Archive for the "Green Living" Category
Choose the Best Countertop Material for Your Home and the Environment
July 29th, 2010
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Key Considerations
Because of the beating countertops take over their lifetime, durability and stain resistance are key considerations.“The truth is that there is no such thing as a burn-proof, scratch-proof, stain-proof countertop material—green or conventional—no matter what some manufacturers will claim,” says designer Lydia Corser of Eco Interiors in Santa Cruz, CA. “The most important thing to realize is that nothing is foolproof.”
Lifecycle Thinking
When weighing the pros and cons of different countertop materials, remember that your countertop’s environmental impact begins long before it is installed in your kitchen or bathroom and will continue after you dispose of it. Here is a basic rundown of key considerations:
- Raw materials: Are the materials used to create the countertop renewable or finite, and can they come from recycled products? Are they mined or harvested, and if so, how well managed are these processes? For example, mining the metals to produce stainless steel is very energy intensive and in some cases highly polluting, but stainless can be easily recycled. To go a step further, using salvaged material is often best for the environment since it avoids even the energy necessary to recycle.
- Manufacture: Materials that require less processing use less energy, and so have less impact. Ceramic tiles must be fired twice, consuming great amounts of energy, while untreated wood only has to be sawed and planed, using far less.
- Transport: The distance a material travels translates directly into air pollution from vehicle fuel combustion, which is responsible for emissions of sulfur and nitrous oxides, particulate matter, and carbon monoxide. Local materials from within a 500-mile radius are always preferable to reduce air pollution, since emissions can lead to acid rain, ground-level ozone formation, increased asthma rates, and breathing difficulty, according to the U.S. EPA.
- Installation: Dust from sawing and grinding as well as VOCs and other chemicals from adhesives can make your home inhospitable during and after installation. Check with your installer to minimize these impacts.
- Use and maintenance: In place, materials may offgas formaldehyde, VOCs, or other chemicals, but selecting specific materials with low impacts on air quality will cut emissions. For example, look for laminates without formaldehyde in their particleboard backing. Durability is also a major factor, directly linked to a material’s lifespan and how often it must be replaced. Laminates are not very durable, but can last 20 years with conscientious care. Using low-impact cleaning materials will ensure that this care is not at the expense of your indoor air quality.
- End of life: Where will your countertop end up when its life is over? Can it be recycled, reconditioned and reused, downcycled into other products, or will it simply be sent to a landfill? Making your unwanted materials available for other uses helps avoid the extraction impacts of mining and keeps harmful chemicals out of the environment. For example, crushing concrete for use as aggregate in new concrete avoids mining of more aggregate.
When choosing a countertop material, keep in mind that “being green is not a black-and-white issue. All products have some green and some not-so-green characteristics. There is no material with zero impact on our planet,” says architect Eric Corey Freed.
CONTINUED ON GREEN HOME GUIDE…CLICK HERE
September 3, 2009 By Green Home Guide Staff
Amazing Homes and Offices Built from Shipping Containers
June 4th, 2010
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Not just for resourceful squatters, container architecture is taking the world by storm. Recycled freight containers bring efficiency, flexibility and affordability to innovative green buildings, from small vacation cabins to movable cafes, schools and skyscrapers.
By Olivia Zaleski for thedailygreen.com
These are so cool. Check out the slide show here. There are so many more already in use than I realized!
Jay’s Green Garage
May 14th, 2010
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Jay Leno and his solar panels bask in the sun on the roof of the Big Dog Garage.
Everybody knows Jay Leno loves cars. He loves working on them, looking at them and, most of all, driving them. But these days, more than 300 cars and motorcycles in a cluster of four adjoining garages totaling more than 25,000 square feet mean he has a whole lot of CO2 to answer for.
Or so you’d think. When Leno took the initiative to green his Big Dog Garage in 2006, it wasn’t because he’s a hippie tree lover who thinks the glaciers are melting but because he wanted to be self-sustaining. “To me, it’s a matter of living your life more efficiently,” he said, “and if you want to sustain this hobby, you’ve got to come up with more efficient ways to do it.”
Leno said that when he was a kid, he was told that “if you take the oil and you dig a hole and pour it into the ground, it goes back into the earth where it came from.”
Times have changed, and Leno has changed with them, embarking on a significant ongoing effort to green the space where he stores, maintains and renovates his collection.
“The first really big change was about three or four years ago with the solar panels,” he said. “And then we added the wind turbine.” Between the Southern California sunshine and the breezy evenings, the turbine and 270 roof-mounted panels cover almost all of the facility’s power needs, even feeding power back into the grid during hot fall days when the Santa Ana winds pick up. “My electric bills have dropped by three-quarters,” he said.
But it’s not the financial rewards that motivate this car enthusiast, it’s the thrill. “We just started to get into it. It’s like anything else; you become competitive and try to figure out ways to become more and more efficient.” The same gearhead instinct that drives Leno’s car obsession expanded to making his garage more environmentally sound.
For example, alongside early cars such as a 1906 Stanley Steamer and a Baker electric car, Leno is renovating a circa-1900 natural-gas-engine generator that was used to make power in Malta a century ago.
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The green technology in Jay Leno’s garage includes a water-jet cutter.
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At the other end of the spectrum, Leno invested in the latest environment-friendly technologies for running his shop. For instance, aerosol cans are out. In their place is an air-powered device called the MX Factor. “Basically,” Leno said, “you fill it with compressed air and put your cleaners in it and use the same one over and over again, so you’re not throwing away 15 or 20 cans that have propellant in them.”
No more dumping the oil back into the ground for Leno, either. A BioCircle cleaner uses bacteria that literally eats the oil, grease and other hydrocarbons off of dirty engine parts, converting them to water and carbon dioxide. Other cleaning tasks are handled with an ultrasonic cleaner, which uses high-frequency waves to scour the dirt from filthy engine parts.
