Have you heard about NRDC’s Smarter Cities?

“When thinking about the urban environment, more often than not problems come first to mind.  Less commonly thought about is the potential presented by cities, potential to rethink and reshape their environments responsibly.

Today urban leaders—mayors, businesses and community organizations—are in the environmental vanguard, making upgrades to transportation infrastructure, zoning, building codes, and waste management programs as well as improving access to open space, green jobs, affordable efficient housing and more. If they succeed in making their cities more efficient, responsible and sustainable, what will result will be smarter places for business and healthier places to live.”

Find out what is smart and green near you. Join the team and start reporting the success of your city!

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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,

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In a Cliff’s Notes version of the myriad incentives, rebates, and tax incentives GREENandSAVE has created a Federal Tax Incentive Decoder and condensed the material to 11 bite sized pages. Best of all, this resource does not cost a dime and can be downloaded at: http://www.greenandsave.com/homecheckup/free_federal_tax_incentive_decoder

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Welcome to the Carnival of the Green! This is the 182nd edition of Treehugger’s weekly roundup of eco links from around the blogosphere.

Welcome to Green Building Elements where home owners and LEED accredited professional alike can learn about advances in green and renewable building materials, current projects in sustainable architecture and progressive urban planning, and local guidelines for creating green structures in different regions of the U.S.

Here’s what greenies worldwide submitted for this round:

• Admiral India brings to life Maitri Bagh,a zoo and a park established by the Bhilai Steel Plant in Maitri Bagh, Bhilai: Part 1 .
• Monkey Profit shares gives us tips on how to rake in the cash with Making Money On Twitter.
• The Knoxville Home Expert has contributed two great posts.  We are taken into the garden with Go Green with Sustainable Landscaping Techniques and Composting 101: What is Composting and Why Should Everyone Do it?
• Guffly gives us the view on eco fashion with Men’s Organic Cotton Polo Shirt.
• In Let Them Eat Plastic: SMART Art — Trash Into Treasure, Beth Terry of Fake Plastic Fish tells us about a competition held by environmentalist David de Rothschild, for works of art constructed from materials that would have otherwise found their way into our waste stream.  Pieces like Kathleen’s plastic bottle wave tell a sad story of consumption as well as the transformative power of the human imagination.
  
• Mikkal Travvis shares tips on staying healthy with How to Survive a Flu Pandemic.
• Energy Saving gadgets gives us green home wisdom with Make Your Home Energy Efficent with The Leak Detector.
• The Green Thinking Blog brings us the movie trailer of a new independent film called FRESH that features “farmers, thinkers, and business people” in the U.S. who are making positive changes in our industrialized food system. Some of the main characters include urban and sustainable farmers and supermarket owners.

Many thanks to last week’s host, The Green Phone Booth. And since Carnival of the Green, always promises to bring fresh, new content, make sure you check out Ooffoo next week for the June 8th edition!

For more information about how to participate in Carnival of the Green, please visit http://www.treehugger.com/files/2006/11/treehugger_to_b.php

Happy Monday to you all!

BrightTALK is hosting a five-day green business summit this week, featuring several free webcasts on green building.  The webcasts run from April 21 to 24.  Each day features a different topic related to green business:

• Tuesday, April 21 - Water Management
• Wednesday, April 22 - Green Building
• Thursday, April 23 - Green IT
• Friday, April 24 - Green Marketing

Some of the highlighted speakers include:

• Peter Williams, CTO of IBM Big Green Innovations - “Water and Information Management” at the Water Management Summit
• Barry Hooper, San Francisco Private Sector Green Building Program - “Building & Operating Green in 2009 - Challenges and Successes in SF” at the Green Building Summit
• Pat Tiernan, Executive Director of Climate Savers Computing Initiative - “The IT Power Problem, simple actions to improve your business” at the Green IT Summit
• Joel Makower, Chairman and Executive Editor of Greener World Media - “Save the Buyosphere! Selling Green in the Age of More, More, MORE” at the Green Marketing Summit

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FairGreenTrade.com recently launched its green product and service directory.  The site covers many green topics, from organic foods, green living, and, of course, green building.

