Day: September 22, 2015

Lifecyle Building Challenge

Lifecycle building is designing buildings to facilitate disassembly and material reuse to minimize waste, energy consumption, and associated greenhouse gas emissions.

Objectives of Lifecycle Building

  • Create designs that facilitate local building materials reuse
  • Consider the full lifecycle of buildings and materials—from resource extraction through occupancy and, finally, deconstruction and reuse
  • Focus on quality and creativity of designs and concepts
  • Develop strategies that maximize materials recovery
  • Reduce the overall embodied energy and greenhouse gas emissions of building materials through reuse
  • Decrease environmental and economic costs
  • Address real-world issues

This site includes publications and case studies related to lifecycle building, as well as links to green building ratings systems.

A Crumpled Watershed Model

Download the activity sheet. Includes discussion questions.

Stormwater Sleuth and Running Rain talk about watersheds. In this activity, you can make a watershed model. Remember, a watershed is all the land that “sheds” water from rain and snowmelt into a specific stream, river or lake. The boundaries of a watershed are the mountains, hills, or other high points where land slopes toward the water. Watersheds can be very small or very large. A large watershed may have many smaller watersheds. It’s like the branches of a
tree. The tiny twigs join bigger twigs, the bigger twigs join larger branches, and the branches join the trunk. Small streams flow into larger streams, larger streams flow into rivers, and rivers flow into larger rivers or even gulfs, seas and oceans.

Beyond Sprawl: A New Vision of The Solar Suburbs of the Future

Read the full story at Yale Environment360.

The concept of the “solar suburb” includes a solar panel on every roof, an electric vehicle in every garage, ultra-efficient home batteries to store excess energy, and the easy transfer of electricity among house, car, and grid. But will the technological pieces fall in place to make this dream a reality?

What’s an ounce of prevention worth?

Read the full post at EPA.

As the old saying goes, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. It’s easier to prevent something bad from happening than to fix it after it’s already happened. For me this means stopping pollution before it starts, which is the core concept behind pollution prevention (P2) or sustainability.

Here’s a couple of real world examples of how costly it can be to clean up pollution after it’s already happened:

  • Effective P2 practices could have avoided hundreds of millions of dollars of PCB cleanup costs. PCBs are a hazardous chemical that can cause cancer and were banned in 1979. Cleanup of Hudson River PCB contamination alone has cost more than $500 million.
  • If we can take effective action to slow down the rate of climate change, we can save not billions but trillions of dollars over the coming decades.

From these examples I know that an ounce of prevention is worth millions of dollars in clean-up activities and countless environmental hazards. What many people may not know is that sustainable practices started out as P2.

U.S. restaurants are terrible at getting wasted food to the hungry. Can we change that?

Read the full post at Grist.

Our country throws away 40 percent of its food, routing $165 billion of food to landfills each year. An individual American throws away an average of 20 pounds of food a month, according to a 2012 report by the Natural Resources Defense Council.

At the same time, in 2013, 49.1 million people lived in food-insecure households, according to USDA figures. At some point during 2014, one out of four Americans relied on some sort of federal government food assistance program. The number of Americans turning to these programs has increased since the 2008 financial crisis, yet, since the start of the recession, funds for these programs have repeatedly been cut, and congressional Republicans are pushing for further cuts this year.

All of that wasted food, meanwhile, creates a host of environmental problems, growing the size of landfills and contributing to climate change. Organic matter decomposing in dumps is the third largest source of methane emissions, a potent greenhouse gas, in the U.S.

Not all of the food we send to landfills is fit to be eaten — but a lot of it is. Grocery stores overstock to make their shelves look bountifully full. Industrial kitchens, like those found in universities and hospitals, cook too much to make sure they will have enough food for an unexpectedly large influx of diners. Much of this food would still make a fine dinner up until the moment it gets bagged and tossed in the dumpster.

So why are we so bad at getting this food to people who want to eat it?

A Small Tweak To Pharmaceutical Production With A Big Environmental Impact

Read the full story at Manufacturing.net.

German scientists believe that a small tweak to common pharmaceuticals could dramatically reduce their impact on the environment and human health.

Researchers from Leuphana University of Lüneburg, writing in the journal Environmental Science & Technology, detailed slight changes made to the common beta blocker propranolol.

Microbeads: The Very Tiny Troublemakers

Read the full opinion piece in the New York Times.

The Great Lakes are being threatened by an invasion of tiny plastic orbs called microbeads, but lawmakers for one state that depends on this huge freshwater ecosystem have failed to do anything about it. That state is, of course, New York, where lawmakers this year sat on a good bill to ban these unnecessary bits of plastic.

That left local governments to try to do the state’s job by banning these plastic irritants, county by county.

Ruffled Feathers

Read the full post at OnEarth.

Your Angry Birds addiction is about to go into relapse. The game makers are hosting a climate change–themed tournament this week.

NSF awards maximum support to Iowa State-based Center for Biorenewable Chemicals

Read the full story from Iowa State University.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has added three years and $8.48 million to the grant supporting the NSF Engineering Research Center for Biorenewable Chemicals based at Iowa State University.

That brings NSF’s total funding of the center (known as CBiRC, “See-burk”) to the maximum allowed: 10 years and $35.26 million. NSF support of the center began in September 2008 and will end in August 2018. After that, the center must be self-supporting.

Basil Nikolau, the center’s deputy director and Iowa State’s Frances M. Craig Professor of Biochemistry, Biophysics and Molecular Biology, said the center was built on a vision of biologists and biochemists working with engineers to solve common problems. The joint efforts have opened up new catalysts and technologies for the production of biorenewable chemicals.

That has helped CBiRC quickly establish a legacy of innovation in research, technology-led entrepreneurship and education, said Brent Shanks, the center’s director and an Iowa State Anson Marston Distinguished Professor in Engineering.

Happy Pollution Prevention Week!

P2-Week-Poster-2015-cropped-for-WPTwenty-five years ago, Congress passed the Pollution Prevention Act. Pollution Prevention (P2) Week, celebrated during the third week of September each year (September 21-27, 2015),  highlights the efforts of EPA, its state partners, industry, and the public in preventing pollution right from the start. Read more about the Pollution Prevention Act at http://www2.epa.gov/p2/pollution-prevention-law-and-policies.

This week, the Great Lakes Regional Pollution Prevention Roundtable will be doing daily blog posts to highlight P2 projects and resources. Read all of the posts associated with P2 Week at http://wp.istc.illinois.edu/glrppr/category/p2-week/.

GLRPPR and other P2 programs throughout the country will also be using #P2Week and #25YearsofP2 hashtags on social media to highlight the importance of pollution prevention as the cornerstone of sustainability.