Environment in Cities
Going “Green” Explained
You have heard your friends talking, seen magazine articles about it, and possibly even considered the pros and cons of doing it, but still you not sure how going “green” is really going to benefit you. Well this will hopefully inspire you and explain the most common reasons why this new trend is becoming the a popular route to take, especially in the Austin real estate market where companies like Hill Country Ecobuilders make it easy to convert.
Essentially the term “green building” refers to the amount of eco-friendly materials which are used to build a structure compared to years ago where builders would use materials without considering the long term side effects. People with chronic health problems benefit from a green building, for example someone who suffers from asthma is able to breathe easily and doesn’t have as many attacks in a green building as the air is a lot cleaner. Other reasons for going green vary from wanting to help the environment to saving money. Green buildings have a higher resale value as well, as a report in Real Estate Weekly says “You do not want to be stuck in a building that is not, in ten years, when you sell, you lose a bit of an edge.” Between the health benefits and the financial benefits it is easy to see why so many people are going green!
The Hill Country Ecobuilders website has a great way of explaining the many ways a building can be converted into a green building. Common methods include solar panels, electricity usage monitoring and water saving technology. Solar panels and electricity monitoring go hand in hand, as you are able to monitor how much energy you consume and learn to cut back on unnecessary usage as well as generate your own energy which could even result in no bill for energy at the end of each month! Water saving is generally understood as catching rain water for use in the home and garden, but this technology can go even further with devices like dual flush toilets or low plumbing fixtures.
It does not matter whether you want to do alterations to your current house or feel that you need a complete change and would like to move into a new house, green building is a wise choice and it will benefit you greatly in the future. Help the planet and yourself and go green!
James Kim writes for Austin Real Estate service Homecity.com. HomeCity combines powerful online Austin MLS search technology and other online tools with personalized real estate services to provide clients with the knowledge they need to make the right buying and selling decisions.
Pollution in Beijing
Another project of this new green architecture is the Linked Hybrid (pictured), designed by architect Steven Holl, a set of tall buildings connected by walkways that take waste water and geothermal energy used for cooling, thanks six hundred wells at a depth of one hundred meters. In addition, the project aims to promote relations between the neighbors, offering not only space for housing, but also a shopping area, other recreational and educational one. To become a small city within the city and residents to avoid having to use the car in their daily lives, thereby avoiding the emission of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
The pollution will be the big problem in Beijing in the coming decades, so are already thinking about new ways of life in the city. It is not separated by many miles of residential and shopping area. Until recent years, many Beijingers bike moved around the city. But now the distances are longer (and greater purchasing power) and cars have taken over the streets. We must return to neighborhood life, in which the movements of everyday life are on foot.
China has a great opportunity to set an example to the world and is acting accordingly. The rest of the world looks expectantly toward it. Because, as stated in the documentary, China “will save us or destroy us.”
Posted in Air Pollution, Environment in Cities | 
Tags: carbon dioxide, geothermal energy, green architecture, Pollution in Beijing, waste water | 
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Green Building and Sustainable Urban Development in China
Green building and sustainable urbanism and green building in China China’s sustainable urbanization
Within the Sustainability Week Zero Emissions in Madrid, was projected short documentary series E2 China, from red to green. The Asian giant has spent years growing and will continue to the next. It also has such a large population, what happens in the country will affect the entire world. At least from the environmental point of view.
In China the population has grown and there has been a process of rapid industrialization. There is a growing middle class with greater purchasing level. In this sense, the average Chinese citizen looks to the West, mainly to Europe and the United States, and wants a similar welfare state. Yes, it is a totalitarian regime may not have the same freedom in the West, but there may be comfort, technology, more and better goods and services. Among them home.
In China there is a boom of unprecedented urbanization. It is the largest rural migration to cities in history. They built huge apartment buildings, where thousands of Chinese live. And the whole process requires resources. Some resources are finite. Materials, water. Chinese welfare state becomes a global environmental problem. Experts from all over analyzed and discussed the process. But is that Chinese citizens have the same right to have a comfortable home and comfortable than Americans or Europeans?
This process has only one possible way: the solutions related to green design. Especially in regard to the building and urbanism. People want heat, electricity to use devices that provide them with life, an enormous amount of energy that will not be able to produce. There is no other outlet to reduce consumption with imagination, with a better design in buildings, neighborhoods and, in general, in the way of life.
And they’re doing. Already in 2000, the building was inaugurated Accord 21, a green building that won international certification. The building uses 70% less energy than conventional buildings. Inspectors could not believe. Checked again and again if the counters were damaged. They were accustomed to a well constructed building. The account could not contain his pride in the documentary, the Chinese Minister of Environmental Protection.
Burning Coal Heats the Planet and Cooling It Either
Burning coal produces large emissions of carbon dioxide that contribute, as everyone knows by now, to global warming. But power plants that burn this material emit other gases such as sulfur dioxide, which produce the opposite effect, i.e a temporary cooling effect.
It has been found that carbon contamination produced throughout the world, the planet cooled and softened, in part, the effect of global warming. Above all, the pollution produced in Asia, where many countries still rely mainly on coal for its energy supply. In short, if all these had not been polluting gases in the atmosphere, global warming of recent years would have been even greater.
More specifically, the particles of sulfur aerosol generated by burning coal which reflect sunlight back into space, forming a layer of “protection.” Thus, there was a sort of pause in the process of global warming between 1998 and 2008 due to the massive output of pollution from China and other Asian countries.
