Tags: sustainability

Integrating solar and wind power capture into natural and urban environments isn’t just a technical or engineering task–it’s also a design opportunity.  Some recent eye-popping ideas have ranged from a dragonfly-shaped urban farm on Roosevelt Island to a snakeskin-like PV-tiled stadium in Taiwan.

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Last week, the Municipal Arts Society (MAS) hosted a panel called Urban Parks in the Twenty-First Century: Creating a New Model.  Park designers, administrators and other experts discussed the some of New York City’s most innovative new park projects: Concrete Plant Park  in the South Bronx, Riverside South on the Upper West Side, and, of course, Freshkills Park.  

This week Mayor Bloomberg signed legislation to establish a comprehensive wetlands strategy by for New York City by 2012. The Mayor emphasized at a public hearing on Tuesday that protecting wetlands (of which there are many at the Freshkills Park site) is a high priority of PlaNYC 2030. 

Scientific American has run a two-week series of interviews with executives of alternative energy companies to explore the technical, infrastructural, and economic obstacles of developing and implementing non-fossil fuel energy technologies. 17 interviews altogether,  including responses from Robert Gates, Senior Vice president for Commercial Operations of Clipper Windpower; David Mills, Founder and Chief Scientific Officer of Ausra (solar thermal energy); and Lucien Bronicki, Chairman and Chief Technology Officer of Ormat Technologies (geothermal and recovered energy).

Corporate masticating mowers: now officially a phenomenon!  Last week we mentioned Bayer Healthcare inviting sheep to chow down on their overgrown Richmond, CA lawn.  This week, Google has hired 200 goats to graze on dry brush at its Mountain View headquarters. 

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gLBE5QAYXp8&w=507&h=370]

Some required viewing for anyone concerned with consumption habits: The Story of Stuff.  The 20-minute, fast-paced, fact-filled story takes you on a provocative tour of our consumer-driven culture.  From resource extraction through sale, use and disposal, the video looks at all the stuff in our lives and how it affects communities at home and abroad.

Harvard’s Graduate School of Design hosted a conference in March called Ecological Urbanism: Alternative and Sustainable Cities of the Future.  Podcasts of talks included in the conference are available for streaming.  Sessions focused on sustainable urbanism, what that means or might look like, and how on earth might we accomplish such a daunting task. 

Columbia University will be hosting The 350 Conference on climate change this Saturday. The one-day conference will focus on the need to lower carbon dioxide emissions (from the current 385 parts per million (ppm) to 350 ppm, hence the name of the conference). 

From new-fashioned eco-technologies to old-fashioned ones: Bayer Healthcare recently brought 1,450 sheep to its Richmond, California campus to graze on 17 acres of grass.  The sheep, managed by Living Systems Land Management, will live on site for two weeks and will eat close to 115,000 pounds of overgrown grass and weeds, including invasive species. 

Chargepoint is a network of electric vehicle charging stations that have been installed cities across the US and Canada.  If that wasn’t a timely and smart enough sounding business venture,  Carbon Day Automotive recently installed a Solar Powered Chargepoint station in Chicago. 

No need to keep Earth Day constrained to just one day: festivities continue through the weekend, with Earth Day New York holding a festival at Grand Central Terminal in Manhattan on Friday and Saturday.  Exhibits and representatives from environmental groups and green businesses, organic food and live music are all part of the program.

Another case study we’re looking at: The New Jersey Meadowlands Commission (NJMC) has proposed the construction of a 5 MW solar farm to be built on top of the Erie Landfill.  This would be the largest solar array built in New Jersey to date and could potentially power up to 600 homes per year. 

Dutch architecture firm Arons en Gelauff has won a design competition to adapt a pair of former sewage treatment silos in Amsterdam into a multi-functional cultural complex.  The design tops one of the silos with a splashy, open-rooftop playground and wraps it with a green wall. 

Interdisciplinary environmental arts organization Ecoartspace has opened a physical space in Soho.  Current featured exhibit is “habitat”, an artist studio shed built of reclaimed materials.  The space will also host discussions, screenings, panels, readings and performances centering around art that concerns itself with environmental issues.

Two years into Mayor Bloomberg’s PlaNYC 2030 initiative, the Sustainability Practice Network is hosting a panel at NYU the evening of April 21st to discuss the status of PlaNYC initiatives and review lessons learned.

Launched on Earth Day, 2007 Mayor Bloomberg’s PlaNYC 2030 promised to address the major environmental sustainability issues facing the city, with 127 initiatives on housing, open space, water, air quality, transportation, brownfields, and the city’s impact on climate change.

While we’re on the subject of alternative power plants: WebEcoist has posted a rundown of 15 cutting-edge biofuels.  Pretty exciting stuff.  As mentioned before, the Freshkills Park site already harvests natural gas from decomposing waste, but we’re interested in developing the site’s capacity to generate energy from other biomass, too. 

A recently announced 200 million euro project in Venice, Italy will harvest algae from seaweed in the city’s canals for use in creating emissions-free energy.  Laboratory-based algae power plants will produce 40 megawatts of electricity–half the energy required by Venice’s city center.

A series of wowzers: the largest green roof in the US!  Which doubles as a driving range!  And sits atop a water treatment facility!  The $2.1 billion dollar Croton Water Filtration Plant in the Bronx was designed by  Grimshaw Architects, landscape architect Ken Smith and green roof gurus Rana Creek. 

TED talks are the best.  Here’s a video of Saul Griffith from Makani Power talking about the giant kites he’s been working on.  Kites with wind turbines mounted on them. These ‘kite turbines’ harness energy from high-altitude wind currents and send it earthward through cables. 

From Brazil comes this gorgeous new “eco-park” built on a brownfield–formerly the 130,000-square-foot site of a garbage incinerator.  Davis Brody Bond Architects and Levisky Arquitetos Associados have transformed it into a multi-functional park that celebrates the site’s industrial, cultural and natural heritage.