Posts Tagged ‘USA’
Fit Cities: Design & Policy Collaboration
Posted in Models, Movements by Kate Archdeacon on September 7th, 2010
Source: MetropolisMag
From “Design + Policy = Fit Cities” by Susan Szenasy:
George Miller, the current president of the American Institute of Architects and a local [NY] practitioner, opened the fifth annual Fit City symposium at the Center for Architecture, in Manhattan, by challenging the crowd to rethink the planning, architecture, and design of our metropolis, with the goal of encouraging physical activity and healthy lifestyles. Our city is in the midst of a health emergency: 43 percent of elementary school children are overweight or obese, and diabetes rates are climbing, driving health-care costs up and life expectancies down. Clearly, a shift in mind-set is needed. “Ninety percent of the game is half mental,” Miller quipped, channeling Yogi Berra, master of the malaprop. That morning in May foretold an era of collaboration between policy makers and the creative community. Fit City 5, a partnership between the local AIA chapter and the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, attracted stakeholders from public health, education, and design as well as other concerned citizens.
Solar is Cost-Competitive with Nuclear: Report
Posted in Movements, Research by Kate Archdeacon on August 24th, 2010
Source: Worldchanging
From “Scaling Up Solar: The Global Implications of a New Study that Says Solar Power Is Cost Competitive with Nuclear Power” by Olivia Boyd:
The sunshine of North Carolina, a state on America’s Atlantic seaboard, has long been a draw for tourists seeking a little southern warmth on the region’s beaches. But holiday companies are not the only ones trumpeting a good local deal. The price of the state’s solar-generated electricity has fallen so far that it is now cheaper than new nuclear power, according to a report published in July by researchers at the state’s Duke University. The authors say their figures indicate a “historic crossover” that significantly strengthens the case for investment in renewable energy – and weakens the arguments for large-scale, international nuclear development.
Solar power is usually branded as a clean but expensive energy source, incapable of competing on economic grounds with more established alternatives, such as nuclear. The outspoken pro-nuclear stance adopted by a raft of iconic environmental figures – James Lovelock, Stewart Brand, Patrick Moore – has helped to instill in policy making circles the sense that this is the only power source that can restructure our energy supply at the pace, scale and price required by the pressures of rapid climate change. This study, which was co-authored by former chair of Duke University’s economics department John Blackburn and commissioned by NC Warn, a clean-energy NGO with a firm anti-nuclear bent, challenges that view. “This report should end the argument for risking billions of public dollars on new nuclear projects,” says Jim Warren, NC Warn director.
Community-Grounded Optimism Live from the Oil Spill
Posted in Movements, Opinion by Kate Archdeacon on August 9th, 2010
Source: Green Cross Australia
Green Cross CEO Mara Bun interviewed Beth Galante, Director of Global Green, to discuss the prospects for a sustainable recovery in America’s climate change impact hot spot – find out more about why community-grounded optimism persists through the nightmare of mega environmental disasters.
MB – How does the oil spill feel on the ground?
It’s been a punch in the gut – earth shattering at the community and personal level. Not a single person was untouched by Katrina. But after a few months, it was clear where the damage was done and people started to move back. Recovery began, first in discrete areas. There has been no shortage of setbacks over the past five years. But the community was truly inspired to put this magical place back together. And it’s come together so much better! With heart, with passion. There is so much to celebrate. But then came the spill.
MB – Let’s get back to the oil spill – but first can you share your reasons for celebrating the recovery?
Sure – some great things come to mind. New Orleans is becoming a model coastal city – resilient, designed to adjust to climate change. The community has embraced sustainability at every level. All levels of government encourage energy efficiency and renewable energy. Awareness about the need to withstand wind and water stresses is massive. We are building to prepare for future hurricanes, so sustainability goes hand in hand with resilience at the neighbourhood and policy level.
The next real accomplishment has been in the public education system. New Orleans had a very poorly performing education system when compared to other parts of the US or other developed nations. Our schools were rock bottom before Katrina. The storm destroyed the school system overnight. The rebirth has been awesome. We now have a decentralized, entrepreneurial school system with all kinds of new models emerging (some private, some traditional public, some supported by Universities). Student test scores have improved every year after Katrina.
