Archive for the 'Environment' Category

With an almost unlimited number of applications, bamboo can do practically everything from spicing up your lunch to building your tropical tree house to feeding your pet panda. And now, thanks to the good folks at CalfeeDesign, you can use the fast-growing grass to get around town on your stylish new bamboo racing bike.

Instead of using fresh bamboo – which would crack and split – CalfeeDesign builds its bikes out of special heat-treated wood, a process that gives the frame rigidity and helps to dampen vibration. The finished product, though just as expensive as other high-end racing bicycles, has a significantly smaller carbon footprint and works just as well.

Maybe I should just mortgage the tree house and buy one.

Link to CalfeeDesign

Popularity: 7% [?]

Allan Chochinov has a good habit of writing his thoughts down in 1000-word chunks:

And given the propensity for teachers to go on and on, keeping that number to 1000 words—whatever else you may think of them—might earn me a couple minutes of your time reading them.

His 1000-word Manifesto for Sustainability in Design has been getting some buzz recently, but I’m a big fan of his 1000 words for design students and later 1000 Words of Advice for Design Teachers.

Favorites?

Place insane demands. Then double them.

If you ask students for 2 models, they’ll bring in 2 models. If you ask for 6 models, you’ll get 6 models. The more work that comes in, the higher the chances that some it will be good, and that a tiny bit of it will be great. So ask for 12 models.

My favorite exercise from an architecture professor? “Make 200 drawings. You have 1 hour. Go.” (Vince Mulcahy and Henry Richardson at Cornell)

Popularity: 3% [?]

Our office here in Peru tried composting for several months, dutifully giving a large red bin table scraps and sawdust and the occasional stir. Though we had such hope in those days, our compost would not cooperate. Something in the humid salty smoggy air of Lima led the bin down a terrible, unspeakable path that is – without question – definitely not towards compost. In fact, I once saw a green tendril reach out of the bin and grab an unsuspecting pigeon. True story.

So I feel a bit better knowing that even well-meaning professionals are having a hard time with composting. Mariposa, California, a popular stop on the way to Yosemite, can’t seem to get its massive compost pile under control, leading to dozens of complaints from nauseous neighbors. The $8 million project hoped to turn the stream of waste left by Yosemite’s millions of visitors into something useful – instead, for the time being, it’s a giant smelly white elephant.

Back here in Lima, we’re all too afraid of what waits for us in the red bin to deal with the problem. See no evil…

Link via LA Times

Popularity: 4% [?]

As Beijing readies itself for the 2008 Summer Olympics, Li Enhui thinks he has the solution to the brutal sandstorms that whip across the city each spring: specially designed water bags that allow trees to take root in the desert. It sounds like a great idea, one worth investing in, but Li – like thousands of other entrepreneurs in China – cannot penetrate the arcane and frustrating world of Chinese investment.

Despite a rampaging economy, debt-laden banks prefer to take advantage of recent Communist deregulation of real estate, seeing no value in technology or start-ups. Combined with China’s loose intellectual property laws and massive bureaucracy, China’s small green companies struggle to survive.

In Mr. Li’s case, he’s getting help from the DC-based World Resources Institute, a green think tank [Green tanks usually mean algae. Try cleaning more often. – ed.] that has raised more than $19 million for environmental start-ups around the world. Even that amount of money is a drop in the bucket, but at least it’s a start.

Link to LA Times
Link to World Resources Institute

Popularity: 4% [?]

Once Gavin Newsom gives his signature to a new law on his desk, San Francisco will become the first major city in America to ban plastic bags in large markets and drug stores. Beginning a year from now, merchants will be only able to offer paper, biodegradable plastic, or cloth in their stores.

The replacement for plastic is a similar material made from corn byproducts, thus making them largely biodegradable, certainly much more than their plastic cousins.

A group representing the fifty grocery stores most affected claim the the corn bags are “new, expensive and untested product.” Still, San Francisco is taken a bold step towards regulating its local environment as best as it can, even if consumers will bear the price difference in the short term.

Link via Yahoo News

Popularity: 3% [?]

