SUNfiltered: Earth Day Design — the RainXchange Rainwater Harvesting System

By Jeff McIntire-Strasburg on: rainxchange

Earth Day provides us with an opportunity to both reflect and act on our desire to use the planet’s resources in a sustainable manner. As we’ve noted in numerous posts, water may be the one resource we should focus on more, individually and collectively. No doubt, many of you have water-saving activities planned; a few of you may already be at work installing low-flow shower heads, faucet aerators, or even rain barrels.

Rain water harvesting makes a lot of sense: the initial investment can be quite low (especially if you do it yourself), and your plants love rain water. Unfortunately, as Rachelle Carson Begley once noted, an awful lot of commercially-available rain barrels are, well, ugly.

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PREFAB FRIDAY: Container Homes for the Tropics

By Bridgette Steffen on: Shipping Containers/ tropical housing

Inhabitat’s Prefab Friday columnhas seen its fair share of shipping container homes, but we’ve never seen shipping containers paired with bamboo as a construction material before. But now, Bamboo Groves, a design and construction firm in Costa Rica, has developed some great designs for homes made from insulated shipping containers and bamboo. Developed for the tropical climate, these prefab homes are different from the designs we are accustomed to — those designed for temperate or cooler climates. Many of these prefab and shipping container homes focus on passive heating and cooling. But in warmer climates, such as Central America, construction requires a different tactic - insulating from the heat and providing lots of natural ventilation to help cool.

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"Fluorescent-Killing" Bikei LED Tube Lamp

By Jack Moins on: LED lighting

Lighting consumes as much as a third of the energy budget of industrialized nations. This amounts to massive carbon dioxide emissions, and high expenses. Cutting even a fraction of these costs seems an attractive option.

LED lighting has arisen as a potential challenger to these older designs. It features a high efficiency, using less than 60 percent of the power of incandescent lighting and sometimes even less than fluorescents. And while costs of LED lighting are currently high, key breakthroughs have helped to send prices dropping into the realm of affordability.

For businesses that currently have fluorescent tube lighting looking to jump on the LED trend, there is a commercial option at last -- well, if they're in Japan, at least. Toshin Electric Co Ltd, a Japanese firm has released the Bikei LED tube lamp.

The tube lamp is designed as a drop-in replacement for fluorescent tubes (not to be confused with compact fluorescent bulbs, aka. CFLs) and features a long silicon substrate with lots of LEDs mounted on it, enclosed in a glass tube. The unit is be a bit pricey at $306 compared to around $14 for a fluorescent tube. However, the rated life is 40,000 hours, nearly 8 times the normal life of a standard fluorescent tube. Another perk is that the LED tubes are mercury-free, while traditional fluorescent tubes feature toxic mercury.

The LED tube also consumes only 20 to 24 watts, about half of what similar fluorescent bulbs its size do. It outputs 370 lumens, which is less than a traditional fluorescent tube, but has superior color quality to the emitted light, something office workers will, no doubt, appreciate.

Toshin plans to market the tubes to factory and store owners as well as local municipalities which employ fluorescent lighting in train stations and tunnels, or in street lamps. If you're a business owner in the U.S. and are as geeked about LED lighting as we are, unfortunately you'll have to wait for now. However, the market is growing fast, so it shouldn't be long before these designs hit the States as well.

via: GoodCleanTech

Arava Power Plans 80 Megawatt PV Plant

By Yoni Levinson on: Solar Power

Israel is a country that, along with the rest of its Middle East neighbors, gets a lot of sunlight. However, aside from its nearly ubiquitous rooftop solar water heaters, Israel has no solar power production facility of any kind… until now. Arava Power, a solar PV startup, is planning to break ground on an 80 MW facility. For reference, the current largest PV power plant (according to pvresources.com) is 60 MW, in Spain.

Arava had to secure approval from the Israeli government in order to rezone the land (which belongs to kibbutzes, traditional Israeli agricultural communities) for use as a power generating facility. Coming to terms with the Israel Electric Company was another major accomplishment – the IEC agreed to built a transmission line connecting the PV plant with the rest of the grid.

Driving all this progress is Arava’s founder, Yosef Israel Abramowitz, and chairman Ed Hofland, a veteran of Kibbutz Ketura – the kibbutz that is partnering on the project. Abramowitz started out his career as a journalist and political activist in the US, and later founded his own media company. He moved to Israel in 2006 to “take some time off”, but when he arrived he was shocked to discover that none of Israel’s electricity came from solar power, despite the powerful Middle Eastern sun rays. He decided then and there to found what eventually became Arava.

