Posts Tagged ‘Resource’
Local Harvest: Metasite for organic & local food
Posted in Models, Tools by Kate Archdeacon on July 26th, 2011
From the LocalHarvest website:
LocalHarvest is America’s #1 organic and local food website. We maintain a definitive and reliable “living” public nationwide directory of small farms, farmers markets, and other local food sources. Our search engine helps people find products from family farms, local sources of sustainably grown food, and encourages them to establish direct contact with small farms in their local area. Our online store helps small farms develop markets for some of their products beyond their local area.
The richness, variety, and flavor of our communities, food systems, and diets is in jeopardy. The exclusive focus on economic efficiency has brought us low prices and convenience through large supermarkets chains, agribusiness and factory farms, while taking away many other aspects of our food lives, like our personal relation with our food and with the people who produce it. More and more people are realizing this and actively working to turn the tide and to preserve a food industry based on family-owned, small scale businesses. They are our best guarantee against a world of styrofoam-like long-shelf-life tomatoes and diets dictated from corporate boardrooms. The Buy Local movement is quickly taking us beyond the promise of environmental responsibility that the organic movement delivered, and awakening the US to the importance of community, variety, humane treatment of farm animals, and social and environmental responsibility in regards to our food economy.
LocalHarvest was founded in 1998, and is now the number one informational resource for the Buy Local movement and the top place on the Internet where people find information on direct marketing family farms. We now have more than 20000 members, and are growing by about 20 new members every day. Through our servers, our website and those of our partners serve about three and a half million page views per month to the public interested in buying food from family farms. LocalHarvest is located in Santa Cruz, California, and was founded by Guillermo Payet, a software engineer and activist dedicated to generating positive social change through the Internet.
www.localharvest.org
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Ethical Consumer is setting up a similar resource in Melbourne, Australia, and is seeking local involvement. KA
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Collaborative Consumption: Infographic
Posted in Movements, Tools by Kate Archdeacon on July 13th, 2011
Source: Fast Company‘s Co.Design
Infographic by Collaborative
From “Infographic Of The Day: A Tour Guide To Collaborative Consumption” by Morgan Clendaniel:
You might own some tools that you never use, or perhaps you have a backyard that you just don’t have the time to do anything interesting with. Until recently, those pieces of property mostly served as nagging reminders that you didn’t have enough time to do everything you wanted to do. Today, they can look like revenue streams, not wastes of money.
Ideas about ownership of property are slowly starting to change in this country. The success of Zip Car and of bike sharing programs in a few major cities are the vanguard of a host of different “collaborative consumption” services and businesses that allow people to monetize their own unused resources, or to find ways to get goods and services without purchasing them. This infographic shows some of the stuff that might be lying around your house that are just profits waiting to happen — and all the start-ups trying to help you along.
This infographic was made by the venture fund Collaborative–which invests in collaborative consumption businesses–and the Startup America Partnership in order to help illustrate the economic benefits of this idea.
Read the full article by Morgan Clendaniel to find out more about specific start-ups, including Park At My House and TaskRabbit (where you can get paid to assemble other people’s IKEA furniture).
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Brisbane to Construct Second Landfill Gas Plant
Posted in Models, Movements by Kate Archdeacon on May 18th, 2011
Image via UK Energy Saving
From “Willawong waste-to-power plan gets Green approval” by Karin Adams, Sarah McVeigh on QUT News:
The Greens have welcomed Brisbane City Council’s plan to turn rubbish into power, but say the council is years behind the rest of the world.
The landfill site at Willawong in the south of Brisbane will have its methane and carbon dioxide emissions turned into electricity and put into the grid. Methane gas is 21 times more environmentally damaging than carbon dioxide. Landfill Gas Industries managing director Adam Bloomer, the company building the plant, says this will tackle a huge problem for council. “Every council in Australia that owns a landfill,” she said. “Their landfill is their single biggest source of their carbon emissions.” “Generally they’re somewhere in the range of 60 to 70 per cent of their greenhouse gas emission.”
Queensland Greens spokesperson Libby Connors says Brisbane and Australia are behind the rest of the world. “Queensland and Brisbane in particular are a long way behind the (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) where at least 20 OECD countries are already using this sort of technology,” she said. She says she has been calling for the Willawong landfill gas plan for 20 years. “Australia has been really smug for many years that the easiest solution for our waste disposal is landfill because we’ve supposedly got all this space,” she said. “You know that is just completely been the wrong attitude.”
Waste Management Association of Australia Queensland president Pravin Menon says Brisbane City Council is pushing forward with good sustainability policy. “What Brisbane City Council is doing is extremely responsible from an environmental perspective…in actually utilising a resource in the ground that would otherwise add to our environmental impact,” he said. He says future waste management strategies need to avoid, reuse and divert waste. “Councils should firstly look at reducing the amount of waste that they send to landfill,” he said.
