running the numbers

American photographic artist Chris Jordan uses images to illustrate mass consumption and consumerism in the US. Each image portrays a specific quantity of something. The one above, for example, depicts 1.14 million brown paper supermarket bags, the number used in the US every hour.

a fresh look at productive urban land

[pic: Greenopolis]

A few days ago I was watching some bees in the CBD of the city where I work. They were foraging around some discarded food; there were no plants anywhere nearby, no pollen -- just buildings and pavement. The bees got me thinking about dysfunctional and dying colonies in the US (and now in South Africa) and the impact on agricultural yields. And that started me on a train of thought about growing food in urban areas. I've talked about urban agriculture before, but this is a new angle -- I promise.

I'll get back to the bees and food in a moment, but I need to talk about city buildings first.

Land parcels are regularly cleared in central cities to make way for new buildings. While some of the demolished buildings have bits and pieces collected for recycling or reuse elsewhere (windows, timber, bricks, sanitary fittings, and even crushed concrete), and may even be replaced with more resource-efficient buildings, I have to wonder whether this is the most sustainable approach to replacing the existing inefficient stock. With all the energy that goes into creating a building in the first place, and the huge volumes of demolition waste, there is increasing emphasis being placed on a cradle-to-grave analysis for making environmentally sound decisions. But it's not so easy to calculate the full impact in each particular case, so it's very difficult to build a case for preservation if the developer is pushing for a clean slate.

recycling is not only for households and offices

South Africa has a lot of catching up to do on reducing waste. Cape Town is the first municipality in the country to develop a by-law and calculate the cost for integrated waste management. The city's landfill sites are almost full, and its 3.2 million residents produce up to 6 000 tons of waste per day. But recycling is not yet routine for most of the population, and very little has been done to reduce product packaging.

There is some movement now in the area of construction waste. Machines to crush concrete for reuse in new construction projects have been available in South Africa for a decade, but demand for the crushers has only taken off within the past year, as contracters start to see the financial benefit of recycling concrete. Particularly in Cape Town, but also in other centres, it is becoming too costly for large volumes of concrete to be dumped - so apart from the environmental impact, there is now a financial incentive to change waste disposal practice.

Now the National Waste Management Act, passed earlier this year, deals with waste in all its manifestations. It stipulates requirements for recycled material in new buildings, and also provides for certain products to contain specified proportions of recycled material.

The voluntary Green Star building rating system gives credit for recycled content in buildings, but this will be the first emergence of a legal requirement. Coupled with this will be stiffer penalties for illegal dumping. [Source: Construction World, April 2009]

The Act is an outcome of the National Waste Management Strategy and the 1997 White Paper on National Environmental Management. In its objectives, the White Paper defined a hierarchy of waste management practices that remains a key principle of the waste management policy:

• Reduction of waste at source;
• Re-use; Recycle; and
• Safe disposal as a last resort.

The Act will start to apply these practices.

climate adaptation needed on both sides of the Atlantic

Turns out that it's not only India and African countries that are already facing climate change threats requiring immediate adaptation strategies. A report released a week ago by the U.S. Global Change Research Program under NOAA’s leadership highlights impacts already being experienced in the United States. The report, Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States, doesn't recommend specific policy responses, but it does highlight the need for responses by sector and region.

In addition to discussing the impacts of climate change in the U.S., the report also highlights the choices we face in response to human-induced climate change. It is clear that impacts in the United States are already occurring and are projected to increase in the future, particularly if the concentration of heat-trapping greenhouse gases in the atmosphere continues to rise. So, choices about how we manage greenhouse gas emissions will have far-reaching consequences for climate change impacts. Similarly, there are choices to be made about adaptation strategies that can help to reduce or avoid some of the undesirable impacts of climate change. This report provides many of the scientific underpinnings for effective decisions to be made – at the national and at the regional level.

