Green Options

Buying your first home is both nerve-wracking and exhilarating. Imagine the heightening of both of those emotions if you choose to 1) buy an older house full of character, and 2) jump right into green updates and renovations upon purchase. You’ll then have a good sense of what journalist, professor, and good friend of sustainablog Simran Sethi is going through right now… she recently purchased an 84-year-old home in her adopted home town of Lawrence, KS. Unlike the rest of us, though, Simran’s inviting the world in to watch the process of greening her new house: on Monday, she posted the first entry on a new blog at Oprah.com.

Home renovation isn’t a task for the feint of heart, and Simran readily admits that her own hands-on experience is limited:

 Coco Eco is an award winning bed and breakfast named both after the area it is located (Coconut Well, Australia) and the ecological principles that it embraces such as:

• solar powered facilities
• black & grey water recycled and purified in Wastewatergarden®.
• plantation & recycled timbers
• solar passive design principles
• building footprints designed to minimize impact on local flora and fauna
• reduced use of chemicals & PVC products
• recycling programs
• organic vegetable garden & free range eggs

GreenTalk Radio host Sean Daily speaks with Tom Schey, President of Minimal Productions. Schey is now leading green home building in Southern California and is the author of an upcoming book on fun ways to green up your life. 737conserve is an incredibly advanced, beautiful intellectual home. One of the most advanced smart homes ever built. The structure [...]

Check out the prefab community blooming online these days! Tiny House Village is trying to connect communities of creative small dwellings. Ideas are abound for these eco communities with Resources For Life’s Small House Society.

Tiny House design has a great set of resources all linked here as well. Check out the plethora of architectural resources,

There is a brilliant sustainability series on urban gardening (Alive Structures and roof garden tutorials will be featured) in New York City this summer put on by a non-profit called New York Restoration Project. There will be four talks, every other Thursday from 7 pm to 8 pm, in NYPC’s Toyota Children’s Learning Garden. All of them are open to the public. 

Where? Toyota Sustainable Summer Series Toyota Children’s Learning Garden 603 East 11th Street, New York, NY

When?  July 30, 2009 from 7:00 p.m. – 8:00 p.m.

What? Sarah Seigal, Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates.  She will give a short garden tour and speak about the garden design, specifically the shade tolerant planting palette she created for this garden. 

What else? Refreshments at the end of each event.

NYRP works exclusively in New York City managing community gardens to help ensure their liveliness in each community. Keep reading for more details on the series in August and beyond…

Jeff McIntire-Strasburg occasionally writes posts on new, innovative green products (see Five Greenish Products You’ve Seen on TV and Five More Greenish Products You’ve Seen on TV). Rather than try to steal his thunder, this post looks at some basic, simple, green products that can make your everyday life many times greener.

Staying away from the topics of food and transportation, which are probably the biggest daily products you could green, here is a list of products you use everyday.

Cities around the world should use a mix of energy efficiency measures and affordable renewable energy schemes to reduce their carbon emissions.

The Mother Nature Network reviews their pick of the top ten greenest cities in the United States.

Sony Pictures Studios believes in creating a culture on their Culver City campus. For CEO Michael Lynton and Co-Chairman Amy Pascal this includes a culture of environmental responsibility and sustainable stewardship, according to Jon Corcoran, VP, Corporate Safety and Environmental Affairs and John Rego, Director, Environmental Sustainability for the movie studio.

During a recent tour of the facilities, they each pointed out that education and employee awareness were key to behavior changes when it comes to environmental stewardship. This philosophy is in keeping with the Japanese tradition of creating an employee culture, a loyalty that reaches beyond the standard employee-employer structure, and one that gives and takes both ways. [Pictured: John Rego, Sony Studios; Paige Donner, Greening Hollywood; and Jon Corcoran, Sony Studios; photo by Ann Burkart]

Case in point: On June 29th, as part of Sony Studios “Links Green Series” they hosted a lunch time “Residential Solar and Hybrid Car Program,” presentation. This is an incentive program, offered through the studio, that gives employees a check for up to $5000 when they either buy a hybrid electric vehicle or install solar voltaic panels on their residence. This incentive “payback” is above and beyond the State and Federal tax incentives. Believe me, I asked. Don’t everyone blast your resume off to Sony Pictures Entertainment now!

The Sears Tower loomed large during my childhood in the Chicago suburbs. I remember when it opened in 1973. We took a special trip downtown to see it. According to my aesthetics as a seven year old, it wasn’t very elegant and I preferred the John Hancock Tower with its swanky restaurant on the 95th floor and proximity to Marshall Fields. Then the company my dad worked for was bought by Coldwell Banker, a subsidiary of Sears at the time, and his office was moved to the Tower. I spent some quality daddy-daughter time there, and one memorable summer got paid the incredibly generous sum of $8 an hour to take the train to the city every day, do some filing and hang out downtown.

But the Tower, in my mind, never had much to distinguish it other than a great view from the 103rd floor, its height of 110 stories and the convenience of the train station. But now everything is changing.

By the end of the summer, it will no longer be the Sears Tower. It will be called the Willis Tower, named for the global insurance broker. But more importantly, the building will undergo a $350 million efficiency and renewable energy retrofit that will reduce the base building electricity use by up to 80 percent - 68 million kilowatt hours annually or 150,000 barrels of oil every year. The retrofit will also create more than 3,600 jobs in the Chicago area.

Saving the planet through story is how Arianna shaped the green panel she moderated at the Produced By Conference held at Sony Picture Studios over the weekend.  The Conference was put on by the Producer’s Guild of America and co-helmed by the legendary Gale Anne Hurd.

If a person’s clout can be measured by the resources they can commandeer, then Hurd is most certainly still at the top of the Hollywood heap.  Not only was the Sony Pictures Studio lot supremely pleasant to stroll around, but volunteers were everywhere to assist with even small things like fetching water. Seriously.

And Sunday’s complimentary lunch featured no less than 10 honey wagons set up to serve the likes of lobster rolls, shrimp tempura and teriyaki flank steak.  Hurd commented to me that people were already asking her when next year’s conference was going to happen and said that “we didn’t even think we’d pull this one off!”  They expected 600 attendees - 900 paying producers showed up.