The green goods

Cool green stuff we stumbled across this week:
Did you catch the first installment of Burn Up last night on Global? This genuinely thrilling thriller about a London oil executive’s encounter with an Inuit environmentalist and some hard facts about climate change is a co-production between CanWest and the BBC with a few recognizable Hollywood faces thrown in for good measure. Part two is set for tonight at 9.

For a long time, we’ve watched Hollywood go green crazy. From green documentaries to entire green television networks, Hollywood has paved the eco-path for the entertainment industry. Now it looks like Broadway is stocking their picnic basket and joining Hollywood on the environmental hike.

Next year, eco-luxe travel will get a new destination with the opening of a new five-star resort for Star Island in the Bahamas. In and among diving, playing tennis and drinking a cocktail or two, holidaymakers will discover that the resort is entirely energy self-sufficient, with power coming from solar, wind and micro-hydro generators. The sustainability aspects of the resort’s construction, interior and grounds have also been considered in impressive detail.

Wow. If you’re trying to go green and you have a Playstation 3, you may want to consider switching to a Wii. An Australian consumer group found that the Sony Playstation 3 consumes five times more energy than a medium sized refrigerator – 10 times as much as the Wii.

In just a month, an area nearly the size of New York City was cleared in the Amazon rain forest—an “alarming” and “worse-than-imagined” development, the Brazilian government said in a statement. That’s eight times more than the 55 square miles (145 square kilometers) destroyed the month before, according to data released last week by the Brazilian National Space Research Institute.

Plastic baby bottles have received extra attention recently as research came to light showing many popular models leach bisphenol-A (BPA), a suspected endocrine disruptor. The plastic of concern, polycarbonate (plastic #7), is used by several manufacturers, but there are safe alternatives. Don’t want BPA leaching into your baby’s lunch? Check out the Daily Green’s list of BPA-free bottles.

Pesticides designed to protect honeybees are losing their effectiveness, say agricultural researchers, leading to a second year in a row of heavy colony losses across Canada. It’s bad news not only for honey producers but also a host of farmers who rely on the bees to help pollinate their food crops.

Suburban developers are peddling eco-friendly construction. And buyers, hoping for cheaper gas bills and a better-built house, are lining up for it. Can new homes really save the planet?