I’ve decided that I really enjoy reading about innovative, affordable, sustainable housing designs. I have a friend doing a Masters of Design program at Carleton University right now who’s all over these kinds of projects. The real push for this sort of design-for-sustainability seems relatively new, too — even Carleton University has only just started up this MA program this year. Hopefully it will become popular as it’s got so many benefits!

Take this one, for example — it’s made from recycled matierals, fits in a small space, yet is large enough to fit 3 people, a kitchen, a reading room, a living room, bathroom, and hydroponia area! And it kinda looks like the Deathstar. I mean, maybe that’s not a sell for you, but I’m certainly all ears.

These prefab pod homes can be built quite fast and adding an affordable price tag to that, it makes it an option for any socio-economic level and a viable solution for emergency housing, too.

This particular pod was designed by Broisson Architects of Naucalpan, Mexico.

“The shelter could become another option for developing low cost housing with very short building time and could improve the quality of the life for people without access to decent housing,” say the architects.

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1. Diapers: …and not just the cloth ones. Did you know that, on average, a baby will go through about six thousand diapers before they’re potty trained? Well, a company called ‘Knowaste’ makes disposable diapers that can be recycled.
2. Soap: That’s right — soap! A non profit organization called ‘Clean the World’ collects leftover soap and shampoo from hotels and donates it to those in need.
3. Caskets: This one nearly blew my mind yesterday and, you know, I don’t know why cause you’d think this was a no-brainer: Why not be buried in something that will easily biodegrade or is made from recycled materials? Seems silly not too, but I suppose that’s just my opinion. And besides being eco-friendly, it’s also much less expensive, too!
4. Running shoes: I am a big gym-goer so I own several pairs of running shoes, cross trainers, ones with shock absorbtion, etc. When you’re done with running shoes that are still in relatively good shape, they can be donated to the less fortunate. But the thing is, for me anyway, they’re so incredibly pricey that you can be sure that I use them until they can no longer be worn. The good news is, they can still be made into building materials. Check out RecycledRunners.com to find out where you can bring your old runners.

Alright, this might be the coolest news story I’ve read all week: A report released by the Institute of Mechanical Engineers is claiming that a building covered in algae are awesome for the environment. Now that’s a green building!

“…sealed containers of algae photobioreactors could be integrated into the sides of buildings to produce biofuels and sequester carbon…” (Inhabitat)

And what’s more?

• using algae for biofuels means that it can use waste water and ocean water making spills or leaks relatively harmless
• algae grows much faster than corn or soy
• photobioreactors are expensive, but could very easily be integrated into our existing structures

It’s really good to see the wheels turning — to see engineers really starting to think about these kinds of things. Very encouraging!

How would you feel about your apartment building being covered in algae? I think done well it could look pretty cool, personally. And with all those benefits, I hope to see this in the near future!

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The Nature Conservancy has just published a kind of calculator that crunches numbers and calculates percentages to figure out exactly how global warming will affect you.

The ClimateWizard is the first of its kind, giving people access to statistics and information that while having been readily available for a long time, is hard to read and understand. The ClimateWizard looks to facilitate that.

“The state-by-state, country-by-country temperature projections are part of a new tool called Climate Wizard that allows people to use an interactive map to explore past and projected climate change data on their computers,” The Nature Conservancy states in its press release. “With Climate Wizard, users can zoom in on any location to quickly see how temperatures and precipitation may change by month, season or year under different emission scenarios.”

Read more here

Thanks to nanoparticle “inks” you’ll soon be able to print off solar panels just like you would newspaper. And if that’s not futuristic enough for you, why not paint your roof in nanoparticle paint?

These products will apparently work as well as any other kind of solar cell to absorb electricity-producing sunlight and will cost only a tenth of what current solar panels cost.

Shown recently in an issue of Journal of the American Chemical Society, the inks must be printed on plastic substrate or stainless steel.

“You’d have to paint the light-absorbing material and a few other layers as well,” Korgel said. “This is one step in the direction towards paintable solar cells.”