This from some months ago – Flax and hemp fiber has proven to be a viable alternative to fiberglass in the manufacture of composites. To me this sounds like the higher-tech we get these days, the closer we’re getting to mud-and-straw bricks. Traveling in mountainous Huaraz, Peru this past weekend, we saw lots of adobe bricks – made from straw and mud right on the spot, they’re a great building material from a sustainability perspective. Could we eventually make consumer products out of some kind of organic resin on an organic substrate?

Link

Related Posts: Bioplastic and Kenaf Fiber, Bamboo Fiber Shirts

Popularity: 7% [?]

People are often startled to see an excellent book on my shelf labeled How to Build a Nuclear Bomb by Frank Barnaby.

For those of you that want detailed schematics, look elsewhere- this book is a down-to-earth, intelligent view of the WMD world. Far from being sensionalist war-mongering, Barnaby cooly discusses what it would really take to build a nuclear bomb, cultivate anthrax, or mix sarin gas.

However, Barnaby’s conclusions won’t leave you feeling safe in bed at night. What really made this book stand out to me was how it highlighted what we should really be worrying about. Nuclear bombs, dirty bombs? Forget those! All one needs is a small airplane, or explosives-laden bus, and an open-air storage facility for spent uranium rods from a nuclear power plant. Putting those things together could easily result in radioactive fallout worse than Chernobyl.

Or maybe this book will make you sleep better. After reading it, you realize that there are so many so-called “soft” targets we are ignoring that one can only conclude, if someone wanted to do something horrible, it would have already happened.

Sweet Dreams!

Popularity: 5% [?]

If the intricacies of Wall St. are difficult enough for investors driven only by profit, then for the environmentally-inclined investor, they are nearly inscrutable. Large funds may hide dozens of companies that do great damage to the Earth’s resources, while no one has the time to investigate individual firms for their corporate responsibility. Luckily, Business Week reviews the five largest ‘green’ funds from an angle we rarely hear, that of the stockholder looking for the next big market movement.

Environmental stocks are fraught with trade-offs and contradictions; even the Sierra Club invested in two large casino companies, businesses that rely on millions of travelers flying into the neon-lit desert. At least one of the funds held a block of ExxonMobil stock, an oil company trying to be greener but certainly known for its soiled reputation.

Still, the future has great promise: eco-friendly investing is slowly becoming part of people’s overall stock strategy, just as a ‘green’ lifestyle is slowly gaining followers around the world. Environmentalists need to understand that the free market is not something to be feared, or even reviled, but is just another tool, a necessary tool, to achieving any sort of global change.

Link to Business Week – Five for the Money

Popularity: 2% [?]

Japan has found a way to make square watermelons. Unlike other food “enhancements”, such as the creation of seedless watermelon (which requires colchine) or genetically modified homogeneous crops (which makes them more vulnerable to disease), this fad requires only a box and your patience. Due to its shape, the melons are actually easier to stack, store, and ship meaning it can be more efficient to deliver and use less fossil fuels. Now if it were only more affordable: it currently sells for about $82 and only in Japan.

News Article

Make Your Own!

See Also: Pyramidal Watermelons

Popularity: 15% [?]

Vestal Design teamed up with Josh To and James Buyayo from Brute Labs for a pro bono project to produce decals that highlight Stanford’s use of biodiesel in its campus shuttle buses, the Marguerite.

The concept behind the bus decal is to use graphic design to build public awareness for biodiesel and to generate momentum for a more aggressive switch to renewable fuels. Stanford currently uses B5 biodiesel, a blend of conventional petroleum diesel with 5% vegetable derived diesel fuel. While this isn’t much, it’s certainly a start. In anticipation for a continually improving program that transitions to higher blends of biodiesel (eg. B10 >> B20 >> B100), we wanted to design a decal that can adapt and improve alongside with the program.

So, instead of a designing a static graphic or creating a decal that needs to be scrapped with the adoption of each new biodiesel blend, we came up with an dynamic graphic that can grow with the addition of yellow die cut decals to illustrate the steps taken to get closer to the use of 100% renewable fuel. If you happen to be in the Bay Area, keep an eye out for the Marguerite and look to see if the little oil drop is turning a little more yellow!

Link

Popularity: 5% [?]