Like their cousin the carbon footprint, water footprints are one of the latest methods scientists and policy makers are using to assess humanity's impact on the planet. And now businesses are starting to use water footprinting as well.

It's just a couple short weeks before we ring in 2010. One of the iconic events for every new year's eve is the Times Square ball drop in New York City. The ball drop has been a must-see event for millions of people for the last 103 years. But it's only been the last two years that the ball was renovated to be energy efficient without losing any of its splendor. This is the third year that an eco-friendly ball is dropping in Times Square, and here's the tricks to making it so.

December 21st, 2009, The Green Pages -- This week, there was such a thing as a free lunch. Spirits were high in London's Trafalgar Square, despite the rain, sleet and cold, as hundreds waited in line for their free lunch of hot curried vegetables. Others queued for free groceries, and others for fresh fruit smoothies. The event was called "Feeding the 5000" and it was organised to highlight the global problems with food waste.

That's probably on the minds of many of us. Can this massive summit where some 15,000 political leaders, industrial players, environmentalists and activists gather help change the current global environmental crises? Read more about COP15 here . 

The urgency surrounding the upcoming UN Climate Summit in Copenhagen has led celebrities to join forces via a Public Service Announcement (in association with the Environmental Media Association and the TckTckTck coalition) to call for a Fair, Ambitious, and Binding treaty. This treaty will ultimately stabilize the atmosphere at 350 parts per million (ppm) carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which an overwhelming number of scientists now insist is the safe upper limit.