#environment (138 links)
- Loco Home - Tenement case study on Vimeo vimeo.com
Making homes more energy efficient through insulation and air tightness can give superior comfort levels while also cutting carbon and bills. However, traditional solid-walled buildings present particular challenges. Lisa Pasquale will show how superior comfort can be achieved on a modest budget with appropriate insulation materials and careful draught-proofing.
- Kim Stanley Robinson on the Cities He's Written About, From Washington to Zurich - Bloomberg bloomberg.com
Humans like being together. Here’s the truth: Everybody moves to cities, not just because of their jobs but because of their sociability.
- A Legendary VC Has a Plan for Solving Climate Change theatlantic.com
- Alternative to Gas Boiler Replacement Guide 2021 heatingforce.co.uk
- Wooden Toys from Holz Toys Cornwall holz-toys.co.uk
- Which Fish? whichfish.org
With fish stocks under pressure, which are okay to eat?
- BLDGBLOG: Comparative Planetology: An Interview with Kim Stanley Robinson bldgblog.blogspot.com
Let’s rate our technologies for how much they help us as primates, rather than how they can put us further into this dream of being powerful gods who stalk around on a planet that doesn’t really matter to us.
- South London Botanical Institute slbi.org.uk
- 1% for the Planet | Home onepercentfortheplanet.org
- Cars (again) - Charlie's Diary antipope.org
Lots of interesting bits here but the stats in particular stand out. "The death toll is not small. The UK, despite having an excellent road safety record, sees more people killed on the roads every year than died during the entire duration of the Troubles in Northern Ireland; "According to the World Health Organization motor vehicle collisions are the 6th most common cause of death in developed nations, with an average rate of 20.8 per 100,000 populations in the year 2000 (30.8 for males, 11.0 for females). African nations have the world's highest road traffic injury mortality rates." (Wikipedia on traffic-related death rates.) 1.2 million were killed and 50 million injured in road traffic accidents in 2004."
- Climate Change: Evidence climate.nasa.gov
NASA says, "the evidence for rapid climate change is compelling".
- Uncommonly Beautiful uncommonlybeautiful.com
An anti landfill fashion accessory label
- Just Saving justsaving.org
When taking part in a challenging event (anything from a marathon to a school scoot-athon), rather than inviting friends, family and work mates to sponsor you by donating money, through JustSaving you will be able to ask for sponsorship in the form of actions.
- UK Indymedia - E-ON's YouTube propaganda indymedia.org.uk
"Let's ruin E-ON's pathetic online attempt to rescue their ailing brand." Oops.
- Julie's Bicycle juliesbicycle.com
A not-for-profit company helping the music industry cut its greenhouse gas emissions and create a low carbon creative future.
"Last month, stretches of the river Lee were included on the list of 117 "bodies of water" across England and Wales that, according a new European rating system, are now classified as "bad". In total, just five of the 6,114 rivers surveyed received the "pristine" classification; three-quarters failed to attain the "good" grading."
- Light pollution is complicated part 2 (or okay, do blame it on the lighting designer) - Headlessness headlessness.com
What if there was some shift in emphasis from designing for the building, to designing for the community, or the wider urban space? If everyone could agree just to turn the lighting down a bit, or even a lot, night-time city centres could become much less competitive, noisy places in terms of ambient light.
- Chris Heathcote: anti-mega: screens in context anti-mega.com
Whilst the advertising industry has one of the longest histories of trying to understand interaction, it’s a very different set of tools that digitalness brings; ones that designers at the coal face of web and mobile encounter every day. Everything can be considered in context, be timely, reactive, and data-driven. I’m going to try to outline some dimensions to think about, with some incredibly quick, simple, off the cuff dumb ideas (All brands are impersonated. Badly.) that hopefully push the advertising into being more useful or interesting.
The acrimonious split follows unsatisfactory negotiations which could have given Freecycle's UK moderators the ability to localise their web pages and allow them to serve the community better [...] The UK is probably the most enthusiastic Freecycling country in the world, hosting just 10% of all the branches but handling 27% of all Freecycling activities.
