Come Craft with Us at Sustainable NYC on Thursday March 19
Friday, March 13th, 2009Some of you may remember the offsite Green Renter Lecture that Chris Neidl held at Sustainable NYC, a really cool and lovely eco-boutique on Ave A in the East Village. Owner Dominique Camacho has generously offered us her storefront windows for a Solar One display that will be up through spring. We’ve decided to make something solar and recycled, and came up with the idea of making flowers out of old shopping bags, then attaching some to solar panels with little motors. Those flowers will spin when the sun hits them, and the display will be interactive because passersby will be able to stop the spinning by blocking the light. Pretty cool, huh? After we take the display out of the window, we’re planning to have it at our Solar One events this summer.
This is what the flowers look like:
On Thursday March 19 at 6pm, bring yourself, your crochet hooks and knitting needles, your old plastic bags and your ingenuity. The flowers in the pic were made with a D crochet hook and the pattern will be available next Thurs, but if you’d rather knit, or have another idea for a flower pattern, well, bring it on! The more variety, the better. We’ll be meeting at Sustainable NYC at 139 Ave A between St. Mark’s & 9th St. There will be free snacks and tons of fun!
For those who are interested in the design/construction aspect of the display, please email Events & Marketing Coordinator Dina Elkan at dina@solar1.org for more info on where and when we’ll be putting it all together. We’d like to have the display in the window by April 1.
To recap:
What: Create flowers out of plastic bags by crocheting or knitting
Where: Sustainable NYC, 139 Ave A between St. Mark’s & 9th Street
When: Thursday, March 19 at 6pm
Bring: Old shopping bags (transluscent plastic only, please! The opaque, shiny bags get too sticky to work with easily), crochet hooks and/or knitting needles, your friends, your brilliant ideas and lots of enthusiasm!
We hope to see you there!
Posted in Design, New York City, Recycling, Renewables, Solar One, Solar Power, Sustainability, Waste | Permalink
Green Renter:Navigating NYC’s Recycling Landscape with Christina Salvi, Office of Recycling Education and Outreach.
Monday, March 9th, 2009| March 23, 2009 | ||
| 7:00 pm | to | 8:30 pm |
Recycling: it’s good for the city, benefits the planet and is required by law, but many find the reality of recycling challenging. How does your building’s program measure up and how can you improve your recycling performance?
Residential building managers, superintendents, board members and others will benefit from this presentation by Christina Salvi, Outreach Coordinator for the city’s Office of Recycling Outreach and Education (OROE). Hear about new recycling laws and old misconceptions. Find out how to avoid fines, improve your recycling program and get your tenants to recycle. Learn about other ways to reduce waste, recycle more and help make NYC a little greener.
(OROE is a program of the Council on the Environment of New York City.)
Posted in Recycling, Solar One Events | Permalink
Green Renter – Labor and Structure: Overlooked Aspects of Recycling in NYC with Samantha MacBride, Deputy Director of Recycling, NYCDOS
Sunday, January 4th, 2009| January 26, 2009 | ||
| 7:00 pm | to | 8:30 pm |
Public education and economic viability are two important features of making recycling work in NYC. But the often unseen labor of custodians, collectors and sorters is no less important; as is the physical set-up of buildings, streets, and public spaces This talk discusses how labor and structure enable successful recycling, encouraging New Yorkers to consider how important these seemingly “background” issues are to the viability of sustainable waste management.
Posted in Recycling, Solar One Events | Permalink
New Energy Technology Is All Rubbish
Monday, November 10th, 2008
Imagine a technology that not only generates energy with minimal greenhouse gas emissions, but that can even remove existing emissions sources while also solving the problem of garbage disposal. If St. Lucie County in Florida proves correct, plasma incinerators may be one more option in our growing sustainability portfolio. Instead of dumping its trash in landfills, St. Lucie County hopes to blast it with streams of superheated gas (known as plasma) at temperatures of 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit. At this temperature, organic matter vaporizes into a form of gas that can be used to power turbines, generating waste steam that could be then be used to create more energy. Inorganic matter such as aluminum cans could be used as recycled material for construction and infrastructure, including filler for roadbeds.
