December 17th, 2012

Consumers continue to be crazy for Keurig coffee systems. Check out any department store this season and you’ll find stacks of Keurig coffee makers surrounded by massive walls of boxes containing plastic cups filled with coffee in endless flavors.

Keurig-ready coffees come in several brands such as Green Mountain, Gloria Jeans, Timothy’s Brooklyn Beans and Caribou and a dazzling selection of flavors like Chocolate Glazed Donut, Cinnamon Roll, Hazelnut, Mudslide, Caramel Vanilla Cream, Mocha Nut Fudge and Wild Mountain Blueberry.

But the fun doesn’t end there. Keurig brewers also make teas, such as Celestial Season’s Mandarin Orange and Twinings’ African Rooibos Red Tea, as well as a toasty, roasty array of cocoas and lattes — all conveniently packed in those little “K-cups” that allow the Keurig owners to make a single, no-muss serving. The Keurig system aims to do away with tedious coffee brewing, spilled grounds and the strain of lifting cups of water with teabags into the microwave. You just pop the “K-cup” into the brewer and afterward toss it into the recyl….ah, the trash.

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October 11th, 2012

Move over Flight of the Bumblebee. Hello Flight of the Butter Tubs.

That’s what you could call the daring 12,000 mile journey that Australian pilot Jeremy Rowsell is planning for early next year, when he will fly a single engine plane from Sydney to London on fuel that’s neither gasoline, kerosene nor any other traditional aircraft propellant.

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July 18th, 2012

This graphic posted by the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) on its Switchboard blog captures so much that we know, but probably still have have difficulty getting our head around it.

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February 9th, 2011

A waste of water, energy and taxpayer dollars.

That’s how a corporate watchdog group described Congress’ bottled water habit in a report released this week showing that the House of Representatives spent nearly a million dollars on bottled water last year.

It its report, Tapping Congress to Get Off The Bottle, Corporate Accountability International, suggests that this money could be saved if lawmakers made onetime investments in water fountains and water filters instead of buying bottled water year after year.

And once members and staff were back drinking economical tap water, they might pay closer attention to the needs of public water systems across the nation which face “a record investment gap of $22-23 billion per year,” according to the CAI, a non-profit watchdog group based in Boston.

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