Sustainable North

BY CCHRC Staff
Energy Focus: Fairbanks Daily News-Miner June 18th, 2009, Section A3

It’s building season. For some, that means finding just the right spot for constructing a home. In Fairbanks, that isn’t so easy. Unlike other places where location, view, and neighbors comprise the major considerations for choosing a building site, Interior Alaska presents a more fundamental question: Will the land itself even support a house? The presence of permafrost can ruin the best laid plans. [Read more →]

BY Adam Wasch, Energy Outreach Consultant for CCHRC and UAF CES
Energy Focus: Fairbanks Daily News-Miner June 11th, 2009, Section A3

Here’s a primer on how to choose more environmentally-friendly paint. Paint ingredients reflect the demands we place upon paint. Outdoor paint must withstand sunlight, heat, cold, and rain. Indoor paint is scuffed, exposed to humidity, and subject to the whims of fashion. All paint produces fumes; some are more noxious than others. Close label reading and careful selection can help you identify the best product for the job, with the fewest undesirable side effects. [Read more →]

From the New York Times on Wednesday, June 11, 2009:

Environmental savings can be elusive, and the benefits and costs confusing. To help households wade through the information, consultants armed with stepladders and gadgets are selling advice on energy efficiency, indoor air quality and even methods for creating an eco-conscious wardrobe.

The field of personal and home eco-consultants is relatively new. GenGreen, a Colorado company that offers a national directory of businesses marketing themselves as green at gengreenlife.com, says it has just over 3,000 listings under the umbrella term environmental consultants, up from 657 when the database was started in 2007. They include energy auditors, health and wellness experts, interior designers and “eco-brokers,” real estate agents who specialize in green homes. While real estate agents can get training and certification as “eco” or “green” by trade organizations, and states like New York run energy audit programs with accreditation rules, there are no industry standards for most eco-consultants, who can range from environmental engineers to the self-taught.

Click here to read the whole story.

From npr.org on Monday, June 8, 2009:

Susan Carpenter breaks California state plumbing code three times a week. Her accomplice is her washing machine. Rinse water from washing machines usually goes into the sewer — so what if you could recycle it? That’s what Carpenter does, using it to water plants at her Southern California home.

“The washing machine is filling up with water, and it is going through its normal process of washing clothes,” she says. “And after about eight minutes, you’ll start to hear it spin and we will run outside and see it squirting through the tubes.”

The “it” is gray water, which looks like its name — a bit gray, a bit cloudy. After all, it’s the wastewater from bathtubs, sinks and washers.

The gray water lapping up Carpenter’s dirty clothes will soon be lapped up by her passion fruit trees — and no, the fruit won’t taste like Tide. She uses a special type of detergent that doesn’t contain salt or boron, compounds which dehydrate plants.

Click here to read (or listen to) the whole story.

BY Adam Wasch, Energy Outreach Consultant for CCHRC and UAF CES
Energy Focus: Fairbanks Daily News-Miner June 4th, 2009, Section A3

I don’t fish. I don’t fish because fish depress me, particularly unhappy fish. In part, this has something to do with having once witnessed my father club a fish repeatedly, chasing it madly around and around a small unstable rented boat. By the time the fish succumbed, the boat’s gunnels had dipped twice beneath the waterline. Our feet were soaked; the boat was sinking in Lake Erie. [Read more →]

From the New York Times on Friday, May 29, 2009:

Building green can open the door to plenty of legal pitfalls, a new study warns.

The study, by Harvard Law School’s Environmental Law & Policy Clinic and sponsored by Manko, Gold, Katcher & Fox, a Philadelphia law firm, says that green building raises a number of liability questions.

What if the building set out to meet LEED certification or other government green-building standards, but falls short, for example? What if it fails to garner expected tax breaks from the government for building green?

Click here to read the whole article.

BY Adam Wasch, Energy Outreach Consultant for CCHRC and UAF CES
Energy Focus: Fairbanks Daily News-Miner May 28th, 2009, Section A3

Don’t keep an open bucket of smoldering ashes in your house. If it doesn’t burn your house down, the carbon monoxide emissions can kill you. This simple fact escaped me during my first winter in Alaska. I thought it was a shame to waste the heat of unspent coals, so I kept an open bucket of coals inside and went to bed. [Read more →]

BY Adam Wasch, Energy Outreach Consultant for CCHRC and UAF CES
Energy Focus: Fairbanks Daily News-Miner May 21st, 2009, Section A3

There were kids whose toys were not powered and those whose toys were. Batteries made the difference. I was a powerless kid. My toys only went as far as I could throw them. My best friend Brett, however, had self-propelled cars, a portable radio, and an electric-eyed Skeletor who said, “I must possess all, or I possess nothing,” when pushed. I thought Brett was better off. Decades later, I still feel defeated by the stamina of battery-powered toys. [Read more →]

BY Adam Wasch, Energy Outreach Consultant for CCHRC and UAF CES
Energy Focus: Fairbanks Daily News-Miner May 14th, 2009, Section A3

It’s not easy recycling in Fairbanks. Just as soon as you load your vehicle full of cans, bottles, and plastics to drop off at the last place you took them, it turns out that whoever accepted recycling before has since stopped, disappeared, or is serving time. In all fairness, it’s not easy being a recycler, either. Unlike other places where recycling options are plentiful and profitable, Fairbanks is remote enough to make recycling a costly business. After all, it takes labor and fuel to process and transport recycling. [Read more →]

From the New York Times on Thursday, February 5, 2009:

President Obama ordered the Energy Department on Thursday to immediately draft long-overdue standards to make a variety of appliances and light bulbs more energy efficient.

Over the last three decades, Congress has demanded stricter efficiency standards on 30 categories of products, as varied as residential air-conditioners and industrial boilers. But successive administrations have failed to write regulations to enforce the laws, even when ordered to by the courts.

In remarks to employees of the Energy Department, and in a presidential memorandum, Mr. Obama said he intended to comply with the laws, starting this year with nine categories of products, including ovens, vending machines, microwave ovens, dishwashers and light bulbs.

He said the new standards would cut energy use and reduce emissions of the heat-trapping gases that scientists blame for global warming.

Click here to read the whole article.