Sustainability has been a big factor in this equation. Global Green has led a green school infrastructure project – funded by the Bush Clinton Katrina Fund – that has delivered six new LEED accredited schools [LEED accreditation is similar to Australia's Green Star Ratings]. One of these is Louisiana’s first LEED Gold school. We are really proud of that – and now green schools are embedded in the system. By legislation, all new schools and school renovations in New Orleans must reach at least “LEED Silver” standard. That’s a nation-leading accomplishment. And it’s no surprise that test scores have improved because worldwide studies show that students have better results if they study in places with better light, better air, and lower toxic and other environmental impacts.
The other cause for optimism is governance. Before Katrina, New Orleans and the State as a whole experienced a never-ending stream of corruption enquiries. Our new Mayor has an overwhelming mandate – from black, white, rich and poor residents. We are in a new era of transparent, good local government that has not been seen for generations. Much of this has been citizen-driven. New Orleans has some of the best local community groups in America, and now finally the government is following the community’s lead. For example, a task force including community and local business groups has out forward thirty recommendations for sustainability, and many of these wonderful citizen projects are being supported. But the best cause for optimism – for sure – was when the Saints won the Superbowl!
MB – So bearing all of that good news in mind – lets go back to the oil spill. How is the community responding?
Extending Value: The Life Box
Posted in Models by Kate Archdeacon on July 19th, 2010
Source: Core 77
From “The Life Box: Packaging That Turns Into Trees“:
Now this is some truly brilliant package design: Mycologist Paul Stamets’ Life Box, a simple cardboard box impregnated with a mixture of Department-of-Agriculture-approved seeds.
The Life Box suite of products builds upon the synergy of fungi and plants by infusing spores and seeds together inside of packaging materials that can be planted. The Tree Life Box is made of recycled paper fiber. In this fiber, we have inserted a wide variety of tree seeds, up to a hundred, dusted with mycorrhizal fungal spores. The mycorrhizal fungi protect and nurture the young seedlings. For millions of years, plants and beneficial fungi have joined together in a mutually beneficial symbiotic relationship.
You can get started by simply tearing up the box, planting in soil, and watering.
The fungi “sprout” or germinate to form an attachment with root cells and extend into the soil with a network of fine cobweb of cells called mycelium. The mycelium mothers the seed nursery by providing nutrients and water, thus protecting the growing trees from disease, drought, and famine.
Stamets estimates that 1 tree out of 100 will survive to the 30-year mark, at which point it will have sequestered one ton of carbon. And how’s this for an endorsement: Al Gore is shipping his new book, Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis, in Life Boxes.
Read the full article on Core 77.
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Retro-Fitting Suburbia: TED Talk
Posted in Research by Kate Archdeacon on July 16th, 2010
Source: TED
Images above: Suburban retrofits contribute to sustainability in a variety of ways, most of which are manifest at Belmar in Lakewood, CO. It replaces an auto-dependent, private mall with an urban, walkable, and bus-served mix of uses and public spaces. It provides a range of housing types, diverse architectural styles, and variety of cultural activities, including but not limited to shopping, with the intention that it function as a downtown. It also uses green bonds to finance rooftop photovoltaics and a small wind farm.
Ellen Dunham-Jones fires the starting shot for the next 50 years’ big sustainable design project: Retrofitting Suburbia – dying malls rehabilitated, dead “big box” stores re-inhabited, parking lots transformed into thriving wetlands. Ellen Dunham-Jones teaches architecture at the Georgia Institute of Technology, is an award-winning architect and a board member of the Congress for the New Urbanism. She shows how design of where we live impacts some of the most pressing issues of our times — reducing our ecological footprint and energy consumption while improving our health and communities and providing living options for all ages.
Dunham-Jones is widely recognized as a leader in finding solutions for aging suburbs. She is the co-author of Retrofitting Suburbia: Urban Design Solutions for Redesigning Suburbs. She and co-author June Williamson share more than 50 case studies across North America of “underperforming asphalt properties” that have been redesigned and redeveloped into walkable, sustainable vital centers of community—libraries, city halls, town centers, schools and more.
Watch the TED talk.
