Upon arriving at Curious Pictures, I (Michael the new Green Intern) spent some time observing different areas of the building and workplace. After two days, I had put together a list of preliminary suggestions of ways in which we can be a “greener,” more sustainable company.
- Replace all existing light fixtures with LED or Compact Fluorescent lights.
- Use the power management capabilities of all non-render farm computers.
- Purchase more recycling bins. Though Curious does recycle already, the bins that exist are not accessible to a large percentage of employees here. There need to be as many recycling bins as there are trash cans.
- Hire a contractor to assess the amount of air leaking from loose connections in our windows and doors, and fix necessary areas.
- Consider investing in wood that is harvested in a sustainable way.
- Encourage employees to use public transportation to get to work each day.
- Eliminate bottled water. Purchase reusable water bottles and coffee mugs for each employee.
- Invest in eco-friendly cleaning products.
- Purchase electric hand-dryers for the bathrooms at Curious to cut down on paper towel use.
- Compile a list of charities, soup kitchens, and other sources for us to give back to the community.
Rome has a bike sharing program where you can check the current location/availability of bikes online through satellite. This is the sort of program we need everywhere - beyond zipcar, let’s get zipbike. And the thinking should be expanding to include objects other than bikes.
There’s no reason we couldn’t share rarely-used items like hammers, lawnmowers, potato ricers… Except, of course, our culture’s association of ownership with affluence. We need to switch our way of thinking to value access and product-service systems over hoarding goods we simply don’t need (and which can actually be a burden to us in terms of cost and storage space). According to research done by John Thackara, the average power drill us used about 10 time over its entire life. Communities throughout the US are already experimenting with these ideas and getting great results. Public libraries in Berkeley, San Francisco, and Oakland now loan out tools ranging from screw drivers to cement mixers. They have a check-out rate of about 6000 tools a month. The Atlanta Community ToolBank in Georgia has about 50,000 members. The Hub in London takes the sharing idea in a different direction - you can rent space in an office (complete with wi-fi, fax machines, printers, water cooler, and pretty much anything else you need) rather that having to buy one of everything of your own.
How many of us already use laudromats, taxis, gyms, Netflix? What else could we include in this model? Let’ s brainstorm and see if there is anything Curious could contribute to this idea - maybe a space on the wiki where we could offer up our cool but rarely-used stuff for other Curious employees to borrow? Industrial kitchen items you use for a dinner party once a year? Lomo camera? Animation hole punch? Long arm stapler? Tripod? Complete works of Egon Schiele art books? What goodies do we collectively have stored that could enrich the lives of others without costing money, materials, or extra space?
Because of surfaces that radiate heat, such as dark concrete and tar roofs, and a lack of plants, cities suffer from something called the heat island effect. During the summer cities can be up to 10 degrees hotter than the surrounding area. What can be done? Paint roofs white, plant green roofs, plant trees, replace dark concrete with a lighter colored surface. All of this will not only make being outdoors a lot more pleasant, it will lower the heating bills of those trying to stay cool indoors with their AC. As New York goes green over coming years, this is one of many great things we have to look forward to.
Here are some fun renderings of what future city life could be like. The first one, of Liuzhuo, China, is already on its way to becoming reality. Liuzhou would, in addition to having all these sweet plants and farms on all its roofs, return as much clean, refiltered water to the surrounding wetlands as it uses. For more info on Liuzhou and all sorts of other great buildings and communities of the future, check out the McDonough + Partners website. The second picture is the Greenbridge building of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, which creates a mixed-use, self sustaining little community with plenty of green space. They are expecting to have occupancy by fall of 2009. The future is pretty much happening right now!
A lot of defunct electronics head to China for recycling. When I think “recycle” I think some kind of high-tech, automated plant. In actuality, recycling cell phones and other electronics is often done by hand (these products are not currently made for easy disassembly), and many contain enough heavy metals to be harmful to humans. We need to rethink the way we manufacture products - so that they are made with easy recycling in mind from the beginning. And we also need to use electronics until they no longer serve us functionally, not just until the next shiny toy comes along. Step one - let’s all contact our cell phone service providers and ask that they provide easy and safe to recycle phones. If they know it’s on our minds they’ll be a lot more likely to do it.
From WorldChanging: A User’s Guide to the 21st Century:
So many people are moving into cities that we are building an urban area the size of Seattle every four to seven days. By some estimates, two-thirds of the urban areas that will cover the plantet in 2030 don’t even exist yet; put another way, two-thirds of the planet’s future cities have not yet been built.