The upside of this discovery is that climate change skeptics had these years as proof that global warming did not occur because of human activity, so you may not use this argument.
The study has analyzed this phenomenon also indicates that something similar happened between the 1940 and 1970 (the great coal boom in the industrialized countries after World War II), when issued lots of sulfur dioxide in Europe and United States before the introduction of measures to combat pollution and acid rain.
In any case, this fight is the winner of the heat temperatures because the cooling effect of sulfur is temporary, whereas carbon dioxide persists for much longer in the atmosphere. It is therefore offset the warming, but not quite, and increased global temperatures in recent decades.
Posted in Air Pollution, Environment in Cities, Global Warming | Tags: burning coal, carbon dioxide, climate change, cooling effect, global warming, sulfur aerosol | No Comments »
Almost Nobody Wants a Green Car
To effectively combat climate change and pollution problems of big cities, drivers have to choose to buy electric cars or at least hybrids. There is no other. Today, these cars are more expensive than traditional ones. Maybe eventually be amortized, more so if, during the early years, you get free electricity. Still can not know for sure if compensated. Given this situation, are most consumers willing to pay more not to pollute?
In Spain, according to a study, the poll found that 85% of the Spanish did not intend to purchase a green car, getting into the sac of both purely organic as electric hybrids.
More concrete, the 41.16% of respondents plan to buy a green car in the next two years and 43.96% has not even raised. Thus, only 14.88% is one that claims to be interested in a vehicle that is not contaminated. E concerned does not mean it is safe to go buy it.
Why this refusal to green cars? A 22.07% of drivers do not raise it for the price and another 17.40% for its lack of economic opportunities, even if they wanted could not afford it. In addition, some are wary of a technology so new (16.17%) and others believe it will be difficult to find points where they can recharge the car (15.21%). The price, which is the majority factor for not choosing this type of cars can be compensated with the aid of 6,000 euros as agreed by the Government of Spain.
However, from the environmental point of view, other data is pretty hopeless: only 33.96% of drivers take into account the carbon dioxide emissions when buying a car. So how will they pay more for something not even considered?
Since then, the variety of models will not be. You can choose a Citroen, Mitsubishi, Smart … or a fireball.
Posted in Climate Change, Environment in Cities | Tags: carbon dioxide, climate change, environmental, Green Car, pollution problems | No Comments »
Recycled Paper is Environmentally
The vast majority of the things we touch throughout the day is paper in either of its forms: cereal boxes, money, books, parking tickets, tissues, and many more items.
This means we spend vast amounts of paper each year, implying a major impact on the environment, which suffers much more than is considered necessary to satisfy such claims annually.
On this subject we can find a report published online by the Environmental Paper Network, a coalition of groups dedicated to protecting the environment which calls for reducing paper consumption, increasing the quantities recycled, among other measures to optimize the cycle life of this product without harming Mother Nature.
These are the points that the report highlights:
1 .- Forests store 50% of the carbon that exists on earth. This causes the coal to mix with existing pollution and promote the terrible global warming.
2 .- Half of the world’s forests have been destroyed either by the hand of man or fire, and the remaining 80% is in poor condition.
3 .- The 42% of the timber from the industry is used to make paper.
4 .- The creation process is terribly polluting paper: nothing less than the fourth largest contributor in terms of greenhouse gases. It also constitutes 9% of total carbon emissions in the industry.
5 .- The paper products occupy 25% of landfills.
6 .- The municipal landfills account for one third of methane emissions from human-related. And we must bear in mind that the more methane is 23 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.
7 .- If, for example, in the United States decreased by at least 10% paper use, could prevent the emission of 1.6 million tons of greenhouse gases. Something like that would produce 280,000 cars in motion.
8 .- Compared to using virgin wood, the resulting paper recycling uses 44% less energy, produces 38% less in terms of greenhouse gases, 41% fewer particulate emissions, 50% less wastewater, 49% less solid waste and, best of all, it leaves the forest intact.
9 .- In 2003, only 48.3% of office paper were recycled.
10.-The paper collected for recycling in general is only 37% of the total distribution made.
11.-sheets for writing or printing are the least likely to come from recycled: only 6% of them leave this process. In this area wins the tissue paper (toilet paper, tissues, etc.), with 45%, and newsprint, with 32%.
12.-In ten years, demand for it, calculating that this increase will be about 1.5 million tons every year that passes.
13.-While the paper industry invests in new machines and factories, virtually none of them use recycled products.
14.-China, India and the rest of Asia are the most consumed products made with paper each year. Require the least are the countries of Eastern Europe and Latin America.
15 .- That if it is believed that the demand for recycled paper is growing by the consumers themselves, advertisers, magazine editors and other users of this precious treasure that is the role and this will produce rapid reforms in the industry.
Posted in Environment in Cities | Tags: cycle life, Environmental Paper Network, global warming, industry, methane emissions, pollution, Recycled Paper | No Comments »
Recycled Paper, Protects the Environment
The vast majority of the things we touch throughout the day are of paper in all its forms: cereal boxes, money, books, parking tickets, tissue paper and many other objects.
This means we spend vast amounts of paper each year, implying a major impact on the environment, which suffers much more than what is considered necessary to meet such claims annually.
On this subject we can find a report published online by the Environmental Paper Network, a coalition of groups dedicated to environmental protection that claims to reduce paper consumption, increasing the quantities recycled, including measures to optimize the cycle life of this product without harming Mother Nature.
These are the points that the report highlights: Read the rest of this entry »