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That’s right — interesting little tidbit I’ve just run across. Though it might not be news to you regular Apple fans, in an effort to save paper and be more environmentally friendly, the Apple Store actually offers to email you your receipt instead of automatically and mindlessly printing it out and stuffing it in the bag like many other stores.

I’m not personally on a crusade against paper receipts, but only because it really hadn’t dawned on me exactly how many of my receipts that I actually just crumple up and throw to the bottom of my purse.

Apple, as a whole, is not doing so well on the big green scale (according to Greenpeace), but hey – this is a start, right?

Apparently former Prime Minister Joe Clark is a self-proclaimed “treehugger”!

He’s heavily involved, these days, in a controversial project in Ghana that’s working to reclaim dead trees from Lake Volta including ebony, teak, mahogany and other beautiful, tropical hardwood where they’ve been preserved by the lack of oxygen in the water. The trees are estimated at being worth $1500 and $2500 each!

So where does the controversy come in? According to the Globe & Mail, the project might be negatively affecting fishing in that area.

Fishermen in the area are worried that the fish will go away if the trees are cut down and taken away. Some fishermen use the trees in their water to hold their traps. But some fishermen say the trees damage their boats.

So, who benefits? That’s the real question. What do you think?

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In case you haven’t been following the news, there is significant worry behind declines in the bee population, which spawned other problems like bee theft.

Now, as if that weren’t scary enough, we have to worry about new reports from Reuters that huge colonies of bee-eating Asian Hornets are spreading like wildfire through southwestern France!

These hornets are said to be able to wipe out an entire beehive in 48 hours — eep! And since the bee population is already under significant stress right now, that’s a much greater threat.

Let’s get together, folks. There are plenty of calls to action in the Twittersphere and we all know that social networking can be great for working together to get things done. Häagen-Dazs has been working to save bees for a long time now as they recognize that a whopping 1/3 of the world’s food supply is dependant on bees.

They currently have a 7-Day Go Natural Challenge going on that is not only delicious, but extremely helpful — and you could win a year supply of Häagen-Dazs! (I don’t think they know what they’re getting into, I can eat a lot of HD in a YEAR, heh).

Spread the word!

You know, I’m seeing this news story all over the place today and I’m thinking long and hard about it. Should Drive-Thru restaurants consider bicycles a worthy mode of transportation?

The conclusion I’ve come to is this: it’s being said often in these type of news stories that letting bicycles through increases the likeliness of accidents. But I wonder — how fast are you driving through a drive-thru? I should think that you wouldn’t be driving fast enough to run over a cyclist, are you? And don’t the people who take your order tell you when you can drive up to the window? I don’t drive myself, but I’m pretty sure that’s how the routine goes, right?

And like a lot of these news stories have suggested, there are many drive-thru restaurants that have refused to serve cyclists recently that also claim to be making an effort to be more lifestyle and eco-friendly — including Burgerville (a Pacific Northwest fast food place that composts, uses wind power, recycles its fresh fry oil into biodiesel, and has signs up that say “Drive Less, Save More” — hrmmm.

Now I’d like to know what you think! Do you think it’s too dangerous to let cyclists use drive-thru windows or do you think it’s a bunch of hooey?

Leave me a comment!

I’ll admit, a news story about cooking chicken poop caught my eye. Call me weird. Apparently charring fowl manure might not save the planet, but apparently when charred alongside beetle-killed pine trees, corn husks, and other organic matter it can help in the war on greenhouse gases.

According to researchers attending this years North American Biochar Conference, biochar (charcoal, more or less) is what remains when organic matter is burned in a low-oxygen environment. Biochar can last for thousands of years locking up globe-warming carbons in the meantime.

Humble biochar has uncharted potential for capturing and storing carbon dioxide, while simultaneously improving soil fertility and agricultural productivity,” Lakshman Guruswamy, head of CU’s Center for Energy and Environmental Security, said in a news release.

For more information, check out Laura Snider’s story on the first ever biochar conference.

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