IKEA Launches Solar Lighting Line

By Megan Treacy on: Solar Lighting

Solar lighting has really taken off and more options are hitting the market, but unfortunately, a lot of them are still pretty expensive. Well, IKEA has come to the rescue with a new line of solar lighting that is pretty, functional and, best of all, IKEA-priced. Most of the lights are meant for outdoor use, but a couple of the options, like the desk lamp featured in the picture above, are suited for indoors. All of the nine lighting options feature rechargable batteries that can be juiced up from nine to twelve hours of sunlight. The lights are, of course, LEDs. You can click here to look at the available designs. All of the solar lights are available in stores, but not online. While these lights are not ground-breaking, I'm still very excited by the fact that they're being sold in a mass-market environment. The more stores that carry affordable, good-looking pieces like these, the more people who will have them in their homes, using solar energy instead of electricity! via: GoodCleanTech

Panasonic Introducing Home Compost Machine in Japan

By Megan Treacy

Panasonic has developed an electric compost machine for home use that turns your organic trash into fertilizer in just a few hours. The machine will be released at the end of April in Japan and there's no word as to whether it will be sold in the U.S.

The machine, the MS-N53, uses a platinum-palladium catalyst to break down the garbage and features settings to create wetter or dryer compost. Users can pick their preference and the trash will compost in three to six hours depending on the selection.

The drawbacks to this seemingly nifty gadget are the size and the price. The machine can only compost two kilograms of waste and with a platinum-palladium catalyst, you know it's going to be expensive. The MS-N53 will sell for the Japanese equivalent of $881.

With the current global mindset of saving instead of spending, I think the MS-N53 will have a hard time finding people to buy it. The idea is a good one. Most people would be keener on the idea of composting if they didn't have to worry about the time it takes to wait for waste to become fertilizer and especially if they could cut out the smells during that time, but it will take a much cheaper price to truly entice people. If this concept were improved with a lower price and a bigger capacity, I think Panasonic could be onto something.

via: GoodCleanTech

Home-Heating Mirrors

By Hank Green on: Solar Power

Photovoltaics are wonderful, but there are some far cheaper ways to harness the power of the sun to do good work for us. Capturing the sun's heat with solar water heaters, for example, is a far cheaper way to reduce your electricity bills than trying to turn that power into electricity.

Well, a new company called Practical Solar wants to take that up another step, and simply use mirrors to focus sunlight on your home, to keep it warm in the winter. Of course, this only works for people who get direct sun in their yards, and who live in sunny but cold places, but that's not an insignificant number of people.

Two of these Practical Solar-controlled mirrors focused on a room (preferably through a window) would have the same effect, roughly, as a space heater. Use ten of them, and you could burn your house down! (Note to Practical solar...please password protect the control system to protect against vengeful neighbors.)

The devices also provide natural lighting at almost all times of the day, so one could save power that way as well. Of course, having a little sun in your yard shining white-hot light into your eyes might detract from the view out of your window, but it's better than a high heating bill!

via: GreenTechMedia

Shower Head With Automatic Shutoff

By Yoni Levinson on: Water

When you live in Australia, droughts are very real, and water conservation is a part of life. One Australian recently came up with a household invention to help reduce the amount of water being used in the shower. The device, called the Aqualim (presumably the “lim” refers to “elimination” of water waste, or possibly “limit”), rations out a certain quantity of water per shower. After the quantity is used, the shower reduces its flow as a warning, and soon afterwards shuts off. Thus, if you say to yourself, “I want to get my water usage under X gallons”, the Aqualim makes it extremely easy to do so without constantly worrying if you’ve gone over. Of course – as is the case with many self-control devices – if you’re the kind of person who’s sensitive enough to buy an Aqualim, you are probably more water-conscious than most people already. Also, there is a reset button; if you really want a longer shower you can just hit it. But the device does address the tendency people have to linger in the shower after they’ve already washed up. Even someone who truly does not want to waste water might lose track of time, or simply not shut off the shower because hey, it feels nice in here and it’s pretty early in the morning. That’s why I’m going to vote in favor of this device. Think of it as an alarm clock for the shower. If we had to rely on our own will power to wake up in the morning, we’d all be late for work (bloggers excluded). Plus, the Aqualim could work synergistically with a low-flow showerhead to reduce water usage even further. via: Inhabitat

MIT Made a Virus Make a Battery

By Hank Green on: Batteries

Those crazy lab rats at MIT are attempting to radically diminish the cost of producing sophisticated nanotech cathodes and anodes by enlisting viruses to do the hard work for them.