- Real Time Carbon realtimecarbon.org
Each unit of UK electricity is currently causing this much CO2...
- Pachube :: blog: Pachube2SketchUp: realtime sensor data in SketchUp blog.pachube.com
"With this tool, you are able to import both realtime and historic Pachube data (i.e. sensor and environment data) into popular 3D CAD package Google SketchUp. The incoming data can be used to generate or modulate a 3D model of a building or environment, and enables sophisticated design-decisions that are based on actual (and not simulated) sensor and environment data. Possible uses include designing interactive façades, undertaking post-occupancy evaluation (which is where you evaluate how well the design performs) and sensor-based form generation." In love.
A service that enables you to connect, tag and share real time sensor data from objects, devices, buildings and environments around the world. The key aim is to facilitate interaction between remote environments, both physical and virtual.
- Cardboard Laptop Stand: available now! cardboardlaptopstand.co.uk
A light, portable and eco friendly laptop stand.
- Headlessness — Indoors vs. outdoors; buildings vs. clothing headlessness.com
Is there potential for buildings to be less good at keeping us warm, or cool, or dry than they are now? You know, for environmental reasons.
Freecycle alternative.
- The dark side of Dubai - Johann Hari, Commentators - The Independent independent.co.uk
Once the manic burst of building has stopped and the whirlwind has slowed, the secrets of Dubai are slowly seeping out. This is a city built from nothing in just a few wild decades on credit and ecocide, suppression and slavery. Dubai is a living metal metaphor for the neo-liberal globalised world that may be crashing – at last – into history.
#dubai #environment #culture #architecture #economics #poverty #via:tomtaylor #capitalism#slavery#middleeast - My Freecycle Network (beta) my.freecycle.org
Freecycle starting the move away from Yahoo! Groups towards custom solution.
- Howies - HAND-ME-DOWN hmd.howies.co.uk
"These products have been made to last. So that one day you can hand them down to someone else. And they can carry on their little journeys." Lovely.
- sw0p - zero cost items and skills sw0p.com
Takes the best bits of online auctioning, recycling and LETS systems and combines them into a simple and free item and skill bartering service.
- FixMyStreet fixmystreet.com
Another excellent mySociety hack.
Radiohead's LED lighting. "Our road to what became, we believe, the first exclusively LED tour lighting system started with a conversation about generators at festivals and green field sites."
- Sandbag: real action on climate change sandbag.org.uk
Thanks to policy makers in the UN and Europe levels of pollution are now controlled. Permits must be bought by polluters to let them keep polluting. But there is a finite number of them in circulation and the good news is anyone can buy them.
- Welcome | Ben Saunders | North Pole Speed Record north.bensaunders.com
- Twitter / CO2Updates twitter.com
- AMEE - The world’s energy meter amee.cc
AMEE is designed as a neutral platform to aggregate and distribute all the CO2 data in the world. It combines measurement, profiling and transactional systems to enable this.
- Virtual Hosting Blog » GreenDev: 50 Environmentally Friendly Apps, Hosts and Resources virtualhosting.com
"Environmentally friendly" being a relative term when it comes to hardware and power.
Within weeks, plastic bag use dropped 94 percent. Plastic bags were not outlawed, but carrying them became socially unacceptable — on a par with wearing a fur coat or not cleaning up after one’s dog.
- Rethinking the Meat-Guzzler - New York Times nytimes.com
"Because the stomachs of cattle are meant to digest grass, not grain, cattle raised industrially thrive only in the sense that they gain weight quickly. This diet made it possible to remove cattle from their natural environment and encourage the efficienc
- Welcome to WWOOF wwoof.org
In return for your help on organic farm, gardens and smallholdings you receive meals, accommodation and the opportunity to learn. Wwoof volunteers do not pay to stay with hosts and Wwoof hosts do not pay volunteers for their help.
"Lets you easily power off devices when not in use, saving both energy and money" Like this idea. Bit manual, mind. Wouldn't have expected it from Belkin.