KFC, How it all Started

Who would have thought that a pure coincidence and a strong friendship were the basis of the Kentucky Fried Chicken epiphany?

 In 1952, during a food service seminar in Chicago, Harland David Sanders , who ran a motel and restaurant in Corbin – Kentucky, met American businessman Pete Harman, who owned The Do Drop Inn restaurant in Salt Lake City.

It was friendship at first sight between the two men. So much so, that Harland David Sanders soon after meeting him, decided to visit his friend Pete Harman on his way to a church convention in Australia.

During the meet-up, Pete Harman confided in his friend that he had been struggling with his Salt Lake City’s burger restaurant. He was looking for a new menu item to increase his revenue.

Harland David Sanders decided to help his friend out, so he decided to give him a taste of the chicken he had been serving in his Kentucky restaurant.

That night, when he cooked him dinner, Harman realized that he had stumbled upon a gold mine. Before Harland David Sanders left town, he shared his secret combination of eleven herbs and spices as well as his method of cooking chicken in a pressure fryer.

Harman soon added the Kentucky Fried Chicken to his menu and publicized it. In no time, the new menu item became a best seller, sales grew to the point that Harman opened a new restaurant branch and invited his friend Harland David Sanders to the grand opening. He billed him as the Kentucky Colonel. Thus giving leeway to the nickname of Colonel Sanders. Harman encouraged  Sanders to franchise his chicken product nationally, which he did in 1954. Harmon became the first Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) franchisee.

Harland David Sanders, started providing restaurant operators with a territorial franchise and charge them a nickel for every bird they sold.   Restaurateur Jim Collins, who had opened Hamburger Handout in 1952 after having been inspired by the McDonald’s brothers and copying their concept as well as their operational methods, showed interest in the Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) business.

In 1968, after having opened four branches of his successful Hamburger Handouts, he closed them all and shifted his focus to franchising Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC).

By 1986, Harmon and Jim Collins became the two largest Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) franchisees, each with more than two hundred fifty stores.

Today, Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) is the world’s second-largest restaurant chain after McDonald’s, with around 22,621 locations globally in 136 countries.

The First of Its Kind: Forest City

Imagine having the best of both worlds, enjoying the perks of modern life without compromising your love of nature. It is the perfect blend between modernism and wild life. Imagine looking outside your window and gazing upon a marvelous forest view whilst enjoying all the comfort that urban life has to offer.

Architect and urban planner Stefano Boeri Architetti decided to make this fantasy a reality with his Liuzhou Forest City project. Inspired by his previous Vertical Forest project that he had executed in Milan in 2014, which received many international awards such as the International Highrise Award ( 2014) and the Best Tall Building Worldwide Award (2015) by CTBUH, he decided to take his pioneering concept of biodiversity in architecture, to the next level. He started off by presenting his project of Forest City in the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP21), becoming one of the main actors in the debate on climate change in the field of international architecture. He got the chance to realize his vision when he was contracted to build a Forest City in north of Liuzhou, a Chinese city of about one and a half million inhabitants in the mountainous Southern province of Guangxi Liuzhou. The Liuzhou Forest City is the first prototype of its kind, an urban city in which offices, houses, hotels, hospitals and schools are almost entirely covered by plants and trees of a wide range of varieties and sizes.

The Liuzhou Forest City will be able to absorb about 10,000 tons of CO2 and 57 tons of micro-particles every year, producing about 900 tons of oxygen at the same time thereby combating the serious problem of air pollution in an effective and indepth way thanks to the multiplication of urban draining and plant surfaces. The distribution of plants not just along the avenues in parks and gardens but also on the facades of buildings means that a city already designed to be self-sufficient in terms of energy will also be able to improve air quality, reduce the average temperature of the urban heat island, generate a barrier against acoustic pollution. Completely connected, the new green city will be linked to the nearby centre of Liuzhou through a highly efficient fast railway infrastructure and a road network reserved exclusively for electrically powered cars. The Liuzhou Forest City is intended to house different types of residential areas and a full range of facilities, combining commercial and hospitality spaces and various public services including two schools and a hospital. The master plan developed by Stefano Boeri Architetti envisages a green city with all the characteristics of an urban settlement that is fully self-sufficient from an energy consumption point of view, starting with the use of geothermal energy for the interior spaces of buildings and the rooftop installation of high efficiency solar panels for the capture of renewable wind energy.

