Geeko friendly's List: Sustainability

• Integrated Environmental Solutions (IES) recently revealed a free plug-in for Google SketchUp that will allow anyone to perform energy modeling on projects.
• The powerful plugin will allow anyone to analyze a building’s energy performance, carbon dioxide emissions, daylighting, air flow, solar analysis, and more, providing functionality that was only previously available in Autodesk’s Revit Architecture and Revit MEP.
• Integrated Environmental Solutions‘ plugin allows designers and architects to configure window size, room type, orientation, building location, and materials in order to reduce energy use - a very important step towards building greener structures.
• Once everything is installed, build a new SketchUp model or begin with one of IES’s models. At this point you will be asked to define the building’s location and function, as well as its HVAC system, envelope, and the distribution of specific spaces throughout the structure.

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• Yvon Chouinard
• • sam filing je cist hud
• While he acknowledges that "sustainable manufacturing is oxymoronic," Chouinard's aim is to minimize waste and damage to the environment.
• Employees earn clothing credits for carpooling to work, where benefits include flex time, on-site child care, paid parental leave, and, for those so inclined, training in nonviolent civil disobedience. (Patagonia pays the bail of anyone arrested in the course of applying the training.) The Patagonia catalogue, famous for heart-stopping portraits of customers putting gear to the test, is bringing Chouinard's environmental message to millions of people.
• Having recently stepped down as Patagonia's CEO, Chouinard is pursuing what he refers to as his "MBA"--management by absence. He attributes his outlook to a long interest in Zen, a philosophy that emphasizes the process rather than the result. "Patagonia is an experiment, an attempt to prove that being ecologically responsible works," Chouinard claims. "Every time we've done the right thing it's ended up making us more money."
• We spoke at Patagonia's home office, where toddlers were noisily at play in an adjacent child-care facility, and surfboards occupied the roof racks of cars in the employee parking lot.
• • ni tko pomembno, ama vseen zanimivo
• Now I'm working on a project I call the "One Percent for the Planet" club, and I'm trying to get other businesses to sign on.
• • zajebano dobr!!!!
• I think of it as a kind of "earth tax" for being polluters and using up natural resources.
• I believe that all of our taxes should be resource taxes. We should be taxing oil at the barrel rather than at the pump.
• • Ne morm verjet kok huda sef firme je to!
• I always say that there's no difference between a pessimist who says, "Oh, it's hopeless, so don't bother doing anything," and an optimist who says, "Don't bother doing anything, it's going to turn our fine anyway." Either way, nothing happens.
• About 30 years ago we started making small grants to grassroots groups. And every one of those people tells us how a $5,000 grant from us made all the difference in the world. We also teach environmental activism workshops on how to run an effective activist organization. So often these folks are fighting against some big corporation, trying to stop pollution or clearcutting or some huge development. Sometimes they're ostracized in their communities. And they're thinking, "Is it worth it?" Or "Maybe we just ought to move out of here." And then they come to our workshop and they find out that other people are facing the same problems. And all of sudden they see: "I'm part of a greater whole." It makes a huge difference in their lives.
• Well, we're healthy and we thrive in a recession. Where every other company goes up and down with the economy, we don't.
• Probably not. I think we could be a huge company right now if we grew at the rate we could have. But you know, I never wanted to be a businessman in the first place. I'm kind of a craftsman that just happened to become successful. Once I realized that I was a businessman and kind of doomed to be one, I felt a certain freedom to try anything. That's the fun part. We break all the rules. You look around this place, you'll see half the people barefoot. There's at least one little baby stashed underneath somebody's desk in a cardboard box. We have a rule here that's called Let My People Go Surfing. When the surf comes up, you go surfing. You don't plan to go surfing next Tuesday at two o'clock because you may go out there next Tuesday and find that the water is flat. So anytime the surf comes up, people just clear out and go surfing. But then they're back here at eight o'clock at night or working on the weekend. I really don't care when they work as long as the work gets done and it doesn't screw up the people depending on them. I just leave people alone and they're totally responsible. No one takes advantage of us.
• Well, for those that do we have an internship program where any employee can take two months off and go to work for a nonprofit, and we continue to pay their salary. For instance, some employees in our Reno warehouse took an interest in creating more wilderness areas in Nevada. It seems that no one had ever done an inventory of potential wilderness there. So they went out hiking and backpacking every weekend and identified nearly 10 million acres that could qualify. Patagonia provided an office for them at the warehouse and made a small grant to the local groups working on the project. They went to Washington, D.C., lobbied Congress, and got a bill passed to create the 750,000-acre Black Rock Wilderness. I say that was a good investment.

