SOURCE MAP

Location: INTERNATIONAL

Institution:MIT

Year:2009

URL: http://www.sourcemap.org or http://vimeo.com/5133927

Sourcemap is an open project

You might have been advised that buying local is "greener". You might have also heard the counter-arguments that state that efficiently made and transported products might be more sustainable than a local product. But if you don't know where your stuff comes from then you have no way of comparing.

SOURCE MAP is an attempt and project to create a platform for researching, optimizing and sharing the supply chains behind products. It believes that people need to be aware and have the right to know where things come from and not only where they are put together. Source map assumes that because we don’t know those details, we are more likely to make unintentionally unsustainable choices. It recognizes that it’s nearly impossible to find out how products and services impact the earth and society and believes that source map will help. Even though source map does not seem to be limited to food maps it suggests a possible new way of eating sustainably.

The Green Chicago Restaurant Co-op

Location: Chicago, Illinois
Founders: Dan Rosenthal and Ina Pinkney

http://buygreenchicago.org
http://sustainablog.org/
http://archives.chicagotribune.com/

The Green Chicago Restaurant Co-op provides a means for Chicago area restaurants and businesses to procur sustainable products and services and works to increase the type and amount of such products.

The goals of The Green Chicago Restaurant Co-op are to:

* Identify and provide information about local sources of sustainable products and services.
* Provide members with opportunities to easily purchase environmentally preferable products at a cost-com petitive price, as compared to traditional products.

The Green Chicago Restaurant Co-op consistently applies the following criteria:

* Reduce or eliminate toxicity; in particular long term persistent toxicity Conserve natural resources, materials, and energy;
* Maximize recyclability and recycled content of the purchased products;
* Help educate businesses and residents on the merits of environmentally preferable products;
* Improve conditions for achieving a healthy community through conserving natural resources, improving water quality and reducing waste generation; Encourage regional partnerships;
* Reduce costs.



One of their initiatives to create more sustainable dining is the introduction of the “Guaranteed Green” seal. Restaurants that would like the “Guaranteed Green” status have one year to prove their sustainability in eight different areas of their businesses: water efficiency, waste reduction and recycling, sustainable furnishings and building materials, sustainable food, energy management, management of disposables, chemical and pollution.

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The Food Trust’s Farmers Market Program

Name: The Food Trust’s Farmers Market Program

Location: Philadelphia, PA

Years: 1992- Present

Funded by: Robert Wood Johnson Foundation

The Food Trust strives to make healthy food available to all. Working with neighborhoods, schools, grocers, farmers and policymakers, they’eve developed a comprehensive approach that combines nutrition education and greater availability of affordable, healthy food.

The Food Trust organization began working with communities to develop lasting and stable sources of affordable foods, through farmers markets and nutritional education classes. Lack of access to healthy, affordable foods has a direct, measurable impact on our health. Research has shown that the presence of grocery stores selling fresh fruits and vegetables in a community helps people maintain a healthy weight. Through the identification of economic development resources, active public/private partnerships, rigorous research and policy advocacy, The Food Trust has successfully addressed the lack of supermarket access in Pennsylvania, New York, Louisiana, Illinois. At present, they are also laying the groundwork for similar initiatives in New Jersey and Colorado. With a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, we will be expanding this campaign into 8 more states across the country over the next several years.

Philadelphia has the second lowest number of supermarkets per capita of major cities in the nation. The Food Trust began its efforts to address supermarket-access issues here. Their network of farmers’ markets helps sustain regional farms and serves more than 125,000 customers in the Philadelphia region. Many of their farmers’ markets are located in neighborhoods underserved by supermarkets, grocery stores and other fresh food outlets. All of their markets accept food stamps (EBT/Access cards) and Farmers’ Market Nutrition Program vouchers and provide helpful nutrition information to ensure that fresh, local foods are available to everyone. The Food Trust continues to reach new heights of success in promoting healthy eating and food availability in urban communities and advocating for policy to promote long-term change.

http://www.thefoodtrust.org

SourceMap

Name: Source Map

Location: The Internet

Contributors: The Public

See Where Stuff Comes From with SourceMap: "Imagine a future in which pointing a PDA at a product bar code returns an instant readout of product source and environmental footprint to inform the buyer's decision. This future could be reality with SourceMap. Designed as a "collective tool for transparency and sustainability," SourceMap aims to be the Wiki of visualizing supply chains."

Sourcemap’s goals are to provide visible supply chains, social and environmental sustainability, and sustain business. We have a right to know more about the products and services we buy, including where they come from and what they are made of. Sourcemap is an open source project dedicated to tracking, documenting, and mapping where all of the components for our everyday goods come from. In short, it’s a supply chain publishing platform dedicated to transparency. Believing their program will allow for industrial productionto become environmentally and socially beneficia. Unfortunately, with the resources currently available to the public, it’s nearly impossible to find out how products and services impact the earth and society. Therefore, they are developing Sourcemap so that those who are interested can make informed, sustainable decisions at home and in the workplace. Yet, their main intention is for Sourcemap to help sustain business. Built as a diagnostic and marketing tool that helps to plan for and advertise a long-term outlook. Their website states that “After all, saving energy and materials saves money, and healthy communities become prosperous markets. Sourcemap provides an edge so you can respond to shifting supplies, communicate with customers, and plan for the future.”

