Many cities are implementing interesting green roof initiatives with the aim of mitigating the “Urban Heat Island” effect, in which cities are significantly warmer than surrounding areas. Green roofs provide various environmental benefits including decreasing water run-off from roofs, helping with stormwater management, lessening the need for air conditioning, air quality control, and promoting biodiversity within the urban environment. Green roofs can also have long-term economic benefits given that they reduce energy consumption by providing insulation and have also been found to protect the roof membranes and last longer than conventional roofs.
There are two main categories of green roofs. The intensive variety consists of about a foot of earth material, allowing for the growth of trees and shrubs, but involves a significant addition of weight to the building and higher maintenance costs. Intensive green roofs are designed for human enjoyment, acting essentially as aboveground parks. The below Austin City Hall roof designed by American Hydrotech is an example of this type of green roof.
There probably are loads of people who own land and don’t have the time to grow their own plants and food. Maybe they could hire someone to do that, but they might not have the money. On the other hand, there might be gardeners and farmers who are dying to have some land to work on. So, this recently launched website connects the dots and brings these people together.
Shared Earth is a non-profit organization, made up entirely of volunteers. In their website, they state: “we can change the way land is used and food is grown – one garden at a time.”
Thanks to this initiative, SharedEarth.com claims that there are now more than 28 million square feet of shared land.
Shared Earth team is made up by founder Adam Dell, who is a venture capitalist, Jeff Chambers, CTO and Technology Advisor, and John Dromgoole, who works as an advisor, and is owner of The Natural Gardener, Austin’s organic garden center.
Shared Earth’s “mission is to build a broad and trusting community of land owners and gardeners that yields the efficient use of land and a greener planet.”
Another similar project is Urban Patchwork, which is working to develop urban farming in Austin, Texas. It is also a non-profit organization, and looks for available land within Austin to grow food. It was created in 2009.
Would you share your land, or grow a garden at someone else’s place? What do you think about these projects?
VIA: WorldChanging / Statesman
This is the sort of creative yet simple solution I love finding. If we can use goats to mow overgrown fields, why should we keep using fossil fuel consuming mowers and herbicides? Google has “hired” some goats to eat extra weed at its Mountain View headquarters.
California Grazing “provides holistic land management and brush & weed control through grazing”. They have over 800 goats, and offer their service in San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego and surrounding areas.
To control the goats and make them mow limited areas, California Grazing provides portable electric fences.
According to Google, the price of hiring these goats is similar to that of hiring lawn mowers. However, the benefits of the goats are quite interesting: the emissions caused by mowers are avoided, as well as the noise, plus goats fertilize the soil while grazing. And, Google workers get to have fun watching the four-legged mowers eat up extra weed!
Who can deny it? GoogleMaps is a fantastic tool. It includes information on directions, addresses, how to get from one place to another by car, walking or using public transport. For a while now, people have been asking Google to add biking information, and they’ve finally done it.
Biking information for 150 cities in the United States is now offered.
Some of the criteria considered while designing the routes include avoiding freeways and high-traffic areas, as well as giving preference to gentle terrain. Ideally, hills are avoided.
Plus, Google is developing a mobile version.
There is also information about bike trails, lanes and recommended roads. You can customize your journey, including places you want to visit along the way to your final destination.
Basically, you just need to insert your starting place and where you’re headed and the software will do the rest.
There are three types of lines, with different colors.
-Dark green stands for dedicated bike-only trails
-Light green indicates a dedicated bike lane along a road
-Dashed green indicates roads designated as preferred for bicycling, but without dedicated lanes
Hopefully, Google will take this to other countries, helping bicycles grow as a sustainable transport alternative.
To start using it, click here
For more information, click here
At Sustentator, we’re developing a project to help a rural elementary school grow its own organic garden. I thought this was a good opportunity to analyze why gardening might be beneficial for kids.
It all depends on how we address the making of a school garden. The more open and creative we are while designing a program, the more we’ll be able to make gardening an extremely enriching experience for all those involved.
To begin with, gardening is healthy for kids. It makes them spend time outside, breathing fresh air, doing a physical activity. Besides, they learn to work cooperatively, helping each other, distributing tasks among kids, and working as a team. It also shows them literally how their effort counts and is crucial for plants to be healthy and grow and give them food.
Concerning the more formal side of education, if intelligently planned, gardening can help enrich curricular contents. The different subjects can be related to different gardening activities. The first subject that comes to mind is science; students can study and experience what they study, such as plants’ life cycles, or the composition of the soil, or different plant species and insects.