Consumers can now get all their green information in one stop.  Even with the newness of the site, there are many resources already listed.  A quick browse of the green construction area led to links for various materials, including flooring, wall coverings, windows, etc.  The book selection, tied in with Amazon, is also quite extensive (as I found many books that I’m sure I can’t live without).

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Low Impact Living will identify the single family home (and its proud owners) that has the lowest Low Impact Living Index (calculated using our Environmental Impact Calculator), and we’re going to share with you what that family has done to get there. Don’t worry if you haven’t done big projects like installing solar panels or a wind turbine - as the calculator shows, many of the best green home projects are simple and inexpensive. We’ll show you how to identify projects to make your home more eco-friendly. The contest will close on February 15, 2009. So you have time to make green changes!

What you have to do to enter

1. Visit our Household Environmental Impact Calculator and calculate your base LILI (Low Impact Living Index). It will only take you five-ten minutes to use the calculator and create your account.
2. Once you have entered all of your base inputs, move on to the “select projects” page of the calculator. Make sure you only check projects that you’ve finished (or will finish by February 15th) before you log out.
3. Make sure that you log out or save your profile before leaving - if you just move on to another web site without logging out, your inputs could be lost.
4. If you’ve already created an account through our calculator, then you need to return and, log in again. We’ve added some new features recently, and they won’t work unless you refresh your account.
5. The calculator isn’t all-encompassing yet, so there may be projects that you’ve done that don’t show up. If this is true, send us an email at contest@lowimpactliving.com describing what you’ve done. Low Impact Living staffers will review your efforts and award up to a 5% additional deduction for compelling projects.

How we’ll select the winner

The contest closes on February 15, 2009, and we will announce the winner on March 1. This will give us time to check with the finalists to make sure that they’ve completed all of their checked projects. (Past entrants to our green home contests are not eligible.)

If you are a finalist (in our top 10 lowest LILI scores), we may ask you to verify that your projects are actually completed, via photos or receipts / invoices for work performed. We’ll also ask for your address (not to be published!) so that we can verify entered information about your home. If you are a winner, then you have to be willing to let us share your projects and process with everyone via our blog, and to provide us with the photos and project descriptions necessary to do that. You’ll become a green star overnight!

What you could win!

The greenest homeowner will receive three nights at Hotel Carlton in San Francisco. The Hotel Carlton is a member of the Joie de Vivre chain of hotels, which is deeply committed to making sustainability part of its core business operations. In fact, their mission is to “adhere to the strictest environmental standards, engage in sustainable practices and maintain an impeccable quality of guest experience.” The JDV Hotels environmental program includes hotel-wide recycling programs, composting, use of renewable energy, use of recycled paper products, energy-efficient lighting and much more. To learn more about Joie de Vivre’s commitment to sustainability, click here. To learn more about the Hotel Carlton, click here.

So, good luck, and get to greening!

Topics in the guide range from legal and illegal logging and responsible forestry to the presence of formaldehyde and other volatile organic compounds in the wood and adhesives.  Eco Timber tackles every step in the process from subfloors to floor pads to the panels themselves.  Looking for a specific hardness of wood?  They’ve got a scale.  Do you already have a hardwood floor and want advice on green care and maintenance?  Eco Timber has a section on maintenance, surface scratching, and refinishing.

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Follow Philly’s Postgreen as they attempt to build a modern green home for $100,000.

Just over a year ago, Philadelphia developer Postgreen undertook an ambitious project, to build a modern green home for $100,000.  Not only are they seeking to shatter the myth that green homes are unaffordable, but they are documenting every step on their site, 100KHouse.com.  Located in the New Kensington area of Philadelphia, the house will be a roughly 1,000 square foot two bedroom one and a half bath modern style home - and will not be a prefab; rather it is being built from the ground up according to LEED for Homes guidelines using such affordable energy saving materials as SIPs (structurally insulated panels.)

Documenting the progress of the 100K House are Postgreen President Chad Ludeman and PR Director Nic Darling.  Both are convinced that affordable green building is not only possible, but necessary to bring about true environmental change.  Their blog posts are not limited to the progress of the 100K House; they write about a range of interesting green topics.

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Not all the changes in the promotional products industry relate to actual products. New technologies are starting to make their way into our industry as well.

The neatest thing I have seen lately is the new concept of order portals from companies like Creative Merchandise, LLC, based in California.

