D'coda Dcoda's List: Sustainability

• Hugelkultur (it's from a brilliant german permaculture engineer called Sepp Holzer, although he started doing this well before the permaculture brand emerged).  Simply, it's soil on top of a bed of rotten wood.  There are lots of very informative and quirky instructional materials on the Web about it (from vids on YouTube to discussion pages).  Also, Sepp has a great book that includes this and more.

• The goal here is soil so alive that doesn't require fertilizer, mechanical tilling, or much water.  Here are the useful ideas I can extract from the available material in summary form:

   
   
  • The rotting of the wood warms the soil (increasing growing times), fertilizes the soil, and keeps the soil moist.  It turns it into living soil.  
   
  • Wood that isn't that rotten sucks nitrogen during the early rotting phase, so the more rotten the wood the better.
   
  • Hugelkultur beds require years to mature.  However, they require little maintenance and can last as long as 30 years.
   
  • You can bury the wood in a trench or build a raised bed.  Doesn't matter.  Your choice (watch water, sun, wind etc. flows).
   
  • The buried wood acts as a moisture capture system.  So, it's great in arid areas, since hugelkultur beds don't require much watering.  
   
  • There is the potential, if hugelkultur is done at scale (acres), that it could create substantial changes in the micro-climate (moisture, temp, water table, etc.) and turn barren environments into lush, productive landscapes.

• the current flow in amps is the power divided by the voltage.

• 1. Hybrid Cars and Alternative Energy

• A new line of green cars have managed to deliver driving performance with a reasonable price tag. The Chevy Volt and Toyota Prius are two affordable sedans duking it out for America’s heart and wallets. Green cars aren’t just for slow-pokes either. A pack of top-line car manufacturers have unveiled sleek concept cars that use electricity. For example, the BMW i8 is a powerful roadster concept. A road-ready version is slated for (possibly) 2013. The basic technology is already being used in BMW hybrids such as the AcitveE, which is starting field trials.

   

  Major cities have gotten wise to the concept with many making their subways and buses greener. New York City subways can generate and store electricity when they break and cities such as Toronto have started updating their fleet of buses to be electric hybrids.
• 2. Sharing is Caring

• technology sharing hubs which let members use and borrow a communal set of goods. Companies such as Zipcar have been letting customers rent cars in a much more fluid way than traditional companies like Hertz.

   

  That concept is expanding to all sort of goods, including bike-sharing programs like Bixi in Montreal, which lets subscribers rent a bike for 45 minutes at no charge. Users can park their bikes at docking stations which keep track of when bikes were taken out and bill accordingly. Renting a bike for longer periods of time costs money, though the cost is minimal ($3 to rent a bike for up to an hour and a half). Bixi has spread to other cities, and New York announced its first bike sharing program to launch in 2012 which will operate similarly to Bixi.

   

  It’s not just about cars and bikes, other programs are sprouting up around the globe which focus on technology sharing, such Worldreader, which provides ereaders to schools in developing countries or SELCO-India which is trying to disseminate solar panels to poor communities in India.
• 3. Micro-Living
• idea behind micro-living, which seeks to either do away with or shrink the technology and material goods that we use every day

• Expect people to cut down on frills to help live greener and as well as less-expensive lives. Technology is helping make this possible as lifestyle essentials — such as kitchen appliances and media devices — become smaller or make better use of the cloud to shrink the amount of stuff we own.

   

  Big business is also trying to shrink its footprint. Many manufacturers are shrinking the amount of packaging they use to ship products. For example, Apple has cut back on some of its frivolous packaging and developed a unibody laptop design that’s easier to recycle and produce. These changes help both the bottom line and the planet.
• 4. Gamification Reigns
• Brands and companies have realized that friendly competition and metered rewards are a great way to get people interested and engaged in a product. Green initiatives are getting wise as well. Games such as Trash Tycoon challenge players to recycle their way to victory whereas sites such as myenergy, recyclebank or DailyFeats encourage users to reduce their energy consumption or improve their green actions by offering light competition and relevant rewards for eco-behavior.

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