Nov 22, 09
‘Reuse It Yourself’ Movement Could Revolutionise DIY
By Rebecca Schischa DIY enthusiasts poised to reuse old building materials Some “14 million tonnes” of unwanted building materials generated by the construction industry could be saved from being dumped in landfills in a new reclaim and resell scheme. Under the new initiative, three ‘ReIY’ (Reuse It Yourself) centres will be piloted across the country – in Wirral, Waltham Forest and Tees Valley – offering a cheaper, greener alternative to DIY. Aimed at the SME building trade...
Conceptualizing the One Planet City
Back in April at the EcoCity World Summit in San Francisco I met Jennie Moore, a fellow alumna from the University of British Columbia’s School of Community and Regional Planning. As I chatted with Jennie during a lunchtime break at the conference, she told me that after earning her Master’s degree in city planning at UBC several years back, she returned to pursue a PhD. She’s currently working on her doctoral research, investigating the concept of a “one planet city.” I was...
Architecture: Green and Greener
A new report from the UN Environment Program (UNEP) released last week (downloadable here) [re]confirmed what many of us already know, but what policy-makers and giant development corporations still need to hear from places like the UN: that the building sector plays a huge role in achieving the greenhouse gas reductions necessary to effectively combat climate change. Achim Steiner, UN Under-Secretary General and UNEP Executive Director, said:" Energy efficiency, along with cleaner and...
Reporting Back: The 2010 Imperative Global Emergency Teach-In
The 2010 Imperative Global Emergency Teach-in just wrapped up, and I think it's safe to say that the event was a great success. Though I haven't heard reports about how many people actually tuned in, Ed Mazria told me beforehand that they were predicting at least a quarter million attendees worldwide. If even a portion of that number heard the 3.5-hour teach-in, there's no doubt that we now have a new flock of green design evangelists in the making. The event was informative, inspiring, and...
Sustainable Development: Jubilee Wharf, UK
For too long now, BedZED has been the quoted example of zero-carbon sustainable development in the UK - and its many teething problems and some more serious faults have thus undermined the credibility of the zero-carbon movement. However, the brains behind it, Bill Dunster, have been turning out many more schemes since that 2002 breakthrough, including a tiny development in East London (the somewhat less pretty BowZED). social housing units in the Midlands and the first in a promising series...
Car-free Urban Living in Vauban, Germany
This year in Worldchanging's hometown of Seattle, one of our allies, Alan Durning, has been chronicling his 365-day commitment to living car-free in the city with his family. We've been following along, hearing about the challenges and triumphs of his undertaking. A little farther away, near Freiburg, Germany, a whole town has been working towards the same lifestyle goal, in a sustainable urban setting called Vauban which was completed this year, after 13 years of development. On a former...
BioRegional Solutions for Living on One Planet
by Pooran Desai and Sue Riddlestone (Green Books, 2003) BioRegional may just be the single coolest environmental group on the planet. It's the group's recent work -- like the BedZED development and their greening of London's 2012 Olympics -- that is particularly exciting, but they got their start by asking how local sustainable-development efforts can thrive in a global economy.
George Monbiot's Heat: How to Stop the Planet Burning
These are hard days, but thrilling. They're difficult, and scary, because for the first time we're coming to understand that things are worse than we thought, and the time we have to act on climate change should perhaps be measured in years, not decades. They're exciting because we're beginning to see paths forward that could lead us out of this catastrophe and into a better future: they're still faint, and we're far from home and night is not far off, but they do exist. George Monbiot's new...
Z-Squared: Greener Than Platinum
For quite some time, BedZED has held the top slot in our unofficial ranking of the hippest, greenest residences around. Completed in 2002, Beddington Zero Energy Development excelled not only in terms of sustainability but in terms of livability and aesthetic appeal. Recently, the development hit some rocky ground and sent green geeks wondering whether better buildings were possible (or whether the ones we idealized were perhaps falling short). Fortunately for BedZED's developers, the...
Saving The World, Drip By Drip
Ten years ago, World Bank VP Ismail Serageldin said "If the wars of this century were fought over oil, the wars of the next century will be fought over water." Though some people at the UN disagree, there is no question that water scarcity is a looming problem of our time. What many urban greens don't know is that solving the world's water problem requires solving the irrigation problem. Both in the developed and undeveloped world, irrigation is a boon to agriculture, and in some ways a...
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