Eco-Living in Style

[Eco Man]

"Urban Eco-Chic" Takes the Stand at London Home Show

LONDON - Urban Eco-chic has arrived to cater for people who want to make a fashion statement while flaunting their green credentials.

From wall coverings of reclaimed timber planks to solar-powered ipod rechargers and cushions made from old silk ties, the concept is an attempt to marry style with recycling and sustainable development.
"Reduce, reclaim and recycle with a strong style element - you could stock a whole home using eco-products," said television home makeover guru Oliver Heath at the opening of this year's Ideal Home Show at London's Earl's Court.

"This is urban eco-chic," he told Reuters.

His EcoCentric stand had two rooms decked out in products from glasses to tables, chairs and lampstands that were either from sustainable sources or had been reclaimed or recycled.

Emphasising the green theme of this year's show that runs for a month is Recycle Now Alley, showing the route taken converting plastic bags, bottles and tin cans into cars, tableware, perfume bottles and even jewellery.

"In this country we are now recycling nearly 24 percent of our household waste - roughly double what it was two years ago," said Jennie Price, head of the government's Waste and Resource Action Programme (WRAP).

"Things like glasses from recycled bottles used to have a bad name as being of poor quality. But all that has changed now. The quality is very good," Price added.

Big business too is taking the retrieve and reuse route as rocketing raw material prices make recycling a commercial proposition.

At the end of Recycle Now Alley, WRAP had erected a kitchen made out of recycled products from work surfaces made from glass and plastic bottles to cutlery from cans and cupboard doors made from old yoghurt cartons.

"This just gives you an idea what can be done. It is stylish and eco-friendly. And this is just a fraction of what is possible," Price said.

Story by Jeremy Lovell

REUTERS NEWS SERVICE - http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/35561/story.htm

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Would be interesting to see how this develops into an on-going trend in the suburbs and city areas. Unfortunate, there are no pictures in the piece.

[Adriana]

Found a similar article:

Living the eco-life in Cornwall
A year ago, the Strawbridge family swapped their comfortable suburban life for self-sufficiency in a dilapidated house in Cornwall. Sanjida O'Connell visits their solar-powered, wool-insulated eco-haven

http://news.independent.co.uk/environment/article352304.ece

[Veronica]

What about eco-death? Would you guys go it this way? Interesting IMO ...

http://www.gainesville.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060409/LOCAL/204090335/1078/rss

[Quizzical]

Self-sufficient living modules hit UK
They sprang up in the deserts of New Mexico and are made of tyres, earth, and rubbish. Now these self-sufficient living modules have arrived in the UK.

Source: Copyright 2006, Independent
Date: April 27, 2006

In the desert a few miles from Taos, New Mexico, is an elegant building, all curves and flowing lines, with a high atrium roofed in glass, its walls painted in subtle shades of terracotta and aqua. Visitors who pull over and knock at the door of Angel's Nest find an equally startling interior. Wooden ceilings and high galleries run alongside an interior greenhouse fragrant with jasmine and planted with fruit trees: banana, mango, papaya, fig and date. The back walls are almost entirely glass, giving views across the austerely beautiful desert. The smart bathrooms and welcoming bedrooms are the equal of those in a five-star hotel.

Some of the less obvious features of Angel's Nest are as important as its glamorous façade. Solar panels and a wind turbine produce electricity. Thick walls and the insulating effect of the huge greenhouse keep the house cool in the strong sunshine but retain heat at night or when the weather is cold. Rainfall is gathered and filtered, used for drinking, and washing, then as "grey water" for the food plants; its final incarnation as sewage is used to nourish non-edible shrubs. "In a drought, we need occasional water back-up if there are extra people here," says the owner, Robert Plarr. "But a family of four can live off the desert all year. The desert is a hostile environment but we live like kings."

Many of the neighbouring homes look like hobbit-holes, some like smart barn conversions, but all are striving towards the same goal: self-sufficiency. As far as possible, the houses are built from recycled materials: tyres, aluminium and steel cans, plastic and glass, even cardboard. They are called Earthships.

