Houses are built to last, at least most are, for a few years.
But what happens when someone decides that a home should be replaced, and the property it’s upon should be used for another building? Usually, homes in that situation are demolished, and pieces of the building finds their way to a landfill. Much of that material is reusable, at least until it is torn apart by a bulldozer.
A New York Times article, This Old Recyclable House, explores the topic of deconstruction of homes, where the materials that make up a house are salvaged so that they can be reused.
The article follows the efforts of the President of the Building Materials Reuse Association, Brad Guy, and his efforts to train a crew on how to deconstruct houses for a pilot project in Cleveland. The deconstruction industry is in its infancy, and Brad Guy is one of its biggest proponents.
Guy presents some great arguments for the growth of the deconstruction industry. According to him, approximately 300 homes were deconstructed last year. The article tells us that the EPA estimates about a quarter of a million homes are demolished each year. Yet the local reuse of building materials from a deconstructed home may end up ultimately costing less than demolition, and also create jobs.
Growing up, I’m not sure that I knew what a good thing I had going. My mom and pop always had big gardens in the back yard, and we had more fresh fruits and vegetables than we could handle, of many different varieties. We had our own little orchard in the back yard too, with apples, pears, apricots, and cherries.
My parents would get up early in the morning, before the working day began, and spend time together in the backyard planting and weeding and nurturing. Many days throughout the year, they would come inside from the garden with a harvest in their arms, and mom would can a lot of stuff that we didn’t eat fresh, so that we could have the fruits of their efforts in the winter months.
They don’t have as large a garden these days, but they still like to plant around the house, and everything they eat usually has something fresh in it, even if it’s the herbs that share space around the house in flower beds.
When I read about topics like crop diversity, those gardens bring back some pretty pleasant memories. The miracle of plants taking sustenance from the earth and from the rain is one that we take too much for granted.
Schools are one of the keystones to a more environmentally friendly world. Maybe we can learn as much as the children of the world by the greening of our schools, and by an environment concern for material in their classrooms.
The article focuses upon two different kinds of reforms happening in Connecticut schools.
The first involves the schools themselves becoming more environmentally friendly and energy efficient. The second kind of reform aims at raising awareness of environmental concerns in students who attend those schools.
The school reforms include things like energy waste reduction initiatives, such as:
Limiting teachers’ use of appliances, like mini-refrigerators and microwaves
Installing state of the art programmable thermostats to more accurately control room temperature
Covering windows at night to create a thermal buffer and keep heat in
Using both sides of paper in classrooms before they are recycled them, and
The congested streets of New York City might see a little relief this summer as plans move forward to close miles of City streets to cars on three Saturdays during the month of August.
The car-free lanes will extend 6.9-miles through Manhattan from the Brooklyn Bridge towards Park Avenue and the Upper East Side. Will removing traffic from busy thoroughfares help people think about city life in a different way? Maybe.
Copenhagen started something similar around 40 years ago (1962) by turning its main street to pedestrian use only, and has continued to develop to a more pedestrian friendly urban area since, adding more pedestrian-only streets, reducing parking spaces, and turning parking lots into parks..
One of the people involved in the transformation of Copenhagen’s more pedestrian urban spaces is Jan Gehl, who consulted with New York Mayor Bloomberg on PlaNYC. PlaNYC is an initiative to make a Greener New York City.
It’s great to hear that New York is taking strides like this, to make urban life more livable, and finding ways to make it more friendly to the environment. An organization that pursues similar initiatives around the world is the Project for Public Places.
I did a little shopping last week for some household goods, and found out a little later the same day while browsing the news, that a couple of my purchases were potentially toxic. Not something I expected from shower curtain liners.
That “new shower curtain smell” supposedly goes away after a month or so, and the potentially toxic chemicals that cause them also disappear. Adverse health effects supposedly include:
Respiratory irritation,
Central nervous system, liver and kidney damage,
Nausea,
Headaches, and;
Loss of coordination
Inspite of the American Chemistry Council response in a press release, my new shower curtains are still in their bags, and I’m looking around for some organic cotton shower curtains instead.
Published four years late and without public review, pursuant to a court order, the United States government has issued a 271 page long report on the impacts of global warming to the country.
Most of the findings, like the spread of warmth-loving pests and the inevitable loss of low-lying lands to rising seas, are not new. But the report included new projections of how the poor, elderly and communities with lagging public-health and public-works systems will face outsize health risks from warming.
Under a 1990 federal law, the US government is required to issue a report on climate change every four years. The last report issued was from President Clinton’s administration in 2000.
Here are some of the issues specifically addressed in the report:
What factors influencing agriculture, land resources, water resources, and biodiversity in the United States are sensitive to climate and climate change?
If you’re interested in the health of the Earth, and the many species that live here, a new report, proposed by the German government at a meeting of environment ministers of the G8 countries and the five major newly industrialising countries that took place in Potsdam in March 2007 is worth spending some significant time reading through.
The purpose of the study was to:
….evaluate the costs of the loss of biodiversity and the associated decline in ecosystem services worldwide, and compare them with the costs of effective conservation and sustainable use. It is intended that it will sharpen awareness of the value of biodiversity and ecosystem services and facilitate the development of cost-effective policy responses, notably by preparing a ‘valuation toolkit’.
The Economics of Ecosystems & Biodiversity page on the European Commission’s environmental pages provides more details into the study. I’m part of the way through it, and it may take a while to digest, but it provides a number of insights into the impact of the loss of many species of animals and vegetables around the world.
As the writers of the report tell us at one point:
The Convention on Biological Diversity has been meeting this week in Bonn, Germany.
The Convention was a treaty originally signed by 150 government leaders during the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, and targets three goals:
The conservation of biological diversity,
The sustainable use of its components, and;
The fair and equitable sharing of the benefits from the use of genetic resources.
Biological diversity, also known as biodiversity, is a term describing the variety of life on Earth, and the natural patterns formed by that variety.
In addition to describing the wide variety of plants, animals and microorganisms or the world, it also stands for the genetic differences within each species, and the variety of ecosystems that life exists within, from salt marshes, to deserts, mountains to farmlands, and more.
You can learn more about the treaty, the activities at this week’s Convention, and future goals of the organization on the home page of the Convention on Biological Diversity
It appears that noise pollution may have a more devastating impact upon the environment that we’ve imagined.
Researcher Bernie Krause has been recording the sounds of the world, without human sounds included, for over 40 years, and he’s finding it difficult to find places that aren’t contaminated by the noise of people any more.
And the impact of that noise may cause serious problems for some species.
But what happens when man-made noise — anthrophony, as Krause dubs it — intrudes on the natural symphony? Maybe it’s the low rumble of nearby construction or the high whine of a turboprop. Either way, it interferes with a segment of the spectrum already in use, and suddenly some animal can’t make itself heard. The information flow in the jungle is compromised.
Krause has heard this happen all over the world. For example, the population of spadefoot toads in the Yosemite region of the Sierras is declining rapidly, and Krause thinks it’s because of low-flying military training missions in the area. The toad calls lose their synchronicity, and coyotes and owls home in on individual frogs trying to rejoin the chorus.
