Garbage is America's #1 export and possibly the biggest raw material source we have.
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Waste is also a new idea - probably no more than 100 years old. It is an idea that came about with the birth of complex polymers and consumerism (brought on by the fad for disposable products in the 1950s). If necessity breeds innovation, then we are long overdue to find innovative ways to solve the waste issue
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If enough businesses begin to use this undervalued material the demand for garbage will skyrocket. As we all know, when demand goes up then supply goes down, which in the case of garbage, is a very good thing!
How much of its own food can suburbia produce? In America, the average suburban lot size is approximately 12,000 square feet. That's about a quarter-acre. At an average of 2.56 people per household, and a rough average of 10,000 feet per lot not covered by structures, that's just under 4,000 square feet of yard per person. Of course, this ignores the potential for parks and other open spaces in suburbia to be converted to food-production. It is also an average figure--some neighborhoods will have far less space, others far more. Despite these sources of variability, it is a good jumping-off point. Is 4,000 square feet enough to provide for a person? There are three requirements: calories, nutrition, and the variety and selection necessary to support culture and quality of life. In addition, there are four limiting factors to food production in a given area: sunlight, water, labor, and soil/nutrients. In the interest of space, I'll only address three of these: calories, nutrition, and soil/nutrients--please feel free to discuss the other requirements and constraints in comments.
Can 4,000 square feet produce enough calories to feed one person? At 26 calories per ounce and roughly 8,000 pounds of potatoes harvested from 4,000 square feet (based on intermediate yields from John Jeavons "How to Grow More Vegetables," p. 92), that's 3.3 million calories, or 9,000 calories per day. This is, of course, completely unsustainable, insufficiently nutritious, etc. But it does answer the question--it is possible to grow enough calories on 4,000 square feet per person. The real limiting factors are nutrition and soil, discussed below:
Can 4,000 square feet produce enough nutrients to feed one person while simultaneously sustaining and improving the soil? One issue is that topsoil has been scraped away from more recent suburban developments. How effectively can we re-build soil, and how long does it take? John Jeavons has addressed this question in depth (summarized at p. 28-29 of "Grow More Vegetables"). He concludes that 4,000 square feet is roughly enough to feed one person a complete, nutritious diet, while simultaneously improving soil quality. His method involves 60% (by area) focus on growing soil-improving crops (high carbon content food crops for eventual compost), 30% mixed high-calorie root crops, and 10% mixed vegetables.
The University of Vermont has a really interesting project on their Alternative Energy Racing Organization [AERO] page. Be sure to check out the "Green Innovation" page for a lot more information on the build.
Our primary focus is Project GreenSpeed, an effort to build a race car for entry in the annual International Formula-Hybrid competition sponsored by IEEE and SAE. For us, it is an opportunity to demonstrate the efficacy of non-traditional drive-systems for mobility engineering and get to drive fast at the same time.
An international conference on Ecological Safety, held earlier this month in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, called attention to a dangerous sanitation issue by offering an inspiring and feasible solution.
The problem: international donors are still promoting pit latrines... but most families can't afford to pay for safe emptying of the pits... the latrines can become dangerous as a result, often leaking and polluting puddles in nearby streets and gardens, leaking into streams or even leaching into groundwater. Contamination ruins an already-limited clean drinking water supply, and puts the local community, particularly children, at risk for bacterial disease.
A new and more sustainable sanitation system promises to change the game, if advocates can generate the resources and policy action necessary to support it. According to Sascha Gabizon, executive director of WCEF, dry or low-flush urine diverting toilets, combined with natural filtration ponds to purify grey water from sinks and showers, is a much safer sanitation system that can be implemented at a cost similar to that of the latrines.
In an attempt to reduce the energy waste in the UK, O2 has just launched a new energy efficient mobile phone charger that works with most of the handsets currently on the market.
Named O2 Universal Charger, the new product is approximately twice more efficient than a regular mobile phone charger, cutting up to 70% of the wasted energy.
The charger meets the energy efficient guidelines of the US Energy Star rating and features a power control system.
The O2 Universal Charger is the first product of this kind released by a UK mobile carrier. It can be purchased as of now, from all of O2’s UK stores, for £14.99. When bought together with a new handset, the Universal Charger costs only £7.49 (offering available until December 31, 2008), while separate connection cables are sold for £4.99.
O2 says that about £30 million are wasted every year in the UK because of the improper use of cell phone chargers, so its new Universal Charger might save quite a lot of money, provided that most of the mobile consumers will use it.
This doesn't quite look like the most crash-safe vehicle ever designed, but electric power plus bamboo construction does provide a dream-like level of sustainability:
Bruce Sterling, sci-fi author / futurist / design critic extraordinaire, has posted his final Viridian note. He has lots of advice relevant for Makers. Some of my favorite:
Get excellent tools and appliances. Not a hundred bad, cheap, easy ones. Get the genuinely good ones. Work at it. Pay some attention here, do not neglect the issue by imagining yourself to be serenely "non-materialistic." There is nothing more "materialistic" than doing the same household job five times because your tools suck. Do not allow yourself to be trapped in time-sucking black holes of mechanical dysfunction. That is not civilized.
Now for a brief homily on tools and appliances of especial Viridian interest: the experimental ones. The world is full of complicated, time-sucking, partially-functional beta-rollout gizmos. Some are fun to mess with; fun in life is important. Others are whimsical; whimsy is okay. Eagerly collecting semifunctional gadgets because they are shiny-shiny, this activity is not the worst thing in the world. However, it can become a vice. If you are going to wrangle with unstable, poorly-defined, avant-garde tech objects, then you really need to wrangle them. Get good at doing it.
Good experiments are well-designed experiments. Real experiments need a theory. They need something to prove or disprove. Experiments need to be slotted into some larger context of research, and their results need to be communicated to other practitioners. That's what makes them true "experiments" instead of private fetishes.
If you're buying weird tech gizmos, you need to know what you are trying to prove by that. You also need to tell other people useful things about it. If you are truly experimenting, then you are doing something praiseworthy. You may be wasting some space and time, but you'll be saving space and time for others less adventurous. Good.
And, an exciting new project on which he can use your help:
This new effort of mine is a scholarly work exploring material culture, use-value, ethics, and the relationship between materiality and the imagination. However, since nobody's easily interested in that huge, grandiose topic, I'm disguising it as a nifty and attractive gadget book. I plan to call it "The User's Guide to Imaginary Gadgets."
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