the greener side

Building the hottest solar house

Ten solar homes are parked on the National Mall in D.C., awaiting Friday's judgment in the Energy Department's second Solar Decathlon. In the competition's solar photo gallery, many of the entries look like trailers—the U. of Michigan's modular MiSo prototype resembles a vintage Airstream model (trendy again).

But Cornell's wood-paneled smart house looks sleek, has nice landscaping, and aims to cost less than six figures to build. The team is proud of its ventilator, which uses silica, "the same material used in the little packets found inside food and other packaging. In summer, for example, the silica gel absorbs humidity from the fresh air intake before it reaches the air handler."

The 18 college teams involved include future architects and engineers as well as potential public relations people and marketers. To peek at some already-inhabited sun-powered abodes, check out some of the stops on the recent San Francisco solar homes tour. (via Greenthinkers)

San Francisco solar homes tour

We started our tour of San Francisco's solar homes in sunny Portrero Hill, near this preschool (left) with solar panels and a panoramic bay view. At our first stop, you can barely spy the twenty 150-watt solar panels just above the skylight on this classic Edwardian Portrero home (below right).

Clean energy turn-ons

Remember those cloying Herbal Essences ads in which petite librarians orgasm over washing their hair? City Hippy, among many, laughs out loud at that campaign for the poser, non-organic, multinational shampoo. But Clairol laughs all the way to the bank.

"Is there a way that we can get people feeling about solar energy like those women felt in the shower with that shampoo?" wonders the CEO of ICP Solar, a Canadian company. "In my mind, they have targeted the absolute most important factor in the success of a product..customer satisfaction." Soon, alternative marketers will stop scaring people off with the grunge-and-goody-two-shoes image and start sexing up clean energy.

It should be easy enough with solar power. Wait, a commercial is coming to me. It starts like this: Turn-offs? (Insert a belching smokestack.) Turn-ons? (Insert a cute, pink fur and shiny pants-clad brunette dancing in the sun.)

That's who was showing off her boyfriend's Solar DJ getup in Berkeley, which I spied last weekend. David Quattro has hooked up a movable music feast, a truck with solar panels to power booming speakers. You can rent the portable, sunshine-powered service for parties. It can store a full day of electricity and lets you dance in the dark for 8 hours too. Check out photos of how the Solar DJ works here.

Sustainable superstores

When the sun comes up over Santa Monica boulevard (hated song spinning in my head) around Halloween, it will shine on a new Whole Foods store that won't sell anything you can eat—unless rosa mosqueta face lotion counts. Instead, the Austin, TX-based chain's "lifestyle" shop will be stocked with household wares, clothes, books, music, and other green dry goods that are easy to find online but not on the street. Will Whole Foods conquer the world? It's coming to London. Sustainablog wonders if Whole Foods is the first green superstore, putting to shame Wal-Mart's dabbling in sustainably-built megacenters.

On a related note, rumors are buzzing that Rainbow Grocery, a vegetarian wonderland in San Francisco, is thinking about opening a biodiesel fueling station. Green fuel isn't a sure thing for Rainbow, but Mission District-dwellers who drive 1980s-era diesel Mercedes would readily fill up their shopping carts and their cars there. Pit stops to fuel both bellies and gas tanks have deep American roots. Mini-McDonald's and BP gas stations share the same space. Might as well take that tradition to the next, cleaner level. But there are concerns that one-stop Goliath shops will corporatize the quirky, once-cozy sustainable marketplace.

Since it opened 30 years ago as the offshoot of an ashram, Rainbow has been at the forefront of the natural foods movement, for which the $130-per-stock-share Whole Foods can be grateful. Rainbow even uses solar panels and gives each worker a stake in the operations. The store's site points out:

Interestingly, the natural foods business has become a competitive industry, one that strongly mimics the industrial agribusiness complex against which many of the first community food stores rebelled.

The same thing will surely happen with alternative fuels as they become mainstream. But without becoming mainstream, cleaner technologies can't do massive good. Hopefully, boutiques can always backlash against the megastore mentality. One good sign is that organic co-ops are enjoying big success.

Solar housewarmings this weekend

Put on a green sunvisor and prepare to envy your neighbor's house this Sat. Oct. 1. It's National Solar Tour Day, organized by the American Solar Energy Society. There are solar tours in most states, lots of course in Northern California and Florida. Absent from the list are some big cities--Chicago, Detroit, and Miami--as well as the Dakota states, Wyoming, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Alaska, and Mississippi. But the show's still going on in Louisiana.

Thinking outside the trash can

Many schools struggle to afford textbooks, so a cheap (or free) source of old National Geographics, pipe cleaners, and other detritus is a lucky find for any hard-up art teacher. Before you fail to cash in on half a paint can, a tangled knot of rainbow telephone wire or that 1984-era faux wood TV through a yard sale, Craigslist or eBay--and get tempted to chuck the stuff on the street—see if some artsy teachers want it.

You can always donate defunct junk through Freecycle, Goodwill, Salvation Army, or an auction--but it’s hard if things are half-broken, torn, or stained. That’s where half-bent, creative do-gooders prove their highest function--as recyclers. This morning, $15 poorer, I left a warehouse enriched with two bags of junk. Junk with “potential” for a diorama that is, courtesy of SCRAP (Scroungers' Center for Reusable Art Parts) a mecca for San Francisco salvagers. (Either I’ll use the tile chunks, buttons, and clip-on earrings--or it’ll all guilt-trip me from the closet.)

