Posts Tagged ‘consumption’
Changing Habits: Making Energy Consumption Visible
Posted in Models by Kate Archdeacon on April 14th, 2011
Source: guardian.co.uk
Image: nora* via flickr CC
From “Tidy St: Shining a light on community energy efficiency” by Flemmich Webb:
[In Tidy Street in Brighton, UK], residents who volunteered for a new energy-saving initiative have been given electricity meters so they can monitor their daily energy use, and identify which devices are using the most power, and when. For the past three weeks, they have been entering daily meter readings on tidystreet.org, to build up a picture of each household’s energy use. Once people started measuring – 17 of the street’s 52 households signed up straight away – local street artist Snub was commissioned to paint the street’s average energy use against the Brighton average in a graph on the road outside their homes.
“It’s a great way to do it,” says Paul Clark, a software developer who has lived on Tidy Street for 10 years. “It engages people – passers-by often ask what it’s all about – and for those of us that live here, it’s something to be proud of.” Open-source software designed specially for the project allows each household to compare their energy use not only with the Brighton average, but also with the national average or even that of other countries.
Involving the community was key to getting the project off the ground, says Jon Bird, the project co-ordinator and designer of the software. “I went along to the residents’ annual street party last year, and explained what we were trying to do; that it was voluntary and that no one was trying to impose anything on anyone,” he says. “Then it was a case of identifying the ‘champions’ in the street – those who were going to tell their neighbours about the project; those who were going to be doing the measuring in the individual households.”
Each household has chosen its own icon to mark the data points on the street and online graphs and residents’ input helps foster the sense they own the project. Ruth Goodall, 70, who has lived on Tidy Street for 30 years, says she wasn’t interested in her electricity use before the initiative but measuring it every day has inspired her to change her behaviour. “I always used to fill up my kettle to the top but having seen how much extra power that uses I’m careful to just boil what I need,” she says. Strikingly, over the three weeks the project has been running, the street’s average energy use has dropped by 15%, with some people cutting usage by as much as 30%. Much of this has been achieved by simple behavioural changes such as turning of lights and devices on standby. “Now the challenge is to see if those reductions can be maintained,” says Bird.
Phase two of the project is about to be launched, during which 10 households on Tidy Street will for the first time measure their gas usage over the next six months. “We are also looking at working with community groups based in the city, such as Brighton and Hove 10:10, to encourage other streets and organisations in the city, to start measuring their energy use,” says Bird, who has recently been approached by one school, keen to set up an electricity-use measuring project with its pupils.
Perhaps energy companies should take note. Next year sees the introduction of the “green deal”, a scheme whereby people can invest in energy efficiency improvements to their homes, community spaces and businesses at no upfront cost, instead paying through installments on their energy bills. Community engagement will be key to their ability to deliver the programme.
This article was posted by Flemmich Webb on the Guardian.
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How to Gauge a City’s Carbon Footprint: Linking Emissions to Affluence
Posted in Research by Kate Archdeacon on April 12th, 2011
Source: Environmental Research Web
From “Carbon emissions ‘unrelated to city density’” by Nadya Anscombe:
- When analysing the carbon footprint of a city, most research studies look at the emissions generated by the inhabitants of that city. Typically they come to the conclusion that denser cities produce less carbon emissions on a per capita basis.But Jukka Heinonen and his colleague Seppo Junnila from Aalto University, Finland, have a different way of examining this issue. They believe that emissions should not be allocated to where they are produced, but to where they are consumed.
“For example, if a television is made in a big factory in the countryside, but bought by someone living in a city, the carbon emission generated from the production of that television should be allocated to the consumer, not the factory,” Heinonen told environmentalresearchweb. “When you look at carbon consumption in this way it becomes almost irrelevant where someone lives and how dense the city is in which they live.”
Heinonen and Junnila studied the two largest metropolitan areas in Finland: Helsinki and its two surrounding cities Espoo and Vantaa; and the important inland city of Tampere, together with the seven neighbouring semi-urban cities. The seven cities around Tampere were allocated into two groups: rural cities (RTC) and urban cities (UCT). The pair found that carbon consumption was directly linked to income and was not necessarily related to the density of the city. “Espoo is a less dense city than Helsinki, but carbon consumption per capita is higher in Espoo than in Helsinki because Espoo is a more affluent city,” said Heinonen.
