via treehugger.com
Lamps which absorb CO2 from the air, and far more than trees. Still under development, but these things could in theory replace the CO2 absorption of the rainforests. Sounds too good to be true...
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Passive environmental design using ancient techniques to cool buildings without technology
via mariclaro.ca
Nice laptop sleeve as part of a collection made from recycled bits and bobs. Really nice stuff!
Fridges are a recent invention; for thousands of years, people lived without them, but had many low-tech ways of making food last. Today most fridges are filled with stuff that would last just as long and probably would taste a lot better if it was never lost in the back of the fridge. They are expensive air conditioned parking lots for what Shay Salomon called "compost and condiments."
Some are looking at alternatives to such an expensive and wasteful model. Kris De Decker of No Tech Magazine "refuses to assume that every problem has a high-tech solution," and shows the work of Korean designer Jihyun Ryou, who says "we hand over the responsibility of taking care of food to the technology, the refrigerator. We don’t observe the food any more and we don’t understand how to treat it."
She has developed a series of modern designs that rely on traditional techniques, learned from her grandmother and other elderly people in the community, the " traditional oral knowledge which has been accumulated from experience and transmitted by mouth to mouth."
Here is an interesting and complicated example. Many fruits give off ethylene gas as they ripen; a lot of people put their tomatoes in paper or plastic bags to make them ripen faster. That's why putting fruit is a fridge is so silly, the ethylene builds up inside the sealed box and the fruit goes rotten faster. But some vegetables react differently to ethylene; with potatoes and onions, it suppresses the sprouting process. Put a banana in a plastic bag with a potato and the banana will be rotten in no time, but the potato won't sprout. Jihyun Ryou's response:
Apples emit a lot of ethylene gas. It has the effect of speeding up the ripening process of fruits and vegetables kept together with apples. When combined with potatoes, apples prevent them from sprouting.
The designer writes about the
Verticality of Root Vegetables:Keeping roots in a vertical position allows the organism to save energy and remain fresh for a longer time. This shelf gives a place for them to stand easily, using sand. At the same time, sand helps to keep the proper humidity.
Kris de Decker elaborates:
Keeping vegetables in slightly damp sand has been a storage method for many centuries. While low temperatures are favourable for vegetables like carrots, high humidity is equally important. Keeping them in wet sand can be a good compromise.... Just don't forget to water them from time to time.
An egg has millions of holes in its shell. It absorbs the odour and substance around itself very easily. This creates a bad taste if it’s kept in the fridge with other food ingredients. This shelf provides a place for eggs outside of the fridge. Also the freshness of eggs can be tested in the water. The fresher they are, the further they sink.
Everyone in North America stores their eggs in the fridge, but few people in Europe do, they can last for days on a shelf or in a pantry. In European supermarkets, the eggs are not refrigerated. Integrating the water into the egg storage shelf is really clever; according to about.com, if an egg:
Sinks to the bottom and stays there, it is about three to six days old. Sinks, but floats at an angle, it's more than a week old. Sinks, but then stands on end, it's about two weeks old. Floats, it's too old and should be discarded .Eggs act this way in water because of the air sac present in all eggs. As the egg ages, the air sac gets larger because the egg shell is a semi-permeable membrane. The air sac, when large enough, makes the egg float. Eggs are generally good for about three weeks after you buy them.
There are more on the designers website and with more analysis at No Tech Magazine, where Kris concludes:
The more food you can keep out of the fridge, the smaller it needs to be and the less energy it will consume. The designs described above show a refreshing way to do that, although it should be remembered that these are artworks, not consumer products. Using similar methods when storing food in a basement or a specially designed root cellar - the traditional way - will give better results.
Smaller fridges use less energy, of course, take up less space and make good cities. Furthermore, these techniques are not relics from the past, they are templates for the future. In the hands of a talented designer, they can look beautiful, too.
Tags: Designers | Food Safety | Less Is More | Living With Less | Preservation
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via treehugger.com
Some fantastic low-tech ways of storing food without a refrigerator!
You can't do away with one, but it could be smaller.
The Financial Times is the UK's version of the Wall Street Journal, not a venue where we would expect to find radical positions on environmental issues and reducing carbon emissions. We are often impressed about how far ahead the UK is in environmental awareness, but Richard Tomkins, Consumer Industries Editor for the FT, has really surprised us in an article questioning the value of recycling. Like many in the UK, he suggests that climate change is the most serious environmental threat facing the human race, and that "When you think of all the energy consumed (and hence, carbon dioxide emitted) during the recycling process - householders driving their empty wine bottles to the bottle bank, lorries collecting the bottles and taking them to the recycling plant, the washing in hot water and the removal of labels, all before the reprocessing can even begin - it is plain that recycling has environmental costs as well as benefits." Then he gets radical with his 10 point program. Actually, first he suggests we should just buy less. "Recycling bits of packaging is as nothing compared with the vast savings in energy and resources that could be made if people bought fewer products. The biggest source of greenhouse gas emissions is the energy used to manufacture and deliver the goods that end up in our homes - furniture, kitchen equipment, televisions, toys, computers, clothes and food. You do not need to recycle if you do not buy anything in the first place." That is not particularly good for the economy, so he then goes on to the 10 Points:
1Never, ever, fly on an aircraft again. Air travel is enormously damaging in terms of climate change and any government that genuinely cared about the environment would be pricing people out of the skies with unbelievably high levels of taxation on air travel. As it is, aviation fuel is completely untaxed internationally and governments almost everywhere have encouraged the proliferation of cheap flights, making air travel more popular and more environmentally damaging than ever.
