Good Fact

Downloading Music to Lower Your Carbon Footprint

- Adam Clare

Going digital is a good way to lower your carbon footprint when it comes to buying music. A new study has been released that assesses the carbon impact of various ways to purchase music from downloading to driving to the mall to buy a CD. It is not shocking to see that digital music is the best way to get tunes.

What this means for the future of music piracy? Well I think yet again we may find that piracy is surprisingly green.

That scenario involves a customer buying a CD online and having it delivered via a light-duty truck; the more carbon-intensive options examined by the study are express air shipment of the CD, and the customer visiting a store to buy the CD.

The advantage for digital comes largely because CDs must be manufactured, packaged and transported over long distances.

Even in a situation in which a consumer downloads the music — and then burns it onto a CD and puts it in a CD case — the carbon differential is 40 percent in favor of the download, the study found. If the downloaded music is not burned onto a CD, the differential rises to 80 percent.

PuRE Makes Swimming Pools a Good Thing

- Adam Clare

Here’s a groovy idea that will hopefully take off: use swimming pools to filter water. Swimming pools consume a lot of water and energy and this concept is designed to take these resource-hogs and turn them into something useful. It’s part of a contest to make suburbs livable.

PuRE

Using the same principles employed in constructed wetlands, puRE treats wastewater through six stages. Wastewater first flows into closed treatment tanks during the first two stages before reaching four separate purification cells in stages 3-6. These purification cells contain several species of aquatic plants and animals which remove pollutants naturally and even allow for small-scale food production as a by-product. The solids from the wastewater stream are filtered and directed to a communal methane digester, generating another bounty for its users – power.

For those of with you with pools but think drinkable water is too expensive here’s some tips on how to make your swimming pool a little kinder for the environment.

Concepts for Vertical Farming

- Adam Clare 1 Comment

Vertical urban farming is pretty awesome and here’s 20 mockups of what urban farming could look like.

urban farming concept

If cities needed to be redesigned to fit a changing environment, a design like this one for the city of San Francisco would not only be environmentally friendly, but this one is estimated to be able to feed over 7 million people.

The world of vertical farming could offer so much to the world as it concerns food, the environment, and our living space issues, as its estimated that we could have as many as 9 billion people on the planet by 2050. It will take a lot of planning, and a lot of energy, but if most of these buildings can be somewhat self energy sufficient, vertical farming could be viable within a relatively short period of time.

US Postal Service Reveals Large Green Roof

- Adam Clare

In New York City the US Postal Service will house the largest green roof in the state. Is it just me or is NYC becoming one of the greenest cities in North America?

The new 2.5 acre park sits on the seventh story of the 2.2 million square foot facility. The new roof will last 50 years, which is twice as long as the roof they just replaced. Polluted stormwater runoff will be reduced by up to 75% in the summer and 35% in the winter. The roof will also help the facility reduce its energy use by 30% by 2015. Native plants and trees are used on the roof and emphasize drought tolerant and low maintenance species, which will be watered with collected rainwater. Planted species include coral carpet, Calamagrostis grass, John Creech, Immergrunchen and Fudaglut sedums. The landscape of the roof was designed by Elizabeth Kennedy Landscape Architects.

Greening the Empire State Building [video]

- Adam Clare

I really enjoy how this video from the American propaganda department really stresses the importance of efficiency as the key element to make buildings green. We can build green all we want, but it is vital that we take existing buildings and increase their efficiency – just like the Sears Tower.

Via Worldchanging

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