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Some great trends/ technologies listed here:
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...how can cities—old or new—take green to a new level? Here's a look at some of the ways
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- District Heating
- Micro Wind Turbines
-Pumped Hydro Storage/ Micro Power
- Walking and Biking
- Personal Rapid Transit
- Pneumatic Garbage Collection
- Waste to Resource
- Green Roofs
Could this move solar panel use into the mainstream? I hope so:
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The film is 3M's answer to demand by solar-panel makers--particularly manufacturers of certain thin-film solar cells--for an alternative to glass. Glass has been the armor of choice because it's cheap, weather-resistant, and durable enough to last decades. The vast majority of the solar panels made today rely on glass as the top cover. But glass also adds weight and bulk to solar panels, and it must be packaged carefully to keep it from breaking, adding to shipping costs. By replacing glass, the new film can do away with the need for supporting racks, which is particularly useful on roofs that can't bear a lot of weight. Blending solar panels into roofs also can overcome aesthetic objections by homeowners.
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Toward smart skins for buildings?
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Windows that absorb or reflect light and heat at the flick of a switch could help cut heating and cooling bills. A company called Soladigm has developed methods for making these "electrochromic" windows cheaply, making them more viable for homes and office buildings.
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Retrofitting older cities/ existing communities to green-ness?
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We are studying different business models (and their pilot projects) for creating better urban environments (aka "smart cities" or "eco-cities"). Living PlanIT is the first business model we have examined in depth. On June 28 one of us (Bob) attended an event in Paredes where an important deal between Living PlanIT and Cisco was announced. It's important because the imprimatur of Cisco, a leader in networking technology, means that Living PlanIT can now shift into execution mode and try to demonstrate that its co-founders' vision for creating a sustainable smart city can work.
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Andy Lipkis, Founder and President of TreePeople, describes how this organization has pioneered an integrated approach to managing urban ecosystems as watersheds in the Los Angeles region. This involves strategic tree planting, tree-mimicking technologies, and community engagement to generate multiple solutions to the environmental threats facing our cities, including ensuring a sustainable water supply, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, preventing water and air pollution, fostering stronger neighborhoods, and creating jobs. For a summary of TreePeople's six demonstration projects that are now collecting 1.25 million gallons of water every time it rains 1" in Los Angeles, visit www. treepeople.org. Video Going to Green: Planting Seeds of Change with Community Forestry produced by the Media & Policy Center Foundation for PBS.
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Great stuff here - fascinating to see how "silo-think" works against solving problems.
Brief article by Andrew Blum about Oxley Woods, a development of "90 eco-friendly homes, with 55 more planned to fill its seven acres." The key aspect? They're all pre-fab, relatively cheap to build, can be built quickly, and have in-built green features.
If Canada had a federal housing plan/ strategy, this would be something the Feds (and the Province) could take a closer look at. It sounds like it could be a reasonable (if partial) solution to our affordable housing crisis.
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northwest of London, British developers are pulling one off on a scale that Americans are still only mocking up in Photoshop. The site, dubbed Oxley Woods, already features 90 eco-friendly homes, with 55 more planned to fill its seven acres. The factory-made dwellings make good on prefab's promise of low cost and quick construction. They take as little as $118,000 and seven days to erect: five in the plant and a day and a half onsite, where crews slide and screw together the modular pieces. (Electrical, plumbing, and other finishing work takes another four weeks.) Manufacturing the major components offsite reduces waste and makes it easier to use green materials, like insulation from recycled paper and lumber harvested from sustainably managed forests.
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But the biggest advantage is improved build quality. The same precision manufacturing that makes an Ikea bookshelf easy to assemble makes the Oxley Woods homes nearly airtight. But that doesn't mean they aren't well-ventilated. Each abode has an environmentally responsible cherry on top: A self-contained unit called an EcoHat controls circulation with a tiny 10-watt fan, pushing out stale air and drawing in fresh stuff, which is then solar-heated to warm the house.
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He reframed the discussion about coping with global warming by saying it was a golden opportunity to make money. One week earlier, Seattle business leaders were hearing the same siren song at the Chamber of Commerce retreat in Vancouver. A bank president declared, "Green is the new gold."
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One big factor that this rosy scenario leaves out is the role of government. Here, the seminal thinkers are Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, authors of a new book, Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility. The authors argue against the high-regulation model for battling pollution and other environmental woes, or approaches that raise the cost of dirty energy. You can read about the controversy they have stirred up with greens in this essay.
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