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• I often get emails from scientifically trained people who are looking for a straightforward calculation of the global warming that
• These people, typically senior engineers, get suspicious when experts seem to evade their question. Some try to work out the answer
• beautiful logic.
• The engineers' demand that the case for dangerous global warming be proved with a page or so of equations does sound reasonable, and it has a long history. The history reveals how the nature of the climate system inevitably betrays a lover of simple answers.

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• three sections housing a theater/lecture hall, a bookshop/galley and a workshop. 
• Endo’s design aesthetic throughout his career has focused on numerous experiments with steel and the seemingly limitless possibilities the material has in the built environment.  He continually sets out to prove that architecture can possess diversity while simultaneously following the rules of geometry, and Bubbletecture H is certainly not an exception.
• the superstructure was prefabricated from local Japanese cedar.
• And like a cliff temple, the supporting structure clings to the earth only where necessary – the building is over 10,000 square feet in size, but it is connected to only sixteen deeply buried five-foot wide beams – and that’s all that goes in the ground.

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• Serious Materials took the category award at 2008 GoingGreen 100 for green building materials. 
• "Nothing consumes more energy, nothing consumers more materials, nothing consumes more drinking water (than buildings), and human beings spend up to 90% of their time indoors, so if they're getting sick from their environment, in fact, they're getting sick from their indoor environment and not their outdoor environment."
• Even though the green building movement is almost 20 years old, it's like we're still in kindergarten
• "People are beginning to think about a legacy and leaving behind something greater than themselves, and so, I think, the ability to say I am doing something for the good of the planet or for the good of the community is going to be a significant driver.
• "The other thing, I think, that is going to be significantly driving this is the increase in resources costs: energy is going through the roof, water is going to be supremely expensive ..."
• "As great as all the material and technical advances are, it's probably not going to be enough to get us to where we need to be to fully live in harmony with the planet, particularly with our population at its current levels.  So we're going to have to cultivate desires that are not quite as high as they used to be.  So, if we cultivate simple desires, we'll be wealthy even if we have fewer things."

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• A large percentage of municipal landfill waste is from construction and demolition debris, estimated to be between 20 and 30 percent nationally.
• We recycle cans, bottles and even plastic bags, so why not reuse older buildings? There are many good reasons to do so, and opportunities and benefits abound to reduce such waste.
• First, it's very costly and energy consumptive: Municipal waste that must be loaded, hauled, transferred from trucks to trains, processed and dumped into landfills costs between $50 and $75 per ton.
• Second, it pollutes:
• Most construction debris — such as land clearing, wood, metal, glass, asphalt and concrete rubble — is fully reusable at lower cost than the production of new materials.
• Third, it's wasteful:
• Upstream, reducing construction and demolition waste reduces the need for the extraction and processing of raw materials, product manufacture and eventual disposal.
• And finally, the preservation and adaptive reuse of older buildings — especially historic landmarks — as compared with new construction is considered to be one of the most sustainable "green building" practices achievable.
• Climate-protection strategies must address the issue. In the United States, building construction and operations account for 48 percent of greenhouse-gas emissions.
• While preservation laws help protect our valued historic landmarks, incentives and possibly new regulations are needed to address waste of building stock. For example, Portland, Ore., mandates that all building projects valued at over $50,000 separate on site and recycle all nontoxic construction materials. New York City provides tax incentives, electric rebates and employs rezone strategies to encourage reuse and conversion of commercial buildings to residential.
• The bottom line: Landfills should no longer be an option for used but otherwise clean and durable building materials.
• • Main thought
• Policymakers, preservationists and architects need to push green building practices into the 21st century by promoting the environmental, economic and community benefits of building reuse and recycling.
• State and local governments should establish working guidelines, programs and incentives to promote the reuse, retrofit and reinvestment of older buildings.
• The energy invested in the existing built environment must be seen as a tangible resource of economic, environmental and cultural value, not to be wasted. In this way, preservation and reuse can be our "greenest" tools of sustainability.

