5 gallon water coolers are often thought of as the alternative to having a water bottle at the office or your home. Rarely do we think about the fact that those water bottles end up in the landfill eventually as well. This article represent a geat alternative to all water bottles!

Gathering around the water cooler has been a time-honored office tradition, but bottled water can be costly for your business, and can have a negative environmental impact! Those 5-gallon plastic jugs eventually end up in landfills, and bottled water services have a high carbon footprint due to the emission of fossil fuel-burning delivery trucks.

When you also consider the inconvenience of lifting new bottles onto the water cooler, storing the empty bottles at your office until the next pick-up, and spending time in the reordering process, you may be ready to consider more sustainable, convenient, and inexpensive alternatives that still provide your staff with clean, safe water: bottleless water coolers.

Bottleless coolers draw directly from your tap water supply and utilize state-of-the-art technologies, such as ultraviolet (UV) sanitation, 5-stage water filtration, and reverse osmosis filtration, to offer you the cleanest, best-tasting water available. With no bottles involved, the expense and logistics of supply and delivery are eliminated, reducing your office overhead costs while also giving your business a smaller environmental footprint. A bottleless water cooler never runs out of water, giving you a convenient, less-expensive, more eco-friendly solution without eliminating the benefit of filtered water for your employees.

Waltham, Mass. – Harvest Power, a developer of technology for recycling waste materials into soils, fertilizers, energy, and engineered fuels, has raised $1.3 million in venture capital, according to a new filing by the company with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Founded in 2008, Harvest Power has developed technology that re-uses organic waste from landfills. The company currently diverts over 425,000 tons of organic material from landfills, in conjunction with its retail and municipal partners in the U.S. and Canada.

Wisconsin, USA -- Europe burns heaps of garbage, getting lots of electricity and some heat. The United States does not. Proponents say incineration shrinks the waste and produces heat and electricity while reducing the need for landfills and the diesel-drinking trucks tasked with taking trash to often-distant burial grounds.

These folks acknowledge that incinerators were rather dirty 25 years ago, but note that current air emissions are below Environmental Protection Agency standards. In a modern garbage incinerator, a complex set of filters removes heavy metals and other pollutants; high-temperature operation reduces the output of ultra-toxic dioxins.