Inspiration to Clean

After visiting the recycling center, the one thing that really stuck was the manual sorting and processing of garbage. It surprised me to see that people actually have to sort our garbage day in day out. Even with our knowledge and technology, one man has to sift through compost and make sure that the pile is “clean” for further processing. What if we were to clean up our own trash? I found this video on youtube and I thought I would share…If a small country did this, think what America can do, and even on a larger scale, the entire world.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A5GryIDl0qY

Google Maps Used to Locate Potential Lands for Renewable Energy

The National Audubon Society and the Natural Resources Defense Council have teamed together with Google Earth in order to help renewable energy groups understand where potential locations are for the placement of renewable energy sources.

Many different obstacles prevent placement of renewable sources in certain areas.  These can include, but are not limited, to areas that are protected species lands, national parks, or other protected lands.  The information was pulled together from 13 differnt states, and it is current available on Google Earth.  Currently, they have updated around 860 million acres in Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oregon, South Dakota, Utah, Washington and Wyoming.

The map appears as it normally would on Google Maps, but it now has color areas superimposed onto the map that indicate areas that are not available for building due to certain restrictions (protected land, national park, etc.).  The goal of the new map is to help save money for renewable energy developers in selecting the lands for renewable energy generation and transportation.

http://www.consumerenergyreport.com/2009/04/02/new-google-earth-maps-show-where-renewable-energy-projects-can-be-built/

Places to Intervene in a System (an overdue reading response…)

The article and the places to intervene are a useful read.  It’s interesting that she starts the list at the last place to intervene, rather than at the first place.  The theory of constraints literature tries to get people thinking systematically right away, while also showing how their current mindset and thinking has created a lot of the negative behaviors that their system exhibits.

According to Meadows, leverage points are those “places within a complex system (a corporation, an economy, a living body, a city, an ecosystem) where a small shift in one thing can produce big changes in everything.”  It seems like she is saying that people know where leverage points are, however everyone is trying hard to push them in the other direction.  She observes, “Leverage points are not intuitive. Or if they are, we intuitively use them backward, systematically worsening whatever problems we are trying to solve.”  Meadow’s goal for this article is not to tell people how to find leverage points, its more to have people think more broadly about system change.

I also found this quote by Donella Meadows online… I feel like it really relates to our class, especially since we just visited the SF recycling center:

“Recycling is better than disposal, reuse is better than recycling, but reduction is the best of all. It is easier to deal with a flood by turning it off at its source than by inventing better mopping technologies.” – Donella H. Meadows

Recycling Lithium

http://green-energy-news.com/arch/nrgs2009/20090035.html

This is an article I found about recycling lithium batteries that could potentially be worrisome.  Since I did my DP1 on recharable lithium ion vs. nickel metal-hydride, I was particularly interested in what this article had to say.

Lithium is a rare material, and it is only found in a couple places in the world.  Right now, it seems like there is only one place that recycles lithium batteries (in British Columbia, Canada).  In my opinion, battery manufacturers should have a plan for how every battery that comes off their assembly line will be recycled.  This is definitely not the case, and now, with the first generation of lithium batteries in cars, we really need to find a way to recycle the lithium.  In about 5-10 years, when these first cars hit their life expectancy, we are going to run into problems if we still aren’t recycling every lithium battery.  We need to figure out a way to do this as soon as possible, so we don’t use all of our planet’s lithium.

Portland, Oregon: Voted Most Sustainable U.S. City

Portland didn’t top the list simply because of it’s various commuting options. Factors such as preparedness for disasters were also considered.

I decided to take the investigation a step further. I wanted to know what sets Portland apart from all of the other cities. I asked myself,

“What makes Portland UNIQUELY sustainable?”

I was amazed with what I found:

***Green Fashion Week***

Watch the commercial for Green Fashion Week:

Here’s pictures from Portland’s First Sustainable/Greenest Fashion Week Showcasing Eco-Responsible Fashion in 2008:

***The Green MicroGym***

When people workout here, they generate electricity! Check out the video:

***Green Home Search Engine***

I found the following information on ecomagazine.com:

Homebuyers educated in green are tuned into a few key words, such as LEED and Energy Star, but until now, they haven’t had many options to use those words to search for third party-rated homes.

Portland, Ore.-based Realty Trust Group has filled this gap with an online database of all homes in the Regional Multiple Listing Service System (RMLS) with the ability to narrow searches down to properties certified under LEED, Earth Advantage, or Energy Star.

For a green home search in the Portland area, visit www.realtytrust.com

Maybe I’m easily impressed……
Maybe Portland is cool……????

An Alternate Strategy For Green Design

Site:
http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2009-05/power-made-shocks

While visiting Stanford before my freshman year, I stopped by the robotics locomotion lab and had the great fortune of touring a research lab in the process of developing a novel quadruped platform.  The project’s goal was to develop a leg assembly that captured some of the impact energy from each footfall, enabling the platform to reach unprecedented speeds and operate for a vastly extended time between charges.  Their motivation for research was the simple fact that power generation is a costly, heavy, space-consuming requirement when designing a mobility platform, especially considering all the other subsystem’s demands.

