Green Options

LEED, for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, has become the alpha acronym when referring to green, or eco-friendly, buildings. The standard, from the U.S. Green Building Council, recently went 3.0.

Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, is taking the green diploma to an even higher degree. University officials are betting a new Living Learning Center will meet the Living Building Challenge, the world’s most stringent green building rating system from the Cascadia Region Green Building Council, a chapter of the USGBC and its Canadian counterpart.

The City of St. Louis has pulled the dozens of 300-gallon recycling dumpsters it had placed in alleyways last March out of commission. Jill Hamilton, the city’s recycling program manager, said the program was never intended to be permanent.

Rather, it was considered a pilot program, serving about 3,200 of the city’s 147,000 households, to see if the economics could make a full, permanent effort viable. The answer is: apparently not. Or, at least, not right now.

The Tower Grove Farmers’ Market and Bazaar in St. Louis is not only a community center piece, but a regional one. And the group is candidly joining a nation-wide line of community-minded organizations who are in economic straits and need support.

Understanding that there are many worthy groups asking for assistance these days, the one that organizes the Tower Grove market is asking, in particular, for those who already value what it creates in the St. Louis region — shoppers and friends who stop by, even just twice a season — to consider stepping forward. The support can be monetary or otherwise.

There’s been plenty of recent talk in the media about “recession gardens.” I’ve kind of thought that urban gardening was just a good, wholesome way of healthy living.

Here in St. Louis, Backdoor Harvest seems to agree. And that’s fantastic news for me — and novice gardeners like me — because I’ve got almost no idea what I’m doing when I start digging into my yard.

Lucky me, my wife, who knows a little more than I do about plunging seeds and such into our tiny backyard plot, enjoys doing the research to figure these things out. Even luckier for us, Backdoor Harvest is hanging its open-for-business shingle in the coming days, just to help urban growers, even ones as inexperienced as in the Williams household.

In preparation for next week’s Earth Day, the Missouri Botanical Garden is sponsoring Eco Expo, a two-day event in the Saint Louis Science Center.  Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will kick off the events on Tuesday, April 14 with a presentation of “Our Environmental Destiny.”  Tickets can be purchased here.  The expo itself is free to the public and spans Saturday and Sunday, April 18 & 19.  Featured in the Eco Expo will be a model green home and a working green kitchen that will feature organic cooking demonstrations.  From the press release:

“The Eco Expo was created to inspire our community to better care for the environment -through education, entertainment and access to businesses who are committed to achieving sustainability. This is a fantastic opportunity for all ages to learn about simple changes that can make great impact.

The Missouri Sewer District (MSD) reports success in its rain barrel sale, which ended April 3. I’d posted here at ecolocalizer about the sale last week.  

As a thoughtful follow-up, Debbie Johnson in the Public Information department for MSD left a comment for that initial posting, updating readers on the program’s status. Here is that information:

The Metropolitan Sewer District (MSD) in St. Louis, Mo., is selling rain barrels through 5 p.m. on April 3.

As of the end-of-business on Thursday more than 1,000 barrels had been ordered, according to the office personnel handling the orders. A news story in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch laid out the general information this way:

The Metropolitan St. Louis Sewer District is offering its customers the opportunity to help take the burden off those creeks — and its storm water system — by purchasing 55-gallon rain barrels to collect and store rainwater that would otherwise flow into a storm drain.

Yesterday’s Post-Dispatch had a story on the front page of the Business section that immediately caught my eye: St. Louis-based agribiz giant Monsanto has started blogging (and Twittering and YouTube-ing).

That’s right: Monsanto, the company many of us in the sustainability sphere love to hate, has entered the conversation.

That, on the surface, is a good thing.

Of course, the devil’s in the details.  As occasional contributor Max Gladwell pointed out in “10 Ways that Social Media and Sustainability Line Up,” social media can provide a high return on investment for a business… provided its efforts are grounded in transparency. I’d add that such efforts must also be based in a genuine desire to interact: social media is conversation, and all parties have to both talk and listen. Without these elements, a corporate blog will strike its intended audience as just another effort at message control.

Monsanto’s blog also seems to validate another of Max’s points: much of the content so far has consisted of responses to grassroots criticisms of the company ventures into biotechnology, particularly genetic engineering of crop seeds. As blogger and public affairs manager John Combest told the P-D, “”There was this big conversation going on (on the Internet), and we weren’t a part of it.”

So, how’s the company doing in its initial forray into the blogosphere?

At this point, I’d argue they still have a lot to learn.

Dallas-based Centex Corporation has rolled-out a green line of home development in St. Louis, building new homes with its Centex Energy Advantage designs.

The homes the company has begun building in the St. Louis metro area are considered as much as 40 percent more efficient than the typical 10-year-old home.

In a region of the United States looked upon as flyover land, usually implying it’s behind the times, Centex is claiming to be the first national homebuilder to install energy monitors in every home it builds, going forward.

The other standard features of the Energy Advantage package, as listed by Centex, are:

The Map Room in the historic Benton Park neighborhood in St. Louis, Mo., is about to open. There are 7 days, 0 hours, 11 minutes, 24 — no, wait: 23…13…8… Well, the seconds keep ticking us closer to the grand opening, as the countdown clock on The Map Room’s Web site proudly — and funly — indicates.

The grand day begins at 7 a.m. on Feb. 14, Valentine’s Day. The address is: 1901 Withnell (at Lemp).

The countdown clock tells me there’s an I-can’t-wait atmosphere over there. That tells me to expect a smile when I walk in the door. And everything I’ve read so far on the Map Room’s site — and via email exchange with one of the inspirations energizing the place, Michele Floyd — tells me I can probably believe a number of the thoughts already put out on the coffee & wine house’s site:

St. Louis, Mo., rates as one of the dirtiest cities — in the bottom 10 percent — in the United States “in terms of air releases of recognized carcinogens,” according to scorecard.org.

It pains me to have to put more horrifying news about St. Louis out to the world. If anyone not from St. Louis, my home city, thinks anything of this historic, blues-music thrumming, Gateway Arch-boasting, Stan Musial-loving, Mississippi River-guarding city, it’s likely about the city’s position in the annual “most dangerous city” rankings.