sustainable

Sustainable Haircuts

- Adam Clare

Sustainability is great and even local and small business can benefit from shifting the attitude to a more planet-friendly one. In Toronto a hair salon has started a bunch of sustainability practices at the benefits are grand!

Over the last 17 years or so, Phillips has turned the place into something of an eco-hub, reducing the business’s electricity consumption by more than 50 percent and purging their hair and beauty product of what he considers to be environmentally harmful and personally toxic ingredients. A member of the Windshare Cooperative (co-owners of the Exhibition Place Wind Turbine with Toronto Hydro Energy Services) and the Toronto Environmental Alliance, Phillips has earned several awards for his efforts, including most recently, a Green Circle Award for Environmental Stewardship at the Mirror Awards honouring Canadian hairdressers, stylists, salons and spas. In an industry known for excess, glitzy surfaces and throw-away ideas, Phillips has tried to create a green heart at its core.

Read the rest of the article.

Sustainable Bus Shelter

- Adam Clare 1 Comment

Waiting for the bus is not the most exciting thing to do in the world, but it is a very necessary one. (And let’s face it waiting for a bus and reading a book is better than starring at a license plate in front of you during a traffic jam.) Designer Tiffany Roddis has come up with a bus shelter that is better than most and is also good for the environment.
Bus shelter

The stylish new eco friendly bus stop will attract new tourists and new custom to lower pollution from existing car owners. The frustration of late buses and complicated timetables can now be reassured by the new colour coded main head-stream. It’s easy-read route finder can accommodate everyone, comforting users that they can arrive to work, school or general destinations on-time by guaranteed GPS signals.

Here’s Tiffany’s project page.

Keeping it Cool Without Air Conditioning

- Adam Clare

In really hot countries air conditioning in buildings might seem like a necessity; however, it is possible to design buildings that stay cool in the heat without even using electricity. In Burkina Faso there is a school that was specially designed to stay nice and cool by manipulating airflows.

There’s not much electricity to go around, Kéré says. “So there is no air-conditioning. It’s too expensive for a country like Burkina Faso.”

So when he designed this secondary school for Dano in his native land, he built it with innovative, elegant, distinctive and yet simply constructed split-level roofing and ceiling structures that funnel warm air up and out of the buildings.
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Tall window slats that can be adjusted control both light and heat. Three to a room, they pull air into the classroom. Heat rises.
To use that movement of air, a series of narrow “chimney” gaps between the convex wave shapes in the highly insulating concrete and brick ceiling pulls the hot air up and out the roof.

Read more and see pictures here.

Sustainable Power in Southern Mexico

- Adam Clare 1 Comment

Here’s an informative short video on energy entrepreneurs in a poor part of southern Mexico the provide sustainable electricity to locals. The generators are built locally and are designed to allow almost anyone build a generator. This is really good to see happening.

Solar Power is Cheaper than Nuclear

- Adam Clare 1 Comment

Solar power is a wonderfully sustainable source of energy and its biggest hurdle to wide adoption is cost (and going up against subsidized fossil fuels). Well, now the nuclear crowd can’t claim that solar is too expensive because the fact of the matter is that solar power is cheaper than nuclear!

It’s no secret that the cost of producing photovoltaic cells (PV) has been dropping for years. A PV system today costs just 50 percent of what it did in 1998. Breakthroughs in technology and manufacturing combined with an increase in demand and production have caused the price of solar power to decline steadily. At the same time, estimated costs for building new nuclear power plants have ballooned.

The result of these trends: “In the past year, the lines have crossed in North Carolina,” say study authors John Blackburn and Sam Cunningham. “Electricity from new solar installations is now cheaper than electricity from proposed new nuclear plants.”

If the data analysis is correct, the pricing would represent the “Historic Crossover” claimed in the study’s title.

Two factors not stressed in the study bolster the case for solar even more:

1) North Carolina is not a “sun-rich” state. The savings found in North Carolina are likely to be even greater for states with more sunshine –Arizona, southern California, Colorado, New Mexico, west Texas, Nevada and Utah.

2) The data include only PV-generated electricity, without factoring in what is likely the most encouraging development in solar technology: concentrating solar power (CSP). CSP promises utility scale production and solar thermal storage, making electrical generation practical for at least six hours after sunset.

Keep reading.

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