| Key characteristics of 'thriving' and the importance of neighbourhoods and precincts |  |
Depending on the merits of a building, homes, interior renovations, schools, commercial buildings and other construction for development projects, a LEED certifications is accorded. These comes in four levels, depending on the merit points of the project. There are four categories such as Platinum, gold, silver and certificate. Leadership in Energy Environmental Design or LEED was developed by U.S Green Building Council or USGBC. According to the merit points, there are some projects which have earned LEED Platinum certification and are mentioned here.
1. Net zero modern house in South Korea
This project includes a zero energy home with green features on a 4,553 sq.ft and 3,208 sq.ft of visitors pavilion. It is located in Yongin and is the first LEED Platinum certification project in East Asia, designed by Samoo Architects. Samsaung C&T built the house with the capacity to reduce energy consumption by 56 percent and sourced from solar panels on the rooftop. Built with non-toxic materials, it has high performance facade, heat flooring, ground source heat pumps, dual flush toilets, daylight sensors, electric car charging and many other features. 72 percent of water for daily cleaning use and irrigation is treated in a biological reactor for gray and black water.
2. Modern Ellis residence
This was designed by Coates Design architects for Ed and Jo Anne Ellis with a vegetated roof, rainwater cisterns and native landscaping. This is the first LEED Platinum family home in Washington state outside of Seattle. The project reduces energy consumption by 70 percent due to its geothermal, solar hot water, heat recovery techniques and photovoltaic solar. It has used hybrid envelope of cell spray foam and butt insulation with sheathing in wood framing making it very cost effective. This 2,560 sq. ft property has rain-screen application, CMU block and recyclable metal panes.
3. Marin hillside house
This was designed by SB Architects and built by McDonald Construction & Development on a hill in a four leveled design, incorporating a number of green elements from within and out. It features efficient aluminum window frames. low flow toilets, LED lighting, passive solar with geothermal design, spray foam insulation, recycled content materials and automation and lighting system for the whole house.
4. Bastyr Platinum project
This 11 buildings project in Bastyr University in West coast was designed by Collins Woerman for 132 students and expected to save about 34 percent on energy costs. This project eliminated unnecessary space, use of locally sourced woods, butterfly roofs for catching rainwater, permaculture teaching garden for edible and medicinal plants.
5. First LEED platinum home in Fort Worth
This minimalist home in Fort Worth, Texas was built by Ferrier Custom Homes and features natural day lighting, fiber cement siding, xeriscaping, energy star windows and doors, SIPs for constructing and recycled construction waste. It was designed by Philip Newburn of Dobbins and Crow Architects.
6. Newport Beach living home
Built of blown in insulation, dual flush toilets, high performance windows, recycled glass tiles, low flow fixtures, recycled steel, mini duct air distribution system and a central vacuum system, the Newport home was designed by Kieran Timberlake. It also features solar photo voltaics rooftop for reducing energy consumption.
7. Solar sufficient LEED home in Houston
Designed by Adams Architects, Virginia Point had durable structure of galvanized steel and aluminum skin. This 3,500 sq.ft home is self sufficient with an output of 23.8 KW powered by 140 solar panels sharp, has rainwater cistern of 7,000 gallon water with operable windows for cross ventilation. It also features spray foam insulation, bamboo materials, recycled paper counter-tops, panel for capturing solar energy and indirect solar light.
8. Affordable housing Silver Gardens
Built with superior insulation and a sloped roof to harvest rain water up to 5,000 gallons, Silver Gardens earns income from an offset transaction of carbon. This 66 unit apartment project in New Mexico is affordable to people and features high efficiency HVAC system, efficient plumping fixtures, wood framing, energy star appliances and lighting and topped with VOC finishing.
9. New world home in Georgia
Designed by Chadwick, this home on a 2,869 sq. ft features renewable energy sources, geothermal systems with drought tolerance and low maintenance landscaping. It also features bamboo floors, energy star metal roof, dual flush toilet, lcynene insulation and tank-less water heater.
