Blogs & Ecology

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Paris Hilton may be the most recognizable heiress on the planet, but is she the greenest?

In a small town in Far West Texas, Clyde Curry has been busy refining and perfecting his papercrete mixture. Papercrete is mostly recycled paper and his new formula even gives an afterlife to styrofoam as well. Clyde mixes this waste into paste and then makes bricks. Lots of them! What looks like large, heavy concrete bricks are actually light and slightly spongy, but also ultra strong, fire resistant, and highly insulative. Clyde then stacks the bricks into non-traditional shapes until…POOF! He has a Palace unlike no other.

Integrity Block may be a brand new company, and Green Design Systems might be struggling to find funding to launch their Straw Wall, but the concept behind their products is as old as the human desire to build shelters.

There were a few familiar faces at West Coast Green 2008 and it's great to see cool technology continuing to grow.

First off, the Aquaduct made an appearance. The Aquaduct is a pedal powered water filtration system useful for people in developing countries.

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Source: TreeHugger

Image courtesy of Pasadena Museum of California Art

Second Growth, First Class Art
An exhibition by William Stranger opens tomorrow at the Pasadena Museum of California Art, and it'll focus on the life cycle, and post-life activity, of trees. The primary idea is to give discarded tree parts a second life—and therefore the exhibit will feature pieces made mostly from salvaged and neglected materials....

The Reclaimer provides a modest but very special service to the people of Los Angeles. They avert about 100,000 board feet of quality lumber from landfills each month, and resell the lumber to builders.

LA landfills are only about five years away from capacity. And about half a billion board feet of lumber each year take up a portion of that space. While The Reclaimer averts only a small amount of that lumber, it is quality, useable wood that not only stays out of landfills but also prevents the need to cut down trees. ...

Dwight Doerkson has developed "an affordable eco friendly building that’s transportable and doesn’t need to be hooked up to the grid"- out of shipping containers. He cuts out an entire wall and hinges it, so when you want to leave your ecopod you simply flip a switch and a solar powered winch pulls up the deck and closes up the box. ...

Image credit: TreeHugger

"Arising out of mutual interests in urban agriculture, community engagement and a belief in social value of sharing food, Mount Dennis Community Kitchen has joined forces with Masters of Architecture students at the University of Toronto to design and build a mobile community kitchen for the historic Mount Dennis neighbourhood."

Students at the University of Toronto Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design (full disclosure: my Alma Mater) built the mobile kitchen from recycled materials.
...

Photo: courtesy Richard Byrd

Image Source: Simple Solar Homesteader ebook

image used with permission of Office for Word and Image

Woning Moereels, Van Watertoren Tot Vuurtoren, Brasschaat, Belgium. Built: 1991-1996.

We love the idea of recycling old industrial structures into housing.

Photo: Lisa Gregoire via Canadian Geographic

As we reported over a year ago global warming will cause agriculture to migrate towards the poles. While it remains to be seen how, and which, crops will survive and thrive as they creep north, residents of Inuvik, NWT are already growing food in a town 120 miles north of the arctic circle sitting on top of permafrost at least 300 feet deep. ...

Image source: West Coast Green

This year's West Coast Green 2008 conference will feature a technology "innovation pipeline" highlighting the future of renewable energy products. Each of these products are new to the market or right out of development. Over 50 products will be featured, including,

"electric plug-in vehicles, the Triac, the Moose, the Microwatt, and the Buckshot from Green Vehicles; compressed earth blocks from Midwest Earth Builders; Lamberts Channel glass walls from Bendheim Wall Systems; solar tracking lights from Solar Track; and a straw wall from Green Design Systems."

Image source: West Coast Green

This year's West Coast Green 2008 conference will feature a technology "innovation pipeline" highlighting the future of renewable energy products. Each of these products are new to the market or right out of development. Over 50 products will be featured, including,

"electric plug-in vehicles, the Triac, the Moose, the Microwatt, and the Buckshot from Green Vehicles; compressed earth blocks from Midwest Earth Builders; Lamberts Channel glass walls from Bendheim Wall Systems; solar tracking lights from Solar Track; and a straw wall from Green Design Systems."