Michael Reynolds founded Earthship Biotecture and has been designing them for the past three decades. He trained as an architect but prefers to be known as a "biotect", because, as he says, his work involves so much more than architecture. He has worked on 2,000 to 3,000 projects. "Looking into the future, it's becoming clear that we cannot continue to move in the direction we are following," he says. "The Earthship is a response to that. Housing, sewage, water, power, garbage, food: it is a living method that addresses all those issues."

One of the beauties of the Earthship design is that it can be adapted to suit other climates. Reynolds has worked in Bolivia, Japan, Canada, Mexico, Belgium and India. "We have explored cloudy weather and found that, with double or triple greenhouses to eliminate heat loss, bills can still be cut by 80 per cent."

The first UK Earthship, which overlooks the Kinghorn Loch in Fife, opened in August 2004. It was built by Sustainable Communities Initiatives (SCI), a registered charity, and was constructed to housing standards, although it is being used as a demonstration, education and research building. It contains 700 tyres (rammed full of earth), 1,500 cans, reclaimed timber and other natural products such as sheep's-wool insulation, clay membranes and earth plaster. More than 200 volunteers worked on the two-year project. The UK's second Earthship, also designed by Reynolds, will be completed this summer. Earthship Brighton has been built by the Low Carbon Network.

"It was a challenge to translate the Earthship into English architectural language, and I think it looks beautiful," says the project manager, Mischa Hewitt. "The biggest issue was damp-proofing. Many American Earthships are built in high, arid areas. Stanmer Park in Brighton is not arid! But the amount of rain we can harvest is awesome; 73,000 litres a year."

More rain means less sun. "The thick walls act as huge storage heaters," says Hewitt. "It is colder here than New Mexico, but it hasn't been that much of a problem. We have more than enough sun; you can walk in on a cold day and it's warm inside, even though there is no visible form of heating." The Earthship also has a stove that runs on pellets made from waste wood for back-up heating; the stove also backs up the solar water-heating system.
To generate electricity, Earthship Brighton has a set of photovoltaic panels to harvest power from the sun, and a small wind-turbine. "They complement each other, because if it's not sunny it tends to be windy," says Hewitt. Energy is stored in battery banks for the days when not enough electricity has been generated. "We have a capacity of 10 or 12 days," explains Hewitt. He adds that generating one's own power makes one use it more sparingly.

Reynolds has worked hard to make Earthships low maintenance. "In the early days it was like being on a yacht; you had to know a lot," he says. "But we realised we couldn't make the general public accept the maintenance issues. So, over the last 10 years, we have designed out all the maintenance. You need to check batteries and clean filters, every two or three months." One of the main barriers to Earthship construction in the UK has been our draconian planning laws. But that may be set to change, as local councils wake up to environmentally friendly, cost-effective housing. Earthship Fife was granted full planning permission and SCI is running a three-year monitoring programme to secure permanent validation for Earthship building techniques in Scotland. The charity is now working towards creating a "zero waste and zero energy" self-build Earthship development of 12 homes. Brighton, too, may see more Earthships. "We have submitted a nine-unit development to Brighton council," says Reynolds. "The community loved the idea. We hope it has a good chance of passing; Brighton is a leader in sustainable development. Approvals used to be a nightmare but now everyone is starting to take these issues on board, and this may cause laws to change."

Should that happen, it's likely that Reynolds will remain at the forefront of Earthship development in the UK. His enthusiasm goes way beyond simply running a commercial company. "We need to make enough money to keep going but we put it back into the business. We're trying spread values of a different kind, that give every person on the planet what they need to stay alive. It's thrilling. We need Earthships more than we need money."

Angel's Nest (http://www.angels-nest.org; 001 505 246 4661); Earthship Biotecture (http://www.earthship.org; 001 505 751 0462); Earthship Brighton (http://www.lowcarbon.co.uk; 07974 122 770); Earthship Fife (01592 891 884; http://www.sci-scotland.org.uk)

How to build one

Getting started

The first step, says Michael Reynolds, is detailed research. Books, DVDs and videos are available; the Earthship Biotecture website is a good starting point, as are the other sites listed. The Earthship community is friendly, welcoming, ready to share its knowledge and actively welcomes enquiries and visits. Earthship Biotecture rents out several of its New Mexico Earthships to visitors, from $75 (£42) per night.

