The new Katadyn Exstream Personal Water Bottle Purifier is a self-contained filtration system in a handy bottle. Drinking plenty of water is important, but to buy bottled water every day is to throw your money and harmful plastic into a landfill. We reported recently on paper water bottles as a way to cut down on the dangerous level of plastic being tossed into seas and landfills, but remember that reusing is always better than replacing.  Paper bottles are reusable to a point, but the whole biodegradable design is based on the assumption that you are going to throw it away, right?

Having a filtration system at home is great.  You can get clean, crisp drinking water any time you want for minimal cost.  The average cost of a bottle of water when using an at-home purifier is about five cents (USD).  However, if you like to have clean, filtered water at work or on the road and don’t have access to your home filter for refills, what are you to do?  In the past you could either suck it up and force down tap water, which isn’t so bad if you live near a Rocky Mountain stream but can be utterly foul if you live in a large city.  Or you could buy bottled water.  At least you don’t have to carry around all that heavy money, right?  Fret no more, for the dilemma has been solved by the Katadyn water bottle purifier.

The Katadyn Exstream Personal Water Bottle Purifier website boasts that it is the only EPA registered purification bottle that is able to remove all organisms from your drinking water, including viruses. Keep in mind that being registered by the Environmental Protection Agency does not automatically guarantee that a product’s claims are true, but does give us very strong reason to believe so.

The Exstream has a capacity of 26 oz, which is about 40 percent of the water you need per day according to the Mayo Clinic, depending on size and lifestyle of course.  So, it should be fully capable of supplying your water needs until you can find a tap to fill it up again. For longer excursions, Katadyn offers a variety of camping and survival oriented filtration systems.

The Exstream’s filter can process about 26 gallons before needing to be replaced, which corresponds to 128 full refills.  The filter utilizes the pressure created by gravity to push water through and requires no pumping or special effort. Unfortunately, there is no indication as to whether the bottle comes with a gauge to let you know when it is time for replacement.

The bottle itself is listed for 40 Euro on the Katadyn website, but can be easily found elsewhere for $40 USD.  Replacement filters run $17 for a pack of two.  That means the cost of your first 128 bottles of water will be about 32 cents (USD) per bottle and 11 cents for every bottle after that.  Compared to buying a bottled water every day, this product would pay for itself after two months.  It would then save you about $25 per month thereafter.  This is all not to mention the mountain of plastic.

Hey, look at this cool paper bottle from BrandImage! It may be leading the revolution against plastic.

The “forever in a landfill” environmentalist slogan is quickly becoming cliché and lost on the general public. Each day, Americans continue to throw out 60 million plastic bottles. Only 14% of which actually get recycled.  So, forget landfill slogans.  We aren’t getting it done.

Try this on for size: there exists an island of garbage out in the Pacific Ocean the size of Texas?  Texas! Due to some interestingly dull oceanographic factors, nearly all of the refuse jettisoned into the Pacific meanders its way over to become trapped in the same area.  Also, plastic is incapable of degrading. Not only has this resulted in a pile of trash larger than I am even capable of comprehending, but it will apparently never go away. Ever.  Plastic does, however, break down physically into smaller and smaller bits until it resembles tasty krill. Krill is what a very large portion of sea life eats.  So, you see the problem.

Plastic is an amazing substance that makes our activities more convenient and saves perhaps billions of lives through food packaging and medical equipment. Plastic has a variety of wonderful properties and high up on that list is the fact that it doesn’t break down.  It doesn’t whither or turn bad.  It doesn’t chemically react with food or medicine or anything really.  But there is the problem.  A substance that cannot be broken down by any environmental exposure and cannot be eaten by anything will fill its little nook in the world FOREVER.

A few decades of intense marketing for plastic made it out to be the end-all miracle material (which, it may be), but many great designers and high-end businesses are finally breaking out of that rut and embracing paper.

We are beginning to realize again that there is no loss of class in paper products.  Even glass is seeing a packaging decline. Many fine mid-range wine makers have begun adopting boxes in addition to or instead of glass bottles.

The 360 Paper Bottle, for example, is a far more sustainable approach to water bottles and packaging in general. It is totally recyclable paper made from 100% renewable resources. The lining uses biodegradable PLA film. The end result is entirely food-grade material. The 360 Paper Bottle meets all criteria for all liquid categories and is sturdy enough for a variety of applications and multiple reuse.  The paper bottle design has had a good critical and market response, including having received an IDEA (International Design Excellence Award) for this design.

Eco experts and enthusiasts will always stress the value of reusing, so keep in mind that filling the same bottle every day is far superior an option than even the most environmental paper alternative. However, we still applaud this great paper design and hope that it sparks the about-face of old industry packaging standards across the board. If we can get all packaging to be made from eco-friendly materials in the first place, then the collective hazardous waste and energy consumption could go down dramatically.

