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Archives for category: Green Living
San Francisco, California achieved a remarkable diversion rate of 80% which is higher than any other U.S. city and they plan to be a zero-waste city by 2020! Talk about an extreme amount of planning, consideration and most importantly a great shift in habits.
Since 2009 the city’s municipal ordinance requires city-wide source separation of all organic materials, that means that urban food waste and composting measures were put into effect. There are also three bins for composting, recycling and lastly their (sometimes smaller) trash cart! Besides requiring San Franciscans to contribute food waste to compost, and the three bins which encourage recycling, the third effective phenomenon that has been seen in San Francisco is a reduction in the amount of convenience items such as plastic bags that shoppers use.
Now, the city has 20% more waste diversion to go to reach their goal of zero waste and our source has a good point that this last bit might be the most challenging. Although San Francisco has the right incentives, technology, habits and laws, there are still more convenience items in their waste steam that will be key in achieving zero waste.
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Our recent blog posts about San Francisco working towards zero waste:
Mirror, Mirror on the Wall–Who’s the Greenest of Them All?
San Francisco Bans Bottled Water on City Property
Cultivate Festival
Sources: http://bit.ly/UO3Zkg
and
The UpTown Green Park is located at 18th St and Madison Ave., Toledo, Ohio. There are a number of green features such as a grey water system that will be used in the park rain garden. There are also native plants in the park and most of exciting of all, after 3 years of planning and development it’s expected to open in the coming days!
Also much anticipated, is the fate of a near-by and vacant building. Planning for it’s future and creating a budget for it’s goals are already underway. The source writes about the potential for it to become a mixed use, residential and commercial building among other things.
Source: http://www.toledoblade.com/Real-Estate/2014/07/14/Construction-of-UpTown-Green-nears-completion.html
Another great Green article from Green Halo
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Thepowerofbrain.com produces awesome videos that cover an array of categories such as biology, engineering, construction, technologies, entertainment and more in a captivating presentation.
“The coolest Nature Video Ever [Edited By Roen Horn] is a spectacular slow-motion film about the origin of life among focused shots. In addition to nature shots, their website shows a “Point of View Surgery Shown with Google Glass”, “Holographic Imaging Via Your Smartphone’s Screen”, “The World’s first “Invisible” Tower [South Korea], “Lamborghini Aventador Process Production HD”, and so many more videos that combine education with entertainment.
For your viewing pleasure please see:
Source: https://wastetracking.wordpress.com/
Another great Green article from Green Halo
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Great news for those in favor of the USA increasing the amount of renewable energy production and for those who want to see solar panels succeed! Business Insider posted early this week Politifact’s findings that 142,698 employees in November of 2013 spend “at least 50% of their time supporting solar-related activities”. At the end of 2013 the same group also discovered that there were 123,227 coal mining jobs in the USA.
Source: http://cleantechnica.com/2014/07/22/u-s-solar-workers-coal-miners/
Another great Green article from Green Halo
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Did you know that 99% of the molecules inside of your body are water? Drinking water is huge! That’s why when we read about contaminates that are in water nowadays that can’t be removed with current water processing plant technologies it felt devastating. Across some regions such as India it’s essential that everyone purify their own water and for this reason, bottles of purified water are often toted around town wherever people go.
It seems like this article focuses on U.S. water treatment, and it pointed out that common medication such as anti-depressants, birth control and antibiotics do not get filtered out of our tap water! This leaves the responsibility up to the consumer if they don’t want to drink water filled with chemicals. In addition to medication pollution in tap water, other contaminates in municipal water and well-water may include pesticides, herbicides, and volatile organic chemicals.
Our source also has a list of good filters to buy that can get rid of these chemicals. The best water filtration system is a carbon block filter because it will “remove all the bad stuff” and reverse osmosis filtration systems are another option. The main difference between these two filters is mainly that the reverse osmosis filtration system will remove trace minerals from what which over time can be problematic.
