production of foods and “they” can monitor my carbon footprint accordingly. Maybe if I stay within my individual carbon targets I could be rewarded with nectar points (or the equivalent), if I do less well I am forced to scavenge through my next door neighbours potato peelings until the next “carbon year”.

I think until such times though I will try to maintain a healthy balanced diet (with the odd Chinese takeaway thrown in) and get locally sourced products where possible. There seems to be too much questionable data and dubious assumptions to create a clear indication of the best diet to be “green”.

At BuilderScrap.com we wish our Builders Exchange site got the coverage it deserved.

Check out this post on persuading others… environmentally speaking!

The survey also included three statements to measure the extent to which respondents discussed environmental issues with people they knew, and encouraged other people to be environmentally-friendly (see Figure 4). For the first statement (”I’ve suggested improvements at my workplace/the place where I study to make it more environmentally friendly‟), analysis is limited to respondents who were working or studying at the time of the survey.

Builders Exchanges are great for recycling

Nearly half (45%) of respondents who were working or studying agreed that “I‟ve suggested improvements at my workplace/the place where I study to make it more environmentally friendly‟. A similar proportion (43%) of all respondents agreed that “I try to persuade people I know to be more environmentally friendly‟. More than one third (37%) agreed with the statement “I often talk to friends and family about the things they can do to help the environment‟, although for this statement a similar proportion (36%) disagreed. For each of the three statements around a quarter of respondents said they neither agreed nor disagreed.

In the 2007 Defra survey respondents were asked to indicate which, if any, of these three statements applied to them. In essence this is similar to expressing (any) level of agreement with the statements as presented in Figure 4. There has been an increase in the proportion of respondents who agreed with “I often talk to friends and family about the things they can do to help the environment‟ from 31% in 2007 to 37% in 2009. The results suggest a significant increase in those claiming that they try to persuade other people to be more environmentally friendly. In 2007 20% of respondents selected the statement “I try to persuade people I know to be more environmentally friendly‟ whereas in the current survey, 43% of respondents agreed with this. Similarly, in 2007 15% selected the statement “I‟ve suggested improvements at my workplace/the place where I study to make it more environmentally friendly‟, while 29% of all respondents in the current survey agreed with this (the equivalent of 45% of those who were working or studying).

Check out this fuzzy picture!

Looking through the new items listed on BuilderScrap.com this week we found a very interesting item… Executive Restrooms.

The picture has degraded as I’ve blown it up. To look at the image and description visit BuilderScrap.com Recycle

Executive Restrooms on BuilderScrap

The reason for the degrade… probably uploaded using mobile phone technology a key benefit on the BuilderScrap.com system. To find out more on uploading from mobile phone click on the hyperlink.