Client Order Portals are custom web ordering platforms to make ordering promotional items even easier as they allow companies like ours to display our client’s logos on actual in stock merchandise in real time.

Why is that green? The number one question we get is how is a logo going to look on X item.

In the far past the only way to address this question was to develop a spec sample, i.e to run one item to serve as a sample for the hundreds of, say, coffee mugs to follow. Today we often run .pdf proofs instead of spec samples, but there are still thousands of spec samples being done in our industry.

The problem is that to run something even as simple as one mug spec sample is the same process as running 10,000 mugs. We use the same big machines, same screens, same setup but all that work and energy produce only one item.

It is like using a bulldozer to plant a single flower bulb in your front yard.

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A tool is available to help assess the financial costs and benefits of several green projects.  GreenandSave.com provides an ROI (return on investment) table that lists the added costs, annual savings, projected savings over 10 or 20 years, and the ROI for a given improvement.  Improvements include Tune-Ups (small projects or changes that can be made to green up a home or building), Remodeling, and Advanced (larger projects or decisions for a new building).

An example of a Tune-Up project is installing an Energy Star approved programmable thermostat.  The average cost is $115.00.  The projected annual savings is $180.00, yielding an ROI of 156.5% and a payback of 0.6 years.

One of the Remodeling projects is to replace windows with Energy Star Low-E windows.  According to the GreenandSave Remodeling Table: the payback time in years is 2.3, the added cost is $700.00, the annual savings is $300.00, ten year savings is $3,000.00, and the ROI is 42.9%.

Advanced projects include doubling the insulation factor (R-value) of the exterior walls from R-19 to R-30.  The added cost for this improvement is listed as $900.00, annual savings of $120.00, ROI of 13.3%, and a payback of 7.5 years.

While the costs and savings may vary according to the area of the country or world a project is located in, this tool certainly gives an owner some hard data to use to when making a decision on whether to pursue a project or not.  Some projects, such as adding a programmable thermostat, pay for themselves quickly, so they become almost “no-brainers.”  Others, like the added insulation example above, require more thought.  Tools like GreenandSave.com’s ROI table give owners the data they need to make an educated choice.

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Whoever designed this game has no understanding of real green building in any meaningful sense. Instead of providing any insight or education about green building, the game reduces design of a green house to nothing more than a couple of mouse clicks. “Choose the climate construction materials and energy sources and see how green you can be.” The oversimplification this presents is a huge disservice to visitors to the site who play the game.

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In addition to discussing green building, let us also take this opportunity to remind you of all the other Green Options blogs in the network and invite you to take a minute to look at some of the other writers and their Earth Day thoughts:

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Ypsilanti, Michigan is in the outlying suburbs of Detroit and is, itself, a city with a long automotive heritage going back to the Tucker Torpedo and Kaiser Motors and extending to a present day Ford assembly plant and the last Hudson dealership in the country and an Automotive Heritage Museum. But now, a local couple have embarked on a different direction towards automobiles, encouraging drivers to embrace a new mindset with a website called DriveSlowly, which they are unveiling for Earth Day.

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Here are some quick reviews of some sites you may want to take a look at, too.

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This local blog first came to my attention via an article in the local paper about a University of Michigan medical student and his daughter who are operating a blog together that is encouraging people to eat vegetarian meals one day a week (on Wednesdays). The Vegetarian Wednesday blog began just this past summer. Originally founded by Josh Mugele and his daughter Eleanor, there are now a few other writers (relatives and med school classmates) who contribute to the blog as well.

“Vegetarian Wednesday started when my daughter wanted to become a vegetarian but couldn’t do it all at once (she loves her chicken nuggets). I told her I’d help her by doing it with her, and we’d start by becoming vegetarians one day a week. Thus was born Vegetarian Wednesday. She wants to become a vegetarian because she loves animals. I want to do it because it’s good for me and good for the planet. Did you know that the meat industry is one of the leading contributors to global warming in the world? Did you know that eating less meat lowers your weight and total cholesterol? Think of what we could do if we all stopped eating meat for just one day a week.

“The purpose of this blog is to encourage meat-eaters like me to make a difference in their health and in the health of the planet by trying to eat no meat one day each week. On this blog we can share recipes, stories about Vegetarian Wednesdays, and most of all spread the word.”