Finding a site

"Most we have built are in rural areas, but they work equally well in cities," says Reynolds. "In rural areas, you might partially bury them to create a hobbit-hole home, but in cities you can insulate rather than burying and veneer them in brick or stone to fit in with other buildings," he says.

Finances

As a rough rule of thumb, you're looking at a similar figure to a conventional new-build. "From working in several countries, we have found that Earthships tend to cost the same as good-quality conventional building," says Reynolds. And remember: no more utility bills! Raising a mortgage could be less straightforward. Mischa Hewitt suggests that financial institutions with an environmental element to their own principles may be a better bet than high street banks.

[Quizzical]

'Green' Roof Unveiled by U.S. Architect Group Showcases Global Trend

April 27, 2006 — By Paul Burkhardt, Associated Press
NEW YORK — An architectural organization unveiled a new "green" roof for its own building Wednesday to showcase a trend toward environmentally-friendly technology.

The leafy rooftop of the American Society of Landscape Architects building in downtown Washington is a model of the techniques used increasingly to cool temperatures, filter air, and lessen the burden on sewers by absorbing rainwater.

Visitors are surrounded on three sides by a variety of plants, and the aluminum grating that serves as a walkway is suspended over more vegetation.

Green roofs, first championed in Germany, have grown in popularity around the world, and experts predict more growth as the practice sprouts as far away as China. In North America, green roof space grew 70 percent last year.

"What you're going to see is a meteoric rise in this industry because it takes serious issues like storm water and offers multiple solutions," said Steven Peck, president of Green Roofs for Healthy Cities, a non-profit industry association.

Germany, which helped launch the trend beginning in the 1950s, now has 50 square miles (32,000 square acres) of green roof space and adds an additional five square miles (13 square kilometers) per year, estimates Christian Werthmann, an assistant professor of landscape architecture at Harvard's Graduate School of Design.

Green roofs began to spread when some German cities encouraged building owners to substitute ballast and tar rooftops with vegetation. Werthmann estimates 40 German municipalities require green roofs in at least some cases.

The United States has only a fraction of the green roof space found in Germany -- but a study this month found U.S. green roof space grew 80 percent last year. North America has a total of 2,150,000 square feet (200,000 square meters), according to the study by Green Roofs for Healthy Cities.

Chicago was the U.S. leader, planting nearly 300,000 square feet (27,900 square meters) of green roof space last year.

Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley has described green roofs as part of an effort to make his city "the most environmentally friendly" American city. Chicago, which installed a green roof on its City Hall in 2000, has offered developers more regulatory incentives than any other North American city, Peck said.

Steven Holl, a leading U.S. architect based in New York, has designed a number of green roof projects, but says the demand is greatest at his Beijing office.

The Beijing Linked Hybrid project, a self-contained city of linked vertical buildings designed by Holl, includes hundreds of apartments as well as stores and schools, and every roof is green. Storm water collected in rooftops will help feed a self-sustaining water system to protect the buildings against water shortages in Beijing, Holl explained.

"They want it and they're willing to pay for it," Holl said of his Chinese clients.

China launched a nationwide drive last month to make energy-saving buildings that help ease fuel shortages and reduce greenhouse gases. The country has also signed an agreement with the United Nations to promote environmentally friendly practices in staging the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

While some advocates say they would like to see more North American cities implement requirements for green roofs, Werthmann warns that forcing developers could result in half-hearted efforts that do little to help the environment.

"In the states it's all voluntary, so it's a totally different push," Werthmann said.

The ASLA roof cost $946,000 (euro761,400), but the organization says two-thirds of the budget was to make the showcase roof accessible.

"The ASLA roof is only 3,000 square feet and to have people and plants together in that amount of space is unique," Werthmann said, adding that typically only maintenance staff make it onto most green roofs.