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• After nearly a decade in the making
• the Academy will house 38,000 live animals and is on track to receive LEED platinum.
• It is currently the only institution in the world to feature an aquarium, a natural history museum, a living rainforest, a planetarium, and world-class research and education programs - all housed under a 2.5 acre green roof.
• the roof’s native plants absorb 90-98% of the building’s rainfall.
• All around the roof’s edges runs an encircling halo of photovoltaic cells, providing 60kW of electricity - enough to supply 5-10% of the structure’s energy needs.
• Incredible architecture aside, perhaps the most stunning aspect of the revitalized institution is it’s steadfast commitment to a vital, living, and changing study of life.

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• Scientists at Genomatica Inc. recently announced that they have developed strains of bacteria that are able to produce plastic without the use of oil or natural gas. The sustainable process utilizes little more than sugar and water to produce butanediol (BDO), which can be manufactured into everything from plastics and fibers to pharmaceuticals. Genomatica estimates that within a year the energy-efficient process will cost less than current hydrocarbon-based processes - a revolutionary development since close to 3 billion pounds of BDO manufactured each year.
• Currently BDO is made exclusively with oil and natural gas, and its production is very energy-intensive.
• Utilizing sugar and E. Coli to create the chemical allows the production process to be conducted under normal pressure and temperatures, which drastically cuts it energy use:
• The bacteria-grown plastic can be produced in large fermentation tanks in a manner similar the way that algae is being used to produce biofuels,
• the company plans on using sugars that are non-competitive with the food industr

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• At 410,000 square feet, it’s expected to be the largest public building ever to attain a LEED Platinum rating. And, with a $488 million price tag, it also represents the largest fund-raising effort for a cultural institution in San Francisco history.
• In 1997 one of the Academy’s own scientists, Patrick Kociolek, became its interim director. A researcher accustomed to approaching problems through data, Kociolek wanted to test the hypo­thesis that the planned upgrade was really in the museum’s best interests. “I said to the board, ‘Why don’t we step back and, instead of being driven by the facilities, ask ourselves: What’s a natural history museum in the twenty-first century?’” he recalls. “I had no idea this naive question would lead us so far.”
• And so the Academy—the only museum in the coun­­try to combine a natural history collection with a planetarium and an aquarium in one ­building—spent a year and a half studying the role of the science museum in contemporary culture.
• First, the museum analyzed 20 years of attendance data and found a dramatic but consistent decrease. Then it crunched more numbers and realized that other science museums across the country were doing even worse. To confirm some suspicions about the state of scientific knowledge in the community, it commissioned a poll with Harris Interactive. As suspected, it showed that while science is a bigger part of our lives than ever before the public’s understanding of it is lower than it was a generation ago.
• the need and desire for science education were great, but the existing paradigm, the Victorian cabinet of curiosities, was not up to the task.
• the Academy’s trustees realized they didn’t just need a new building; they needed a forward-thinking design that could carry the whole institution into the new century.
• there were only about 40 firms in the world who could take on the scale of the project, so the Academy sent out a request for portfolios and narrowed the field of 38 respondents down to six: Toyo Ito, Moshe Safdie, Norman Foster, Richard Rogers, James Polshek, and Renzo Piano.
• The first five architects to meet with the Academy all gave the kind of polished presentations you might expect. One arrived with two slide projectors, 50 poster boards, and five staffers, “literally and figuratively surrounding the committee with an answer,” as Kociolek puts it. But the final architect to interview, Renzo Piano, arrived with one ­associate—his daughter, Lia—and took just ten minutes to set up.

  • svashta
• When the committee members entered the room, they were surprised to see that he had no presentation materials with him. He had used the ten minutes to pull a table from the corner and rearrange all the chairs into a circle around it.
• Piano told them that he didn’t know how he would design a new California Academy of Sciences. He would need to hear from them before he could answer that question. “If you go into a meeting and you already know everything,” Piano says, “you lose the capacity to understand.”