10. Multifamily project in LA county
Suited for low income families, Casa Dominguez in East Rancho Dominguez has irrigation landscaping with an 85 KW solar photo voltaic and a good insulation for cutting energy costs. Residents are able to read the level of energy consumption of the property through a video monitoring.
Wave power is an intriguing but difficult proposition. It offers a fairly steady source of power that is more regular than many other renewable power systems, but the marine environment is particularly harsh and difficult to work in. A number of wave power projects have struggled in the past few years, which shows how difficult this approach can be.
A mobile wave power generating system proposed by Fraunhofer Center for Manufacturing Innovation would install wave generators along with banks of storage batteries onto ships or barges for portable wave power generation. The ship would go to sea and deploy its generators, and then return back to port and connect its batteries to the grid when it was fully charged.
These ships would need to be outfitted with millions of dollars worth of storage batteries, and would have storage measured in megawatt-hours. One advantage an integrated power system incorporating this kind of vessel would have is that it could also serve as a grid-tied power storage system. If other renewable sources were producing additional power, there might be times when it would make more sense to keep the barges tied up at the dock and providing their storage capacity instead of sailing out to generate additional power.
The basic premise for this has been around for a few years. Existing ships might be able to be repurposed for use as power stations, rather than requiring that new vessels be built. Additionally, while permanently installed wave power systems need to be robust enough to withstand the strongest storms, the mobility of the ship-based system would allow it to be moved back to safety in a harbor when severe weather threatened, which would allow for lighter weight construction.
The cost of electricity generated in this way has been estimated to be as low as 15 cents per kilowatt-hour, as compared with 30 to 65 cents per kilowatt-hour with other wave power systems. There would also be considerably fewer regulatory hurdles that would have to be overcome since the generators would be vessels, rather than permanently installed structures.
via: ecomagination
Originally posted at Los Angeles Auto Show
Google, Intel, Kohl’s, Staples and the Empire State Building were among the winners of the EPA’s Green Power Leadership Awards, presented yesterday in San Francisco. The awards, made in conjunction with the Department of Energy and the non-profit Center for Resource Solutions, are designed to recognize organizations, programs and individuals that significantly advance the development [...]
At the start of Day 2 of the European Seafood Exposition, SeafoodSource Editor Steven Hedlund and Contributing Editor Jason Holland answer the question, “Who’s driving the sustainable seafood movement?”
Access to accurate flow-metering technology has become vital for facility managers trying to reduce the energy consumption of their buildings, according to Marisa Fedele of Siemens Industry. Writing in Consulting-Specifying Engineer, Fedele says that flow meters allow facility managers to measure HVAC systems’ performance and make the best decisions to optimize efficiency. In one example, [...]
We are living in a new age of austerity. Environmentalism is no longer just a crunchy cause, but also a corporate mandate. Simple is good.
So why has product spam spun out of control? Perhaps HP (and others) didn't get the memo? Whatever the reason, one thing is now painfully clear: Product spam must stop.
Spam Attack!
As exhibit A, check out Hewlett Packard's new computers released yesterday. In fact, it's practically impossible not to check them out: HP has coughed up a number of machines at the same time, and they're filling the homepages of many a gadget site. There's the Envy 15, the Envy 17, the Envy 17-3D for starters--all aluminum-bodied, chiclet-keyboarded units with a variety of internal specs and screen technologies. They're otherwise very similar to each other, and don't depart too far from the designs and specs HP has used in previous models. There's also the new Folio 13 Ultrabook, aimed at the burgeoning ultra-light/heavy-on-performance laptop market. And the newly made-over Pavilion DM4, with refreshed audio internals alongside a nearly identical but "special" Beats edition. These machines join a stable of dozens of other HP machines on sale--the company's website even carefully defines them for you as its Mini, Everyday Computing, Ultra-Portable, High-Performance, and Envy ranges.