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Sustainable South Bronx: Community-Scale Action
Posted in Models by Kate Archdeacon on July 12th, 2010
Sustainable South Bronx (SSBx) is a community organisation dedicated to Environmental Justice solutions through innovative, economically sustainable projects that are informed by community needs. In 2001, SSBx was created to address policy and planning issues like land use, energy, transportation, water, waste, education, and, most recently, design and manufacturing.
The Hunts Point neighbourhood in the South Bronx is one of New York City’s last remaining industrial areas. On the one hand, the neighborhood has numerous assets, including a waterfront location on the Bronx and East Rivers, proximity to Manhattan, the economic engine of the Hunts Point Food Distribution Center (the second largest in the world), new City-led development projects, waterfront parks, and a strong local organisational infrastructure. Simultaneously, it exhibits one of the highest poverty and unemployment levels in the City, with poor community health, noxious uses and commercial traffic, substance abuse, and prostitution issues.
Caught in the middle of these pressures are approximately 11,000 residents who have been neglected, under-served by the neighbourhood local economy. The one-square mile area of Hunts Point is bound by the Bruckner Expressway to the north and west, and the Bronx and East Rivers to the south and east.
Sustainable South Bronx has a diverse range of ongoing projects which deliver multiple benefits. The South Bronx Greenway, for example, will create bike & pedestrian paths to connect key areas, but will also provide spaces for physical recreation, improve local travel options and create more employment, as well as improving air quality and reducing the heat island effect.
Visit their website for a better insight into the range of programs this 9-year old organisation delivers.
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Food Hub: Connecting Regional Producers & Consumers
Posted in Models by Kate Archdeacon on July 9th, 2010
Source: Springwise
From “Site connects producers and buyers of local food“:
The locavore movement may be focusing new interest on locally produced food, but regional farmers, ranchers and fishermen continue to struggle to find a market for their products. That’s as true in the Pacific Northwest as everywhere else, which is why Portland, Ore., nonprofit Ecotrust created FoodHub.
Launched late last year, FoodHub aims to increase food trade in the Pacific Northwest by connecting food buyers of all types and sizes with local farmers, ranchers, fishermen and food manufacturers. For food sellers, FoodHub offers an easy way to let buyers know what products are available and how to make contact to complete a sale. For food buyers—including local restaurants, public schools, grocery stores, caterers, universities and hospitals—FoodHub provides a robust database of food products that are available. Customisable search features allow a buyer to hone in on the exact product specifications they’re seeking — “pallet quantities of Northwest-grown certified organic black eyed peas,” for example. After paying an annual membership fee of USD 100, both buyers and sellers can create detailed online profiles; FoodHub’s message center, meanwhile, streamlines communications.
Deborah Kane, vice president of Ecotrust’s Food & Farms program, explains:“FoodHub is designed to be a one-stop-shop for the chef who needs six dozen artichokes for a menu special, the baker looking for a local source for flour, or the large institutional food buyer whose purchasing power could significantly stabilise a family farm.”
Currently, FoodHub is open to food buyers and sellers of all types in Alaska, California, Idaho, Montana, Oregon and Washington. However, Ecotrust intends to make the FoodHub platform available to qualified partners in other parts of the country as well.
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Urban Manufacturing: Small, Sustainable Business
Posted in Models by Kate Archdeacon on June 30th, 2010
Source: MetropolisMag
From “Made in Brooklyn” by Karrie Jacobs:
The United States has lost over 42,000 factories since 2001, and some 5.5 million manufacturing jobs since the turn of the millennium. Officially, this is a death spiral. At the same time, a powerful desire to make things—tangible things, products even—has sprung to life in the border zones where high tech meets the green movement. And Brooklyn now sits squarely in this fertile territory. The borough is home to the wildly successful Web site Etsy, a marketplace of handiwork, which can be read as a Web 2.0 rebuke to the clean-out-your-storage-locker ethos of creaky old eBay. Local food production is booming; it seems as if every 28-year-old guy in the borough has a line of artisanal pickles.
