A fellow architect here at Ziger/Snead tipped the green team off to this great new web site. Go to www.walksite.com, type in an address and watch as it tallies up amenities within walking distance to calculate your “walk score.”
Testing out our office’s location near downtown Baltimore revealed what I already know — We’re in [...]
Walk Score - New Web Site Helps Locate Walkable Communities
James Fallows on China’s Pollution Problem
The arrival of a new Atlantic Monthly is an eagerly awaited event in my household. Well written articles on a variety of domestic and foreign issues, a nice collection of book and entertainment reviews, listings of esoteric current events and a letters section full of inside-the-beltway politicos battling things out in public all generally [...]
The Terrifying Beauty of Waste
Artist Chris Jordan photographs mounds of discarded soda bottles, piles of crushed cars, scrap heaps, discarded cell phones, heaps of sawdust and old computer circuit boards. They all do a good job hamming it up for the camera, looking as composed as the subject of French pastoral landscape painting or a Dutch still-life :
The [...]
Earth Tubes
This ultra-low tech energy saving system first caught Greenline’s attention when a mechanical engineer proposed one for a Ziger/Snead building.
With contemporary buildings so well sealed from the outside, indoor air quality suffers from a lack of fresh air. As a result, national building codes began to require that hvac systems bring in a minimum [...]
Cogeneration - Have Your Electricity and Heat it Too.
Cogeneration has been in the news a bit more lately and it seemed like it was time for Greenline to offer a primer.
So what exactly is “congeneration?” In general terms, it’s system which provides both heat and electricity from the same source of fuel. Such systems often take advantage of what would normally be [...]
376.59 Miles Per Gallon Car Sets World Record (in 1973)
The Toyota Prius is a nice car. It’s also tops in fuel efficiency according to the EPA. (See their list of best and worst mileage cars in America for details.) Still, it doesn’t hold a candle compared to our contender. What do you ask could unseat the Prius from it’s green throne? Perhaps a futuristic [...]
Bottled Water Gets the Boot
On March 13, 2008, the mayor of Seattle signed executive order #02-08, banning the use of city funds to pay for bottled water. Seattle wasn’t the first to ban the bottle either: San Francisco, Los Angeles and Ann Arbor have all restricted city spending on bottled water. Numerous other cities, such as [...]
Building Integrated Photovoltaic Cells from Open Energy
The Greenline team came across the Open Energy Corporation while doing some initial research for a sustainable school project of ours.
Open Energy produces building-integrated photovoltaic cells. Their product line includes energy producing roofing shingles, roof membranes and architectural glass:
We’re especially enamored of their architectural glass product:
While providing on-site renewable [...]
House of Representatives Eats Green
The New York Times reported today under the cheeky headline, “More House Salads, Whether the House Likes It or Not,” on recent efforts at the national capitol cafeterias to go green. Like just about everything else in our nation’s capitol, food service within the congressional office buildings seems to move with the political whims of [...]
"Smart" Urinal?
Well… okay, it won’t beat anyone at chess or help your kid with his calculus homework, but there is an impressive amount of technology in Caroma’s new “Cube 3 Ultra” urinal. The Australian plumbing products company already sold a waterless urinal model. (See our previous post on the technology.) They also sold [...]
Skip the Left Turn; Save The Planet.
Can simply avoiding left turns while driving significantly reduce one’s environmental impact? After all, each left turn requires additional idling at intersections while waiting to make the turn. Well, if own one or two vehicles, you probably won’t make much of a dent in your carbon emissions this way.
But… what if you owned 92,000 [...]
Times Publishes "7th Annual Year In Ideas"
For the 7th year straight, the fine folks at the New York Times Magazine have gathered together their favorite ideas of the year. The collected wisdom ranges from the esoteric (the martini cased in a pickle or the science of lap dance tips) to the potentially world altering (how to deflect a killer asteroid or [...]
Historic Preservation Organization Promoting Sustainability
When the largest historic preservation organization in the United States starts it’s own sustainability initiative, others take notice. Founded in 1949 as a national organization dedicated to the preservation of historic buildings and communities, The National Trust for Historic Preservation is now 270,000 members strong. Started in 2006, the Trust’s Sustainability Initiative [...]
AMD&ART - Scientists, Designers, Artists, Historians and Community Team Up to Tackle Environmental Degradation
Vintondale, Pennsylvania was like many former coal mining towns. Economically stagnant since the departure of the coal mining industry in 1977, the town was also left with the environmental legacy of decades of unregulated mining activities.
Most prominent of these environmental issues is acid mine discharge: Inside of abandoned mines, ground water reacts with [...]
New Recycled Porcelain Tiles From Italy
They’re beautiful, green, inexpensive and… Italian. What more could a tile consumer want?
The manufacturer, Floor Gres, uses waste from its manufacturing processes for 70% of the material in its Ecotech line. Items previously sent to the dump or to the sewage plant, such as quality-control rejected tiles, scraps, waste water and sludge, are [...]