Our Green Streets Blog

If it appears that resolutions for each New Year flow plentifully, launching a resolutions for sustainable practices comes as easy as pulling a wisdom tooth.

With this in mind, the “New Year x(1)” practice of sustainability has been released as a very simple and painless way for each member of the world population to participate in contributing toward an increase in sustainability practices.

During the upcoming year, people can start their “New Year x(1)” practice as follows: Read more of this >>

the stairscraper is a design from Nabito Architects. Source: Nabito

There is more than one way to create a tall building that can provide dwellers with access to the outdoor air or a garden, even if it happens to be on the 10^th floor.

A high-rise building concept called the stairscraper was recently featured on the gizmag website. This design innovative skyscraper design comes from Barcelona-based firm Nabito Architects. With one of the best-known drawbacks to high-rise living being the lack of outdoor space, this firm solves the problem by using a corkscrew design that makes the roof of the unit below an outdoor space for the unit above.

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In an era when an abundance of items requires electrical or battery power to operate, what happens when you aren’t near the grid or – heaven forbid! – the power goes out?

Place your bike into a Pedal-A-Watt and generate electricity for yourself. Photo: Convergence Tech

There are some interesting portable power generating options are available to generate electricity from the sun or wind or by simply pedaling a stationary bicycle.

We begin with the do-it-yourself version of power generation: the bicycle. Convergence Tech manufactures the Pedal-A-Watt, a bicycle stand that not only generates electricity, it seconds as a fitness device. The power that’s generated can be used to power lights and/or other small appliances, such as laptops, cell phones, fluorescent or LED lights.

As Convergence Tech writes on its website,  “Any bicycle that is in good shape will work with the Pedal-A-Watt Stand as the stand adjusts to fit any wheel size including children’s bikes.”

The company states that the average rider can produce between 125 and 300 watts using the Pedal-A-Watt.  While this amount of power isn’t huge, many pieces of equipment draw very little power and can be powered for long spans of time with small amounts of power.  As an example, a laptop draws 70 watts, thus one 20 minute workout could run the laptop for over an hour.

The Assembled Pedal-A-Watt (including a blocking diode) allows the owner to drop a bicycle into the stand, pedal and generate watts. According to Convergence, “The Assembled Pedal-A-Watt includes the bicycle stand, generator, 20 amp blocking diode, adjustment knob and instructions. The Pedal-A-Watt is built with off the shelf components to reduce waste and carbon footprint. The stand weighs 23 lbs.”

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Mike Yohay is the founder and CEO of Cityscape Farms. Photo: Cityscape Farms

While a city may be dense with population, it is generally regarded as sparse with agricultural space, unless you hear Mike Yohay, the founder and CEO of Cityscape Farms, which specializes in creating urban farms wherever there happens to be growing space, from vacant lots to rooftops.

These smart solutions come from entrepreneurial sustainability companies like Cityscape Farms, which  provide urban greenhouse systems for agricultural production with low water use.

“By growing fresh food within just a few miles of where it will be eaten, we will have healthier, better tasting produce and make our cities cleaner and more self-sufficient,” says Yohay.

Important for city farming, the system for growing food has no soil because it uses an aquaponics system. Aquaponics is a method combining aquaculture (fish cultivation) with hydroponics. This approach to growing uses natural fertilizer from filtered fish effluent, creating a closed-loop, pesticide-free organic system:

Yohay says the aquaponics process works this way:

• Water containing natural fish waste gets filtered to become organic nutrient feed for the plants
• Plants absorb the nutrients and the cleansed water is recycled back to the fish tank

One perspective of rooftop farming from Cityscape Farms. Sourcwe: Cityscape

Yohay says he also offers a program to owners of commercial rooftops to monetize their roof by leasing it to Cityscape Farms. A Cityscape team of architects and engineers will develop “site-specific greenhouse systems that are consistent with local building codes and zoning laws. We address every liability concern to assure a safe, structurally sound installation that will earn you income that didn’t exist before.”