Experts say green roof installation can be as cheap as $9 per square foot, and increased property value, energy cost savings and longer life for the roof can offset the investment.

Over the last six months, Peck said he has seen green roof associations spring up in Mexico, New Zealand and Australia. Next month, he is planning to announce a world green infrastructure association that will work with eastern European and developing nations to adopt green roofs.

"Green roofs should be treated as necessary infrastructure for a city," Perk said. "Like sewers and streets."

[Eco Man]

Here very decent article:


Eco-warrior: Mark Barthel recycles non-compostable waste, re-uses 'grey water' and insulates his roof with a mat of sedum and alpine plants

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/property/main.jhtml?xml=/property/2006/05/10/pgreen10.xml&sSheet=/property/2006/05/10/ixptop12.html

[Veronica]

'Green' Burials Growing in Popularity

July 03, 2006 — By William Kates, Associated Press
NEWFIELD, N.Y. — It sits on the eastern fringe of New York's Finger Lakes region and is bounded on three sides by 8,000 acres of protected forests: the perfectly natural place to spend an eternity. The 93-acre Greensprings Natural Cemetery is the first of its kind in New York and one of just a handful in the United States, where interest in "green" burial is just taking root.

Carl Leopold, a retired Cornell University plant scientist, bought one of the first 20 plots sold.

"It's so sensible," he said. "Putting bodies in a waterproof, permanent container protected from the environment, it's ridiculous."

At Greensprings, where a plot costs $500 plus a $350 fee to dig the grave, bodies cannot be embalmed or otherwise chemically preserved. They must be buried in biodegradable caskets without linings or metal ornamentation. The cemetery suggests locally harvested woods, wicker or cloth shrouds. Concrete or steel burial vaults are not allowed. Nor are standing monuments, upright tombstones or statues.

Only flat, natural fieldstones are permitted as grave markers (they can be engraved). Shrubs or trees are preferred.

And only one person is allowed in each 15-foot-by-15-foot plot.

"This is more than just dig a hole in the woods and roll them in. We see it as a natural return to the Earth, becoming part of the circle of life," said Mary Woodsen, a lifelong conservationist and the cemetery's president.

"Not everyone will find this appealing," she said. "But there are people who want that look and feel of nature."

Natural or woodland cemeteries are common in the United Kingdom, where they make up more than 10 percent of burials. In the United States, however, green burial is a relatively new idea, but one that has caught the attention of people who favor blending land conservation with a natural approach to funerals.

Thirty-two-acre Ramsey Creek Preserve, which opened in 1998 in rural Westminster, S.C., is acknowledged as the nation's first green cemetery. Others are in Florida, Texas, California and Washington state.

Elizabeth Stuckman, 47, made arrangements to be buried at Ramsey Creek, which was started by family physician and environmentalist Billy Campbell, who was looking to simplify the increasingly involved funeral process and help conserve land. Stuckman had her brother's ashes spread there after he was killed in a car accident last fall. Her parents have plans to be buried there, too.

"There's life in the land. It's not a dead place like a conventional cemetery. It's intensely alive, and that's what you focus on," Stuckman said.

At her brother's funeral, the children were able to play in a nearby stream, while his friends picnicked and performed bluegrass music.

"I like that the land is wild and always changing with time," she said. "Whether we like it or not, death is about change. To pretend my brother is just sleeping under a mowed and manicured lawn is to deny that death is about change."

Today, there are 70 people interred at Ramsey Creek, said Campbell's wife, Kimberley, who is vice president of Memorial Ecosystems, which runs the cemetery.

"We've seen growth in the hospice movement," she said. "We've seen an upswing of home birthing. People are interested in returning to the simple ways. This is just a dust-to-dust approach to funerals."

Robert Fells, a spokesman for the Virginia-based International Cemetery and Funeral Association, said the green concept is just a repackaging of what the conventional cemetery burial already offers.

Contrary to widespread belief, embalming is not required by law so people can refuse it, Fells said. Buy a no-frills wooden coffin. Plant a bush instead of a gravestone. Those options are currently available at most cemeteries, he said.

