Environment

Bamboo is Super!

- Adam Clare

Bamboo grows quickly and so to is the market for bamboo. The plant can be used for many different things from building to bicycles, but what’s so great about it today is that more construction sites are aware of how great bamboo is. Bamboo can be used to build stand-alone structures or be used as scaffolding at a construction site – either way bamboo also acts as a carbon sink.

The fast growing rugged grass has “unrivaled capacity to capture carbon” the article claims.

The bamboo industry hails the crop’s other environmental benefits. Because it shoots up quickly – as much as a meter (over 3 feet) in a day – it is highly renewable.

According to the Bamboo Clothing website, it thrives without fertilizers or pesticides, requires little water, grows on slopes too inhospitable for other crops, and has a 10 times higher yield per acre than cotton. Want more? It does not uproot soil (harvesting involves cutting it as it’s a grass) and it’s 100 percent biodegradable, the website notes.

The World Bamboo Organization says today’s bamboo market is $10 billion and could double in five years. China produces about 80 percent of the world’s supply, but other nations are turning to it as a cash crop.

Read more here.

Denmark Increases Green Energy Transition

- Adam Clare 1 Comment

Denmark is getting looking to have 50% of it’s energy come from wind power and are looking to further their need to import any energy at all. Not only is Denmark looking to lower the need for foreign energy they are trying to decrease the amount of energy that the country uses.

“Denmark will once again be the global leader in the transition to green energy,” said Lidegaard. “This will prepare us for a future with increasing prices for oil and coal. Moreover, it will create some of the jobs that we need so desperately, now and in the coming years.”

The agreement will help Denmark achieve its goal of supplying 100% of its energy from renewables by 2050, including electricity, heating, industry and transport.

Read more here.

What’s in a Lot?

- Adam Clare

Here’s a challenge from Eran Ben-Joseph: name a great parking lot.

Couldn’t do it, could you? Neither could I, and neither could Ben-Joseph. In a new book ReThinking a Lot: The Design and Culture of Parking he explores the horribleness of all that space that car drivers demand. If you look at North American cities in the 60s and 70s all you’ll see is a giant slab of pavement for automobiles instead of people. Today, those cities are dealing with the car-created destruction.

Where’s the good news in this? Well, Ben-Joseph’s book is all about finding ways to make these wastes of space practical and helpful to the areas around them. Some solutions might be to design a parking lot to serve the local community or to make these parking spots actually green.

So what can be done to make parking lots greener and better integrated into their civic surroundings? Ben-Joseph recommends a menu of ideas to improve parking lots according to their settings — which he regards as “a healthier approach to planning, rather than giving prescriptive ideas about how to design them.”

For one thing, planners might simply plant trees throughout parking lots, as the architect Renzo Piano did at Fiat’s Lingotto factory in Turin, Italy. Low-use parking lots need not be entirely paved in asphalt, either: Miami’s Sun Life Stadium features large areas of grass lots that are environmentally better year-round.
“The whole space does not have to be designed the same way,” Ben-Joseph says. “Overflow parking can be designed differently, and not paved with asphalt.”

Lots can also incorporate green technology. Some parking spaces in Palo Alto, Calif., have charging stalls for electric vehicles. A Walmart parking lot in Worcester, Mass., has 12 wind turbines that generate clean electricity for the store. The Sierra Nevada Brewery parking lot in Chico, Calif., has solar panels built into its lattice structure.

Read more at Physorg.

Ontario Chooses to Protect Old-Growth Forest

- Adam Clare

In northern Ontario there is a region called Temagami and it is absolutely stunning as it holds Ontario’s oldest old-growth forest and is the home to a diverse wildlife. In a tradition of profiteering, some people want to destroy the area and plans were set in motion in place to permit that – until now. The province has decided to commit to protecting the area from destruction.

Check the video below to see the region:

Wolf Lake from Rob Nelson on Vimeo.

The decision is a victory for the 300-year-old red pine trees, said Ontario’s environment commissioner, Gord Miller. He said the plan would have allowed logging of the ecologically treasured trees if the mining intensified.

“The essence of the ecological dispute in that area is whether or not we should preserve the red pine old-growth system,” Miller said.

“The trees are the key issue. The government has reconsidered and that means the trees stay, which is critical in the long term.”

Read more at the Star.

Green Spaces Can Reduce Gun Violence

- Adam Clare 1 Comment

Countries and regions with a lot of gun violence may want to note that the simple act of providing more green space in urban areas can reduce gun-related crime. In the USA (ranked ninth globally for gun deaths per capita) researchers have found that converting unused lots into parks has had a positive effect on peace!

A new study, published online this week in the American Journal of Epidemiology, offers some of the more promising evidence. Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania studied a 10-year project in Philadelphia to convert vacant lots into park space. They found that gun-related assaults significantly declined in areas around the lots that had been greened. Vandalism and criminal mischief also significantly fell off.

Residents in some areas around these newly converted green spaces also reported feeling less stress and getting more exercise – presumably some of the byproducts of a neighborhood reclaiming its streets from crime.

Read more at The Atlantic Cities.

Scroll To Top