The blog includes a number of recipes for a variety of vegetarian dishes, as well as some (very brief) reviews of vegetarian dishes by an actual 9-year-old (ranging from “No way,” for zucchini and mushroom enchiladas to “I love tofu. Tofu’s great,” for a simple General Tso’s Tofu recipe). Beyond the recipes there are also discussions of related topics connected to overall reduction of lifestyle impact to reviews of books and movies such as The Omnivore’s Dillemma and The 11th Hour. There are also discussions about restaurants (some local, some national chains) as they are connected to vegetarian eating.

Certainly this isn’t the first time anyone has considered partial vegetarianism, either as a step towards embracing vegetarian eating completely (as the daughter is doing), or just to push themselves to eat lower on the food chain and to eat a healthier diet (as the father is doing). My own family did something like this a couple years ago (though not so regularly or as organized as this is) when we had a share of vegetables each week from a local CSA farm (community-supported agriculture). Even when it is done in a haphazard fashion, you will most likely find yourself trying new things and increasing the variety of your meals. We’ve kind of let that idea slip lately, but perhaps this will be the inspiration for us to restart that ourselves.

Just taking a break from eating meat for one day a week reduces your consumption by about 15%. And Vegetarian Wednesday offers a list of other benefits to not eating meat:

• It fights global warming.
• You’ll get your daily vitamins at least one day a week.
• It makes you look better.
• It’ll make you feel better.
• It cuts back on the killing of animals.
• It reduces our reliance on foreign oil.
• Chicks (or dudes) will dig you.

If you are looking for a community to support you in a partially vegetarian lifestyle, this seems like it might be the place for you. It’s very much an experiment rather than a soapbox for these writers. It’s vegetarianism for the rest of us. Vegetarians who can also say, “But pork chops taste so good!”

Link: Vegetarian Wednesday

The guide is timely and up to date. (This is actually a recently revised second edition of the guide. The first edition was produced in 2004.) In discussing various materials or approaches to construction, the guide is very comprehensive in trying to include as many things as possible. Both the positives and the negatives behind each choice are addressed, and while the information is not exhaustive, it is an excellent starting point.

“This guide is meant to enable you to compare building materials and make your own educated choices to affordably seek out safer, more sustainable products. It is also meant to help you evaluate the larger life cycle implications of all the products that you buy and use.”

A section on “Talking with your Designer and Contractor about Building Green” is one of a number of sections that is excerpted on the website as well. This section approaches the beginning of a project in much the same way that I would: by asking questions. This helps to direct in figuring out your particular green goals and determining what is most important for you in terms of Energy and Water, materials and Toxins, and Space Use, Appearance and Purpose. It also addresses the (unfortunately all-too-frequent) view of green building as an add-on or a commodity, rather than as a fundamental and integral part of any building project.

“Don’t start by asking yourself: “Do I want a green building?” This inadvertently suggests that you can treat sustainability as an add-on process. If sustainability is the real deal (and it is!) it needs to be a part of every project in some way and it should be as natural to all of us as breathing. The rest of the green building guide will give you a great starting place for talking more with professionals about your building choices.”

The book is divided into sections. A preliminary section talks about “What We’re Up Against” and lays out the issues surrounding a number of materials and chemicals found in construction and discusses them both in terms of the problems they can cause and the possible alternatives that can be used.

The main focus of the book though is construction. Here the sections address issues to be considered “Before You Build” including site issues and the size of the building, renewable energy options, the selection of building materials, and the aforementioned “Talking with your Designer and Contractor about Building Green.” “Time to Build” addresses green aspects of a range of building materials and helps with some guidance for making good green choices for material selections. Materials from the basement to the roof are presented along with information about the various options in each case. A small third section deals with “Building Outside” and covers outdoor decks and landscaping issues.

The book also contains a number of resources for finding suppliers, further information, and professional advice, but is specific to the state of New York in most instances. Though there is some regionalism in the guide, it is so full of good information that it is worthwhile no matter where you live.

If you aren’t inclined to read an entire book like this online, this is one instance where printing out an online document makes good sense. This is a manual that I am going to refer to again in the future. More importantly, I am going to recommend to clients and friends who are interested in building or expanding their homes that they read this book.