New lithium ion batteries are being designed with increasingly sophisticated cathodes and anodes that allow fast charge, controlled discharge, longer lifetimes and higher power densities. The problem is, as these components become more advanced, so too do the batteries. Which is why practical electric vehicles (now that they're feasible at all) seem to be generally out of my price range.

The team at MIT genetically engineered viruses to excrete certain proteins. Those proteins then react with chemicals introduced to the environment to create complicated structures. Proteins are very good at directing compounds to create complicated structures...like life forms.

The viruses, in effect, pull the needed compounds (gold and cobalt for the anode and iron phosphate and carbon for the cathode) into nanowires. Both the cathode and the anode for the battery were constructed by viruses, though the battery created is only big enough to power a calculator, they same technique could be used to make batteries for cars.

The best thing is, all you need is the viruses (which are easy enough to multiply exponentially in a lab) and the raw materials to create these sophisticated components. So the cost of advanced battery production could drop like a rock.

Unfortunately, the batteries being produced are not up to the standards of traditionally designed nanotech batteries. They can only go through about 100 cycles (vs. more than 1000 for today's batteries) before starting to lose their charge. Of course, the team is confident that they can direct the viruses more effectively and increase that number significantly.

This technique could also mean a more cost-effective way to build and test new battery chemistries. The team is already experimenting with slightly different cathodes and anodes to attempt to increase power density.

And so maybe soon viruses will be doing all our work for us.

via: GreenTechMedia

CFLs Even More Like Incandescents

By Philip Proefrock on: CFL

"I don't like the twisty shape of compact fluorescent bulbs; that's why I don't use them." We've come across this excuse as one of the reasons people don't use CFLs.

GE now has an answer for that. The new GE Energy Smart CFL places a much smaller electronics package inside the neck of the bulb, and puts the familiar twisted fluorescent tubes underneath a cover, so that the entire bulb has the same size and shape as a conventional incandescent bulb.

The new bulbs started to arrive in some stores around the beginning of this year, but will start to be more broadly available (including being in the inventory of some big box chains) around Earth Day later this month (April 22). In addition to the 15-watt bulb, the line will eventually include 9-watt and 20-watt versions to be available by the middle of the year.

So, if there's a fixture where the the bulb is visible and you can't stand the idea of a visible CFL spiral, or if you have that beloved lamp with the shade that clamps directly onto the bulb, now you can fit it with a more responsible and energy-saving bulb that offers the appearance of an incandescent profile.

via: Sustainable Home

Florida Planning Solar-Powered City

By Megan Treacy

In the past couple of years, there have been quite a few plans unveiled around the world for fully sustainable cities and communities that run on a combination of renewable energies, but a new plan for a city in Florida would be the very first completely solar-powered city.

Florida is known for its sunny weather and solar projects have been successful there, so it makes sense that the state would stick to what it knows works. Utility Florida Power & Light is teaming up with Kitson & Partners to develop the 17,000-acre community called Babcock Ranch that will be near Fort Myers. The entire community will run off of a $300 million, 75 MW solar-powered generator.

The city will have a smart grid that will manage the energy used and generated and residents will have smart home features that allow them to monitor and control their energy use. Electric cars will have access to charging stations throughout the city and the street lamps will be solar powered too.

If this sounds like somewhere you'd like to live, you won't have to wait too long to move. Construction on the solar facility begins later this year and the city center will follow next year. The city will eventually include 19,500 homes, 6 million square feet of retail and light industrial space and 8,000 acres of green space. Beyond all the eco-friendly features of the new community, it also promises 20,000 permanent jobs. It sounds too good to be true, but I hope it isn't.

via: Inhabitat

Google Debuts PowerMeter Energy Monitoring Tool

By Mike Chino on: Energy

From joule-counting energy jars to twittering power monitors we’ve got power meters on the brain as of late, what with the upcoming Greener Gadgets Conference and Design Competition. Proving that great minds really do think alike, we’re excited to hear that Google is getting into the energy-saving act with their recently debuted PowerMeter. The application will collect information from utility meters and energy monitors and provide easy access to energy statistics right from your iGoogle homepage.

