Environment

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Consumers buying plants sprouting from eco-looking fibre flower pots have been buying pots which actually contain a petroleum-based product—until now.

A team of University of Toronto entrepreneurs from the Faculty of Forestry has developed a new formula to make fibre plant pots truly biodegradable. Working in collaboration with Myers Lawn and Garden Segment, they are bringing to market a green alternative to fibre pots.

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Toronto – and other cities around the world – can significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions by implementing aggressive but practical policy changes, says a new study by University of Toronto Civil Engineering Professor Chris Kennedy and World Bank climate change specialist Lorraine Sugar, one of Kennedy’s former students.

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Professor Kim Strong, the inaugural director of the new School of the Environment at University of Toronto, is one of the founding members of the Canadian Network for the Detection of Atmospheric Change, a group of researchers working to improve atmospheric remote sounding in Canada.

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Filmmaker Michael Allder has travelled the globe to document the natural world, and for more than a decade was executive producer of The Nature of Things with David Suzuki. But despite all of his experience, he expects to learn something himself from the public lectures he will be giving at U of T Scarborough this fall.

“I think it’s a fascinating opportunity,” he says. “For 13 or 14 years at the CBC I managed 20 films a year. I didn’t have the time to deconstruct them. The main focus was to make the best film you can.”

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They’re calling it a mobile public art project – and it has people talking.

Challenged to use media to promote the environment, students from U of T’s Knowledge Media Design Institute, part of the Faculty of Information, prototyped a smart phone application called tetAtet.

Working with partners at Go Transit and artists from No.9 — an organization that uses art and design to bring awareness to environmental concerns — the students then launched a train car dubbed “Art Train Conductor No.9.”