The link above provides the full report as well as summaries of key findings, and links to relevant IPCC reports and news articles.

managing performance of buildings

With the growing imperative to reduce energy consumption in the built environment, operations and information management systems become more important. While tools like LEED help with initial building design, actual performance may not be quite what was expected. A big challenge with fine-tuning designs and specifications for mechanical and electrical systems is a lack of information about true performance. This means that learning from past successes and failures can be a slow process - particularly as building owners and managers often are reluctant to release performance statistics.

As energy management systems in big buildings become more hi-tech, their control moves into the IT arena, and a whole new range of possibilities open up for remote control and monitoring of systems; and information management also becomes easier. This can help improve the performance of the building that is being monitored, but does not necessarily result in wider dissemination of energy information. In fact, with more accurate assessment of system performance, it may become obvious that some aspects of building operations are not as efficient as previously thought, and the operators of "green" buildings may be even less enthusiastic about sharing knowledge.

How do we get around this reluctance? One impetus - at least in North America - may be the rollout of the smart grid, which brings electricity utilities and building managers closer together in managing energy supply and demand. Another could be  the emergence of open source software like OpenLynx, which has been implemented in a number of buildings in Washington D.C. According to a report in earth2tech, the open source approach can bring to the building industry the same ethic of collaboration and innovation that exists in the software industry. The building automation industry currently works with proprietary standards that are not compatible among suppliers, but the smart grid will necessitate development of common standards, and a platform like OpenLynx could provide the basis for these standards.

Peter Michalek, who has been working on OpenLynx for a few months, pointed out [at Connectivity Week] that open source can bring down the costs of the energy management systems dramatically and can make them more advanced, because they will be built on already-established basics. He said the licensing agreement of OpenLynx is “liberal,” explaining that a developer can do anything s/he wants with it, but has to publish the benefits created back into the system.

That last point is key: feedback is important in open systems, and maybe the open source ideology will begin to break open closed doors. [via WorldChanging]

Another interesting software tool for the building industry is the Environment Code from Investment Property Databank, which is not open source, but provides a free template for the collection of environmental performance data, and comparison against international indices. This is a global product that was recently launched in South Africa, and according to IPD South Africa MD Stan Garrun:

The IPD Code provides guidance on how to collect environmental data in a consistent way across properties and portfolios. It can be linked with other reporting methods, such as the Global Reporting Initiative.

The IPD Environment Code measures operational performance of a building, and data analysis can show where improvements could be made. As an environmental tool, it covers energy, CO2, water, waste, pollution, materials, health and well-being; and thus is useful in seeing the broader impact of a building's operation in relation to modelled performance, say, as part of a Green Star evaluation. [via Engineering News, 11 June 2009]

two-wheeled wonder

Following the lead of Tesla Motors, electric vehicle developers seem to be going all out to shake the dowdy golf cart image. For those interested in the two-wheeled variety, Mission Motors has developed Mission One: an iconic electric motorbike that is said to rival conventional motorbikes in performance. Just don't expect this to be affordable transportation.

Liberia's analogue blogger

Originally on AfriGadget:

Alfred Sirleaf is an analog blogger. He runs the “Daily News”, a news hut by the side of a major road in the middle of Monrovia. He started it a number of years ago, stating that he wanted to get news into the hands of those who couldn't afford newspapers, in the language that they could understand.

And this blackboard blogger even makes money from advertising. [via Bizcommunity.com]

Makes me wonder why we allow technology to dictate the terms of cultural evolution, when things could be the other way around. Life gets faster and more stressful simply because technological development makes it so. When it comes to technological innovation, sustainability is about the use of appropriate interventions that support the social, economic and environmental context. This black and white, handwritten newscast does just that.