Not only does St. Lucie County hope to provide power for 50,000 homes in the process, but, by keeping trash out of landfills, it would significantly curb methane emissions that would result from decomposition. In addition, the plasma process itself (also known as plasma arc gasification) apparently generates far fewer emissions than standard incineration, and the county administration expects that the resulting energy will be no more expensive than natural gas.
Though plasma plants have been around since the 1980s, St. Lucie’s will be the first intended specifically for waste disposal. Expected to go on-line in 2011, city planners anticipate that it will process 1,500 tons of garbage daily and will supply the local energy grid with 60 MW of electricity (though some sources claim that public outcry (see below) and other logistical difficulties have caused GeoPlasma – the plant’s owner and developer – to propose a scaled-back verison that will process only 200 tons per day).
The plan is not without controversy, however. Skeptics claim that the technology is unproven and may release unsafe amounts of dioxin and other cancer-causing particulates into the community. Others claim that the proposed benefits may be overblown; a study of a similar plasma arc waste disposal facility in Honolulu concluded that the technology actually increased waste disposal costs while providing little if any environmental benefit. Until such concerns are abated, our trash isn’t likely to go anywhere but into the ground.
Sources: “Plasma Turns Garbage Into Gas”, Scientific American; “Doctors Say: Be Careful, St. Lucie County; make Geoplasma prove its claims about proposed arc incinerator”, www.tcpalm.com; “City to Brief Council on Plasma Arc Recommendations For Landfill Reduction”, City of Honolulu Department of Environmental Services (press release); “Can We Turn Garbage Into Energy? The Pros and Cons of Plasma Incineration”, www.slate.com; “Plasma arc waste disposal”, “Plasma (physics)”, www.wikipedia.com; “How Plasma Converters Work”, www.howstuffworks.com; “The Prophet of Garbage”; Popular Science; “Generating Power From Waste”, www.recyclingexpert.co.uk; www.geoplasma.com (Geoplasma homepage).
Posted in Global Warming, Pollution, Recycling, Solar One, Sustainability, Technology, Waste | Permalink
CFLs Soon Safer to Handle
Saturday, July 12th, 2008
In the not-too-distant future, it looks like you’ll be able to handle your CFLs without worrying about the hazards of mercury.
While Compact Fluorescent Lightbulbs (CFLs) have long been seen as a technology with significant potential to conserve electricity and reduce consumer energy costs, one of their main drawbacks has been public trepidation about exposure to this toxic element if a bulb happens to break. Now nanotechnology researchers may have developed a way to reduce this concern. According to an article in this week’s Science Times, experiments with microparticles of various elements including sulfur, copper, nickel and most notably selenium have demonstrated promising results when binding with mercury. Potential applications could weave “nanoselenium” into CFL packaging and special cloth with which to mop up breakage, even plastic bags for recycling spent or shattered bulbs.
This means one less reason not to make the switch to these spiral-shaped icons of energy efficiency. Anyway, you won’t have a choice beginning in 2012. As a consequence of last December’s energy bill, traditional incandescent bulbs will be phased out of use, beginning with the 100-watt bulb and ending with the 40-watt in 2014. This ensures that, while we may not necessarily know how bright the future will be, getting there will be a whole lot more efficient.
Posted in Energy, Energy Efficiency, Legislation, Pollution, Products, Recycling, Renewables, Technology, Tru Light | Permalink
Where Are Your Old Cellphones?
Saturday, January 26th, 2008
Our friends over at INFORM have started a new series called The Secret Life. First on the agenda: cellphones. These devices that have totally transformed communication over the past 20 years have also become too-synonymous with “disposable” leading to their being sent by the millions to landfills and incinerators. And yet, many, if not all, of the materials used to make them are reclaimable and/or recyclable.
INFORM has put together a great 5 minute video about the need for more cellphone recycling, while also showing in some detail what happens to these phones during the recycling process. We encourage you to check out their website, watch the video, and then take those old phones out of your junk drawer and find a way to recycle them (they provide the info on how to do just that, of course).
