New York City’s Empire State Building is in the midst of a five year $550 million renovation that includes many green upgrades 6,500 windows will be replaced with panes that have krypton and argon gases injected between them for insulation $20 million in green refurbishments will reduce energy use by 38% and save $4.4 million [...]
Archive for the ‘Five Friday Facts’ Category
Five Friday Facts: Greening the Empire State Building
September 24th, 2010 
Justin Manger Five Friday Facts: Un-Green Burials
September 10th, 2010 Eric Wilson Each year in U.S. the dead are buried along with: 827,060 gallons of embalming fluid 1,636,000 tons of reinforced concrete 14,000 tons of steel vaults and 90,272 tons of steel caskets 2,700 tons of cooper and bronze 30-plus million board feet of hardwoods From ReDirect Guide via Mary Woodsen, Greensprings Natural Cemetery FAQ [Image source: [...]
Five Friday Facts; Incredible Pakistan Flood Numbers
September 3rd, 2010 Justin Manger Whether trying to live in concert with it or trying to control it, humans will always be impacted by the chaotic whims of Mother Nature. The floods that have ravaged Pakistan over the last two months are an extreme example. Here are some astonishing statistics. Nationwide, the flood has displaced 20 million people, destroyed 1.2 million homes and [...]
Five Friday Facts: Tar Sands
August 27th, 2010 Eric Wilson The Athabasca oil sands (as known as tar sands) are the largest of its kind in the world. They produce oil, much of which is exported to the United States. In fact, the US imports more oil from Canada than any other country. Heated water from the Athabasca River is used to separate oil from [...]
Posted in Eric Wilson, Five Friday Facts 
Tags: Carbon Dioxide, Oil Consumption, Peak Oil 
No Comments »Four Friday Facts Potpourri
August 20th, 2010 Justin Manger Combine fuel use with passenger occupancy, and buses are four times as energy efficient as cars or planes. 24 Percentage of U.S. credit card users who receive statements online only. $1 approximate cost for a company to print and mail a paper statement. 39% Portion of survey respondents that would elect online statements for a [...]
Posted in Behavior, Conservation, Eric Wilson, Five Friday Facts, Justin Manger Tags: Waste No Comments »Five Friday Facts: Logging in Madagascar
August 13th, 2010 Justin Manger After a coup in March 2009, Madagascar’s leaders legalized exports of the nearly extinct rosewood tree. They reversed the law earlier this year but cutting continues. Rosewood is used in furniture and musical instruments $3.5 billion: value of all kinds of illegal wood shipped to the U.S. through China (much originating from Madagascar). 90%: the [...]
Five Friday Facts: Junk Mail
August 6th, 2010 Eric Wilson More than 41.5 billion pieces of mail advertisements were produced and distributed in the U.S in 2005, according to the Worldwatch Institute. It took more than 100 million trees to create all this bulk mail – that’s the equivalent of deforesting the entire Rocky Mountain National Park every four months. Even though most junk mail [...]
Five Friday Facts – RMI’s Reinventing Fire
July 30th, 2010 Eric Wilson The following five Friday facts come via Rocky Mountain Institute’s Reinventing Fire pamphlet. Despite new technologies, codes, and design strategies, the U.S. building stock is not much more energy efficient than it was twenty-five years ago – it uses 70 percent of the U.S. electricity, half of which is made from coal. Transportation uses 70 [...]
Posted in Energy Efficiency, Eric Wilson, Five Friday Facts Tags: Biomass, Coal, Electricity Generation, Nuclear, RMI No Comments »