Other benefits: helping the environment and the local food economy. The systems that are used created their own nutrients for plant growth and require less water.

On his website, Yohay cites two influences in the development of Cityscape Farms:

“Attending college in Iowa, where I witnessed topsoil depletion and environmental pollution from large-scale corn, soy, and livestock agribusiness. The second was living in La Amistad rainforest in Costa Rica, where for a year I managed an eco-lodge and participated in low impact organic farming that supported our local community.

“Looking critically at these two extremes, I became determined to find a happy medium: a modern way to feed people on a large scale without spoiling the land, air and water.”

Vermeer drove a mobile CEB press from Iowa to the Rocky Flats CEB production site.

TSC Global, championing its innovative “Roofs for the World” program, met in Denver with a group of earth building advocates, including Partners Worldwide and Iowa-based Vermeer Tractors for a full production test run of the Vermeer’s mobile compressed earth block machine press.

Brad Wells, TSC executive director, says Vermeer drove its equipment from Iowa, setting up a mobile production facility to manufacture over 1000 compressed earth blocks (CEBs) which TSC will then use to complete the walls on a demonstration unit at its Denver headquarters. Wells believes this represents a new building paradigm for impoverished areas in the world.

The CEBs were manufactured on facilities west of Denver that had been donated by Church Ranch, where the team used “a mountain of blue ribbon dirt!” says Wells. The goal of this endeavor is to build durable, inexpensive structures that will resemble the Ugandan units developed by Moses Musaazi Kampala, as shown in this photo.

This October, a group of international business people gathered to observe Vermeer’s portable CEB press – the 714 Dynabloc Press. Vermeer and Faith Tech Connect developed the machine to use in worldwide poverty areas to build low-cost CEB homes and provide jobs to local residents in the process.  The blocks are produced using a mixture of clay-based soil and a small amount of cement for bonding.

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Styrofoam can be recycled

In spite of what many recycling proponents think, Styrofoam now has a place in the recycling supply chain, reports Fort Collins artist, Nancy Dobbs, who has been storing Styrofoam junk in hopes her wait would lead to getting the material recycled.  That was when she heard about one innovative company, ACH Foam Technologies, which ran a recycling operation from its corporate offices in Denver.

While Styrofoam may be regarded as a miracle substance for the packaging industry, it has long been considered a curse with no cure by recyclers and environmentalists due to an interminably long lifespan and its difficult fit in the recycling industry, where most regard it as nonrecyclable.

Thus Dobbs was happy to make the long drive south from Fort Collins with a carload of Styrofoam she had collected over the years. ACH indicated it was willing to receive the load, as long as it hadn’t been contaminated with food.

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Nick Mallos, a scientist from the Ocean Conservancy, joined on the expedition to the North Pacific Gyre.

Embarking on an important journey this past August, the Ocean Conservancy set sail with San Francisco-based Project Kaisei to expand its research and help with some cleanup on the massive trash vortex that exists in the North Pacific Gyre. Four boats joined in the journey, including a barge large enough to haul away some of the trash that was found in this “Great Pacific Garbage Patch.”

The North Pacific Gyre, an area between California and the Hawaiian Islands, happens to be where trash from around the world is trapped – much of it plastic – due to four converging ocean currents. Some estimates report the gyre is twice the size of Texas, others argue its size goes double that of the United States.

The actual size of the garbage patch is a great question, says Nick Mallos, Nick Mallos, a marine scientist and member of Ocean Conservancy’s marine debris program who joined the expedition. He describes the trash vortex as being more like an archipelago in character, with parts being clear ocean, while other parts are dense and deep with trash.

Mallos collects data on microplastics, parts that have broken from bottles and packages into very small pieces that almost resemble confetti.  “There was this shimmering gleam of color because the water column just below the surface was littered with these objects. I was just astonished,” says Mallos. “In certain areas, the top three to six feet of water is absolutely dense with these microplastics. If you wave your hand in the water, you come up with these fragments on your hands.”

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