That was about three years ago, and sadly, I’ve yet to get around to checking up on that project.  It sprang to mind, though, when reading this Popular Science article.  Both the Stanford robotics research team and these MIT students have been pursuing the same goal–increasing efficiency–only in radically different contexts.

The difference between the two teams applications of super-efficient innovations struck me as especially significant when considering what we’ve learned about in class.

Essentially, the MIT team is developing a technology that starts with commonplace, inefficient systems and then applies technological ingenuity to render the systems more sustainable.  In contrast, the Stanford team is starting from scratch, and trying to integrate a new design goal (super-efficiency) into the plethora of other design criteria for a novel mechanical system.   The two projects are so dissimilar that directly comparing their costs and rate and amount of progress is meaningless; however, I personally find it rather intriguing to compare the two sustainable-design strategies in a hypothetical context where I can legitimately contrast their strengths.

The reason I find it worthwhile to blog about this is that I believe that little thought experiment is valuable–and furthermore, that it is valuable because our current rate of progress in steering our civilization’s development onto a more sustainable path is woefully too slow.  Simply, I think that we as a civilization need to drastically increase and accelerate our efforts, lest our currently unsustainable habits cause irreparable environmental damage.

Even if the damage I’m [pessimistically] referring too is not actually irreparable, I think it’s still valuable to think about the issues of which “green design” strategies are ultimately superior.  Obviously there won’t be one strategy superior across all contexts, but nevertheless, wasting time and resources on inefficient innovative strategies strikes me as a horrible loss.

In conclusion, I found this Popular Science article valuable because it reminded me that even though people can complain that too much of the “sustainability” movement is intellectual hypothesizing, or ineffectual analyses by academia that actually achieve no physical changes, there is STILL great VALUE in taking time to simply THINK about our actions. 

It’s true that some positive action is better than none.  However, when you factor in a time constraint–and I very much believe that our civilization faces just such a constraint, due to our unfortunately lengthy history of unsustainable practices–simple action versus inaction is no longer enough.

I haven’t actually thought much about which of these examples (the top-down MIT or bottom-up Stanford approach) of green design is better.  What I have done, though, is reaffirm by conviction in the value of expending effort and time on sustainable design.  Thus, while the issue of sustainability seems to grow ever more complex the longer I think about it, I’m also growing ever more convinced that pursuing sustainable goals is a challenge worth my attention.

- D.E.L.

Emotions and Sustainability

While working on a class project about the man-machine connection in manual-transmission cars, I began to think about the connection between emotions and sustainability.  There seems to be a direct inverse correlation between the degree of emotional attachment to products and the product’s disposability.  That is, products that consumers do not relate to in any way on an emotional level, like a plastic coffee lid or plastic grocery bag, are logically disposed of in unsustainable ways far more often than, say, an heirloom watch passed down from a grandfather.  A product’s life cycle is perhaps most strongly influenced by just how much it’s owner cares for it.

In an age in which even laptops have become disposable items (regardless of price point), it would seem to me that designing products to develop and sustain emotional connections with the people who own them is at least as important as designing them with ‘greener’ materials.  The reason for this is that if we can slowly diminish a culture of disposability, we will certainly help the planet by reducing enormous amounts of waste.

Designing with emotion in mind is certainly no easy task, but we can start by taking cues from products that do, in fact, resonate with their owners in more meaningful ways.  From my experience, products that tell a story or make a statement or somehow facilitate memorable experiences are those that are most successful at establishing an emotional connection with their owners.  Once this connection grows, the owner becomes less and less likely to dispose of the product, reducing the need for future new products and eliminating waste, not to mention giving the owner a much more meaningful and impactful product experience.

Green Workplace

I was thinking about areas that we could improve energy efficiency in our everyday lives, and it came to me. “Why don’t we work on improving energy where we spend the most time (work, unfortunately)?”

So what should we do and where can we start? I think a great thing companies could do is be more liberal about co-workers working from home. We must utilize the technological and philosophical advances that are available to us. The reason I say philosophical is because the workplace philosophy is constantly changing. No longer do people have to punch in and out of a clock to record there working time. Also, companies allow there employees to work from home from time to time if they or sick or something. With this said, employees can save a day of commuting if companies allow employees to work from home 1 day out of the week.

The average US commuting distance is approximately 30 miles, meaning 7200 miles per year (30miles*4weeks*5days*12months),  meaning 323 gallons of gas per year (7200 miles per year/22.3 avgm pg) for one person, translate to approximately 71 billion gallons (220 million people) of gas used for commuting in one year.

http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/Traffic/Story?id=485098&page=1

If we take one of those days off one of those days from working at home we get approximately 57 billion gallons of gas used for commuting in one year. This is a whopping ~20% less gas and emissions that can saved each year.

What do you think?