Great, you may think: A machine to suit nearly everyone's needs, and everyone's pockets. But HP isn't the only computer maker doing this. A scan through Sony's laptop offerings, Acer's, Dell's and so on turns up the same behavior. Everyone offers a huge array of machines, each with slightly different internal specifications and vastly different prices.
And it's not just laptops. How about Klipsch's new Lou Reed signature headphones? Apart from the slight redesign, the branded edition is almost identical to an existing Klipsch set. But let's not pick on Klipsch, as there's much more exciting fare to be offered by Sony: Its headphones page for the USA store lists seven different headphones designs for the "iPod/iPhone remote control" category alone.
What The Spec?
RIM just revealed its new BlackBerry Bold 9790 and Curve 9380 machines. The Bold has a 2.44-inch touchscreen, 1GHz processor, 8GB of storage, QWERTY keyboard, and an almost identical look and feel to the dozens of similar BlackBerrys that have preceded it. The Curve 9380 has a 3.2-inch touchscreen, no keyboard, NFC support, and a 5-megapixel camera--the "first-ever BlackBerry(R) Curve(TM) smartphone with a touch display," the press release calls it. But turn the Curve off, and slot it on a shelf on a phone store next to the Android machines from HTC, Huawei, Samsung, Sony...and you'll barely be able to single it out at a couple of paces distance.
Even Samsung, which is keeping things fairly consistent with its Galaxy lineup of phones and tablets (and is embroiled in a legal battle with Apple, which accuses it of cloning everything about the design right down to the boxes and promo materials), feels the need to sell a 10-inch Galaxy Tab alongside a 7-inch unit and a 9-inch unit.
Smartphones are a particularly interesting case to look at, especially if you at the work of companies like iSuppli. These firms hit the headlines with their informed teardowns of new hardware, and their smart backwards-engineering thinking to try to work out how much it costs to make these machines--thanks to their expertise in sourcing components. That's where we get the bill of materials comparisons between phones from, and while gizmo geeks may love poring over the details, the casual observer will note that the difference in component prices between, for example, most top-level smartphones is measured in tens of dollars--not hundreds. A five-megapixel camera unit for one smartphone versus an eight-megapixel one for another costs only a couple of dollars difference nowadays, thanks to ubiquitous supply among competing Asian manufacturers, and yet consumers are charged a huge multiple of this difference in the end price.
The Shotgun Effect
All this is fuel for a skeptic to ponder if product spamming is a mask for charging consumers a spectrum of prices for superficially different products.
There are reasons for making multiple products, of course. There's the shotgun effect, for one: If you can shoot multiple products at a market at the same time, you may find enough of them hitting their mark, pleasing the public and selling well--but you have to shoot enough at the same time to cover losses from the poor sellers with the good sellers. It's also a move that also limits the amount of money and effort you spend in differentiating your products: Hence, spam. This approach is different to taking aim at the market with a specific, carefully crafted shot--a single product, which requires confidence you've got your aim right.
You can also argue that the public has been trained to expect a diverse choice--consumerism has run rampant since Henry Ford offered just one edition of the Model T car, and by offering multiple similar products firms like Sony and HP can create an illusion of choice in the shopper's mind.
From a production point of view, putting out numerous similar products also creates economies of scale with suppliers of component parts, efficiencies in design, simplicity in creating packaging, and so on. Rich Leigh of the 10 Yetis PR agency and the writer behind the Good And Bad PR blog, gets to see much of the efforts companies put into promoting their diverse product lines. "Whereas some market-leading manufacturers are confident in developing a few products per division, innovating and releasing new iterations to keep customers buying," Leigh says, "certain manufacturers seem to rely on this product-spamming." From a PR point of view, Leigh thinks "although these releases may have slight differences that serve different niches, it appears desperate or cowardly, almost like the manufacturers are afraid to develop one or two products and fully back themselves."