  • presenetljivo iskren tale tip
• As the committee members spoke, Piano sketched ideas.
• After the interviews, Kociolek says, a number of the trustees wanted to hire the architect who had done the elaborate presentation. But one board member offered a different view. “She said, ‘Do you want to have a lecture from that person, or do you want to have a dialogue with Renzo Piano? That person already told us the answer. Renzo Piano is waiting to talk to us about an answer.’” Her question changed the tenor of the deliberations, he says, and led the board to choose Piano to design the new museum.
• Once he was selected, the first thing Piano knew was that he wanted the new roof to be the same height as the one he’d stood on top of: 36 feet. It was an appropriate scale for the park yet tall enough to offer a view, and it retained a vestigial memory of the old building, a local landmark. It was only later, when he learned that some program features—the planetarium and the rain-forest exhibit, for example—would need to be taller, that Piano developed the rooftop’s signature hills. “The idea was: keep the roof at thirty-six feet, and every time you need more, just wave up,” he says. “It’s a landscape that witnesses what is underneath it.”
• The other big idea behind the roof—that it should be a habitat for native California plants, birds, and insects—developed more slowly, as Piano’s team worked with botanists from the museum.
• it also insulates the building, reducing energy consumption, and absorbs 98 percent of storm-water runoff.
• Meanwhile, Piano’s “waves” mean that most of the building doesn’t need air-conditioning: cool air from outside flows down the hills and into the building’s central piazza, while hot air on the ex­hibit floor rises, hugging the planetarium and rain forest, and is released through automated skylights in the hills.

  • tuki pojasnjuje kako deluje prezracvanje in ogrevanje
• Late in the design process, when the Academy hired the Rocky Mountain Institute to find out how much the green features would cost, it found out that Piano’s design was just two points away from a LEED Platinum rating.

  • svashta! sploh se niso potegval za LEED Platinum al kwa?:)
• Neither Piano nor the Academy had heard much about the U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED program. They had worked not from a checklist but from a total dedication to the value of sustainability to the Academy’s mission.
• The aquarium, planetarium, and natural history museum are no longer separate silos—there are live penguins alongside the dioramas and a coral reef surrounding the planetarium.

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• Vertical gardens reduce cooling loads in summer by shading buildings; this “blanket effect” also cuts heating loads in winter, with the green layer acting as extra insulation. As the plants grow, they trap carbon dioxide and produce oxygen, and soak up such pollutants as lead and cadmium. Green walls absorb noise; help reduce the heat island effect, keeping cities cooler; and provide a habitat or insects and spiders, which in turn feed birds and bats
• two kinds of green walls: green facades, where a trellis structure is attached to the ground, and living walls, where the wall becomes the growing medium.
• Green facades are much simpler as they are planted in the ground and do not need elaborate watering systems.
• But the reigning king of the living wall is Patrick Blanc. He invented a version that he calls Le Mur Végétal, or Plant Wall, a dense sheet of vegetation that can grow against any surface, or even in midair. It works by doing away entirely with dirt, instead growing plants hydroponically in felt pockets attached to a rigid plastic backing. His most famous is at the Quai Branley Museum

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• Shimizu, one of Japan's great construction dynasties with Minoru Industries, has developed a rather interesting one that looks good and seems relatively affordable at 80,000 yen per square metre, about 80 bucks per square foot. This "wall surface afforestation system" (parabienta) is light, can be designed in different patterns and grids, and cools the building significantly.

  • alternative to Patrick Blanc?
• How about a green air-purifying grass wall in your apartment? Believe it or not, it’s possible without having a mess thank to these grass panels from Argentinean company Ustatic. The “Wall Grass” is a system of grass rectangular panels, which function with a structural substrate, a humidity retainer substrate with small conducts that warrantee the homogeneous distribution of water in the entire surface, and a basement formed by the grass’ roots, which add support.

  • indoor grass

• This, if confirmed, is really, really, really bad news:
• The first evidence that millions of tons of a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide is being released into the atmosphere from beneath the Arctic seabed has been discovered by scientists.
• In the past few days, the researchers have seen areas of sea foaming with gas bubbling up through "methane chimneys" rising from the sea floor. They believe that the sub-sea layer of permafrost, which has acted like a "lid" to prevent the gas from escaping, has melted away to allow methane to rise from underground deposits formed before the last ice age.
• Methane is about 20 times more powerful as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide and many scientists fear that its release could accelerate global warming in a giant positive feedback where more atmospheric methane causes higher temperatures, leading to further permafrost melting and the release of yet more methane.
• Some have already begun calling for a program of massive geoengineering to stave off the triggering of runaway climate change as this methane starts hitting the atmosphere.