A bunch of SCRAP-like centers opened in the 1970s. Generation Green runs recycled art workshops in California's East Bay, where your kid can learn about solar energy by making a shiny sun mandala. Trashopia's nearby in Contra Costa County.

Some art-scrap centers are self-sufficient, like the Hudson Valley Materials Exchange, which demands a “social and environmental conscience about the sources of our funding.” NYC has the Materials for the Arts. The St. Louis Teachers' Recycle Center holds workshops and organizes an electronics pick-up service. There’s a MECCA art thrift shop in Salem, OR. The Baltimore-based ReDo lists organizations in every state that “recover thousands of tons of building materials, equipment, furniture, food, and industrial materials.” Is your town dry? SCRAP shows you to be a copycat.

Insert raw sewage, exit Evian

We cook up and cast away so many gadgets just for fun. But what good does high tech boil down to if it can't save your life? What's the "invention of the century," according to Gizmag, Gil Friend, and others  (pre-Katrina)? The LifeStraw, a tube filter (from some great Danes) that puts fresh agua at your fingertips for two bucks a year.

Water purification, a $100 billion annual market, will only get bigger. Desertification, melting ice caps—whether you live where there's too much or too little, H20 with a dash of salt or poison won't do a body good. Within half a century, more than half the world will thirst for a safe drink.

Here's another portable purifier to sip on: A UC-Berkeley lab built a $70 kit that zaps water with UV-C rays and can run on solar power. Scientists discovered UV as a disinfectant a century ago. Cheaper chlorine treatments instead became standard. But UV beams kill what chlorine cannot: the cryptosporidium diarrhea bug. A Berkeley team brought its UV tubes to post-tsunami Sri Lanka in May.

"Mankind, despite all of our technology in the 21st century, we use molecular machines to do nothing," a Scottish nanotech researcher told the BBC. Thinking small, scores of scientists are changing that. Another take-it-with-you, energy-efficient life-saver includes "the holy grail of purifying water," as NanoMagnetics'  president described its product to Wired.  The company popped a magnetic nugget into a 12 nanometer-sized protein, filtering water via forward osmosis. (1 nanometer = 1 billionth of a meter)

A future home for Popeye

This 3-bedroom green concept house gets energy from a living spinach-based skin. It photosynthesizes and harnesses more power than it can use, giving the surplus to neighbors...which makes the soy foam wall insulation and wastewater recycling look humdrum. Its two Seattle designers won the international Cradle to Cradle contest, which asked entrants to "exert intergenerational responsibility." Do they really plan to build this? The competition lauds the winner because it:

...ends the process of taking and begins the process of giving…No advances in residential building design and technology truly matter if single families remain isolated and independent of one another.  This design suggests that community interdependence is the necessary foundation for future growth.

Find other C2C winners here. (found through Future Feeder). On a related note, Harvard researchers have dreamed up a way to turn algae into "microoxen" that might someday power gadgets. You can steer the one-celled animals' to swim in the direction you choose, making them carry nano-sized loads.

Knowing the potential of microscopic critters, you might shed a tear to learn that a single gram of soil can be home to millions of bacteria—not tens of thousands as we earlier thought—and pollution by lead and other metals can slaughter 99 percent of them.

Hot, cool fridges

Know how you have to move your fridge away from the wall so the heat can escape? Forget about that, and about those medieval-looking lamps that warm cafeteria curly fries. Here's a refrigerator that puts its hot working parts on top, where your snacks can stay cozy and warm (from we make money not art). Alas, it's only an experiment for now, cooked up by Korean designer Hae-jin Kim.

But there are ongoing efforts to make more energy-efficient fridges, which in the States still use HFC greenhouse gases, which will be banned by 2020. One hundred fifty million Greenfreeze fridges, safer for the environment, are used everywhere in the world but (did you guess?) North America. Coca-Cola and McDonald's are switching to such systems. Greenpeace, which was behind the development of Greenfreeze, is also working with NGOs on SolarChill sun-powered coolers to keep food and vaccines fresh wherever there's a sunny day. You can also get ultra-efficient models from Northern California's Sun Frost.

Megastores: green and less mean?

It can't make up for killing off America's main streets, but Wal-Mart's solar and wind-powered store outside of Dallas, TX is an interesting experiment. And that's probably exactly what Wal-Mart wants its enemies to say. A tree-shaded parking lot and wildflower meadow, rain capture and pavement that lets water seep into the ground, recycling of food and motor oil--what more can your media campaign ask for?

If this single green megastore shaves a few dollars off its overhead costs, will the corner-cutting corporation convert to clean operations elsewhere?

If Wal-Mart could spark a clean-energy domino effect across the corporate landscape, it might even live up to its p.r. hype about "operating globally and giving back locally." Well, on second thought maybe not. Is Wal-Mart going to stop ripping off the Bangladeshi women who sew the stripes on the store's pants? Is Wal-Mart going to stock its shelves with doodads made from bioplastics and hemp?

Meanwhile, CostCo's getting points from the New York Times (its most e-mailed story today) for being the "anti-WalMart," as investment gurus chide CostCo for paying employees an average of $17 an hour.

Green-eyed developers are working on an 800-acre renewable energy resort and shopping hub with "the world's first 21st century technology cluster." Syracuse, NY, is bracing for the green mega-mall DestinyUSA, and Joel Makower promises to keep you posted on its progress.