Waste not...
One other downside to product spam could be high product turnover.
To put things in context: In 2009, it was estimated that 53 million tons of electronic waste was generated globally as people threw away products (the figure would be higher if you included waste material generated at manufacturing), and only 13% of it was recycled.
In 2007 it was estimated 426,000 cell phones were decomissioned every single day in the U.S., many of course being tossed in the trash rather than being recycled--the statistic prompted an artist to create this image of what that pile would look like (each spec in the left hand part of the image is a phone--zoomed in on the right):" 
In 2010, as a measure of how much worse this problem has got in a short interval, it's thought the U.S. alonegenerated 3 million tons of e-waste, and China produced 2.3 million tons--with estimates that China will rapidly produce much more waste as its population embraces consumer purchasing more and more. By 2020, the UN estimates that e-waste in South Africa and China from old PCs will be at 400% of its 2007 levels, and 500% in India. In terms of cell phones, the figure is 700% for China, and 1800% in India.
...Want not
But as well as e-waste, consider the intellectual waste of tech product spam. How often have you trawled the shelves of your local electronics store, comparing specs, price, look and feel of a new purchase? Did it ultimately perform remarkably differently to how a very similar--but different--product would have? If you remember Watership Down, the classic young adult novel and movie, you'll recall the rabbits in the story have a behavior called "going tharn." It's when they're confronted by dazzling headlights, and can't make a decision on what to do: This sensation has been applied to the act of shopping for the dazzling array of consumer goods by Shari Swan, CEO of Streative Branding--and we've all felt it.
Leigh commented that all product spam does "is confuse your average consumer who doesn't particularly want to spend days researching each purchase, forcing them to buy a simpler, more off-the-shelf alternative. In any industry, the scatter-gun approach rarely works." Graham Hill, founder of Treehugger, took it one stage further, and alluded to the complexities of owning too much stuff (including gadgets) in a recent Ted Talk, suggesting "less stuff, more happiness."
[youtube L8YJtvHGeUU]
The Future Is Unwritten
It's time for manufacturers to stop spamming us with a bewildering array of hugely similar products, sometimes with a dazzling array of names (DROID Eris, DROID Incredible, Curve, Bold, London, Zeta...or equally the MDRAS50-G, Series 7 Chronos 15.6, NP-RF711-S03 and far worse examples).
We're not suggesting centuries of commercial practice be upended, as this makes no sense. It's that more honesty in design and function should perhaps drive product ranges. One upshot of this happening could be that consumers could feel free to buy less, take better care of what we have, throw less away, and suffer less emotional pressure when shopping.
And finally, less spam would mean more time for all those talented folks in the R&D and design teams at major manufacturers to concentrate on innovating new ways for new products to actually improve our lives in meangingful ways.
[Image: Tumblr ThingsOrganizedNeatly]
Chat about this news with Kit Eaton on Twitter and Fast Company too.
The Economist has put together a nice graphic using data from Enel showing exactly how many gigawatts of each type of renewable energy were installed as of 2010 and where that power was located. As of the end of last year, the world had a total of 1,313 GW of installed renewable energy projects.
As of 2010, hydropower was still the global leader of renewable energy sources with 1,005 GW installed, but that could change in the coming years. Hydropower only increased in installed power by 3 percent from 2009, but solar power had the biggest year over year increase with a jump of 70 percent from 2009 to 40 GW.
Wind power also added a nice 24 percent in installed capacity from 2009 to 2010 and comes in second place globally, albeit a pretty distant second. If those trends continue, solar and wind power could catch up in the near future.
The greatest concentration of renewable energy projects are located in Europe, which accounts for 433 of the 1,313 GW. Asia is a close second with 420 GW and will likely eclipse Europe soon. Asia had the biggest growth in renewable energy installations with a 30 percent increase from 2009.
North America had 251 GW of renewable energy projects installed at the end of 2010.
via The Economist
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