New Type of Green Home: Fab Tree Hab
Ever dreamed of living in a tree house, but as you got older realized that they are only for kids? Now there is prototype of a tree house that could revolutionize the home building process. This new green home is called the Fab Tree Hab and was created by three architects of out MIT, Mitchell Joachim, Lara Greden and Javier Arbona.
Photo from Mitchell Joachim of Terreform.
History of Green Home
The idea behind the Fab Tree Hab derived from the fact that building designs currently being used failed to fall in the category of truly being sustainable. Even though many architects try to design buildings that are considered green, they are still unnatural to the environment. The idea behind this new type of home is to allow your home to coexist with nature. The walls and exterior of the house allow for people and animals to derive nutrients from it and every piece of the home is completely natural.
The Design
The basic design is based off of a principal called pleaching:
Pleaching is a method of weaving together tree branches to form living archways, lattices, or screens.
The Fab Tree Hab would be produced by first starting a flexible tree at it’s youth, like the ficus. Since the ficus hardens as it gets older, it could be formed into a structure and then would get hard. This is how the basic framework of the home would begin. As the tree gets older it would grow into a tree structure as in the picture above. Along the way, soil and plants would be embedded into the weaved structure to provide for animals and provide insulation.
The interior of the home would be comprised of a clay and straw mixture to provide further structure and insulation to the green home. The windows are made of a soy based plastic and the entire house is heated and cooled naturally. These homes have a completely different look on the outside, but are almost identical inside to existing homes.
One really cool concept of this house is the water cycle throughout the house. Water used in the house is collected from rain water on the roof. The water then cycles throughout the house depending on what you are using the water for. For example, the water from your sink would be the first place for the water to go, then it would circulate for use in the toilet. After the water has completely been used by the homeowner, it drains to get filtered and enters a pond. It will then either evaporate into the atmosphere or soak into the soil.
See the video below of Mitchell Joachim going further in depth about the design of the tree home:
A longer version of this video is available at Scribe Media.
Looking Ahead
Even though the the principals behind this new green home are nothing new, it is difficult to actually produce these houses in a short period of time. Also, As Mitchell Joachim describes at the end of the above video, most areas have regulations that would not allow for a tree house like this to currently be built. The sheet size of the tree would be much larger than allowed. Another big problem would be getting the masses to buy green homes like these because of the way in which they are built.
This idea just gets me really excited. To think that a home can work with the earth and still be a livable home. Who knows of these green homes will ever be more than just a prototype. My hope is that builders begin to incorporate some of the principals that make this house sustainable into new buildings.
Sustainable Bamboo Kitchen and Dinnerware
Later last week, I went to a local vineyard along with my fiancee and some friends. Every week the vineyard has local farms musicians and food demonstrations.
A seafood restaurant was serving samples of oysters. I was excited to see that when I went to grab a plate and fork, that they were all made of bamboo. On the back of the plate was the name of the company, Bambu.
Bambu has a range of bamboo made products including plates, utensils, cutting boards and even cutlery. All of their products are made from bamboo organic, meaning that is sustainably harvested and free of fertilizers or pesticides. They even use environmentally friendly packaging. The cardboard used is made from recyclable fibers and soy-based ink is used for the printing.
The biggest problem with Bambu products is the price. I wanted to get an idea of how much some of their products cost and I was able to find that each plate costs about $.80 per plate and under a dollar for a set of utensils. That is pretty steep considering that they are disposable products. I asked the chef about the plates and he said that he got a pretty good discount when buying in large quantities. If you are serious about getting rid of plastic disposable products, these are the way to go.
Donate to Green Community Projects
I found an interesting company called GlobalGiving that is trying to help promote green projects throughout the world. They have created a site called GlobalGiving Green that aims to connect people to make donations with small community projects in rural parts of the world. They describe on their site how they judge the “greenness” of each of the projects:
We’ve evaluated each project according to how well it helps reduce harmful emissions, plus how it stacks up in areas such as providing sustainable, positive economic growth, aiding the culture and environment of a community, educating future generations on green techniques, and more.
About GlobalGiving
GlobalGiving was founded by Mari Kuraishi and Dennis Whittle. They originally created a competition while working for the World Bank that would give bank employees the opportunity to submit their best ideas on how to fight poverty worldwide. Mari and Dennis used this same concept to the public to award innovative ideas several million dollars of the World Bank’s funds. The competition ended up giving away close to $5 million to the 44 projects. After seeing that a marketplace for philanthropy could succeed, GlobalGiving was created in February of 2002.