Even hand washing is done in an environmentally conscious way, using waterless cleaners that don’t wash toxic oils, solvents and other workshop chemicals down the drain and into the water system.
“I think it’s a fascinating time to live,” Leno mused. “The technology is limitless. I remember one of the first fuel-cell vehicles I ever saw. It was a Mercedes SUV-type vehicle towing a huge trailer–that was the fuel cell! And now they’ve managed to put that under the hood of a car.”
Where some see stricter environmental regulations and rising fuel prices as the end of enthusiasts’ love affair with performance cars, Leno is optimistic. “It’s a good time to be a car enthusiast, not a bad time. We’re seeing these incredible breakthroughs in technology. I mean, I have a Corvette that has 505 hp and gets almost 30 mpg on the highway. That was unheard of when I was a kid! When I was a kid, a car with 500 hp got 6 mpg. Maybe.”
Is the man whose friends include prominent politicians across the spectrum concerned about taking a stand on an issue as controversial as global warming? Not at all.
“It’s not a matter of global warming for me; it’s a matter of living your life more efficiently. It doesn’t really matter why. Whatever the reason, the final end product is good. I tell people, “Whether you believe in global warming or don’t believe in global warming, do it to be self-sufficient.’ “
And Leno has one more argument up his sleeve: “If you don’t believe in global warming, do it to screw the oil companies.”
Contributed by: Logan Kugler for AutoWeek.com
Biosphere 2′s Second Life as Environmental Research Outpost
February 6th, 2010
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If they ever make a movie, it should be titled: “Biosphere 2: Atmospheric Boogaloo.” The once loudly and widely mocked failed self-contained experiment has quietly gone from laughingstock to touchstone of important environmental research into the effects of climate change.
| We’re reminded, thanks to a news item by David Knowles at AOL.com’s Sphere News, of how valuable it can be to fail, even on a grand scale (and perhaps especially so).
Not only is there the learning experience and the character-building and all, but there’s always the chance that the failure itself may plant the seed for subsequent and unanticipated success and insight. Just as with the building materials used with the construction of the proverbial Hades Expressway, Biosphere 2 was cobbled together with good intentions. |
The 3-acre site north of Tucson, Ariz., was intended to function as a self-contained network of engineered biomes including forest, ocean and coral reef, savanna, and wetlands. The web of systems were hoped adequate to provide food, water and oxygen to sustain the human crew, livestock and agricultural crops.
But the science did not pan out; oxygen levels dropped and carbon dioxide levels increased, plants and livestock died. And the social psychology of the project was perhaps even worse: factions developed within the group, old friends became enemies and the interpersonal denouement served to inspire the Dutch television creatives to pitch what we now know as the Big Brother reality TV show. Biosphere 2 quickly became fodder for late-night comedians and anti-environmentalists alike.
But after the jokes died down, something funny happened. After the facility enshrouded in ignobility closed in the mid 1990s, its management was ceded over to the University of Arizona and Columbia University, where scientists quietly went about the business of conducting research.
And as Knowles spells out in the article at Sphere, the very scale of the project combined with the way in which it failed has been serving environmental science research projects like a champion. Because of Biosphere 2′s underperforming atmospheric and hydrologic systems, it has become invaluable in modeling and studying the effects of climatic disruption and change. Insight into how plants respond to increased carbon dioxide levels or to drought are being achieved through work conducted at Biosphere 2 today.
The Biosphere 2 facility is open to the public, and invites all comers to have a look: rubber-necking fans of social train wrecks and committed environmentalists alike can make the trek and learn more not only about what failed, but of what victories are now being snatched from those jaws of defeat.
By David Bois
Tonic, the “good news” site
Wednesday, January 13, 2010 4:16 PM ET
Wednesday, January 13, 2010 4:16 PM ET
Photo courtesy of DrStarbuck, via Wikimedia Commons
10 Do’s and 10 Don’ts of Green Shopping Choices
October 17th, 2009
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10 Fair Trade Products to Look For
- Tea
- Chocolate
- Bananas
- Sugar
- Rice
- Vanilla
- Apparel
- Wine
- Olive oil
- Coffee
10 Things You Should Never Buy Again:
- Styrofoam cups
- Paper towels
- Bleached coffee filters
- Teak and mahogany
- Chemical pesticides and herbicides
- Conventional household cleaners
- Toys made with PVC plastic
- Plastic forks and spoons (this one drives me personally crazy!)
- Farm raised salmon
- Rayon
Lists compliments of Green America – www.GreenAmericaToday.org
Trees in Trust – Great Gift Idea
September 15th, 2009
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Trees In Trust enables you to quickly and easily dedicate a piece of forest to give as a gift, as a memorial or to reduce your carbon footprint. You don’t own the trees, but they are held in your name forever by a not-for-profit charitable land trust which protects the woodland in perpetuity.
The 2005 Canadian government information on Climate Change estimates that you produce 3 tonnes of CO2 if you drive a mid-sized car 15,000 km a year and another 4 tonnes to cover heating, lighting and other appliances, totaling 7 tonnes of CO2 per year.
An acre of mature trees can capture 2.6 tonnes of CO2 per year.
The Kyoto target for Canada is to reduce our CO2 output by 6% of 1990 levels by 2012.
A sixth of an acre of trees can capture 430Kg of CO2 per year, which is 6% of your annual CO2 production.
So one way to meet your personal Kyoto target of a 6% reduction of CO2 is to secure a sixth of an acre of trees. To absorb your entire personal CO2 production requires almost 3 acres of trees.
Many dismiss the Kyoto target as impractical, impossible, ineffective – but if we do nothing then we are headed for disaster. Only by many of us acting individually can we make a real difference.