Zero Resource

Tour a Tiny House in Portland

Anna LaRue — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 13:00:06 +0000

Finance blogger J.D. Roth posted a video of his friends giving him a tour of their tiny house (only 130 square feet!). You can check out more detailed info on all the nooks and crannies from the owner’s blog. You can also check out the website of the designers of the house, Portland Alternative Dwellings.

THIS POST IS PART OF OUR FRIDAY VIDEO SERIES.

Snippets – Waste Not Want Not

Anna LaRue — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 13:00:51 +0000

Today, I want to share a few not-quite-so-recent stories related to waste that have been on my mind lately.

Via the New York Times, a food industry alliance is planning a three-year initiative to reduce the tremendous amount of food that Americans still throw in the garbage even as they grow somewhat more conscientious about recycling paper and yard trimmings. … A substantial portion of food is thrown away while still fully edible because of cosmetic blemishes or overstocking. … According to the most recent available statistics, more than 30 million tons of food was dumped in landfills in 2009, making food by far the most abundant material there by weight, the federal Environmental Protection Agency says.

From NPR comes a story about how all that wasted food contributes to climate change. A company called CleanMetrics gathered USDA’s estimates of food loss from retail and consumers for 2009. And when the company’s founder, Kumar Venkat, fed the data into his software he found that food waste is responsible for 135 million tons of greenhouse gases every year, or about 1.5 percent of all emissions ,,, ”If you compare beef to tomatoes, beef has a much higher footprint,” says Venkat. “So if you’re going to reduce waste, you need to prioritize.”

Via Bloomberg, a story about Bank of America selecting some its most decrepit, derelict homes in Cleveland, Detroit, and Chicago and paying up to $7,500 to local agencies toward demolition costs. “There is way too much supply,” said Gus Frangos, president of the Cleveland-based Cuyahoga County Land Reutilization Corp., which works with lenders, government officials and homeowners to salvage vacant homes. “The best thing we can do to stabilize the market is to get the garbage off.”

From the New York Times - Across western North Dakota, hundreds of fires burn as companies rushing to extract oil from the Bakken shale field treat the gas as waste and simply burn it. … Every day, more than 100 million cubic feet of natural gas is flared this way — enough energy to heat half a million homes for a day. The flared gas also spews at least two million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year, as much as 384,000 cars or a medium-size coal-fired power plant would emit.

And again from NPR, some insight into why cleaned wastewater stays dirty in our minds. … ”It’s a very broad feature of human thinking,” Nemeroff explains. “Everywhere we look, you can see contagion thinking.” … The conclusion? ”It is quite difficult to get the cognitive sewage out of the water, even after the real sewage is gone,” Nemeroff says.

The GBA Glossary

Anna LaRue — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 13:00:04 +0000

Usually, we post a definition of a term that we have heard a lot recently, or that is being used in several ways. Today, I am posting a resource for looking up terms related to green building, the Green Building Advisor Glossary.

The glossary is a simple list of terms and acronyms, organized alphabetically. So if you’ve been wondering about LSL, bake-outs, or PEX, among many other terms, it’s worth a little exploration.

THIS POST IS PART OF OUR DEFINITIONS SERIES ON “ECO-LINGO” AND TECHNICAL TERMS.

A Year Ago on Zero Resource – January 2011

Anna LaRue — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 19:00:35 +0000

A Quote

Anna LaRue — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 17:44:42 +0000

“We teach how to build, but what we build teaches us how to live.”

–Richard Register, founder of the EcoCity movement

Alameda County Bans Use of Some Plastic Bags

Anna LaRue — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 04:42:15 +0000

According to Berkeleyside, the Alameda County Waste Authority voted Wednesday to ban the use of plastic bags at pharmacies and grocery stores in the county starting in 2013. The plastic bag ban will apply to 2,000 stores in the county.

A Travel Photo

Anna LaRue — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 04:00:58 +0000

(Photo credit: Anna LaRue)

During the holidays, I spent a couple weeks traveling in Cameroon. It is dry season there, and it is especially dry in the northern part of the country. The riverbeds are bone-dry sand.

Water is so precious that every single leaking water meter I saw had a bucket under it to catch the extra drops. The photo above was taken near a main road in the city of Ngaoundéré. While someone else is paying for the water, none of it is wasted.

We’re Back!

Anna LaRue — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 19:44:59 +0000

We’re back from winter travels and other holiday adventures. We’ll be putting up new posts and updating the events and webinar pages over the next couple days. Happy 2012!

A Year Ago on Zero Resource – December 2010

Anna LaRue — Sat, 31 Dec 2011 13:00:02 +0000

Geothermal Map of the United States

Anna LaRue — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 22:43:35 +0000

Image Credit: Google Green Blog

According to the Google Green Blog, a recently completed project to update the Geothermal Map of North America by SMU Geothemal Laboratory (supported by Google.org), estimates that the technical potential of geothermal energy exceeds 2,980,295 megawatts. More details can be found on the blog here.

Google has also worked to develop this information as a layer in Google Earth. The file can be downloaded from a link towards the bottom of this page. The map shows Enhanced Geothermal Systems (EGS) Potential from depths from 3km to 6.5km and excludes protected lands such as National Parks.

An important note: I am not in any way endorsing EGS. Messing with the Earth at big scales makes me nervous, since we have so little information on the potential impact of our actions. I live in earthquake territory. Also, I read this alarming article in the New York Times a couple years ago. An excerpt:

All seemed to be going well — until Dec. 8, 2006, when the project [in Basel, Switzerland] set off an earthquake, shaking and damaging buildings and terrifying many…

As early as this week, though, an American start-up company, AltaRock Energy, will begin using nearly the same method to drill deep into ground laced with fault lines in an area two hours’ drive north of San Francisco.

…For geothermal energy to be used more widely, engineers need to find a way to draw on the heat at deeper levels percolating in the earth’s core.

Some geothermal advocates believe the method used in Basel, and to be tried in California, could be that breakthrough. But because large earthquakes tend to originate at great depths, breaking rock that far down carries more serious risk, seismologists say. Seismologists have long known that human activities can trigger quakes, but they say the science is not developed enough to say for certain what will or will not set off a major temblor.

It is well worth reading the entire article. And it is well worth remembering that just because it is called “clean” energy does not mean that there are no potential hazards associated with the energy production and use.