Sourcemap is already a running website, yet it has not achieved their initial goals. This is how it works. It catalogues various materials from food to clothing, and their CO2 emissions. You can then use these statistics to map the total CO2 emissions or carbon footprint of the product. Functioning like a social network, anyone can contribute to the storyline of a products lifetime. For example, you can calculate the impact of manufacturing, transporting, using, and throwing away products using their Life-Cycle Assessment (LCA) calculator. The website uses geographic resources and data while relying on user contributions and a panel of advisers to keep information up-to-date. They hope that as the site grows, suppliers will be able to contribute their products to the Sourcemap database, providing a geographic catalogue of materials and products for sale around the world.

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2009/10/see-where-stuff-is-from-sourcemap.php

http://vimeo.com/5133927

http://www.sourcemap.org/beta/stage/

Aquaponics in Antarctica

Name: Aquaponics in Antarctica

Location: Ross Island and the South Pole, Antarctica

Years: 1987- Present

Institutions: McMurdo Station in Ross Island and Amundesn-Scott South Pole Research Centers

Contributors: University of Arizona Controlled Environment Agriculture Center

The largest research station in Antarctica goes without sunlight for 4 months of the year, meaning that it relies on food deliveries for fresh vegetables. To eliminate this dependency, they created an 820-square foot insulated hydroponics tank that grows vegetables to provide the 240 workers with fresh weekly salads. The Antarctic Conservation Act prohibits the import of soil into Antarctica as a precaution to prevent the introduction of microorganisms. So, one might wonder, how can fresh vegetables be grown in a place with out sunlight and soil? The answer is Hydroponics! An 820 square foot insulated growth chamber containing 41 high intensity discharge lamps and 10 NFT hydroponics systems was built at McMurdo in the 1980’s. Plants grown in the chamber include lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers, herbs and even flowers. McMurdo’s “greenhouse” is operated manually. That is to say, the hydroponics nutrient solutions are monitored using a hand held meter and nutrient adjustments are made by adding stock solution with a graduated cylinder.

The Amundsen-Scott South Pole Research Station, located at the South Pole at 90 degrees, is in darkness 6 months out of the year. The distance between the South Pole and McMurdo is more than 800 miles. Although the South Pole has had a year-round presence since 1957, a new station is currently being built to replace the original aging station. Within the new station, a computer controlled vegetable growth chamber has been in operation for almost 2 winters. Like McMurdo, the South Pole cannot be re-supplied over the winter and so, if fresh vegetables are to be had, they must be grown on site.

The South Pole Food Growth Chamber’s (SPFGC) production room, covering a 392 square foot area, was designed and built by The University of Arizona’s Controlled Environment Agriculture Center (CEAC) under the supervision of Dr. Gene Giacomelli (Director, CEAC) and built in cooperation with the Sadler Machine Company.

The South Pole “greenhouse” is climate controlled. It has automated atmospheric CO₂ enrichment, hydroponic nutrient delivery and acid injection systems. It records, controls and displays key environmental conditions via its ARGUS agricultural environment control equipment. And it is illuminated by twelve 1000-watt water-jacketed HPS lamps capable of capturing waste heat given off by the lights to supplement the heat used in warming the station’s fresh air supply. Obviously, heat is hard to come by at the South Pole and with the SPFGC, it is not wasted.

With support from University of Arizona’s CEAC, Nan Rogers and Kelly Kozdras currently operate the South Pole chamber. The SPFGC now grows tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, lettuce, strawberries and many different herbs for the 70 crewmembers currently wintering at the South Pole.

http://www.aquaponicsjournal.com/articleAntarcticHydroponics.htm

Dane County Farmer's Market

Dane County Farmer’s Market
Madison, WI
1972-present

dcfm.org

The Dane County Farmer’s Market Inc. is committed to providing Wisconsin growers and producers with farming products and opportunities for marketing, to help sell Wisconsin grown produce, to improve the overall quality of food grown in the Madison area through the education of farmers, to provide opportunities for farmers to deal directly with urban consumers, to educate consumers on the benefits of locally grown food and to preserve Wisconsin’s food heritage, including the farmers that continue it.

Inspired by the European model of open marketplaces and the urban and rural richness of Dane County, Bill Dyke (Dane County’s mayor in 1972) instructed the Dane County Extension Office and the Central Madison Committee of the Chamber of Commerce to create a community space which would capture his ideas; they developed the Dane County Farmers’ Market. The Market was to be set up on the grounds of the State Capitol and farmers came in on Saturday mornings to sell their produce, which must be grown in Wisconsin. The Market has evolved from 5 stalls in 1972 to a co-op of about 300 vendors with a Board of Directors. The hours of operation have also increased from just the Saturday morning produce selling slot to include Wednesday morning, an Early Winter Market, a Late Winter Market, Arts and Crafts vendors, educational initiatives, food tasting events, street musicians. Though the market has undergone immense evolution, it still stays true to its founding ethos of uniting the rural and urban communities.