According to the Federal Trade Commission, the average funeral in the United States costs about $6,000. Many exceed $10,000. Even cremation typically costs more than $1,000 -- and has its environmental downside: Cremation uses energy and releases dioxin and mercury (up to 6 grams a body) while preventing nutrients in bodies from enriching the land.

Josh Slocum, of the Funeral Consumers Alliance, a Burlington, Vt.-based federation of advocacy groups, said natural cemeteries provide "another choice for consumers, and that's always good."

"Most of what we think of today as the traditional funeral -- embalming, expensive caskets, manicured cemeteries -- are practices started in the 20th century when burying the dead became an industry," he said. "This is really nothing new. It's what the pilgrims and the pioneers did ... Really natural burial is as old as death itself."

The Greensprings preserve, located 75 miles southwest of Syracuse, was once mostly pasture and cropland before it was acquired from a conservation-minded seller.

"Someday, we'd like to see most of the property return to the native woodlands that used to be here," said Woodsen.

Eventually, trails will wind through meadows, woods and burial areas.

[Eco Man]

Saving Trees Is Music to Guitar Makers’ Ears

Source: Copyright 2007, New York Times
Date: June 7, 2007
Byline: Glenn Rifkin

Christian F. Martin IV is the sixth generation to run his family’s renowned guitar-making business, C. F. Martin & Company. But he is surely the first to worry about the availability of the distinctive woods needed to build Martin guitars, the choice of musicians like Sting, Paul Simon, Jimmy Buffett and John Mayer.

As old growth forests have been razed and several species of tropical woods like mahogany, ebony and rosewood have become much scarcer, guitar makers like Martin, Taylor, Fender and Gibson have had to rethink the notion that there is an inexhaustible supply of the desired woods to make their instruments.

As small, privately held companies, these instrument makers have banded together to join the burgeoning corporate social responsibility movement, not just to appear politically correct but to ensure their long-term survival.

“If I use up all the good wood, I’m out of business,” Mr. Martin said. “I have a 2-year-old daughter, Claire Frances Martin, and she can be the seventh generation C. F. Martin. I want her to be able to get materials she’ll need, just as my ancestors and I have over the past 174 years.”

Though they are fierce competitors for a small but vibrant marketplace, the companies have become aware of the significant changes in the availability and price of the best woods. In an unusual alliance, the four guitar makers have joined with Greenpeace in one of many efforts to bring attention to forest management and sustainability.

Bob Taylor, president and co-founder of Taylor Guitars in El Cajon, Calif., says that he has observed one vital wood species after another become unavailable in the 35 years he has been in business.

“I used to buy Brazilian rosewood back in the 1970s at the lumber yard for $2 a square foot,” Mr. Taylor said. “Now it’s impossible for us to make a guitar out of it and ship it outside the U.S. If we do get a little bit of it, it’s extremely expensive. The cutting of it has all but halted.”

He added that “Adirondack spruce is unavailable. Mahogany was so plentiful it was a commodity. Now only specialty cutters are getting it, and the prices have gone through the roof. All these things happened just in my lifetime.”

Greenpeace headed the Musicwood Coalition, as it is called, in January 2006, to promote better logging practices, particularly in the rain forest region in southeast Alaska. Because of its unique geography — a thin strip of land in the Alaska panhandle with the ocean on one side, huge mountains on the other — this temperate forest is considered one of the rarest on the planet.

Its majestic trees — Sitka spruce that are hundreds of years old — have been clear cut by private timber companies, and Greenpeace has worked to encourage these landowners to try new approaches that would help preserve the ancient forests.

Specifically, Greenpeace wants the private logging companies to apply for certification by the Forest Stewardship Council, an environmental organization that would require the adoption of different logging practices. Scott Paul, the forest campaign coordinator for Greenpeace, said that if the current practices continued, the last old-growth Sitka spruce trees would be gone in just six or seven years.

“This scared the hell out of them,” Mr. Paul said of the guitar makers. For them, Sitka spruce is a precious commodity, a tonal wood used for the soundboards in acoustic guitars and pianos. To achieve the sound that guitarists cherish, the Sitka spruce, at least 250 years old, has long been a required material.

