Archive for January 30th, 2007

CO2-based parking permits approved

Tuesday, January 30th, 2007

Richmond, a borough in southwest London, has approved a parking-permit pricing scheme based on the carbon-emissions profile of the vehicle being parked. “The new plan would cut charges for owners of compact cars and raise them for drivers of larger vehicles,” according to a report from Bloomberg News. “London Mayor Ken Livingstone is considering a similar pay scale for the city’s traffic-congestion charge zone.”

Hey Toronto, what about testing this out here????

I first wrote about this back in October, when Richmond council was first considering the new sliding-scale parking fee. It’s nice to see that they followed through.

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Water: A glimpse of the future?

Tuesday, January 30th, 2007

The Australian state of Queensland, which is battling the worst drought in a century, says it has been forced to pursue a strategy that involves recycling water from sewage. And it’s expected other regions of Australia will follow. Could this be a sign of things to come as the world’s climate continues to change?

The good news is that we have such options, and that the technologies do exist to extract pure water out of raw sewage. It might not sound so appealing, but hey, let’s not kid ourselves: the stuff we get out of our tap every day undoubtedly has disgusting origins.

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