The new GlobalGiving Green really allows people to make a difference worldwide. They have a massive database of projects that you can donate in several categories:
- Emissions reduction
- Reforestation
- Green Technology
- Climate Change Education
Each project has a number of photos, details and specific donation amounts could provide as well the people benefiting from them. Donations can be made in amounts as little as $10 and can be tax-deductible since they are a non-profit company. One thing that always concerns me with making donations is what percentage of the funds will actually get to the project I am donating to. I was a little disappointed to not find it on their site. I looked around a little further and found that they keep 10 percent of the value of the gift. The cost is understandable since it does cost money to maintain their website and connect people with these green projects.
This Week in News: August 7th
Olympics
The United Nations Environment Programme or UNEP has been working with China for the last several years to make the Olympic games more environmentally friendly. China has spent around $17 billion in order to make Beijing a much more environmentally friendly place. Many of the venues used for the Olympics will get some of their energy from renewable sources. Not all of the changes just for the Olympic games, but to improve the overall city for the long run. These changes include enhancing Beijing’s public transportation system, building a wall of solar panels and restricting harsher standards on emissions.
Hydrogen
MIT scientist have made a breakthrough discovery that would allow hydrogen to be separated from water simply by using solar power. The process only requires pressure and can be done at room temperature. A major concern to many is that the currently the process of separating hydrogen and oxygen from water relies on fossil fuels. This eliminates any of the environmental benefits gained by using hydrogen in fuel-cells. This new discovery therefore allow for hydrogen to be produced cheaply and remove any dependency on fossil fuel. I am excited by this finding as it really makes hydrogen a viable renewable resource.
Geothermal
TRUenergy and Petratherm have joined forces in Southern Australia to enter into the geothermal energy market. Under the venture, TRUenergy would acquire 30% of Petratherm’s Paralana project. The Paralana project is located in Flinders Ranges of South Australia and aims to be provide Australia with geothermal electricity by 2011. The hope is that the Paralana project can product up to 260 megawatts of electricity from geothermal energy by 2020.
Going Green Through Computer Virtualization
At work, I often see lots of servers being under utilized because they have a dedicated application running on them. It seems like a waste since many of these server machines aren’t being fully used to their full potential as many of the applications only have a few users on at a time. There are ways to save money at your work and also conserve energy by using few server machines.
Photo by JOHNNIE W@LKER.
A concept that has been getting popular as computer get faster and have large hard drives is virtualization. The basic idea behind virtualization is that a virtual computer can take up part of an existing computer and have no knowledge of other possible virtual computers on the same machine. What’s even nicer is that you can run multiple operating systems on the same computer. There can be an instance of Linux on a Windows box or vice versa. There can even run different size processors on the same machine.
This probably seems a little techie for most people, but it’s not hard to see how you can really save money. One nice thing with computers is as the capacity of a hard drive increases, the cost per GB of memory actually decreases. There is an upper bound, but this means you can actually buy a much larger hard drive at a cheaper cost to a few smaller ones with the same capacity. This means a single server machine has enough space to hold several applications instead of a single server for each application. This is especially useful with other applications that only have a small user-base.
I currently work in a lab that is also a server room. The temperatures must be below 60 degrees in order to prevent the servers from overheating. Imagine how much your company can save by choosing virtualization. A smaller room could now be used as there are fewer servers. This could drastically increase savings on energy by simply having a smaller room to now cool. Time can also be saved because you now only have to make system updates on few machines.
While virtualization is only available free on the Linux operating system, server machines are usually better off without having Windows on them. Linux contains far less overhead that Windows making it a smarter choice for a server OS.
Next time the idea of buying new servers comes up in your office, remember computer virtualization. It could save your company tons of money and cut back on your energy usage that will help contribute to a cleaner environment.
Environmental Friendly Printing Tips that Save
One thing I hate to see at work are employees printing things out and never actually use them. We had a meeting the other day with a document provided to all participants in the meeting of over 20 pages of paper. The document was outdated and needed to be reprinted again the next day anyways. The document didn’t even need to be printed in the first place. That why I put together some ideas that could save you or you company money while being a little more environmentally friendly.