The LunchBox

Location: Boston, Massachusetts
Years: 2000-Present
Founder: Chef Ann Cooper
Partner: Whole Foods Market


The LunchBox: Healthy Tools to Preserve All Schools is the most prominent school lunch initiative started by Chef Ann Cooper to transform the school lunch program is part of F3; Food Family Farming Foundation. The goal is to see systemic change for all school-age children, k-12, and provide access to healthy food “to grow their minds, bodies and their future.” The LunchBox is a web-based portal for preparing a more healthy and locally driven school lunch program with information for items as simple as portion control to new storing techniques.


The site provides a well-documented list of “nutritionally analyzed and scalable” recipes as well as a list of partner schools with descriptions of what they are doing. The program plans to provide ways for schools to track costs, resources, waste, and labor to create measureable metrics of comparison for schools. Recently the program has partnered with Whole Foods Market to develop recipes for the program. The LunchBox also features a video blog with Chef Ann Cooper promoting the methodology of the program.

SourceMap

Location: Boston, Massachusetts
Years: 2008-Present
Founder: Highlands and Islands Enterprise and Media Lab of MIT
Users: 1003


SourceMap serves as an open source platform where users can create a known supply chain, adding information as to where a product’s natural resources originate, where products travel for assembly and distribution, and calculate a reliable estimate of the C02 released for each step. The project currently has a small user base that currently limits the amount of data input, but it is similar to a Wikipedia model of information collection but does not allow anonymous posts. It is based on the MIT Open Source Initiative computer codes and poses the most potential for the collection and presentation of large amounts of data, which should make estimates for carbon footprints of products more accurate. For example using commonly accepted standards for C02 emissions in its Parts and Transport Catalogues, the project calculates the total emissions from the distance and type of transportation. Supply chains are essentially closed minus the ubiquitous “Made in _____” Smaller companies are using SouceMap to show how they are locally-sourced or carbon-friendly in comparison to others. In addition to Product Maps users can input Travel Maps and Food Maps which work on the same principles but are differentiated by color and use more industry specific values for calculating carbon emissions. The project has various forms of export that include embedding into other websites, printed product labels, and even QR codes readable by camera phone meaning additionally information about the product could be researched quickly while shopping. The project also hopes to create a more reliable predictor of Life Cycle Assessments to quantify impacts that are often not considered because they are externalities.

Terre et Humanisme (Earth and Humanism) and Colibris: Mouvement pour la Terre et L’Humanisme (Colibris: Movement for the Earth and Humanism)

Location: France

Year: 1994-2009 and 2006-2009
Founder: Pierre Rabhi

http://www.terre-humanisme.org/

http://www.colibris-lemouvement.org/

http://www.ashoka.org/fellow/5689

http://www.actu-environnement.com/ae/news/lancement_colibris_pierre_rabhi_6053.php4

French writer, farmer and environmentalist Pierre Rabhi has been working for over 45 years to create a new form of North-South development aid. He has trained more than 150,000 farmers in France and West Africa to adapt and apply ecological practices to their land, dramatically increasing their agricultural yields while at the same time respecting and preserving the environment. Rabhi’s initiatives have helped counteract the intensification of agricultural industrialization in France, where two-thirds of farms are larger than 125 acres and employ countless quantities of pesticides and fertilizers. They have also help address the pervading underdevelopment of agricultural practices in Western Africa, a region which unlike Asia and Latin America did not undergo a “green revolution” in the 1960s but continues to maintain stagnant productivity.

The NGO Terre et Humanisme (Earth and Humanism) runs agroecology programs in France, Mali, Morocco, Burkina Faso, Senegal and Cameroon. In France, the onsite training programs are paired with the actions of the internet-based Colibris Movement, founded by Rabhi in 2006. This venture is centered on three objectives: to sensitize the public about the importance of sustainable land practices and the consumption of local, seasonal produce, to support citizen action in initiatives that have these goals in mind, and to facilitate exchanges between communities and their local farmers. Particularly interesting is Colibris’ interactive map of France that shows locations where organic and local produce may be purchased. In March 2010, filmaker Coline Serreau will release in partnership with Colibris “The Earth Seen From the Earth,” a documentary on ecologic agricultural solutions from around the world.

Pierre Rabhi’s impact is visible in the hundreds of thousands of farmers he has directly or indirectly helped shift towards a more sustainable and productive practice. With the public backing of figures such as French ecologist Nicolas Hulot, the Colibris Movement has grown over the past few years, currently totaling 7,500 contributing members. Rabhi’s efforts have received recognition both in France and internationally, earning him in 2009 a fellowship with Ashoka: Innovators for the Public, a leading non-profit international organization supporting social entrepreneurs.