The Liuzhou Forest City construction which started in 2016 is expected to be completed by 2020. It will accommodate 30,000 residents spread over an area of ​​138.5 hectares. The community will include apartment buildings, schools, hotels, hospitals, shops and offices.

 

Things You Didn’t Know about Keukenhof

If you are to infuse tulips, windmills, clogs, cheeses and klederdrach dresses, you will end up with beautiful Holland, a region tucked on the western coast of the Netherlands.

In this corner of the earth, that one can consider as the birthplace of spring: With its mesmerizing flower streams, you can find one of the world’s largest flower gardens: Keukenhof.

Hereby are interesting facts to know about this enchanting garden:

• Keukenhof means kitchen garden.
• It has over 7 million bulbs, with 800 varieties of tulips.

• The 32 hectares of flowers displays spectacular flower shows, inspirational gardens, unique art and hosts wonderful entertainment such as treasure hunts, petting farms, mazes and a huge playground.

• Keukenhof used to be a fruits and vegetables garden for Jacqueline of Bavaria‘s kitchen staff.
• In the beginning there was no castle, it was built in 1641.
• In 1949, Keukenhof garden was designed to mimic an English garden. Twenty of the country’s leading flower growers decided to use the grounds to show off their goods.

Leonardo Di-Caprio’s Quest

When Leonardo Di-Caprio isn’t busy playing heroes on screen, he is actively playing one in the dark, for the greater good of humanity.

For the past 20 years, Leonardo DiCaprio’s Foundation has been establishing partnerships, supporting innovative projects that protect vulnerable wildlife from extinction, while restoring balance to threatened ecosystems and communities.

In a public statement, Leonardo Di-Caprio once said “Clean air, water, and a livable climate are inalienable human rights. And solving this crisis is not a question of politics; it is a question of our own survival.”

According to Leonardo Di-Caprio,  we are now experiencing what can only be called a planetary crisis — a convergence of accelerating climate change, unprecedented loss of biodiversity, and increasing human health issues caused by a toxic environment. Since 1970, we have lost one-third of the world’s wildlands, and in that time 50% of all vertebrate land animals have vanished. One-third of the world’s coral reefs, the “nurseries” of the ocean, have died and another third are expected to perish by 2030. Climate change is only adding fuel to the fire, with rapidly increasing global temperatures wreaking havoc on the delicate balance that has allowed life to flourish since the end of the last ice age. The situation in which we find ourselves is not just tragic for the thousands of species that will never again roam the Earth, but could threaten the very existence of our own species, homo sapiens.

In 1998, Leonardo DiCaprio established his foundation with the mission of protecting the world’s last wild places. LDF implements solutions that help restore balance to threatened ecosystems, ensuring the long-term health and well-being of all Earth’s inhabitants. Since that time the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation (LDF) has worked on some of the most pressing environmental issues of our day.

Through grantmaking, public campaigns and media initiatives, LDF brings attention and needed funding to six program areas — Wildlands Conservation, Oceans Conservation, Climate Change, Indigenous Rights, Transforming California, and Innovative Solutions.. Several successful fundraising events have enabled LDF to scale up our grantmaking strategy, driving support for vitally important projects around the globe.

Leonardo’s website and social media platforms are also dedicated to inspiring the public to take action on key environmental issues. Growing in reach from just 500,000 followers in 2007 to over 50 million today, Leonardo’s fans have engaged on an array of issues protecting key species — sharks in California, tigers in Asia, elephants in Africa — and calling on world leaders to address the global climate crisis.