And then there’s the Brooklyn Navy Yard, a 300-acre site on the East River, established by the U.S. Navy in 1801. Since 1966, when the Navy pulled out, it’s been a city-owned industrial zone. Sitting on what is now prime real estate, just across the river from Manhattan, the Navy Yard contains a fascinating mix of about 240 businesses, only a couple of which have anything to do with ships. There’s Crye American, a young company that managed to snag a defense contract to make Kevlar body armor; Steiner Studios, the largest soundstage on the East Coast; and Cumberland Packing, the company that invented Sweet & Low. There are also artisans—metal- and woodworkers, set builders, display makers—who straddle the boundary between art and industry. The Navy Yard, according to Andrew Kimball, its president, is energetically rebranding itself as a “sustainable industrial park,” home to America’s first “multistory, green industrial facility,” the newly completed, 89,000-square-foot, LEED-certified Perry Building.
Down in Building 275, one of the ramshackle old warehouses typical of the Navy Yard, I run into Jeff Kahn, a partner at Ferra Designs, a 10,000-square-foot metal shop specializing in architectural fabrication and miscellaneous small, intricate metal objects. Many of his 15 employees studied industrial design at nearby Pratt Institute. “This is a Pratt shop,” Kahn boasts, explaining that graduates are drawn to Ferra and other Navy Yard companies because they’re no longer content to just design things. “Most of them are under thirty,” he says. “They’re into craftsmanship; they want to know how to build things. It’s a renaissance.” The 40-year-old Kahn, who originally planned to be an artist and never made it to college, is the face of New York City’s industrial revival, representing an approach that is pre–industrial revolution in scale and post-industrial in strategy.
Read the rest of this entry »
Compost Cab: Food Scraps Pick-Up Service
Posted in Models by Kate Archdeacon on May 28th, 2010
Source: Springwise
…For every 50 pounds of organics the company collects, customers can receive five pounds of fresh compost and one pound of worm castings in exchange.
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Read it on Springwise:
The average American family produces more than 500 pounds of leftover organic material every year; composting not only keeps that waste out of methane-generating landfills, it also produces nutrient-rich, fertile, natural soil. Composting may be the right thing to do for the environment, but it can be hard to get around the smell and the mess—particularly for urbanites without expansive yards. Compost Cab is a new service about to launch in Washington, DC, that can be called upon to handle all the dirty details.
DC-area consumers begin by signing up online. Once it launches, Compost Cab will then provide them with a standardized bin equipped with a sturdy, compostable bag liner. Each day clients will fill the bin with their organic material, and once a week—on a reliable, fuel-efficient schedule—Compost Cab will pick up the bag, leaving behind only a clean bin with a new liner. The cost is simply USD 8 per week per bin; no long-term commitments are required. Compost Cab’s primary composting partner is Engaged Community Offshoots (ECO), a seed-stage urban farm in College Park, Md., that uses finished compost to grow natural, nutritious food for local kids.
At least as interesting is that clients who have been with Compost Cab for nine months or longer can claim some finished soil in return. Specifically, for every 50 pounds of organics the company collects from them, they can receive five pounds of fresh compost and one pound of worm castings in exchange. Those who choose not to claim their share, meanwhile, can ask Compost Cab to donate it on their behalf to ECO. Compost Cab is a production of Agricity LLC, a Washington, DC-based company focused on sustainability.
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SoupCycle & Community Supported Agriculture
Posted in Models by Kate Archdeacon on April 22nd, 2010
Source: Springwise
SoupCycle is a bicycle-based delivery service for organic soup, made from locally grown produce and delivered each week to subscribers.
Three soups are typically on the menu in any given week at SoupCycle. Consumers who live or work in the Portland, Oregon, company’s delivery area begin by checking out the selections for the following week and placing their order by midnight on Friday; rustic bread, salad and dressing are also available. With a list of subscribers in hand, SoupCycle then buys the necessary produce from local farmers. On Monday it cooks up those ingredients into delectable soup, and then on Tuesdays it begins its weekly deliveries, with a different delivery day for each area. Each of SoupCycle’s trailers can carry some 40 soup containers, 40 bread loaves and 20 salads at once.
Since SoupCycle first launched about a year and a half ago, it has delivered more than 10,000 orders of soup, spent USD 33,000 with local farmers and saved 3,000 gas-powered miles by using bicycles instead. Some 300 subscribers now enjoy its weekly deliveries.
See the original post on Springwise.
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