Ms Connors says Queensland is missing landfill gas plant opportunities. “It’s interesting the only two plants are here in Brisbane but there are plenty of other opportunities to develop this around the state,” she said. Mr Bloomer says the benefits of the plant are environmental but won’t stem the rising electricity prices. “I don’t think it’s going to make a big difference to electricity prices,” he said. “Renewable energy is still a premium product as far as cost is concerned.” But he says what it will do is provide power to around 1400 homes annually. The plant will be operational by June 2012.
Read this article by Karin Adams & Sarah McVeigh on QUT News.
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Resilience Thinking Seminars: Free to download
Posted in Research by Kate Archdeacon on December 20th, 2010
Source: Stockholm Resilience Centre
Photo of Elinor Ostrom via US Embassy Sweden - flickr CC
Listen to more than 50 seminars with the world’s most renowned thinkers in resilience.
The Stockholm Resilience Centre website isn’t the only place you can access the latest in resilience thinking: Facebook, Twitter and YouTube all provide you with the latest videos and news on social-ecological research. Now the most important and popular seminars and presentations that have taken place at the centre are also free to download from iTunes.
The list includes presentations by Elinor Ostrom, Will Steffen, Brian Walker, Frances Westley, Johan Rockströmand many more.
Find all the centre lectures and seminars by searching for “Stockholm Resilience Centre” in the top right corner of the iTunes page.
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Could urban heat islands produce geothermal power?
Posted in Research, Sustainable Cities by Kate Archdeacon on November 3rd, 2010
Via Environmental Research Web
Image: dustinphillips via flickr CC license
From Hot water to get cities out of energy trouble? by Liz Kalaugher
Cities are generally warmer than the rural land surrounding them, in a phenomenon known as the urban heat-island effect. It’s not just above-ground temperatures that rise – the soil beneath also experiences several degrees of warming. Now, researchers have found that the extra heat stored in groundwater beneath cities around the world could provide enough geothermal energy to heat urban homes.
“In most cities, with a variety of populations and climates, the large amount of geothermal energy stored in the urban local subsurface is capable of fulfilling the annual space-heating demand for years and potentially decades,” Ke Zhu of the University of Tübingen, Germany toldenvironmentalresearchweb.
Together with colleagues from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany, St Francis Xavier University, Canada, and ETH Zürich, Switzerland, Zhu measured groundwater temperatures in Cologne, Germany, and Winnipeg, Canada. Both cities had extensive underground warming, with temperatures 3–5°C higher than surrounding rural areas. Similarly, the subsurface beneath urban green spaces was cooler than that below business districts.
The urban heat-island effect arises because of factors such as buildings preventing heat from leaving the ground at night, changes in the properties of the ground surface and the absence of plants that provide cooling by evapotranspiration.
“Urban aquifers with elevated temperature are attractive shallow geothermal-energy reservoirs, and meanwhile there is high energy demand just above,” said Zhu. “In our opinion, it is important to study the geothermal potential of urban heat islands before planning large geothermal projects.”
Residential Design & the Benefits of Plants: Online Resource
Posted in Research by Kate Archdeacon on January 6th, 2010
Source: Sustainable Cities Collective, from “Sustainable Residential Design: Maximizing the Benefits of Plants”
The American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) has created an online resource guide on maximising the benefits of plants through sustainable residential landscape architecture. The guide contains lists of organisations, research, concepts and projects related to plants and sustainable landscape architecture, and includes sections on: native [U.S.] plants, residential agriculture, residential wildlife habitat, indoor plants and residential composting. Developed for students and professionals, the resource guide contains recent reports and projects from leading U.S. and international organisations, academics, and design firms.
This sustainable residential design resource guide is the third in a new four-part series. See earlier guides in the sustainable residential design series: increasing energy efficiency and improving water efficiency. One last future guide in this series will focus on how sustainable residential landscape architecture can incorporate innovative, recycled (and recyclable) materials.
The guide is separated into five sections:
* Native Plants
* Residential Agriculture
* Residential Wildlife Habitat
* Indoor Plants
* Residential Composting
As an example, the section on “native plants” includes models for reintroducing native plants into residential landscapes, as well as plant databases and government and non-profit organization native plant conservation efforts. There are also links to projects that have successfully incorporated these concepts in a residential context.
Go to the Resource Guide to see the full range available.
Resource: Climate Change Map
Posted in Research by Kate Archdeacon on October 30th, 2009
Source: Met Office, UK
Image: Met Office
A new map illustrating the global consequences of failing to keep temperature change to under 2 °C was launched [last week] by the UK Government, in partnership with the Met Office. The map was developed using the latest peer-reviewed science from the Met Office Hadley Centre and other leading impact scientists. The poster highlights some of the impacts that may occur if the global average temperature rises by 4 °C above the pre-industrial climate average. Ahead of December’s international climate change talks in Copenhagen, the Government is aiming for an agreement that limits climate change as far as possible to 2 °C. Increases of more than two degrees will have huge impacts on the world.