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Bloomberg showed glimpses inside the tiny houses that are becoming big with U.S. owners. In this article: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-07-09/tiny-houses-big-with-u-s-owners-seeking-economic-freedom.html Nina Glinski wrote about how good owners of tiny houses in the U.S. feel about making the decision to downsize their homes in favor of achieving economic freedom.
The article starts with Doug Immel who recently completed his custom-built dream home that has just 164 square feet of living space and saves him a lot of money which he invests for his retirement.
Aldo Lavaggi, a New York folk musician who lives in Hudson Valley built a 105 square foot home on a friend’s farmland in the Berkshires. His humble abode runs on energy from two solar panels and a car battery. Lavaggi “has money to splurge on artisanal break and gourmet cheeses from the local market” and pointed out that “there’s a fallacy of limited options” where people feel that they must have a full-time job, stellar credit or a lot of money to own a house.
This article looks at a lot of different angles regarding owning a house like the “biggest barrier”, zoning restrictions, and the freedom explained above. We hope that you enjoy, and please tell us what you think on Twitter @GreenHaloUSA or in the comments here!
Another great Green article from Green Halo
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This video shows astronauts playing soccer from the International Space Station (ISS) and astronauts answering fan submitted questions.
You can watch the whole video downlink by clicking this image:
Watch TIME.com Chat With the Crew of the International Space Station
( Source: http://time.com/2970293/time-space-station-video/ )
Another great Green article from Green Halo
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This is the outside of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s new FLEXLAB
FLEXLAB is the world’s first energy use lab that will help builders and manufactures test entire building systems down to the component level on a significant scale.
This lab offers solutions for people who bring products to test out and want to use all of the lab’s equipment to do so, to people who want to bring their product to test out with their own machinery and equipment.
Current projects involve measuring energy usage for the Genentech building, PG&E and more!
The lab has 4 stations (shown in the video above) to accommodate a variety of testing scenarios including:
1. “Test-drive technologies”
2. “Individual circuits and meters”
3. “Lighting and plug-load elements”
4. “On-site training”
5. “Compression testing”
and more.
According to the FLEXLAB, there is a problem that buildings are designed to be energy efficient, but once they are being used they end up using a lot more energy than was planned. A new study even pointed out that energy efficient buildings sometimes use more than twice the energy than was expected based on their design.
Here’s an except from the lab’s website about what they offer:
FLEXLAB is the first test bed in the world that can evaluate the energy efficiency of major building systems, as an integrated system, under real-world conditions. Stakeholders can evaluate energy-efficient building technologies individually or as integrated systems in advance of building projects or retrofits, in order to:
- Optimize integrated systems to maximize energy savings
- Ensure occupant comfort and user-friendliness
- Verify cost-benefit numbers
- Train building operators
- Build confidence in new technologies
( Source: http://flexlab.lbl.gov/ )
Another great Green article from Green Halo
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The Portland-Montreal Pipe Line (PMPL) carries crude oil between South Portland, Maine and Montreal, Quebec. The PMPL was built in the beginning of World War II to transport the oil shipments to Canada to central Canada. The Portland-Montreal Pipe Line was originally finished in 1941 which could transport oil to Montreal from The USA. Today the Port of Portland is the largest volume oil port on the Eastern Seaboards because of the PMPL.
At the beginning of 2008 the PMPL parties looked into expanding and/or reversing the flow of the PMPL since crude oil reserves are increasing in western Canada. The Athabasca oil sands in Alberta, Canada for one have also been in the news a lot recently because they have bitumen or heavy crude oil. Since the modern method of oil production from heavy crude oil causes devastation to the natural environment and human health, the South Portland, Maine area recently made the decision to keep tar sands out of its port.
The PMPL Corp. says that “the ban won’t hold up in court”.
More from:
http://www.npr.org/sections/environment/
and http://updates.mainetoday.com/updates/021895.html
Another great Green article from Green Halo
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