Month: October 2010

Solar Energy to Power Trains

- Adam Clare

Trains are a great transit solution and are efficient at moving people and goods. Trains are really a green way to travel.

In Belgium, they are taking this green form of travelling and making it even better by powering the trains using solar power.

More than 16,000 solar panels will be installed on the roof of the high-speed rail tunnel stretching just over 2 miles long. The tunnel is primarily used by the high-speed train connecting Amsterdam and Paris via Brussels.

The roof’s total surface area is 50,000 m2, roughly equivalent to 8 football fields. The installation should generate an estimated 3.3 MWh of electricity per year.

The installation commenced this summer on the tunnel’s northern side. Project completion is scheduled for December 2010. The total investment budget is $20.1 million.

Infrabel, the Belgian railway infrastructure manager, will use the green energy in the Antwerp North-South junction (including Antwerp Central Station) and to power both conventional and high-speed trains running on the Amsterdam-Brussels-Paris line. With this project Infrabel has re-emphasized its belief in renewable energy as a viable alternative, and complement, to conventional energy sources.

Read the full press release.

Build a City by Limiting Parking

- Adam Clare

Parking spaces for automobiles take away precious land from other uses and too many parking spaces can effectively kill a community. In Boston where they do anything to ensure cars reign supreme urban planners are turning their backs on providing parking spaces in order to revitalize the city.

The pro-car attitude is very 20th century and it’s good to see that more and more cities in North America are finding ways to ensure people can use the city as more than a place to drive and work.

City planners are in the middle of an extensive re-thinking of Boston’s zoning codes. As they work, neighborhood by neighborhood, to update the code, they’re flipping the conventional thinking about parking on its head: Instead of mandating that minimum levels of parking accompany new developments, they’re pushing to establish maximum parking caps.

Minimum parking requirements are relics of a time when urban vitality depended on developers’ ability to draw suburbanites into the city to work, shop, or live. As the suburbs boomed, cities imported suburban-style infrastructure and grafted it onto a decaying urban fabric. The result wasn’t just a landscape scarred by highways and pockmarked by monolithic concrete parking garages; this postwar shift also left reams of zoning code built on the assumption that the world revolved around the automobile.

Patterns of living, and travel, have evolved. Residents now work and shop in closer proximity to their homes. The city is no longer at the automobile’s mercy. But zoning hasn’t caught up to this new reality. Until now.

Environmental officials imposed flat parking caps downtown during the 1970s, but this new approach is surgical. The old parking cap made wide allowances for automobiles at residential developments. City planners are now arguing that residential developments should be given less leeway, not more, since many urban residents don’t need a car to get to work. That’s true in the Back Bay and downtown, and especially along the waterfront, where the BRA is trying to create a critical mass of technology and innovation firms by pushing small business incubators and cheap live-work space.

Developers aren’t huge fans of large parking requirements for urban apartment buildings, since parking garages are expensive to construct. Often, the cost of building parking spaces can make or break a project. Developers are also finding that renters aren’t demanding as many parking spots as they used to. Archstone’s Chinatown tower, for example, was built with a glut of excess parking; the last two residential towers to enter permitting in that neighborhood have been designed with dramatically lower quantities of parking. And the envelope can be pushed even further.

Read the rest at the Boston Globe.

Tubeless Toilet Paper

- Adam Clare

Nobody really thinks that much about toilet paper and I think that needs to change. Kimberly Clark took five years to respond to Greenpeace’s campaign to get the company to kill fewer trees.

Today Kimberly Clark they have done one more green thing and this time with no needed push from environmental organizations. In order to save trees and money Kimberly Clark has announced the tubeless toilet paper roll.

The 17 billion toilet paper tubes produced annually in the USA account for 160 million pounds of trash, according to Kimberly-Clark estimates, and could stretch more than a million miles placed end-to-end. That’s from here to the moon and back — twice. Most consumers toss, rather than recycle, used tubes, says Doug Daniels, brand manager at Kimberly-Clark. “We found a way to bring innovation to a category as mature as bath tissue,” he says.

He won’t disclose the tubeless technology used but says it’s a special winding process. A similar process is used on tissue the company sells to businesses but not to consumers.

Behind the marketing push is a growing consumer demand for environmentally friendly products.

One environmentalist applauds the move. “It’s a positive example of how companies are seeking creative ways to reduce environmental impact,” says Darby Hoover of the Natural Resources Defense Council. But more relevant than nixing the tubes would be more recycled content in its paper, Hoover says. While Scott Naturals normally has 40% recycled content, this test product does not — but future versions will, Daniels says.

Read more about toilet paper here.

Superglue

- Adam Clare

Surgery is obviously complicated and recovery times from surgeries can be really fast or seem to drag on forever. In order to drastically speed up recovery times of people who have to have their chest opened up doctors are now using superglue to help heal the bones effected.

Superglue is harmless in our nice bodies and the glue used in the surgery is actually derived from natural sources.

Instead of it taking six to eight weeks for the bone to fuse back together, “we do it in 24 hours.” The glue makes it rock solid within a day.

A study released Sunday suggests the use of adhesive in chest surgery reduces the normal recovery time by half. Patients have less physical disability in the first six weeks after surgery and can breathe deeply sooner, Dr. Fedak reports. He adds that patients are able to cough with less discomfort and require significantly less medication such as narcotics to manage pain.

No complications or side effects from the glue were reported among the 55 patients in the randomized controlled trial.

The procedure has the potential to improve post-operative care for an estimated 1.4 million open-chest surgeries performed worldwide each year, according to the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada

Read the rest of the article at The Globe.

Thanks to Astrid for the find!

Take a Week Off to Think

- Adam Clare

Are you living in a shotgun shack, are you living in another part of the world, or are you behind the wheel of a large automobile? Ever wonder how did you get here?

Well as the days go by we tend to get caught up in the mundane activities of working culture. To ensure that you don’t waste your life in a cubicle farm (or something similar) try taking a week off to just think.

It was an enlightening experience that allowed me to make a clear decision on what I wanted to do next with my personal and professional life.

In an age where we are connecting to everything through our phones, internet, facebook, twitter, etc; we are constantly being interrupted. A couple of years ago, I heard a statistic that having a Blackberry is equivalent to smoking two joints because you are always being interrupted, and never really “here”. Just think about that for a second.

By disconnecting from the world, time moved really slow. I really got to enjoy the moment, which we often neglect in our chaotic worlds. This is the time worth cherishing, which is more valuable than the time that flies by because you’re working hard on something “you’re passionate” about.

Read more at Life Hacker.

Once in a lifetime.

Scroll To Top