2 Call on the government to ban incandescent light bulbs, which turn 90 per cent of the energy they consume into wasted heat. Instead, everyone would use the newer compact fluorescent lamps. Admittedly these are green in more ways than one, enveloping their unfortunate users in a ghastly green glare but the energy savings would be colossal - enough to shut down a power station or two.
3Switch to a diet of ready meals and McDonald's. It takes much less energy to make a mass produced meal than to assemble all the ingredients at home and cook them yourself. It also produces less waste. If you can take yourself to a centralised meal distribution depot such as McDonald's, so much the better, as long as you leave the 4x4 in the garage and take the bus.
4 Speaking of gas-guzzlers, obviously you should trade in your 4x4 for a Toyota Prius. But even trading it in for an ordinary family saloon would save as much energy in a year as your household would save if it spent the next 400 years recycling glass bottles. Then again, if you care about climate change, what on earth are you doing driving at all?
5 Sell the second home. Just think how much environmental damage is done by the duplication of household goods. Even worse, just think of all the journeys that the second home generates. It is bad enough if you drive there and back each weekend but if you are using cheap flights - really, are you trying to destroy the planet single-handed?
6 Lower your standards of personal hygiene. Apart from the energy that goes into making the goods we buy, the next biggest source of energy consumption in the home is hot water. So, shower once a week at most and wash your clothes less often. If anyone complains about a funny smell, blame global emissions.
7 Forget, for a moment, the edict about cutting consumption and buy a whole new set of domestic appliances. Modern washing machines, dishwashers and dryers are much more energy efficient than the old ones, and the environment will benefit in the long run, assuming you resist the temptation to fly-tip the old machines.
8 If you must buy any other manufactured product, make sure it comes from a country that uses renewable energy sources, such as Sweden, not fossil fuels, such as China. It must also be made out of renewable materials, such as wood, not non-renewables, such as plastic. In short: the only place you can shop is Ikea.
9 Consider joining the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, a so-called deep ecology organisation that believes we should phase out the human race by voluntarily ceasing to breed. Then reject the idea. What, after all, is the point of saving the planet if there is no one left to enjoy it?
10 Recycle if you like but do not kid yourself that it will make a lot of difference. The ugly truth is that saving the planet really will mean sacrifices, however much we may like to pretend otherwise. The old rule applies: no pain, no gain - for the environment, as for everything else. ::Financial Times (subscription required) via our old favourite, ::Environmental Valuation and Cost-Benefit News
via treehugger.com
Interesting article on recycling from the Financial Times.
via treehugger.com
There are a number of ways to look at this. On the one had you might take the view that Maine has taken a stand against the limited, check-box methodology of LEED and the narrowness of its approach.
On the other hand, you could equally take the view that environmentalism has been scuppered by political lobbying by companies with a vested interest.
Abandoning LEED without replacing it with an alternative is not the solution though. It's like throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
via techcrunch.com
Interesting alternative to concrete, but with much faster curing/hardening properties.
No Portland cement, but is it sustainable?
Sharp announced the latest in their series of energy efficient LED lights, a square ceiling light. Available in three models for small, medium, and large sized rooms, the light is 1.6 times more energy efficient than previous LED ceiling lights, making it the most efficient in the industry. Sharp has achieved this by combining direct illumination with the kind of highly efficient LEDs used in LCD televisions.
“The main feature of this LED ceiling light is that it’s the top performer in terms of energy efficiency. In particular, the model for small-sized rooms has a luminous efficiency of 81.3 lumens per watt, which is an industry-leading performance. Another feature of this light is that it utilizes the characteristics of LEDs to enable its brightness and color tone to be adjusted. So you can vary the brightness and the color tone in 10 steps. Even when it’s used as a night light, this light can be adjusted in three steps. So it offers 103 variations in brightness and color tone.”
The light also features an insect repellant structure, which makes it hard for bugs and dust to get inside. There is also a Favorite Setting button on the remote control, which remembers the preferred brightness and color tone. As an environmentally friendly feature, the light also has a Sleep Button, which can gradually fade the light to a low output night-light level or switch off completely.
“We plan to release this ceiling light on August 27. We expect it will retail at around 55,000 yen for the large room model, 45,000 yen for the medium room model, and 35,000 yen for the small room model. Lots of current lighting hasn’t yet been switched to LEDs or efficient light-bulbs, so we’d like to work on achieving a quick changeover to high energy efficiency.”
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Have LED light fittings finally become ready for the mass market?
