Green Options

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AltBuild, the Alternative Building Expo sponsored by the City of Santa Monica, CA, returns for its 5th year on April 25-26, 2008.

Designed to promote green building, alternative energy, and sustainable technologies and practices, the Expo brings together all members of the building and construction community. This includes architects, contractors, designers, government representatives, as well as the interested public. And really, aren’t we all interested these days?

Green roof manufacturers incorporate sustainable products beyond the greenery.

If it looks green, smells green and feels green, it must be green. Right? The answer, it turns out, is more of a maybe. It is common knowledge that green technology has large positive environmental impacts: large-scale energy savings, run-off reduction and heat reduction among their chief assets. But as green builders continue to define the standards and guidelines for sustainable construction practices, different levels of earth friendly products continue to circulate the market. Green roofs in particular are taking a harder look at the sustainability of their component materials.

Make it last
Brad Budde of Conwed Plastics, Minneapolis, Minn., believes the future development of sustainable green roof products lies in the hands of builders. He suggests that as companies continue to understand the commercial concerns regarding the application of sustainable and earth friendly products that the market as a whole will become more educated about their applications, benefits and uses.

His company is a leader of earth friendly, compostible packaging materials as an alternative to traditional plastic bags, as well as biodegradable plastics that don’t leave the harmful, long lasting resins of other industry plastics. “It’s a really great product that solves some of the disposal concerns for traditional plastic products,” he says.

Sustainable Landscapes 101

What if you could have a beautiful garden that also put a “Mona Lisa smile” on Al Gore’s lips? And what if your yard thrived without toxic chemicals and reduced your energy and water bills?

It’s not only possible, it’s easy. Just adopt a few simple sustainable landscaping practices to have a positive impact on your pocketbook and the environment.

By now, the principles of sustainable landscaping are becoming more commonplace, but you’ll still get a variety of definitions depending

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Spring is just around the corner (a very long corner for those of us who live in the north.)  Americans are very concerned about their lawns.  Each year we spend millions of dollars on fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, and other chemicals and services to make sure that our yards are greener than the neighbors.   There’s nothing wrong with wanting to have a nice lawn, but its important that we consider the effect that our lawn care efforts have on the environment.

Apparently, […]

A lot of people who think about  the environment and efforts to improve sustainability think about “big ticket” items.  However, it really isn’t about the “big ticket” items like landfills or oil spills.  The bulk of the damage we do to our environment is done on the individual level and then magnified by millions or billions.  That’s why it is important for all us to look at our day-to-day activities and try to find ways to reduce our impact on […]

I’m celebrating Boxing Day in a new way this year - I’m putting all the cardboard boxes saved up from Shipping Month, aka December, to use in my Permaculture garden, by making sheet mulch.

Google sheet mulch and Permaculture. (For those not in the know, Permaculture is a fairly recent term for cultivating an edible landscape that establishes positively reinforcing relationships between water, soil, insects, microbes, sun, etc…for the purpose of sustainably and organically feeding its designing human.)

Sheet mulches are an easy way to ‘compost in place’, delivering all the water-borne yummies to the plants instead of under the compost pile. Design-wise, sheet mulching also avoids the not-so-Neighborhood-Association-Friendly look of compost piles, so it’s a tricky way to subvert the negative effects of suburban sprawl - grow a food landscape!

Exciting news from here in the Heartland: Six Midwestern governors and a Canadian premier have signed a climate change agreement that will increase renewable energy use, increase energy efficiency, and cut global warming emissions.

Illinois, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Kansas, Wisconsin, and the Canadian province of Manitoba all signed onto the agreement at the Midwestern Governor’s Association (MGA) Energy Summit that was held in Milwaukee, WI earlier this month. Wisconsin Governor Jim Doyle (D) and Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty (R) co-chaired the summit. The governors of Indiana, Ohio, and South Dakota signed on as observers to the process but did not commit to the accord.

So I’ve been snooping around the countless garden blogs that are out there and saw one about Xeriscaping—a term I thought had died about 20 years ago. Xeri—Greek word root meaning dry (same for Xerox, ‘cause they use dry toner to print). The article took the usual “10 tips” approach, and one had to do with “helping your soil.” Readers were encouraged to dump lots and lots of organic material into their beds to create a rich medium for their […]

The best thing that can happen to your garden sounds a little like a zombie movie. I’m talking about little babies eating grown-ups. As they say in Hollywood, here’s the story treatment. Here in Santa Barbara, CA we’re so close to Hollywood, I’ll give it my best shot. And with the writers’ strike, maybe I can hone my craft…

Just before dawn, as an waning moon sets over the gnarled and twisted trees, a barely visible white oval, perched on a […]

How many of you watered your lawn this week? Come on, raise your hands, don’t be shy. Good.

Bearing in mind that I’m writing from southern California, here’s your next question. If the average annual rainfall in Santa Barbara is between 18 and 21 inches, and we only received 6 this year, and a chicken gets on a train in Miami heading north at 60 mph into a 6 mph headwind, how long will it take to water your lawn […]

Wildfires aren’t usually on my radar, because I don’t live in a region that is much susceptible to them. But, in the past couple of weeks, everyone has become more aware of them. They have been widely across the news because of the number of serious wildfires in southern California recently. At the same time, recent news coverage has also looked at drought conditions which are being felt in Georgia

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