Sustainable North

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 [...]

[Read more →]

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 [...]

[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 [...]

[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 [...]

[Read more →]

From the Washington Post on Thursday, May 7, 2009:
There was a time when choosing paint for a home mostly meant mulling over color swatches (”Sahara or Sandy Beach?”). Now, for many homeowners, there’s also the pressing issue of being green: finding paint that not only looks good but is environmentally friendly or, at the very [...]

[Read more →]

From slate.com, Tuesday, May 5, 2009:
It’s unsurprising, if a little odd, that green marketing has come to the world of mattresses. A mattress may be a big-ticket consumer item—in 2006, the median price for a queen-size mattress was $650—but unlike refrigerators or cars, its carbon footprint is negligible. Still, eco-sales pitches are prevalent in the [...]

[Read more →]

From the New York Times on Wednesday, February 11, 2009:
The modular housing industry likes to say that it has always had a few characteristics that today might be considered eco-friendly — from reduced waste to a smaller construction footprint.
“In a modular plant, recycling is huge,” says Chad Harvey, the deputy director of the Modular Building [...]

[Read more →]

From the New York Times on Tuesday, February 3, 2009:
Wind and solar power have been growing at a blistering pace in recent years, and that growth seemed likely to accelerate under the green-minded Obama administration. But because of the credit crisis and the broader economic downturn, the opposite is happening: installation of wind and solar [...]

[Read more →]

From businessweek.com, posted on January 6, 2009 and retrieved on Friday, January 30, 2009:
When the homebuilding industry descends on Las Vegas on Jan. 20 for its annual trade show, a highlight as always will be a project called the New American Home. This model house—a new one gets built each year—serves as a showcase for [...]

[Read more →]

From the Chicago Tribune on Friday, January 23, 2009:
Even before home designers and builders headed to Las Vegas for this week’s International Builders Show, they had a pretty clear idea of where residential construction was headed.
Yes, the home-building industry is in the dumps, but there are still visionary designers coming up with a better mousetrap, [...]

[Read more →]