rachel-indecol-blog

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Type in your address, see if it is ideal to set up solar panels! I want this website for the USA

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Clean tech company Algix and environmentally-minded product and material development company Effekt have joined forces to commercialize the world’s first algae-derived flexible foams. The foams, which can be created in a range of colors, will be used for a variety of applications and marketed under the brand name Bloom.

The joint venture’s aim is to help make sustainable products more easily accessible. It could be used to produce yoga mats, footwear, sporting goods (e.g. traction for surfboards) and toys, to name but a few.

More: Downward Dog Onto an Algae Yoga Mat. Via.

— d.n.

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“Climate change is a problem that can no longer be left to a future generation.” —Pope Francis at the White House

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Future solar panels might be invisible and plastered on the sides on buildings instead of roofs. A new startup called SolarWindow makes transparent coatings that turn windows into mini power plants.

On a skyscraper, where rooftop solar panels can only provide a fraction of the massive amount of energy that big buildings use, the new windows could power a much larger chunk of an electric bill.

“Rooftop space available for conventional PV is so limited it is difficult to generate meaningful energy for a skyscraper,” says John Conklin, the startup’s CEO. “SolarWindow, on the other hand, is developing its transparent electricity-generating coatings for the vast surface area of glass available on a skyscraper.”

More here.

— rw

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Before & After – A Dramatic Transformation For A Building In Thailand

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Plastic ingestion will affect 99 per cent of the world’s seabird species by 2050

Researchers from CSIRO and Imperial College London have assessed how widespread the threat of plastic is for the world’s seabirds, including albatrosses, shearwaters and penguins, and found the majority of seabird species have plastic in their gut.

The study, led by Dr Chris Wilcox with co-authors Dr Denise Hardesty and Dr Erik van Sebille and published in the journal PNAS, found that nearly 60 per cent of all seabird species have plastic in their gut.

Based on analysis of published studies since the early 1960s, the researchers found that plastic is increasingly common in seabird’s stomachs.

In 1960, plastic was found in the stomach of less than 5 per cent of individual seabirds, rising to 80 per cent by 2010. The scientists estimate that 90 per cent of all seabirds alive today have eaten plastic of some kind.

This includes bags, bottle caps, and plastic fibres from synthetic clothes, which have washed out into the ocean from urban rivers, sewers and waste deposits.

Birds mistake the brightly coloured items for food, or swallow them by accident, and this causes gut impaction, weight loss and sometimes even death.

“For the first time, we have a global prediction of how wide-reaching plastic impacts may be on marine species – and the results are striking”, senior research scientist at CSIRO Oceans and Atmosphere Dr Wilcox said.

“We predict, using historical observations, that 90 per cent of individual seabirds have eaten plastic. This is a huge amount and really points to the ubiquity of plastic pollution.”

[Continue Reading→]

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We can disrupt the building and construction industry. Materials that are put in and taken out of buildings can have future uses - but mostly this is not taken advantage of. Recovery from construction sites and rehabilitation projects is something that I want to see more and more of. 

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A new project, dubbed Sunroof, uses Maps data along with information from other databases to estimate how much buying or leasing solar panels could save homeowners on their electricity bills in the coming years — taking into account things such as shade from trees, sun position throughout the year and historical cloud and temperature patterns.

Then the tool provides information about solar providers available near homeowners’ addresses.

Not everyone can use it yet: Right now, it works only for people in the San Francisco Bay area, Fresno, and the greater Boston area. But a launch video promises that “pretty soon it will grow to include the whole country and maybe even the whole world.”

— rw

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The dose makes the poison -Paraceleus (1493-1541)

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it hit me that "zero waste" is equivalent to "100 percent resources."

Nora Goldstein , http://grn.bz/1KO7jBI

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This is a “Free Store,” a yard sale without price tags, where everything old is considered anew.

The host of this store in Brookland is an organization called the Peace House, a nonprofit focused on enacting social change locally. In this case, that means encouraging neighbors to give their stuff away and take the stuff that others leave behind.

The group is not alone in trying to create free item exchanges — formally known as “gift economies” — in the Washington area.

There are neighborhood “Buy Nothing” Facebook groups, online marketplaces where users offer up unwanted goods, in NoMa, Silver Spring, Annapolis and nationwide. A newlywed recently set up a group in the Columbia Pike corridor after becoming overwhelmed by the amount of stuff she had to get rid of while moving in with her groom. Free items have also been known to crop up in bulk on the streets of Arlington and Shaw, and legend has it that a “free tree” in Alexandria once accommodated castoffs beneath its boughs.

When discards are given a second chance, a lot can happen. A lot of stuff.

Time for one more weekend read? Continue here.

— rw

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Plastic-Free Tuesday: One day a week no plastic consumption and no plastic waste.

On Plastic-Free Tuesday we skip plastic to reduce our plastic footprint. That means we don’t buy anything that is made of plastic or contains plastic. We also don’t use anything made of plastic that we have to throw away after using it. So no bananas wrapped in plastic, no plastic bags, no take-away coffee in plastic cups, and so on.

What can I do?

Share your Plastic-Free Tuesday on Twitter using #PlasticFreeTuesday. Please like and share us on Facebook. We are always looking for new ideas and ambassadors to make Plastic-Free Tuesday a global movement. Contact us through Facebook or Twitter @PlasticFreeTues.

You are also welcome at our Dutch website www.plasticminimalism.blogspot.nl.

Don’t feed the plastic monster!

More at plasticfreetuesday.com.

— rw Thx: Chip!

Got a tip for Unconsumption? Submit it here! 

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“Join us. We can do this. It’s time form America, and the world, to act on climate change.” —President Obama. Tune in at 2:15pm ET to watch him announce the biggest step we’ve ever taken to act on climate change.

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What Millennials see is the inspiring, social side of the circular economy; the side that revolves around DIY culture and community empowerment.

Maxine Perella

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Take, make, waste

Our current linear economy

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Playful urban design. A Baltimore bus stop that doubles as a giant typographic sculpture.

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Sculptures made with Keys by Moerkey