Environment – Page 41 – Things Are Good

This New Paris Community Demonstrates Sustainable Cities

Good Street from Streetmix

In the capital of France, the new Clichy-Batignolles development demonstrates how a city can have a carbon-neutral footprint while providing modern living. The development itself is built on old industrial lands and includes community housing, a theatre, and many other important features of a city including a massive park. The neighbourhood focusses on sustainable buildings and sustainable transit; the developer specifically designed the spaces to be walkable and ensuring that there is no need for a car.

All buildings are being constructed to the demanding Passivhaus standard, meaning that the energy consumption required for heating is just 15 kilowatt-hours a square metre of floor space per year, and the overall energy consumption is under 50kWh asqm of floor space per year.

The buildings are south-facing and super insulated, capturing and retaining the sunâ€™s heat and warmth given off by their occupants and technology. Buildings are composed of renewable materials while other materials such as PVC are banned.

The area will contain 40,000 sq m of solar photovoltaic roofs that will eventually generate around 4500-megawatt-hours a year to supply 85 per cent of the remaining energy needs, while deep geothermal energy will provide 83 per cent of the space heating and domestic hot water, so that the entire site will have a carbon neutral footprint.

Diamonds Suck; De Beers Gives Up

Back in 2006 Josh Kaufman got married and during that process he discover the sham of modern diamonds – they aren’t that valuable. Kaufman created the website Diamonds Suck to raise awareness of a diamond alternative: maisonette. It was known then that blood diamonds were a problem and still today people are dying for something that can be made in a lab. Diamond companies don’t like being portrayed as killers (and destroyers of nature) pushed back with marketing efforts; while that was happening they were trying to fend off another threat: fake diamonds.

Today there is no reason to spend a large sum on diamonds for a ring and there’s no reason to continue mining the planet for them. Indeed, it’s good to read that the world’s largest diamond miner, De Beers, has admitted defeat and is switching to manufacturing diamonds.

Here’s Kaufman’s rationale for not evening considering diamonds:

If I can prevent a single reader from needlessly dropping $6,000-10,000+ on a diamond engagement ring, this site will be a success. Financial worries are the #1 cause of stress in a married relationship – there is absolutely NO excuse to start your married life by taking on that level of debt.
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Moissanite is a rare, naturally-occuring gemstone that is typically found in very small quantities in meteorites, corundum deposits, and kimberlite. (The chemical name of moissanite is Silicon Carbide.) Moissanite has several qualitites in common with diamond: it is transparent, extremely hard (9.25 on the Mohs scale, compared to 10 for diamond), and has a high index of refraction (2.65 – 2.69, compared to 2.42 for diamond). When a large rough moissanite sample is cut and polished, the end result is a very bright, brilliant, transparent gemstone that is indistinguishable from diamond to the human eye.

Diamonds suck

How to Deal with Problematic Recyclables

Recycling programs still can’t recycle every consumer good, which means that we still need to think about what we put in the blue box (or whatever colour it is where you live). Some plastics are too hard to recycle and some containers too hard to clean. The CBC recently ran a live Q&A (video above) on common concerns around recyclables and what to do about it. Of course, the best thing you can do as a consumer is just buy less stuff and reuse what you can. Reduce, reuse, and recycle are in that order for a reason.

Coffee pods

Why they’re a problem

These contain many parts with different materials that need to be separated. In some places, like B.C., the plasticÂ from plastic pods canÂ be recycled when separated. But in other recycling programs,Â because the pods areÂ small,Â pieces of them can drop through mechanical screens at recycling plants and contaminate other streams, especially glass.

What are the options?

The plastic parts can be theoretically recovered, provided everything else is separated out. Some brands let you return these. There are also private programs that recycle them.

Costa Rica to Ban use of Fossil Fuels

forest and river

Back in 2015 Costa Rica ran on only renewable energy for the first quarter of the year, and since then they have improved. The country now regularly runs their power grid using only renewable sources and their new president wants to take that to the next level. The government announced that the long-term goal of Costa Rica is to decarbonize their entire energy consumption. Yes that means cars, boats, and anything else that currently consume fossil fuels.

“Decarbonization is the great task of our generation and Costa Rica must be one of the first countries in the world to accomplish it, if not the first,” said Alvarado, a former journalist and political scientist.
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At 38, making him Costa Rica’s youngest ever president, Alvarado is keen to lead the way in environmental initiatives as “the world’s decarbonization laboratory,” meeting the demands of the Paris Climate Agreement.

Modern Shipping Uses Sails

The shipping industry recently agreed to care about the environment and this led the Guardian to examine how the industry will change. Here at Things Are Good we’ve been keeping an eye on old-school propulsion used on ships since 2005 and one difference now from over a decade ago is the efficiency of hybrid systems. Mixing solar, sails, and other kinds of enhancements with industrial shipping is being explored by all kinds of companies now. In another decade news that ships are more efficient than ever before will likely be standard news – stay tuned for 2028! In the meantime we can envisage what ships will look like and how they’ll reduce the carbon footprint of the shipping industry.

But much could be done more quickly by retrofitting existing ships with technology to cut their fuel use and hence emissions, according to the ITF. Here are just four:

Fitting shipsâ€™ bows with a bulbous extension below the water line reduces drag enough to cut emissions 2-7%;

A technique known as air lubrication, which pumps compressed air below the hull to create a carpet of bubbles, also reduces drag and can cut emissions by a further 3%;

Replacing one propeller with two rotating in opposite directions recovers slipstream energy and can make efficiency gains of 8-15%,

Cleaning the hull and painting it with a low-friction coating can deliver gains of up to 5%.