A major cost of even the most modern offices is still paper.  Though stationary and Xerox has been mostly replaced by so-called paperless technologies, your company will always receive mail and always generate some form of intra-office paper. But that doesn’t mean that the recycle bin is the best we can do. There will never be a truly paperless office as long as we keep drinking coffee and microwaving burritos. And of course there seems to be no getting around one particular paper product: toilet paper. If you could take all that paper from the recycling bin and place it in the restroom… then you’ll have a very uncomfortable solution.

Tokyo-based Nakabayashi is developing a way to turn your paper waste into fluffy, soft paper for your waste.   Nakabayashi designs and manufactures paper products and machinery from book-binding to child car seats. Their latest creation turns reams of used up copy paper into rolls of toilet paper right in the office.  So go ahead,  express your exact feelings for your boss’s new policy memo!  It may make you and the environment feel better.

The magic toilet paper machine processes two rolls per hour from approx. 15 lbs of paper (about 1,800 sheets of A4-sized paper).  No reviews currently available as to the nether region friendliness of the toilet paper. But at $95,000 (USD) per unit, one would hope it to be triple-ply heaven. Sadly, I think we have to assume otherwise.

Distribution is set for this month, and  Nakabayashi has a reported sales goal of 60 units for its first year.  The quota may seem modest for an international company, but the toilet paper machine’s price tag and its weight of over 1,300 lbs. will keep it out of all but the largest companies.  And even then, will most likely be a PR piece, as the machine will require around 100,000 hours of use before making up for the initial cost.  This is not to mention that there are currently no available figures on the operational costs of this bulky machine.  A machine like this will most likely eat up energy and double the amount of use required before making up for its cost. There are other questions that the Nakabayashi website unfortunately fails to answer.  Namely, what kind of chemicals this machine uses, if any.  To take that Xerox copy paper and turn it into pillow soft tissue seems quite difficult to achieve purely mechanically.

Nakabayashi’s toilet paper machine is an interesting step toward in-office recycling, but I think it is a safe bet that this particular machine is neither all that environmentally, nor economically, friendly.   Of course, we should also mention that Nakabayashi does a good job of never explicitly marketing this machine’s eco-friendliness.  So, we should take the tenuous allusions to green technology with only a grain of salt and assume that Nakabayashi is selling novelty more than anything else in this particular case.  However, we do applaud the innovation and progressive design.   Nakabayashi manufactures a variety of high-quality goods and machinery, so we can surely expect many advances on this concept in the near future.

Although the greenness of Amazon’s wireless e-book reader is surrounded by some controversy, there is no denying the mountains of paper and energy electronic reading medium can potentially save.  This great gadget is as thin as a magazine and as light as a paperback book, but can download and store thousands of books, newspapers and magazines over its free 3G wireless service. From a train, a car or moments before the stewardess announces takeoff, you can access an wealth of printed media.

If you’re like me, you enjoy reading articles online but cannot imagine reading from a screen for hours at a time.  However, the Kindle is unlike any computer screen.  It uses a revolutionary technology which mimics the look and luminosity of ink on paper.  Your eyes will strain no more than with any other book or newspaper. The screen is about the size of a quality paperback book and has a slick, intuitive interface.

Over the 3G network, Amazon claims, any book may be downloaded in less than 60 seconds.  You can program it to deliver your morning paper and weekly magazines.  Over 300,000 books and periodicals are currently available and the database grows every day.

The Amazon Kindle is a great gift to any avid reader who finds transporting all that content to be a challenge.  The Kindle 2 is also capable of downloading audio books and is fitted with a new text-to-speech option for the visually impaired.

The controversy over Amazon’s Kindle comes in a variety of forms.  Mostly, they deal with the Kindle’s inability to sync with any other device, rendering the user only able to purchase from Amazon.  However, when it comes to environmentalists, the opinions are split down the middle.  Some feel this product is an amazing way to consume media within a paperless environment.  This camp might also say that the enormous energy costs of transporting books alone is greatly offset by the Kindle.  While others disagree, citing that there is more to consider than paper alone.

This camp would argue that the Kindle 2 requires a constant supply of energy in order to function.  While this is true, the Kindle works with a different type of display technology than the one you are using to read these words.  The technology is both green and is what makes the reading experience so much more like paper: electronic ink.  Tiny spheres of ink are moved about via an electronic pulse.  Think of Wooly Willy, but with electricity rather than magnets. The ink only needs energy to move, not to be continually displayed like the pixels on this page do.  This makes for a gadget that is green not only because of what it replaces, but also because the gadget itself is energy efficient.

I know it may be tough at first to give up that great feeling and smell of paper.  So, I propose that you use the Kindle for everyday stuff and reading books for the first time and then purchasing used copies to build your physical library of only the stuff you love.