JonStarbuck.co.uk

Ecotopia, not the fine people who cycle across Europe every year but the peddlers of “environmental and ethical shopping” (an oxymoron if ever i heard one), have created the “Facebook Forest”, a place on Facebook where, in return for our joining up and inviting our friends to join up, Ecotopia will plant one tree for every fifty of us who join up.

Ecotopia are one of a large number of companies selling eco-nonsense, blatant eco-cons and fraudulent eco-snakeoil products. While I am sure some of the products Ecotopia sell are great, they also sell EcoBalls, magnetic toilet descallers, magnetic fuel savers, Aqua Balls and Magno Balls; none of these products offer a any proof that they work, indeed i am quite certain that they don’t work, they are a cynical exercise in extracting money from well meaning people. More info on what I think of EcoBalls here and the magnetic products here.

Ecotopia were shortlisted for an award for Observer Ethical Awards as Ethical Business of the Year, but they seem to have been removed.

At face value the Facebook Forest seems a worthy enough cause, does it not, or at worst a fairly benign, albeit cynical, marketing exercise? However, they came in for a lot of hard questioning and criticism on the Facebook site (at least in part from me, but from many others too) which they chose to edit and delete rather than publicly respond to. Sure some of people were out-and-out nasty but others, such as myself, were not; we asked fair questions and Ecotopia deleted them. Funnily enough this annoyed people and they posted their outrage on the Facebook Forest site, resulting in further deletion until eventually Ecotopia withdrew the facility to post messages to their page entirely.

Now the FacebookForest page of Facebook is rather dull and lifeless because the “wall” and the “discussion” sections have been removed, making it a very one way experience; a very old school, read only internet rather than the bold, two way, “web 2.0″ Facebook experience.

It seem obvious to me, though clearly no to them, that it is a bad move to use social networking sites and viral marketing to jump on the environmental bandwagon to try to sell pseudo-eco ideas and products. This is presumably because they don’t see the irony of selling the idea of planing trees, with Ecotopia-branding on them, to somehow offset their/our guilt for having bought into the oxymoron of eco-consumerism and selling eco-shit, while trying to get us to attract our friends to their web site, presumably to sell them things they otherwise would not have bought and do not need and probably don’t work. They seem to be muddling the altruistic idea of planting trees with the not so altruistic idea of marketing crap, and they have chosen the wrong place to do it.

Problem for Ecotopia is that if they censor people on the internet in one place then the censored material will pop up elsewhere on the internet, where they can’t do anything about it. Anyone who would like to comment on this is welcome to, please fill in the form at the bottom of the post.

[ Facebook Forest on Facebook and Facbook Forest on Ecotopia's site. ]

According to multiple news sorces, a Mr Gilmartin from Cumbria has re-invented the water wheel.

Apparently the 60-year-old electrician and inventor, who does not own a television (so what? nor do I) and has never lived in a house with electricity (??), has invented a micro hydro power station which can power a house from a stream with only 8 inches of head. This has been reported as some how miraculous and how he has solved a century’s old problem in building a micro hydro (there is nothing new about micro-hydro schemes). What actually is miraculous is the idea that one can run a house from a stream with only 8 inches of head (seems he has solved the problem of how to break the laws of physics), this is risible nonsense; by my calculations that is 1.7 cubic meters of water per second for a mere 2kW load (an conservative average UK household load)…….. 1.7 cubic meters of water per second!! That would fill a bath tub twice, every second; quite some stream.

A Danny Miller, in this wiki, comes up with a very similar conclusion:

2000W is 2000 joules/sec. 1 joule is the energy of raising or lowering 0.7376 lbs over 1 ft. So at 100% efficiency, you’d need to move 2212.8 lbs/sec over 8″, 276.6 gal/sec. 16,596 gal/min. Water turbines have had 80%-90% efficiency for over 100 years when used under ideal circumstances. As such it’s notable that while a small, economical, low draw waterwheel may be something new, it cannot possibly produce much more power than turbines have in the past. The 70% specified is a somewhat low performer but operating on such low head may be something new. So let’s take 70% specified in. Then we need 23,709 gpm through the turbine to generate 2KW. That’s a pretty powerful stream @ 8″ of head! This would fill a 50m by 25m by 2m Olympic swimming pool in 27.8 minutes. I have to note that since the speed of water in a natural stream is usually limited to a few feet per sec, the width of the device depicted is perhaps a meter, and the height of the water channel’s cross sectional area must be only a small fraction of the 8″ head then I don’t see how such a volume could flow through a device of the width depicted. I get 89.9 cu meter/min through a 1 meter wide by 2cm high cross section (10% of head) requires 74.8 m/sec flow rate, or 167.3 mph!

So what is going on here, bad science, another Windsave, or just bad reporting?