In acknowledgement of LDF’s impactful work over the last two decades, Leonardo was designated as the United Nations Messenger of Peace for Climate Change and received the 2014 Clinton Global Citizen Award. In addition to founding LDF, Leonardo also serves on the board of several environmental organizations, World Wildlife Fund, Natural Resources Defense Council, National Geographic’s Pristine Seas, Oceans 5, and the International Fund for Animal Welfare.

The Straw Predicament

Who would think that a small plastic straw could have a ravaging effect on the environment?! We expect it to come with every beverage that we order, without much thought. But when added up, plastic straws create a big problem for the eco-system.

The situation became so serious that several states like for example Washington, D.C, has issued a ban on plastic straws in restaurants and other service businesses. Several establishments such as Starbucks and McDonald’s announced plans to go straw-less soon.

That’s where LOLIWARE comes in. It has pioneered the world’s leading seaweed technology to replace single use plastics. LOLIWARE’s products harness LIST (LOLIWARE Intelligent Seaweed Technologies) to create single use items designed to disappear. LOLIWARE is poised to completely replace single-use plastics beginning with the launch of the company’s new seaweed-based straw. LOLIWARE’s Straw, The Straw of the Future, looks, feels and acts like plastic, but is made from 100% food grade materials.  It is designed to disappear either through composting or natural processes.

The LOLIWARE Straw is 100% plant-based, hyper-compostable and marine degradable, in addition to being gluten-free, sugar-free, and non-GMO. With a mouth-feel similar to traditional straws, and vegetable-based colors, the LOLIWARE Straw introduces an environmentally friendly solution to the global plastics problem, without compromising the user experience or requiring a shift in consumer behavior. The straws target pricing parity with current plastic straw alternatives on the market.

The LOLIWARE Straw can withstand over 18 hours of continuous use and is made with seaweed, a regenerative resource which sequesters C02  vs. paper straws which require tree-based resources and last up to an hour.

LOLIWARE CEO Chelsea Fawn Briganti is pioneering a plastic-free future with an interdisciplinary team of leading material scientists, food technologists, seaweed biologists, and biopolymerists. The team is focused on replacing the 360 billion plastic straws used globally every year. “Every piece of plastic ever created still exists,” says Briganti. “There are five trillion pieces of plastic in our oceans; an estimated ten million tons of plastic is produced every second. Single use plastics should never be built to last, they should be designed to disappear.”

Several initiatives have been launched to counter the ecological problem. If businesses can help without it disturbing their routine, this constitutes a win-win situation and can be lucrative in the long-run as it labels them as socially-aware establishments.

A Mount-Everest Power Plant

Copenhagen is on course for becoming the world’s first zero-carbon city by 2025. On its quest to realize its goal, it is resorting to creative ways, such as establishing a ski slope on a waste-to-power incinerator. This original idea will not only allow Copenhagen to be eco-friendly but a touristic attraction as well.

Usually, incinerators are established outside the cities for health reasons, however, this plant is different because instead of emitting smoke plumes, the plant will blow smoke rings.

Designed by Bjarke Ingels Group, the energy plant will turn trash into power that will then go to the city’s grid. It will generate less CO2 than the city’s former plant.

The plant features a one of its kind 2,000-foot-long ski slope and the world’s tallest artificial climbing wall. It will serve a ski slope in winter.

Around 57,000 people are expected to use the facility’s ski slope and recreation area comprised of: water sports, soccer fields, and a go-kart track surrounds the building.

The $643 million project will not only be the world’s most efficient waste burning and energy-generating plant in the world but also an original and one of its kind touristic attraction with ample benefits:

• Generating 25% more energy from the same amount of waste.
• Emitting 100,000 fewer tons of CO2
• The reuse 90% of the metal waste
• Powering 62,500 homes and providing 160,000 homes with hot water

Copenhagen ambition is exemplary as it shows other countries that investing in eco-friendly initiatives might be expensive but if done smartly it can generate money not only economize on expenses in the long run.