It's an unusual application of a very normal principle for informal sector entrepreneurs in developing countries: do what you can with what you have available to suit the market. Not unlike traders clustered around public transport facilities in South Africa, roadside driver training in Botswana or coal cycle wallahs in India.

campaign for dot eco domain

Al Gore and other heavyweights have been pushing for .eco as a new TLD. Dot Eco LLC wants to use the domain for lodging green info, and Big Room, supported by the David Suzuki Foundation and others, is also campaigning to use it as a low-cost platform for sustainability reporting. If you think it's a good idea, both sites offer ways to support the campaign to convince ICANN.

[via TreeHugger]

user pays - but who is the real user?

Just as children are taught (one hopes) to clean up their own mess as an incentive to avoid making a mess in the first place, so too with carbon emissions: we have a mess to clean up. Political philosopher Henry Shue, speaking at a technical briefing in the latest round of UNFCCC climate negotiations in Bonn, describes the mess like this:

If we want to limit global warming, for example, then, to 2º C above pre-industrial levels, we must avoid emitting the trillionth ton of carbon to be confident of having even a 50% chance of meeting this target. We have already emitted 0.5 Tt C and are therefore already committed to 1º C of warming. “Having taken 250 years to burn the first half-trillion tonnes of carbon, we look set, on current trends, to burn the next half trillion in less than 40”. Recent research suggests that the most helpful way to conceive our challenge, if we want to avoid warming of more than 2º C, is as the challenge of remaining within a total cumulative carbon budget of 1 Tt C, although of course it may turn out that this cumulative cap needs to be revised as time progresses. Total cumulative emissions of carbon must not surpass 1 Tt C or global average surface temperature will, with 50% confidence, rise more than 2 º C above preindustrial levels, due to CO2 alone. As shorthand, then, we can view our challenge as staying within a cumulative carbon budget of 1 Tt C, or avoiding the trillionth ton.

The question is, who is responsible for cleaning up this mess that was largely created by previous generations? It may seem unfair that we should clean up someone else's mess, but neither would it be right for us to leave it to future generations.

Apparently the latest round of negotiations hasn't gone too well, precisely because of arguments about this key point. There are all sorts of issues around equity and fairness and whether developed countries should carry the burden of responsibility because of their historic advantage of having benefited from a carbon-intense industrialisation process.

Given the remaining fixed budget of half a trillion tonnes of carbon that can be released into the atmosphere, it is crucial to recognise that this quantity is fixed for many generations to come. Which means that whatever we use up of that budget now, leaves less for future generations. "We are in direct competition for a scarce resource with our own great-grandchildren, and everyone else’s great-grandchildren." Shue notes that "Over the time-scales that matter to humans, the planet’s capacity to deal with carbon without rises in surface temperature is non-renewable, even if over several centuries the atmospheric carbon will break down." Therefore, "Intergenerational equity is not an additional peripheral aspect of the question that we may optionally take up or not, as we choose; the central question is essentially intergenerational. One budget is shared by us and every foreseeable generation to come."

So which countries and sectors should pay for what they use of this budget, and which should not? Quite understandably, developing countries are pleading for leniency on the grounds that they have not used as much of the historic budget, and are not benefiting now to the extent that industrialised nations are. Shue provides a robust rationale for why the "free" emissions should be reserved for the poorest countries.

The outcome of this issue will have profound repercussions for many countries. If you are at all interested in the debate, I urge you to have a look at Shue's discussion paper. It's brilliant in sweeping aside all the political crap and presenting a coherent argument. At eight pages, it's not too onerous a read.

[With thanks to Harald Winkler for pointing out Shue's paper}

cut and paste cities

Here's a global project that invites anyone to submit photos of things you like and dislike about your city. The Arup Foresight and Innovation group will curate insights, stories and speculations based on the images submitted.

The brief is to capture through photography what you really like in a city, what makes it tick, and what you would like to see more of in the future. They can be spaces or services, aspects of everyday life or temporary events. Alternatively, describe something that should be removed from the city, a building you could do without, a service that just doesn't work. These are a CUT. Things you like are a PASTE.

Check it out at cut 'n paste cities.