  • wtf is geoengineering??
• Our first priority as a civilization ought not to be huge interventions in systems we only barely understand, but a planetary commitment to Zero, now.
• The stakes are rising faster and faster. You often hear the line at conferences that on climate change, science is 10 years ahead of business, and business is 5 years ahead of policy and the public debate; I'm increasingly less sure that science and the public debate are even operating in the same space-time continuum anymore.
• Geoengineering, he said, is a forbidden topic among many who are concerned about climate change, because they fear that it will help to legitimize wasteful lifestyles which they would rather see changed.
• This, he said, is analogous to those who don't want to talk about birth control with teenagers, for fear that it will encourage them to have sex.
• To carry the analogy further: if the methane hydrates are indeed going off, then the girl is officially knocked up.
• Carbon sequestration is the *only* thing which might turn that process around

  • wtf is carbon sequestration?
• Nathan, I take your point, but that's a terrible analogy. Leaving aside the weirdness of gendering the climate as a teenage girl, it's not like geoengineering is abortion and will suddenly make that girl un-pregnant. We don't even know that any of the proposed geoengineering ideas would actually work. History suggests that it's far more likely that they would go disastrously wrong.

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• the reports remain spotty on some critical details. Most important question: is this coming from frozen methane hydrates? If it's not, the potential release of methane could be bad, but probably something we could deal with. If it is... we're in a lot of trouble.
• that's 50 gigatons of methane that could be released. And methane, as has been reiterated time and again, is 23 times more powerful a greenhouse gas than CO2.

• Except it's not. It's actually worse. That 23x figure refers to the impact of a given quantity of methane over a 100 year period -- a standard way of comparing the effects of different gases. But methane cycles out after a decade, so a better way of comparing its impact is over a shorter time period -- say, 20 years. Compressed to two decades, then, the relative power of methane as a greenhouse gas is 72 times that of carbon dioxide.

    

  72x.

    

  So that 50 gigatons of methane? That's the equivalent of 3600 gigatons of carbon dioxide, in terms of greenhouse effect.

    

  To put that into comparison: the Earth's atmosphere holds a total of about 3000 metric gigatons of carbon dioxide.

    

  This would more than double the concentration of CO2e in the atmosphere.

    

  So this is not just huge, it's really freaking huge.
• As I said, we still don't know if this is the methane hydrates beginning to melt. If it is, then even going to zero CO2 emissions now won't do a damn thing. Ocean thermal inertia will keep the temperatures up undersea for a good while, even if we stopped all carbon outputs now. Thermal inertia alone would keep us warming on land for a couple of decades, too, after we zero out, but that's comparatively less catastrophic than the hydrates.
• Albedo-modification geoengineering (stratospheric sulfates, "space mirrors," that sort of thing) won't do much to change ocean temperatures in a short enough period to stop hydrate melts.
• CO2 sequestration geo (iron or urea dumps in the ocean, bioengineered supertrees, that sort of thing) won't do a damn thing about methane, even if it worked.
• It's hard to imagine a geoengineering project gone wrong that would be worse than a methane hydrate melt; a big methane hydrate event appears to be connected to one of the largest extinctions in geological history (bigger than the KT event killing the dinosaurs). 90+% of all species gone.
• I've made it abundantly clear that I don't think geo is a good idea. It's a pretty damn crazy idea, in a lot of ways. But if this methane report is as bad as it looks to be, crazy ideas may be all that we have left.

• Zero emissions from human activity needs to be the standard, world-wide, and remediation techniques have to be developed and deployed, oh, yesterday.

    

  Looks like we're going to have an interesting 21st century. I know the Uh-ohs (what I call this present decade) has been fair crazy already.

