sustainable living
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No traffic lights. No traffic signs. No painted lines in the roadway. No curbs. And 26,000 vehicles passing every day through a traditional village center with busy pedestrian traffic.
Lots of Cars and Trucks, No Traffic Signs or Lights: Chaos or Calm? - Sarah Goodyear
Albert, Righter & Tittmann: Sustainable Design
We have a long history of building durable, efficient, and well-loved buildings. Now we can design buildings that use dramatically less energy than standard. Our Habitat Passive House has a documented 90% reduction in heating costs as compared to similar houses built to code. Sustainable and green architecture is an extension of building well. We believe that building green is the result of a complete and comprehensive approach based on the following considerations. The following principles guide our thinking:Green building websites can be confusing. One site might tell you that a green home should include spray foam insulation, a tankless water heater, and a geothermal heating system. After you’ve absorbed this advice, you visit another website, where you learn that spray foam is a dangerous petrochemical, tankless water heaters are overpriced gadgets, and “geothermal” systems aren’t really geothermal. Eventually someone tells you that you can usually trust advice from Green Building Advisor. After reading a few GBA articles, you start to feel more comfortable.
Green Building for Beginners
In 2005 I visited the Cottage Life Show in Toronto and wrote The Hot Poop on Alternative Toilets , looking the various toilets on the market. Since then I have become convinced that these toilets have a much bigger future. We can't continue using drinking water to flush away our waste, and we can't afford to keep wasting our waste; at some point soon these are going to be coming into our homes and offices. Don't laugh; already, if you want to build to the Living Building Challenge standard, they are pretty much the only way to go.
More hot poop on composting toilets
Cheaper LED Bulbs Make It Easier to Switch Lights
By David Pogue 60 Seconds With Pogue: LED Light Bulbs: LED bulbs are a gigantic improvement over incandescent bulbs and compact fluorescents. David Pogue tries out LED bulbs and kits from six manufacturers. You don’t have to be one of those self-defeating rubes.
© Neo-farms Growers in colder climates often utilize various approaches to extend the growing season or to give their crops a boost, whether it's coldframes , hoop houses or greenhouses. Greenhouses are usually glazed structures, but are typically expensive to construct and heat throughout the winter. A much more affordable and effective alternative to glass greenhouses is the walipini (an Aymara Indian word for a "place of warmth"), also known as an underground or pit greenhouse. First developed over 20 years ago for the cold mountainous regions of South America, this method allows growers to maintain a productive garden year-round, even in the coldest of climates. Here's a video tour of a walipini that even incorporates a bit of interior space for goats:
Build a $300 underground greenhouse for year-round gardening (Video)
© Kristoffer Tejlgaard & Benny Jepsen We're used to seeing the geodesic dome as a full-formed structure. But for this year's "People's Meeting" on the future of housing, held in Bornholm, Denmark, Danish architects Kristoffer Tejlgaard and Benny Jepsen decided to create an unusual-looking venue for the event -- a deconstructed, geodesic dome using locally-sourced and recycled wood. Similar to more conventional-looking domes, this dome's supportive " frequency four " frame consists of triangles, but still behaves the same structurally, allowing the architects to play with the form, creating niches for different uses like kitchen, bar, dining area and stage, while being punctuated overall with contrasting areas of clear glazing with wooden cladding. Instead of a generic dome, this deconstructing of the dome's form is done in response to the program, the site and to daylighting.
Fantastic Deconstructed Geodesic Dome Is Built With Local and Recycled Wood
ELIOOO. Grow Your Food | Indiegogo
VISION: The ultimate object of design is information. As a designer I display quantities and dimensions; I organize briefs, I explain procedures. Sometimes this has more to do with storytelling than with technical drawings. These stories and their illustrations are traditionally given to artisans who, in their workshops, mills, or labs, actually turn them into concrete things: objects. But as a designer, I like to design things that anyone can make.Growing food in tyres: a bad idea?
by Mischa Hewitt "I've never met a potato I didn't like." - Irish traditional saying Permaculture is about closing loops, removing waste from profligate systems and finding innovative ways to reuse things. We throw away lots of car tyres every year, so finding things to do with them must be good. One food-growing technique that seems to embody this principle of reusing waste is using old tyres as a container to grow potatoes and other vegetables in, but is it a good idea? Academic research into shredded tyres suggests that there maybe a problem.
32 Innovations That Will Change Your Tomorrow - Interactive Feature
Electric Clothes Physicists at Wake Forest University have developed a fabric that doubles as a spare outlet.Earth Air Tunnels
Earth Air TunnelsSolarFlyer2_for_pr PRLog (Press Release) - Jan. 9, 2012 - Green Roof Technology today announced the ‘Sun-Root’ solar-living roof system, the first fully integrated, non-penetrative solar and extensive green roof system in North America.
'Sun-Root' Solar Living Roof System Unveiled
Building the Green Modern Home: Looking at Windows /via Green living has often been about technology; about smart grids and hybrid cars and solar panels.
Building Green Is No Longer Enough, It is Time To Build Resilient
A Quick Guide to Starting a Beehive
© Jaymi Heimbuch via Flickr With Colony Collapse Disorder consistently chipping away at our global honeybee population, the art of beekeeping has become more important than ever. So when I found out my local newspaper--the San Francisco Chronicle --had a rooftop beehive, I just had to see it for myself as I've been curious about starting my own hive for a few years now.energy monitoring
permaculture