To come to these conclusions, the researchers used a hybrid life cycle analysis (LCA) approach. This combines the principles of an input–output LCA – where emissions are calculated based on monetary transactions – and a process LCA, where emissions are assessed based on the energy and mass flows in the main production and supply chain processes. Heinonen and Junnila looked at 10 consumption areas: heat and electricity; building and property; maintenance and operation; private transport; public transportation; consumer goods; leisure goods; leisure services; travelling abroad; and health, nursing and training services.
“We found that the biggest impacts on a consumer’s carbon footprint are heat and electricity; the construction and maintenance of buildings; and private transport,” said Heinonen. “Tampere is considerably more dense than the urban and rural cities surrounding it, but we found a negligible difference in carbon consumption between these three metropolitan areas.” The researchers believe that their study is a useful model for analysing the emissions of different urban structures that could be used in urban development when low-carbon solutions are sought. They have published their research in Environmental Research Letters (ERL).
This article by Nadya Anscombe for Environmental Research Web.
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Garage Trail Sale 2011
Posted in Events, Movements by Kate Archdeacon on March 31st, 2011
What if all the garage sales in your area were held on the same day? You could plan your route and visit heaps of different sales easily – maybe even with a bike and a trailer.
The Garage Sale Trail is about sustainability, community and fun. By getting people together to turn their old stuff into someone else’s new stuff, the day not only proves that second hand items can still have value, it keeps rubbish off the street, removes clutter from cupboards, stops a bunch of new things being brought into the world (along with the environmental impact that creates) and gives everyone good reason to meet the neighbours and have a good natter at the same time.
The Garage Sale Trail is on Sunday April 10 all around Australia – check out the map to see sales in your area or add your own. The site also has a free app to let you navigate easily on the day using your phone.
http://www.garagesaletrail.com.au/
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Beyond Food Miles: Some Types Of Food Take More Energy
Posted in Research by Kate Archdeacon on March 17th, 2011
Source: PostCarbon Institute
Image: renatamiyagusku via flickr CC
From “Beyond Food Miles” by Michael Bomford:
NOTE: The following article is concerned strictly with the energy equation of the food system and is intended to stimulate questions about how best to grow, transport, store and prepare (ideally local) foods. There are many reasons to favor local food, including supporting local economies and building local food security.
A locavore is “a person who endeavors to eat only locally produced food.”[1] What better diet could there be for an energy constrained world? After all, feeding Americans accounts for about 15% of US energy use,[2] and the average food item travels more than 5,000 miles from farm to fork.[3] It seems obvious that eating locally will go a long way to reducing food system energy use. Yet cracking the case of America’s energy-intensive food system demands that we look beyond the obvious.
A local diet can reduce energy use somewhat, but there are even more effective ways to tackle the problem. Single-minded pursuit of local food, without consideration of the bigger picture, can actually make things worse from an energy perspective.[4]
If you realize you’re spending too much money, the first thing to do is figure out where it’s going. Cutting back on pizza won’t make much difference if you’re spending most of your money on beer. Similarly, the first step in reducing food system energy use is to figure out where all the energy is going. That’s what a team of economists working for the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) did last year, in a report called “Energy Use in the US Food System“.
The report contains some surprises. Transportation is the smallest piece of the food system energy pie. Even farming isn’t a particularly big contributor. The big energy users turn out to be food processing, packaging, selling, and preparation. Our kitchens command the biggest slice of the pie, using twice as much energy as the farms that grew the food in the first place.
[...]
Read the full article by Michael Bomford at the Post-Carbon Institute for more information and access to the end-notes included above.
Modular Components for Long-life Electronics
Posted in Movements by Kate Archdeacon on March 11th, 2011
Source: Grist
Image: jurvetson via flickr CC
From “What if you updated your electronics like you update your wardrobe?” by Jess Zimmerman:
Designer and TED fellow Dominic Muren wants you to update your electronics like you update your wardrobe. In other words, he thinks you should be able to replace or update only what gets worn out, instead of tossing and re-purchasing everything you own at one whack just because one part is busted or old or doesn’t fit your lifestyle anymore.