Conserve Paper
Wasting paper really makes me angry as it seems like nobody thinks before they print. The easiest way to save paper as to whether the item actually needs to be printed. As with my meeting example, if you think the document is going to be outdated soon or there are other ways to show the document without having to print one for everybody at the meeting then don’t print it. You can easily project the document at the meeting and either share the location as to where the file is at or send a copy of the document upon completion of the meeting.
Another way to save paper is to also print multiple pages onto a single sheet of paper. A co-worker in my office always prints everything on both the front and back of paper. This cuts the amount of paper used in half. Another option is to print several pages of a document on a single side of a piece of paper. This is especially useful with PowerPoint documents where the slides contain large amounts of text and you can sometimes fit up to 6 pages of the presentation onto a single side of the paper.
Recycled Paper
One option along with conserving paper is to use partially or fully recycled paper. Many offices including, my own company, are going this route and using recycled paper. Though it costs a little more than traditional paper, it can make a big difference in the amount of trees being cut down. I have used 100% recyclable office paper at my work and it prints great. I would say the quality is just as good as regular paper.
Save Energy
Paper is not the only concern when it comes to printing that is bad for the environment and wastes money. You can tons of energy by simply turning off your printer when you are not using it. This might be a hard thing to do at the office, but definitely something you can do at home. By turning off you will cut the amount of energy you are using from the printer dramatically. If you really want to eliminate any energy use by your printer, you can completely turn it off as you printer still sucks up electricity to keep that little red light on.
Recycle
Recycle any paper after you printed on it. Pretty simple, but one of those things people often overlook. Companies often contain recycling bins next to most trash cans so that it makes it easy to recycle paper instead of throwing it in the trash can. If a recycling bin is not close to your desk, just save up the paper and take it to the recycling bin when you collect enough paper. If there aren’t many available at your work, try pursuing it with management.
The market for recycling printing cartridges is huge and you should take full advantage of it. Many companies including HP will provide envelopes with paid postage where you can send back your old cartridges to the company at no charge to you. Staples has a program in which you can recycle your cartridges to get reward cards back that you can use at their stores. You can take the cartridges to any Staples store for recycling. You can also go to http://www.earth911.org/ and find a local recycling center to not only recycle your old printer cartridges, but any electronics you no longer need.
The best way to really save money and the environment is to conserve. Thinking before you actually use the printer can save lots of money and prevent less trees from being cut down. It will also reduce the amount of ink you use and save you on cartridges. Recycling should only be an option after you have carefully chosen to print something.
All of brother printers conserve energy and paper that will help you save. You can choose from many brother laser printer products and more. We also have brother label printers to help organize your home office as well.
EPA Head Visits Wind Powered Community
Stephen Johnson, the head of the EPA administration, visited a small community in Massachusetts called Hull. This community has built two wind turbines to meet some of their energy needs in clean way. Stephen Johnson called this community an “example for the rest of the nation”. He seems to be really genuine about pushing for more Wind Energy across America. As I reported in this week’s news, he could also be trying to get the bad press away from him with his failure to follow through with the .
History Of Hull
Hull is a small town located in the off the Nantasket Peninsula of Massachusetts and has been known as “Windmill Point” since the 1820s. In 1985, Hull built a small 40-kilowatt turbine near its high school in an effort to reduce some of their wind energy costs. That same windmill was later destroyed by a storm in 1997. The town wanted to continue using wind energy, but at a larger scale. They decided to do more research and in 2001 was able to afford a new wind turbine called the Hull Wind 1. The Hull Wind 1 was purchased from Vestas, one of the world’s leading wind turbine manufacturers. The town didn’t stop there and purchased an additional wind turbine called the Hull Wind 2.
Hull’s Wind Energy
Hull’s main goal behind buying these wind turbines was to power a good portion of the town’s energy needs. The Hull Wind 1 was able to cut the town’s street lighting bill from $150,000 a year to zero. It can produce 1.5 million kilowatt-hours per year, enough to power approximately 250 houses. The Hull Wind 2 alone handles 10% of the town’s electricity needs, producing triple the amount of energy of the first. As stated by Hull officials:
The wind turbines save the town $680,000 per year because Hull has to purchase less electricity from other, more expensive sources.
Community Involvement
The greatest accomplishment this town has done is to get together as a community and try to make a difference. Whether it’s strictly for monetary benefits or for the environment, it is a wonderful to see this town take action. This community hopefully will set a precedence for other towns and cities across America that they can rely on themselves and not have to wait until energy companies or the government decides to take action.