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LOTTO TURM: Stuttgart’s Shipping Container Skyscraper

By Bridgette Steffen on: Shipping Container tower

In the center of Stuttgart, Germany, lies an odd roundabout called Oesterreichischer Platz. Speeding traffic circles around it, and for the last 40 years no one has found much use for it, except as a parking lot. Now German designer Lars Behrendt has conceived of an incredible tower for the unused site that is comprised of 55 shipping containers stacked up like blocks. The Lotto Turm would function as a mixed-use development with a sphere at the top, which would be used to announce the city’s lotto numbers.

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Michelle Obama To Plant White House Edible Garden

By Bridgette Steffen on: White House Garden

Eleanor Roosevelt’s World War II-era Victory Garden was a shining example to Americans that they could grow their own food. And now Michelle Obama is following in her footsteps, taking up the cause by planting an 1,100 square foot edible garden on the South Lawn of the White House. Her hope is to educate children about locally grown food, inspiring them to eat healthier and encourage their families and community to follow suit.

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Is Boxed Water Better?

By Margaret Teich on: Water/Recycling

Only 14% of plastic water bottles are recycled, and Americans add 30 million PET water bottles to landfills every day! Aiming to provide an alternative to this alarming trend, Michigan-based Boxed Water Is Better is filling FSC-certified Tetra Pak boxes with Minnesota water and in doing so, giving us a new way to tote H20. But is boxed water truly the best option, or are there more ecologically-sound alternatives at hand?

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TOP SEVEN GREENWASHINGS!

By Jill Fehrenbacher on: Propagreenda

Now that green is trendy, marketers are starting see green when they hear the term ‘green’. As the green movement grows, so does the amount of ‘green-wash’ out there - stuff that is marketed to look ‘green’, organic or healthy, but in reality is anything but. Every industry seems to be susceptible to green-washing, from consumer goods, to buildings, to food. Here are the top ten worst examples of greenwash we’ve ever seen…

1. ‘Eco-shaped’ bottled water

2. Hybrid SUVs

3. Carbon credits

4. ‘Eco-friendly’ Mega Mansions

5. ‘Organic’ restaurants that don’t server vegetarian food

6. The Swiffer

7. ‘Clean Coal’

Worm Factory Compact Composting Kits

By Janet Lina on: Vermicomposting/ worm factory

The uneaten food and food preparation scraps we leave behind after ever meal weigh in as the single-largest component of the waste stream in the U.S. Want to do your part to reduce food waste but don’t know where to start? Washington-based Cascade Manufacturing Sales Inc. designed The Worm Factory, a composting kit complete with almost everything you need to reduce the amount of kitchen scraps, junk mail, and old newspapers you’re sending to the landfills. The Worm Factory promises odorless year-round operation, and with its compact footprint, it can even be used in apartments.

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A Starter Guide To Urban Gardening

By Marjorie Dunlap on: Urban Garden

So you’ve picked up a compact composting kit and are ready to start recycling your food scraps into nutrient-rich compost - the next step is to start a garden! For those with budding green thumbs, urban gardening can be an intimidating prospect. To clarify a sometimes-mysterious process, we’ve put together a very brief how-to guide on starting a flourishing container garden replete with herbs, veggies, and flowers.

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PREFAB FRIDAY: The Annie Residence

By Bridgette Steffen on: Prefab/ Rooftop Garden

This modern and warm prefab home is a stunning example of the beauty and quality you can achieve through the efficiency of prefab construction.. Inspired by multiple cultures, this eye-catching design by Austin-based Bercy Chen Studio features outdoor living space, water features and lots of windows to create a comfortable and attractive home. The home is constructed with a modular steel frame and thermasteel panels for an efficient and waste-minimizing design. With two families living in this home, the architects divided the house, providing separate, but inter-connected living areas for each family.

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RENOVATION: A Home Built Around 3 Trees

By Olivia Chen on: Xeriscaping

Trees are often the victim of building construction, so we were excited when Jeremy Levine shared his design for a Eagle Rock renovation and addition — built around three existing trees — in Los Angeles with us. The project included renovating the current home while adding 400 square feet to the existing house. Jeremy’s design for addition not only preserved the existing trees on the site, it integrated them into the design of the home by creating a courtyard to help the owners appreciate the trees’ beauty. Additionally, the home features everything from passive daylighting and evaporative cooling to keep the interior comfortable and solar panels and a green roof to minimize the house’s environmental impact.

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