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Wilmington Organic Recycling Center opened last November. It is dedicated to composting food waste, yard waste and paper products. Thanks to it, the amount of trash sent to landfills will be reduced, lots of nutritious compost will be generated, and emissions of methane will be diminished.
The center is located in an industrial area near the Port of Wilmington, in the state of Delaware. It claims to be the biggest of its kind on the East Coast of the US.
It aims to produce 100,000 tons of compost yearly, starting on April, when the center will become fully operational. Where will all this compost come from? From around 160,000 tons of waste, that instead of being thrown to contaminating landfills will be generating a useful product.
Clients that dump their waste there have to pay $50 per ton, much less compared to the fee paid to dump waste in one of the three landfills in the state.
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We can’t complain about lack of space for growing plants, since we’ve seen here on Sustentator that they can be grown on living, or green, roofs and in hydroponic systems for the home. Now we’ll present green murals, which are also called living walls.
A living mural is a wall, even just one, which is part of a building or functions as a median and which is completely or partially covered with vegetation in the same way that living roofs are. This could include the façade of a house or building, or sometimes an interior wall. That’s why these walls are sometimes called vertical gardens.
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Hoping that you will have a jolly green Christmas, we want to give you a few suggestions for helping you make your holidays greener.
GIFTS
In case you still haven’t bought all the presents you needed to buy, we suggest that you choose giving services instead of things. For example, you can offer tickets to a show, or a dinner some place nice, instead of buying stuff.
The wrapping of the gifts you make is also very important. Try to minimize the amount of paper you use for wrapping. There are options, such as old newspapers, magazines, pieces of cloth, shoe boxes. By using your creativity, you will avoid tonnes of paper from being sent to landfills. On the other hand, this year you can save all the wrapping paper accumulated on Christmas, and re-use next year! It’s not cheap, it’s green!
TRAVEL
If you are going somewhere, try to use public transportation. If you go by car, try to share your ride, so each of your footprints will be diminished. Also, check out our driving tips in Green Suggestions. Mainly, the speed you drive at is a key factor determining your fuel consumption.
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Today we’ll give you a break from Copenhagen. Instead we present green roofs, an extremely innovative idea.
Cement, concrete, tile, and other materials that are usually used to construct roofs or terraces for homes and other buildings usually generate a lot of heat that accumulates from the sun. They then release the heat, creating what is called the heat island effect. This effect is the reason why it is hotter in a concrete city and cooler in a garden.
This line of reasoning gave rise to the idea of green roofs, which are basically roofs covered with vegetation.
Why cover our roofs with vegetation?
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We have seen why combating desertification is a matter that should be considered in the fight against climate change. Soil can retain carbon and transform it into an input for the production of food It diminishes the quantity of carbon dioxide by sequestering it from the atmosphere, thus reducing global warming.
Taking this into account, the BIOCHAR FUND was created to combat hunger, deforestation, energy poverty, and global warming simultaneously. BIOCHAR is a carbon-rich product obtained from the pyrolysis of biomass that allows the replenishment of nutrients in poorly productive soils.
The current practice in many countries is to cut down forests in order to cultivate the soil, consequently destroying the biodiversity and liberating tons of carbon that were stored in the trees. The soils obtained from deforestation, aside from being poor in nutrients, are also incorrectly managed after the first crop. Eventually, they are abandoned and new extensions of forest would have to be slashed for cultivation. This completely unsustainable cycle generates more desertification and the destruction of biodiversity and forest. Around 300 to 500 million subsistence farmers depend on this practice for their food supply.
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Lake Arenal is located in the mid-north of Costa Rica. This great lake is the principal source of energy of the country by using hydro power and wind power generation. Around the lake, you can find hotels, restaurants and homes that want to develop in a sustainable way in order to keep the spectacular environment that surrounds them. This is where the project of sustainable urbanization project is being developed.
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The state of Hawaii can be made into a sustainable paradise. It is still very far from achieving this goal, but it is on the right path. To begin with, it has a large variety of renewable energy sources, and those with political power have a predisposition to this important change. Today Hawaii depends on 90% of the imported petroleum to generate electricity, the highest level of all of the states of the United States. At the same time, Hawaiian citizens pay the highest energy costs in the entire country. This energy dependence prompted Governor Linda Lingle to look for a change in the state’s energy system. That’s why she is researching and carrying out a series of projects intended to get 40% of the state’s energy from renewable sources by 2030.
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