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• Underground stores of methane are important because scientists believe their sudden release has in the past been responsible for rapid increases in global temperatures, dramatic changes to the climate, and even the mass extinction of species.
• Scientists aboard a research ship that has sailed the entire length of Russia's northern coast have discovered intense concentrations of methane – sometimes at up to 100 times background levels – over several areas covering thousands of square miles of the Siberian continental shelf.
• areas of sea foaming with gas bubbling up through "methane chimneys" rising from the sea floor. They believe that the sub-sea layer of permafrost, which has acted like a "lid" to prevent the gas from escaping, has melted away to allow methane to rise from underground deposits formed before the last ice age.
• They have warned that this is likely to be linked with the rapid warming that the region has experienced in recent years.
• The amount of methane stored beneath the Arctic is calculated to be greater than the total amount of carbon locked up in global coal reserves so there is intense interest in the stability of these deposits as the region warms at a faster rate than other places on earth.
• An extensive area of intense methane release was found. At earlier sites we had found elevated levels of dissolved methane. Yesterday, for the first time, we documented a field where the release was so intense that the methane did not have time to dissolve into the seawater but was rising as methane bubbles to the sea surface.
• At some locations, methane concentrations reached 100 times background levels. These anomalies have been seen in the East Siberian Sea and the Laptev Sea, covering several tens of thousands of square kilometres, amounting to millions of tons of methane
• "The conventional thought has been that the permafrost 'lid' on the sub-sea sediments on the Siberian shelf should cap and hold the massive reservoirs of shallow methane deposits in place. The growing evidence for release of methane in this inaccessible region may suggest that the permafrost lid is starting to get perforated and thus leak methane... The permafrost now has small holes. We have found elevated levels of methane above the water surface and even more in the water just below. It is obvious that the source is the seabed
• Dr Semiletov has suggested several possible reasons why methane is now being released from the Arctic, including the rising volume of relatively warmer water being discharged from Siberia's rivers due to the melting of the permafrost on the land.

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• LEED stands for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, and is a performance-based rating system for green buildings established by the U.S Green Building Council. It has come to be accepted as the benchmark for green building, and covers all aspects of a building, from materials, to energy, water and building operation.

  • RA
• I studied for about a month to pass the exam, which consists of 80 questions

  • exam
• The way LEED works is that the points are broken down into 5 topic areas: Sustainable Sites; Energy & Atmosphere; Water Efficiency; Materials and Resources; and Indoor Air Quality. A final category rewards efforts that don't fall under the other topic areas. Within each category, points are awarded for achieving environmental performance. For instance, 1-10 points can be earned under Energy & Atmosphere, depending on the energy-efficiency of the building. Each category has pre-requisites that must be met, and depending on how many points the project is awarded a building can be rated anywhere from LEED certified to LEED platinum
• I took the LEED for Existing Buildings exam (LEED has different rating systems, including LEED for Neighborhood Development, LEED for New Construction, etc.) and I read through the entire 400 page study manual twice

  • exam
• For more information about becoming a LEED AP, check out the LEED AP candidate handbook, LEED AP exam preparation, and the Green Building Certification Institute web site .

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• 
• Dutch architects MVRDV and Spanish architects GRAS have won a competition to design a new carbon-neutral city in La Rioja, Spain.
• The development will cover two hills and will include 3,000 social homes with sports facilities, retail, restaurants and gardens. The buildings will occupy 10% of the 56 ha site, with the remaining space used for energy production and as a public park.
• All energy required by the city will be generated by solar cells and and wind turbines. The city will also incorporate a greywater circuit and natural water purification.

• A museum and viewing point hidden in the top of one of the hills will house a research and promotion centre for renewable and energy-efficient technology.

   

  

  • Eco center!
• The remaining landscape becomes an eco-park: a mix of park and energy production. As the slopes are south facing solar energy is easily generated. A tapestry of PV-cells clad the mountain, covering the hills in golden reflection. On top of the two hills, windmills generate part of the energy needed for the 3.000 social houses and at the same time they work as landmarks for the development. 100% of the energy demand is generated on site by a combination of solar and wind energy. A greywater circuit and on site natural water purification are parts of the plan that combines dense urban living with real ecological improvements.
• Next to this, by building as compact as possible (following the optimal height line of the hill) the building costs are minimized.
• 
• The total sum of investment is 388 million Euro of which 40 million will be invested in renewable energy technology.

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