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Archive for the ‘Sustainability’ Category

Regarding the “eco vacations” some travel agencies sell these days;

One of the best eco vacations would be local travel by bicycle or by foot. I’m sure there are many a location fairly near to where one lives that you have not visited or don’t know much about.

For a more distant location rail is by far the best (most efficient regarding energy) trips under a 1000km should if at all possible be done by rail. If you have to fly try to book your flights so that you fly non-stop as takeoff takes up to 25% of the total fuel consumption during a flight.

For accommodation, camping (in a responsible way), certified hostels hotels and the like by any “green” standard, The Green key, ISO etc. or otherwise proof of the fact that the place you stay really does something for the environment. These places might do a minimum for getting the piece of paper that says they are “green” but they are promoting environmentally friendly lodgings and you know that they will have had to at least think about these issues.

I think part of the ideal eco vacation is the process of planning an eco vacation it’s a very informative process that more of us should go through.

When considering activities try to consume services and experiences that has a minimum impact on the local environment but brings a maximum revenue (that you can afford) to the local population. Try not to consume goods, one of the reasons being it’s very hard to know what impact that little hand-painted-made on the other side of the world souvenir has on the environment.

You can of course buy a “eco-vacation” from a travel agency but an important part of the eco is to understand and know what exactly is your impact on the environment when you do go on vacation.

For more information have a look at this site as an example http://www.ecotourism.org/index.html

Re-greening Chicago is a short video about greening urban space and other environmental actions within the urban area.

the U.K. based programme WRAP (Waste and Rescources Action Programme) published a report in the spring of 2007 with the findings that prefabricated buildings could cut construction waste by a staggering 90%! by increasing the use of off site manufacture and modern methods of construction. this is adding to the cost and time predictability as well as health and safety benefits construction companies already count on with prefabrication.

The biggest parts of the waste flows from a construction site are plasterboard <36%, timber <25% and packaging <%5 (wood pallets, shrink wrap, cardboard)  as well as concrete, bricks and cement.

Since march this year (2007) there has been an Industry agreement in place in the U.K to increaase the recycling of Gypsum from plasterboards.

The targets of the agreement being: (form the WRAP website)

• to reduce the amount of waste being sent to landfill from manufacturing operations in Great Britain to 10,000 tonnes/year by 2010; and
• to increase the take back and recycling of plasterboard waste, for use in plasterboard manufacture, to 50% of new construction waste arisings by 2010.

In addition, all parties have agreed to work with other parts of the supply chain to develop processes to reduce the amount of wastage generated in new construction and to make further progress towards achieving the ultimate objective of zero plasterboard waste to landfill.

In 2006 about 2.5 million tonnes of plasterboard was used in the U.K of this about 300.000 tonnes ended up as waste. which accounts for about 12%! reducing this to 10.000 tonnes would take it down to 0,4% or save up to 290.000 tonnes of material! reducing the amount of waste by a factor of 30 for plasterboard.

design for sustainability is a joint publication by the UNEP and Delft University of Technology  on
Design for Sustainability: a practical approach for developing economies. The site is basically a set of .pdf documents explaining the concepts and how to do it! you can find an introduction to the publication and the concepts on the website or here (.pdf, 260kb). to be able to implement sustainable ideas in our daily life we need that people who plan and design the products and services we use to have an understanding of the concept of sustainability but also the tools to be able to implement that understanding, d4s is a good step in the right direction.