Environment

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.

World’s Largest Wind Farm Starts Sprouting

- Adam Clare

Britain has started construction on the world’s largest wind power generating installation. This will be a massive increase in renewable energy hitting the power grid in the UK – and a benefit for all thanks to less pollution.

Check out the video on the project:

The 100 turbines, each measuring more than 300ft, will power more than 200,000 homes. It will increase the amount of energy generated from offshore wind in the UK by a third to 1,314MW, compared to 1,100MW in the whole of the rest of the world.

Mr Huhne said the UK is leading the world in an exciting new technology that will cut carbon emissions and boost green jobs.

Read more at The Telegraph

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.

Green Buildings Build Momentum

- Adam Clare

If I had my way every new building would have to be green, lucky for me other people are thinking along the same line. Green buildings are on the rise in the USA and the NPR has a good piece exploring what this means:

While much of the U.S. real estate market has been floundering, one area has not seen a dip. Green building now accounts for nearly one-third of new construction in the U.S. That’s up from 2 percent in 2005, according to McGraw-Hill Construction, which tracks the industry.

The numbers suggest a revolution is taking place within an industry that is historically slow to change. There are many factors — and many players — in this move toward green building.

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