Sustainable North

From The Daily Green: Enjoying an eco-lifestyle means living greener in all areas of your life. You may be taking environmentally friendly steps at home, but are you also doing it at work? People spend almost 90% of their lives indoors, and for those people who work inside that equates to about 40 or more [...]

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ASK A BUILDER By CCHRC Staff The “Ask a Builder” series is dedicated to answering some of the many questions Fairbanks residents have about building, energy and the many other parts of home life. Q: What is offgassing and is it something I need to worry about? Offgassing, also called outgassing, is a term used [...]

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From The Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, Thursday, February 25, 2010: Lawmakers are weighing a huge expansion of construction work to improve the energy-efficiency of public buildings across the state. The Legislature two years ago set aside an unprecedented $360 million for household-level energy efficiency projects. A comparable figure could go toward contractors to cut energy consumption [...]

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From Alaska Dispatch, Tuesday, February 23, 2010: On Tuesday, the village of Unalakleet, seated on Alaska’s northwest coast, celebrated the town’s newest energy force — turbine number six. The awakening of the high-tech wind catcher completes the installation of the town’s new wind farm, which has already saved the village tens of thousands of dollars [...]

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From The Tundra Drums, Wednesday, February 17, 2010: What might be the only commercial farm in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta will expand this summer, despite early worries that the new potato field near the airport would increase the threat of bird strikes. To prepare the field for farming, Bethel resident Tim Meyers scraped away two acres [...]

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From The Associated Press, Saturday, February 20, 2010: A proposed new rule in Fairbanks would fine people at least $300 for using wood- and-coal-fired stoves that belch out dense smoke, part of an attempt to curb air pollution in the area. The Fairbanks News-Miner reports that Fairbanks North Star Borough Mayor Luke Hopkins is sponsoring [...]

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From The Christian Science Monitor: In the US, where 40 percent of homes contain at least one, video game consoles consume 16 billion kilowatt hours of energy yearly. That’s enough to power the entire city of San Diego for about 12 months, say the Natural Resources Defense Council and Ecos Consulting, which conducted a study [...]

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From The Tundra Drums, Wednesday, February 17, 2010: Houses in Quinhagak battered by decades of fierce wet winds might soon be replaced by a new model that hearkens back to traditional Native sod houses. At a meeting last week, village leaders in the Southwest Alaska community accepted a preliminary plan for an energy-efficient home that [...]

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From The Associated Press, Friday, February 19, 2010: The attorney general and researchers at the University of Alaska Anchorage are attributing high gasoline and heating fuel costs in rural Alaska to market conditions. Two independent investigations say small scale distribution over great distances in challenging locations appears to be the main culprit in rural-urban price [...]

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ASK A BUILDER By CCHRC Staff The “Ask a Builder” series is dedicated to answering some of the many questions Fairbanks residents have about building, energy and the many other parts of home life. Q: I’ve read LED lights perform well in cold temperatures. What about in Alaska? Absolutely. LEDs are generally pretty tough. They [...]

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