That may seem scary, but it also holds a lot of potential. Green building and urban planning are easier to deal with than retrofitting of existing cities, and the possibilities are less limited. Innovations in green design are already happening in countries around the world. It’s exciting to see how those future cities (or extensions of existing cities) will turn out. How can we help New York keep up with the new guys?
The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power actually has a program where, if you take a free lesson on how to care for and plant trees, they will give you up to seven trees for your property. FREE! Having shade trees around your house keeps it cooler (which means less need for AC), looks nice, cleans the air, absorbs carbon, and helps limit soil erosion. Hopefully programs like this one will catch on all over the country. Maybe we could each take the time to email Mayor Bloomberg and suggest starting one here in New York. Obviously those of us living in apartment buildings with no actual soil visible for miles around would not be able to collect on our seven free trees, but there are plenty of others who could.
Check out this living wall at the University of Guelph-Humber in Toronto. It’s 4 stories high and works as an all natural air purifier. And it’s beautiful. Although it’s unrealistic to expect walls like this one to become a common retrofit in NYC any time soon, can you imagine if they were? I can’t imagine anyone being in a bad mood with one of these things around.
Not sure who to give credit for the photo - but thanks to whoever it is!
While our efforts towards greening the planet shouldn’t be devoted entirely to preventing climate change, global warming has undeniably been a motivating factor. Here is an excerpt from How Stuff Works’ take on what exactly climate change is:
Global warming was once an uncommon term used by a few scientists who were growing concerned over the effects of decades of pollution on long-term weather patterns. Today, the idea of global warming is well known, if not well understood. It is not unusual to hear someone complaining about a hot day or a freak storm and remark, “It’s global warming.”
Weather is local and short-term. If it snows in the town where you live next Tuesday, that’s weather. Climate is long-term and doesn’t relate to one small location. The climate of an area is the average weather conditions in a region over a long period of time. If the part of the world you live in has cold winters with lots of snow, that would be part of the climate for the region you live in. The winters there have been cold and snowy for as long as weather has been recorded, so we know generally what to expect.
It’s important to understand that when we talk about climate being long-term, we mean really long-term. Even a few hundred years is pretty short-term when it comes to climate.
In fact, during the last ice age (ice ages recur roughly every 50,000 to 100,000 years), the earth’s average temperature was only 5 Celsius degrees cooler than modern temperature averages.
Other observations from the IPCC include:
- Of the last 12 years, 11 have ranked among the warmest years since 1850.
- The warming trend of the last 50 years is nearly double that of the last 100 years, meaning that the rate of warming is increasing.
- The ocean’s temperature has increased at least to depths of 3,000 meters (over 9,800 feet); the ocean absorbs more than 80 percent of all heat added to the climate system.
- Glaciers and snow cover have decreased in regions both in the Northern and Southern hemispheres, which has contributed to the rise of sea levels.
- Average Arctic temperatures increased by nearly twice the global average rate over the last 100 years (the IPCC also noted that Arctic temperatures have are highly variable from decade to decade).
- The area covered by frozen ground in the Arctic has decreased by approximately 7 percent since 1900, with seasonal decreases of up to 15 percent.
- Precipitation has increased in eastern regions of the Americas, northern Europe and parts of Asia; other regions such as the Mediterranean and southern Africa have experienced drying trends.
- Westerly winds have been growing stronger.
- Droughts are more intense, have lasted longer and covered larger areas than in the past.
- There have been significant changes in extreme temperatures – hot days and heat waves have become more frequent while cold days and nights have become less frequent.
- While scientists have not observed an increase in the number of tropical storms, they have observed an increase in the intensity of such storms in the Atlantic correlated with a rise in ocean surface temperatures.
Read more »
In addition to keeping everyone at Curious up to speed on our greening progress, this blog is going to be a place to post new ideas and info about green issues, services, products, and goings-on throughout the world. A place we can all learn more about what it is we are trying to do.
This one sounds too good to be true, but here it is:
Dell to sell eco bamboo computer later this year
By Simon Leufstedt
Michael Dell, the chairman and CEO of Dell, announced at the Fortune Green conference that the computer company will start selling a “never before seen” eco-inspired computer with a bamboo casing later this year.
The computer will be, according to Dell, 80% smaller than an average desktop computer. It will also contain recycled materials from plastic bottles and use 71% less energy than the average desktop computer.
The price tag is expected to land somewhere between $500 and $700. A name for the computer has not yet been decided on.
Green Timeline | green | 
May 30, 2008 12:01 pm | 
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