by Justin Manger on August 25th, 2010
Before I get to the meat of this post, I’ll add one more crazy stat that I furtively creeped this morning from the Express Newspaper the guy next to me on the bus was reading: 1,900 cars every day are added to the streets of Beijing alone. That’s one city, in one country.
Now for the real dinger. Construction in Beijing has caused a 60 mile backup outside the city that has gone on for 10 days. Traffic is moving at the glacial pace of a half-mile per day. The highway where the traffic jam is occurring is known for congestion, especially since large coal fields were discovered in Inner Mongolia, where the highway goes. The recent confab, however, is blamed on
by Justin Manger on August 24th, 2010
There’s usually a flurry of speculation before major elections. Similarly, sports finals bring out all kinds of arguing and debating about who will win. Only when the votes are counted and the buzzer sounds does it really matter.
In announcing that the U.S. is on track to achieve four major innovation breakthroughs due to Recovery Act investments, the Obama administration has stirred up excitement and stoked the fires of speculation. What will actually be achieved when the buzzer sounds? Well, we’ll have to wait until 2012 and 2015 to find out for sure. Those seem to be the years by which we’ll know whether the breakthroughs have indeed been reached or have sputtered off course. If they remain on track, the four innovations listed below would definitely be impressive headway down the road to sustainability.
by Eric Wilson on August 24th, 2010
Watch the Travel Channel’s Food Wars: LA Food Trucks or tune in to Food Networks’ The Great Food Truck Race and you just may get a sense of how prolific these mobile restaurants have become. They are the hottest thing to hit gourmet food. No longer are these meals on wheels the bane of the food industry. In fact, they are so popular that they have achieved some level of culinary fame, as witnessed in a recent episode of Guy Fieri’s Diners, Drive-ins, and Dives which featured Don Chow, a Chinese-Mexican food truck in Los Angeles, California.
One local Denver restaurant – Steuben’s, a personal favorite of mine – has taken the food truck and transformed it into an environmentally conscious food delivery system.
by Justin Manger on August 23rd, 2010
Well, at least the roof rotates. That’s still pretty wild and, it turns out, solar efficient. The Heliotrope, designed by German architect Rolf Disch is a wild looking structure located in Germany that has a rotating array of solar panels to follow the sun during the course of the day. A “Sun Sail” on the roof of the Heliotrope “is made of 60 monocrystalline silicon modules…with 6.6 kW peak output. The mounting system and rotation mechanism of the Sun Sail were completely newly developed: the panel tracks the sun throughout the day automatically and computer controlled – turning independently from the building itself.” Staying more directly below the sun’s rays during the day allows the house’s solar panels to produce five times more electricity than the house actually uses. Triple paned thermally insulated glass maintain balance between letting light in and keeping the house cooler on the inside.
Rotating gives the solar panels
by Eric Wilson on August 23rd, 2010
After a devastating tornado essentially leveled the town of Greensburg, KS a few years back, the rebuilding effort yielded a city that lived up to its green name. The reconstruction efforts, which were profiled on Plant Green’s series “Greensburg: A Story of Community Rebuilding” have resulted in a number of LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) structures. One of these buildings opened this past Thursday as the school year began. The Kiowa county school has achieved the highest possible rating – LEED Platinum.
According to a recent NPR story, the school features an abundance of natural “day lighting”, a 50 kilowatt wind generator, a “recycling center, durable cabinets made out of wheat straw, and hall lockers built from recycled plastic.”