Who really ever buys all new clothes? Instead, we modify a little at a time, replacing parts that wear out, of adding new pieces as our lifestyle changes. I needn’t point out that clothing is one of the few products manufactured in a distributed way, across the US, by small designer/manufacturers. Why can’t we have the same for electronics? How do we encourage designers to contribute to an ecosystem of pieces, rather than forcing users to buy entirely new clothes every few years?
Click through for Jess’ summary of this original article on Treehugger.
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Burning Wood: Not So Carbon Neutral?
Posted in Models, Opinion, Research by Kate Archdeacon on March 1st, 2011
Source: The Ecologist
Image: Shandchem via flickr CC
From Turning our Victorian Terrace into an Eco-Home part seven – Heating by Sue Wheat:
Sue Wheat thought a wood-burning stove was the greenest way to heat her house until a chat with authors, Nick Grant and Alan Clarke, made her think again. The biggest crisis of her eco-refurb so far? You bet it was!
With the cold weather closing in, it was time to think about green ways to heat our home. We chose a Stovax multi-fuel stove, which we were lucky enough to get from friends.
[...]
In a city where every other house seems to be having its kitchen or bathroom ripped out, there is vast amounts of burnable scrap wood lying around waiting to go to the dump, which could instead be heating your house. Paying for wood to burn seems positively stupid when you can pick up a week’s supply from neighbours, most of whom are all too willing to let you have it. I can’t see the logic in buying wood that’s been transported hundreds of miles either, so I’ve become something of an eagle-eyed wood-spotting obsessive. We look for wood that’s unvarnished, unpainted and untreated, and either carry it home, or rope in friends with cars or vans to pick it up for us. I’ve also got a few friendly builders who drop off scrap wood to us (thus saving them dumping fees), and a supply of off-cuts from a furniture repair workshop. To build up next year’s wood store, which we made from scrap wooden pallets covered with tarpaulin, we’re planning to buy some logs from a local tree surgeon and season them for a year, by which time the excitement of dragging wood out of skips and yards may well have worn off.
[...]
As I basked rather smugly in the warm glow of our pretty, near zero-carbon heating system, for a good few weeks I was unaware that things were about to get tricky. Then with one click on the mouse, I stumbled across a website which catapulted me into my biggest eco-refurbishment crisis yet. It seems, according to some of the eminent researchers at the Association of Environmentally Conscious Builders [AECB] that burning wood is not carbon neutral after all. I was gutted, to say the least. I emailed the AECB in a panic, who put me onto the authors of Biomass: A Burning Issue, Nick Grant and Alan Clarke. Their paper concludes that while it’s true that trees do absorb carbon dioxide when they grow, it doesn’t mean that the best use for the wood biomass is burning it. Burning, say Grant and Clarke, produces more carbon emissions than burning gas. Disaster.
Instead, they argue that timber should be left unburnt, thus imprisoning the carbon, and put to other uses; for example, as structural timber, insulation material or furniture. As owners of low-energy houses fuelled by wood burning stoves, they are both gutted too. ‘We don’t want people to hate us,’ Nick told me. ‘Please don’t shoot the messenger.’ The unfortunate result of assuming that wood-burning is carbon neutral is that it has been promoted by just about everyone, which has meant, as they point out, that wood is now being burnt faster than it’s grown, leading to rising prices and unsustainable burning practices to start.
Read the full article by Sue Wheat, and check out the comments section which has some useful links posted by the author.
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World’s first post-growth economy?
Posted in Opinion, Research by Rob Eales on February 9th, 2011
Source: Make Wealth History
Image by Matthew David Powell via Flickr under this Creative Commons licence
One of the problems with moving towards a more sustainable model for the world seems to be the current economic system which champions, and is based on, growth. It is hard to image how the world could be like once this model has been superseded: what will it look like? How will I fit in to it?
Perhaps however a post-growth world is already starting to appear or in some cases is already here,
From: Japan: the world’s first post-growth economy by Jeremy
Or do we? Perhaps the world already has a post-growth society, albeit an unintentional one. [...]
As far as economists are concerned, this is a tragedy and a disaster. How the mighty have fallen. Japan’s GDP is essentially unchanged since the early nineties, its share of global GDP falling from 17 to just 4%. China overtook it last year to become the world’s second largest economy, and now it limps along as a economic failed state, a cautionary tale for students of capitalism.
