Paint it White!

4 July 2010 - Global warming or not: the Andean glaciers in the mountains of Peru are slowly melting. A Peruvian inventor, called Eduardo had a brilliant idea to stop the process by painting the mountain tops white. He only uses simple and environmental-friendly ingredients for the paint: lime, industrial egg white and water. The mixture has been used since the Peruvian colonial times. There are also no paint brushes, the painters just splash jugs with whitewash over the rocks. The principle is based on the simple concept that when sunlight is reflected off a white surface, solar energy passes back through the atmosphere rather than warming the earth. The World Bank awarded the idea with a prize of USD 200,000.