April 2011
- Pay-As-You-Throw
- Putrescible Waste
- Plastic Bag/Retail Bag Laws in the U.S.
- Reconnecting America: Transit Space Race 2011
- Bay Area Plan/YouChoose Bay Area
- Bad News About CBECS 2007
- More Bad News – EIA Faces a Funding Cut
Snippets
Why young people are driving so much less than their parents [The Atlantic]
Berkeley starts to recycle mixed rigid plastics [East Bay Express]
BART is projecting a budget surplus for next fiscal year [SF Examiner]
Urban development projects in California are in limbo [NY Times]
Photo: A water fountain and water bottle filling station at O’Hare Airport in Chicago, IL, by Anna LaRue
Two Years of Zero Resource
Over the last two years, we have covered a number of topics, from tiny houses, to DOE rules on showerheads, to definitions of terms.
Since the end of February, when WordPress starting showing the statistics, Zero Resource has attracted readers from all over the world.
Over the last two years, the top twenty most popular posts of all time are:
- Death Rays
- More Tiny Houses
- The Difference Between the CEC and CPUC
- Tour a Tiny Apartment in Spain
- Putrescible Waste
- Finding Data – GDP and Electricity Consumption
- Alex Wilson, Founder of EBN – Part 1
- Plastic Bag / Retail Bag Laws in the U.S.
- Bad News About CBECS 2007
- Nina Maritz
- Are People Clueless about Energy Savings?
- MRF (Rhymes with Smurf)
- Resilience vs. Sustainability
- The Key System
- Visualizing the U.S. Power Grid
- Do Green Roofs Improve Solar PV Performance?
- Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR)
- Local Target Stores & Hazardous Waste
- Tiny “Spite” Houses
- Houses – Small, Reused, and Prefab
Many thanks to all the Zero Resource readers around the world! We look forward to another year.
Snippets
After 100 years, San Francisco Muni has gotten slower [NY Times]
LBNL and UC Berkeley researchers measured emissions from drayage trucks in the Port of Oakland [EETD newsletter]
A report from UC Davis says water in California’s farm country is polluted by synthetic fertilizers [UC Davis]
A report from the Institute for Transportation & Development Policy chronicles the life and death of urban highways [ITDP website]
Photo: A front yard full of chard in Berkeley, CA, by Anna LaRue
Like this:
UC Berkeley myPower Website
Yesterday, UC Berkeley announced several new energy-related tools designed to reduced campus energy use. From the email announcement:
Starting April 3, 2012, the campus community can visit the myPower website to see real-time energy use data for 57 campus buildings. … These dashboards will provide evidence of the cumulative impact of the energy-saving measures you and others in your building take, demonstrating that small actions can add up to a large impact. The website also provides information about proven ways to save energy in offices, labs, and residence halls.
The screenshot above shows the dashboard for Wurster Hall, which houses the Department of Architecture, among others. I’ll be checking out some of the other campus buildings over the next few days.
A Year Ago on Zero Resource – March 2011
Solar Decathlon Time Lapse
This week’s video is a time lapse of the construction of the 2009 Solar Decathlon entry from Cornell University, nicknamed the “Silo House.”
You can find more information about the 2009 Solar Decathlon here. You can find more information about the Cornell entry here.
THIS POST IS PART OF OUR FRIDAY VIDEO SERIES.
FEMA & USGBC on Resilient Communities
Last Wednesday, the Administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) gave a speech describing the role green building can play to ensure resilient communities as the climate shifts. Fugate was the keynote speaker of the National Leadership Speaker Series on Resiliency and Security in the 21st Century at the National Press Club in Washington, DC.
The presentation also featured the launch of a report by the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) and the University of Michigan’s Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning. The report, Green Building and Climate Resilience: Understanding Impacts and Preparing for Changing Conditions, describes potential adaptive strategies familiar to green building practitioners. These strategies add an important new dimension to green building’s long-standing focus on reducing greenhouse gases through energy efficiency and renewable and low-carbon energy supplies.
You can find the full report on the USGBC site here.
THIS POST IS PART OF OUR FRIDAY VIDEO SERIES.
Blots, or Blotting
(Image credit: StructureHub)
I started hearing about blots and blotting late last year, first via a couple posts I found on Shrinking Cities (here and here) and then most recently via a story on NPR. Both sources feature stories about the de-densifying city of Detroit. Interboro claims credit for coining the term “blotting” about eight years ago.
According to Shrinking Cities, “the use of ‘blots’, or ‘side lot expansions’, is a technique that gives homeowners with vacant land adjacent to their home the opportunity to purchase that property as an expansion to their own for a nominal cost.”
The NPR story cites a startling statistic – in Detroit, it’s estimated that up to 40 square miles of land sits vacant.To give a sense of scale,the entire city of San Francisco is about 47 square miles. So both formally and informally, Detroit is encouraging its residents to buy or just sort of annex adjacent properties in order to take care of the properties and stabilize neighborhoods.
Part of our series making sense of eco-lingo and technical terms.
For more, check out our Jargon page.
Interactive Map of ARPA-E Projects
ARPA-E (the Advance Research Projects Agency-Energy) has launched a new interactive project map that allows users to identify ARPA-E funded projects based on a project location and project type. You can play with the map here.
There are a number of projects in the Bay Area in the following areas, among others:
- GENI = Green Electricity Network Integration
- IMPACCT = Innovative Materials & Processes for Advanced Carbon Capture Technologies
- BEEST = Batteries for Electrical Energy Storage in Transportation
- GRIDS = Grid-Scale Rampable Intermittent Dispatchable Storage
- HEATS = High Energy Advanced Thermal Storage