Mr. Paul said that the amount of Sitka spruce used by guitar manufacturers is a tiny fraction of the total shipped. As few as 150 logs are enough to supply the whole industry each year. Nearly 80 percent of the spruce cut in Alaska is shipped to Asia, primarily Japan, for home building.

“These 400-year-old trees are getting buried in the walls of homes in Japan,” Mr. Paul said.

But while researching the customer list of Sealaska, the largest private logging company in the area, he noticed the names of well-known instrument makers and decided to get them involved to create public awareness of the issue.

Mr. Paul approached Henry E. Juszkiewicz, the chief executive of Gibson Guitar. Mr. Juszkiewicz was an early supporter of the Rain Forest Alliance on whose board he sits and helped start the SmartWood program, which monitors the poaching of endangered wood species. Over the last decade, illegal poaching of old-growth trees has become a serious problem, particularly in the Pacific Northwest.

He rallied his competitors to join the Greenpeace effort. “This is both a public relations effort and an effort to do the right thing for our kids,” Mr. Juszkiewicz said.

Though the market for guitars is small — Mr. Martin estimates that three million acoustic and electric guitars are sold in the United States each year — it is growing again, especially among serious amateurs willing to pay $2,000 and up for a quality instrument.

The guitar makers are looking for alternative woods that are more plentiful and cheaper, but everyone agrees that buyers who spend a lot of money for an instrument are looking for a distinctive sound as well as the characteristic look and feel of traditional woods.

“In many cases, alternative species of woods will deliver a consumer a great instrument,” Mr. Juszkiewicz said. “From a marketing standpoint though, it’s a different story.”

His view is echoed by Brian Berk, editor in chief of the Music and Sound Retailer, an industry trade publication. “It’s going to be difficult for this effort to make a major impact on the industry because the sound is so important to the end user,” Mr. Berk said. “There are definitely replacement woods that are sustainable for making guitars. But will they sound great?”

Rock stars like Sting and Dave Matthews, among others, are lending their names to the effort. Orianthi, a 22-year-old Australian protegee of Carlos Santana who recently signed with Geffen Records, bought a new $3,000 Martin made of red birch and cherry, both sustainable woods. “Guitars made from alternative woods generally don’t sound very good,” she said, “but when I started playing this one, it sounded amazing, as good as the traditional instruments. I’m using it to record my new album.”

For the dealers, however, the buyers of high-end guitars continue to crave Brazilian rosewood and mahogany. “People are looking for investment-grade guitars,” said Joe Caruso, co-owner of the Music Emporium in Lexington, Mass. “I’ve got guitars for $25,000, and that upper-tier market has really blossomed over the last 10 years.”

Mr. Caruso noted that all guitar makers, including smaller specialty manufacturers like Collings Guitars in Austin, Tex., and independent luthiers around the country, are charging more for guitars made from the great tonal woods.

“The idea is simple: Let’s treat this resource for what it is, a really valuable, really scarce material,” Mr. Caruso said. “If you want it, pay for it.”

Mr. Martin, as with his counterparts, is seeking compromise solutions that favor better forest management rather than a complete cessation of logging in those forests. He is wary of telling the people of indigenous cultures how to run their businesses, but he doesn’t want shortsighted economic goals to endanger the future of his own business.

“None of us,” he said, “want to cut the last tree.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/07/business/smallbusiness/07sbiz.html

[sandesh]

EUGENE, Oregon - From an urban forest infused with hiking trails to wetlands housing endangered plants and animals, the natural beauty of Eugene, Oregon, provides a scenic backdrop befitting America's greenest city.

Nestled between the Willamette and McKenzie rivers in central Oregon, the city has adopted aggressive environmental policies aimed at conserving energy, using alternative fuels and fostering an industry of green businesses.

Nonetheless, Eugene struggles with many of the same problems facing other growing US cities: urban sprawl, congested roadways and limited public transportation.

http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/39415/story.htm