And yet, the lights are still on, everything still works. Literacy is high, and crime is low. Life expectancy is better than almost anywhere on earth – 82 years to the US’ 78.
(Not sure what a post-growth ecomony is? I wasn’t… A Post-Growth Economy FAQ helps. On the same site.)
Replacing Bottled Water on Campus
Posted in Movements by Kate Archdeacon on January 26th, 2011
Via Cleanfood, the Future Climate newsletter
From the University of Canberra:
21 January 2011: The University of Canberra will discontinue the sale of bottled water on campus, the Vice-Chancellor announced today.
The University is the first in the country to go bottled water free and will immediately begin phasing out on-campus sales. Covering a campus population of almost 13,000 students and staff, the move is the largest of its kind in Australia. It was initiated by students and assisted by action group Do Something!, represented at the launch by founder Jon Dee.
New water bubblers and bottle refill stations, installed with funding from the ACT Chief Minister’s Department, will significantly increase the supply of fresh, healthy, free drinking water on campus.
Students and staff will also be offered a chilled water alternative to bottled water in the form of the Australia’s first WaterVend machines. WaterVend machines dispense filtered, ‘flash-chilled’ still, sparkling or flavoured tap water into the customer’s own refillable container. The WaterVend provides a cheaper alternative to bottled water in campus food outlets and provides those outlets with a commercial income to offset the income lost from bottled water sales.
Read the full press release.
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This is cool – Passivhaus NYC
Posted in Models by Kate Archdeacon on January 17th, 2011
by Lloyd Alter via Treehugger
Image by Loadingdock5
Sustainable design techniques and high tech photography merge to give us a great insight into advanced architectural practice through this piece on Treehugger.
“Really, one could go on for hours explaining the benefits of Passivhaus design, but it is all right here in this thermogram (thermograph?) of Loadingdock5′s 174 Grand Street in New York City. It’s neighbours just glow with red, representing lost heat; the building in the middle barely registers. In fact the high performance windows are even darker than the building itself.”
Read the rest to see a larger photo and visit Loadingdock5′s site to see detailed information about the project.
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Simple Tools to Enable Decision-Making
Posted in Models by Kate Archdeacon on January 7th, 2011
Source: Nourishing the Planet: Worldwatch Institute
Photo: IRRI
From “Simple, Low-cost Color Chart Promotes Fertilizer Efficiency for Asian Rice Farmers” by Matt Styslinger:
Access to nitrogen fertilizers can mean the difference between success and failure of an entire year’s investment for an Asian rice farmer. But overuse of fertilizer can degrade the long-term quality of the soil and water resources on which they depend—and can eat away at precious little profits. But researchers have discovered that rice leaves themselves can give clues about how much nitrogen is needed for optimal yield.
A new 4-panel leaf color chart (LCC) that corresponds to actual colors of rice leaves has been developed for rice cultivation in Asia—the chart was created by the Irrigated Rice Research Consortium (IRRC) in collaboration with the University of California Cooperative Extension (UCCE). The LCC consists of plastic panels, each with distinctly different shades of green—ranging from yellowish green to dark green. LCCs can be used by farmers in the field to gauge how much nitrogen fertilizer is needed for efficient use, and to maximize rice yields.
The LCC is used at critical growth stages by simply holding a rice leaf against the panels. A farmer can tell whether the crop has received too much nitrogen or is nitrogen deficient, by comparing leaf color too LCC panels. This provides real-time guidance for when to apply, and when not to apply fertilizer. Any color outside the range of the four panels would signal extreme nitrogen deficiency or excess.
[...]
This effective, low-cost tool helps farmers improve their nitrogen fertilizer management, improving their prospects for success. “Smallholder farmers benefitted from the low cost [about US$1 a unit] and the learning that was associated with it,” says Witt. “It wasn’t just the chart, but also learning when the plant really needs the nitrogen and observing leaf color. Once farmers used the LCC for two or three seasons,{they} adjusted their nitrogen management, and they developed an eye for the optimal green leaf color.Managing soil fertility and having adequate tools to be able to communicate soil fertility to farmers is essential to sustainable agriculture and food security.”
Read the full article by Matt Styslinger for Worldwatch.
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