The poster shows that a four degree average rise will not be spread uniformly across the globe. The land will heat up more quickly than the sea, and high latitudes, particularly the Arctic, will have larger temperature increases. The average land temperature will be 5.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels. The impacts on human activity shown on the map are only a selection of those that may occur, and highlight the severe effects on water availability, agricultural productivity, extreme temperatures and drought, the risk of forest fire and sea-level rise. Agricultural yields are expected to decrease for all major cereal crops in all major regions of production. Half of all Himalayan glaciers will be significantly reduced by 2050, leading to 23% of the population of China being deprived of the vital dry season glacial melt water source.
“The map’s release marks a significant shift in political discourse on climate change, with many politicians until recently unwilling to discuss the possibility of a failure to hit the 2C target “, David Adam and Allegra Stratton, guardian.co.uk.
Read the full article.
BuilderScrap: FreeCycle for the Building Industry
Posted in Models by Kate Archdeacon on October 14th, 2009
Source: Springwise
Image: Bryn Pinzgauer via flickr CC
More than 90 million tons of construction and demolition waste are generated each year in England and Wales alone, and at least 13 million of those tons are surplus new materials that could have been reused. Hoping to keep such waste out of landfills, BuilderScrap is a free site for the construction trade that aims to connect builders who have extra materials with those who need them.
UK-based BuilderScrap was established by builders for builders as a way to use up surplus new and high-quality second-hand material in the supply chain. Users begin by registering and then uploading any extra building materials they’d like to sell or give away. Allowable items include timber, doors, floorboards, stair components, joists, tiles, window frames and office furniture, to name just a few. Other users who are interested in an item then contact the relevant user via the BuilderScrap website, which in turn notifies the listing member, who can respond to work out the details. Once the item has exchanged hands, the original listing member then de-lists it from the site.
Read the full article on Springwise.
(What’s Freecycle?)
Supply Chain Transparency: evolving Online Tools
Posted in Movements by Kate Archdeacon on October 6th, 2009
Source: Worldchanging
Image: Sourcemap
From Kirstin Butler’s The Backstory of Stuff: New Sites Enable More Transparency in the Supply Chain
Until recently, visualizing global goods’ sourcing was the domain of contemporary artists and technoactivists. Tracing an object back to its origins could be a time-consuming and frustrating process that meant doing solitary research and creating original interfaces. But the increased accessibility of online mapping tools and wiki-style collaborations have changed the cartography of consumption.
Enter Sourcemap, an open-source application for collective supply chain research and mapping. When WorldChanging first reported on Sourcemap last year the project had yet to launch; now its users have already traced the global travels of products as diverse as cars, granola, and lace (even though the site is still in beta mode). An MIT-based team built Sourcemap’s applications around Google Earth, and its geotagged food, travel, and product maps will look familiar to anyone who has called up a set of road trip directions. Still, while not the exclusive province of programmers, Sourcemap does require some skill with computing language to manipulate data. Most visitors to the site will probably gain the most from viewing supply chains in progress.
Even the pinpoint accuracy of a global map, however, can lack the immediacy of a human story. That’s where high-profile advocacy can take up the charge of transparency for more just and sustainable sourcing practices. A great example is the Enough Project’s Come Clean 4 Congo campaign, which seeks to connect the points between your cell phone and conflict minerals.
Living Planet City
Posted in Models by Kate Archdeacon on September 8th, 2009
Source: Worldchanging, taken from an Article by Christa Morris
“Welcome to the Living Planet. It’s clean, it’s efficient — and it’s doable. Today.”
WWF Canada‘s The Living Planet City’s bright animation of thriving urbanism illustrates 20 big ideas to make any city more sustainable.
In the “west end,” a combined heat and power plant uses “waste” heat energy to provide chilled water for a nearby supermarket. In the “east end,” a municipal waste station feeds into a biofuel plant, complete with solar, green roofs on top. At the waterfront, wave, tidal and wind energy power the city while a rapid transit station ferries people back and forth: all this with plenty of park space.
Clicking around brings up summaries of the technology and provides links to learn more. Once properly informed and inspired, visitors are encouraged to get the ideas out there by sending a link to elected officials, friends, and business owners. You can even send a suggested message to your slated Copenhagen representative.
Good start! But is it good enough?
How do you adapt and perfect a Living Planet City when there are so many varying starting points, and thus, varying challenges? One solution would be to make the city as interactive as its sister site, “the Living Planet Community.”
In the Living Planet Community, you can commit to any number of thousands of climate-friendly actions or add your own, and the site will calculate the GHG reduction you achieve. You can even create groups — of friends, coworkers, or strangers — and set a goal for GHG reduction while engaging in planet-friendly competition.
Why not merge this community and the city? Why not take it further, with a sustainable Sim City-esque program, where, after creating your city, you get realistic feedback on its CO2 output? A well-designed simulation could train leaders (and future leaders) to see the changes necessary to achieve emissions reduction goals in their unique cities.
Read the full Article by Christa Morris, on Worldchanging.com