In addition, this seems like a great time to remind everyone about the Greener Gadgets Conference coming up this Friday, February 1st. Our recent Green Renter with conference co-chairs Marc Alt and Jill Fehrenbacher was a great overview of the need to re-think the design process for digital technology, complete with some great examples like the BOGOlight that the audience got to pass around and test out. We’ll have a video version of their presentation on our site soon, but you can register for the conference right now.
Cellphone image by Chris Jordan, taken from inhabitat.com
Posted in Pollution, Products, Recycling, Sustainability, Technology, Waste | Permalink
New Video of Green Renter Lecture Up Online
Thursday, January 3rd, 2008
For the past three years, our Green Renter lecture series has drawn New Yorkers from all over the five boroughs to Solar 1 to learn about green issues that confront urban dwellers, including programs on recycling, local food, urban planning and the redevelopment of New York Harbor’s native oyster population, among many others. Now, even if you weren’t able to attend in person, you can see the presentation and hear the lectures online! The first available Green Renter is the Sheridan Swap, a plan for transforming the Sheridan Expressway into green space, presented by the South Bronx Watershed Alliance. You can check it out here, and we encourage you to come back often as we’ll be adding more Green Renters very soon.
The next Green Renter will be held Tuesday, January 15 at 7:00pm. The topic is “NYC Greener Gadgets Conference Preview”; come see the fantastic new green electronic products that will be shown at the conference being held in NYC on February 1, and get tips on how to recycle your old cell phone and iPod.
Posted in Education, New York City, Recycling, Renewables, Solar One | Permalink
Show Support for Upcoming eWaste bill in NYC
Thursday, January 3rd, 2008
With all the new gizmos coming into apartments as holiday gifts, an equally impressive stream of outdated electronics gets jettisoned to make room in tight apartments. The toxic metals in these throw away items is something we have written about before, and are something that politicians are taking more notice of.
We wrote about the bill in October, and it looks as if City Council is nearing a decision on a great step forward to making electronics recycling easier and more widespread. It would require manufacturers to be responsible for the recycling of increasing percentages of their products–25% in 2012 and 65% in 2018 (NYT). Many people are very excited about this and are encouraging emails and phone calls to the City Council. Heads up from no less than No Impact Man himself. (Read his post for the contact info)
Posted in Products, Recycling, Waste | Permalink
Power Users
Friday, November 30th, 2007
Electronics are definitely the ‘it’ gift this holiday season–one of Amazon’s featured gifts for preschoolers is a frog with a keyboard on it. But there are many ways to get great gifts while keeping other things in mind.
All video game consoles are not created equal. Nintendo was recently castigated by Greenpeace for their lack of transparency on toxics and recycling, which took Nintendo by surprise. But their Wii game console uses only 17w of power–roughly 10x less than the other two hot consoles the PS3 and the Xbox 360, which both use close to 200w. If you are shopping for your first console, consider a last-gen device like the PS2 or GameCube, which both use less than 30w, and will be cheap and have lots of games available.
In the market for a new TV? LCD screens, in general, use almost 70% less energy than their tube counterparts. Plasma TVs use a bit more, and rear-projection TVs used the least. But some used way more vampire current than others. A Sharp TV set used a whopping 72w in standby mode. Check out this CNET chart for different models.
“Laptops use half the energy–and are twice the fun,” boasts a ConEdison subway ad. Laptops are designed to use much less power because they must be able to run on a battery. But new laptops (which have been outselling desktops since 2006) have capabilities similar to a desktop–without the power consumption. A new laptop will use around 45w, compared with 200w for a speedy desktop.
And as always, recycle and freecycle any old electronics that are taking up space in your apartment.
Posted in Energy Efficiency, Recycling | Permalink
Happy America Recycles Day!
Thursday, November 15th, 2007
Via Treehugger. To find out more, visit the National Recycling Coalition website.
Posted in Recycling | Permalink
