sustainableflatbush.org

It may surprise many people to know that bottled water is a huge sustainability issue, but ponder for a moment the transportation aspect alone and the problems become obvious. According to an article in today’s New York Times importing bottled water from France, Italy and Fiji to the U.S. generates 4,000 tons of carbon dioxide, the equivalent of annual emissions from 700 cars. Consider the other sources and destinations worldwide and it is clear that a huge amount of fossil fuel is being used to transport a commodity that is almost always available locally, but smart advertising has discouraged us from consuming.

Credit the bottled water industry with a brilliant marketing job, selling purity and convincing the public that its product tastes better, is more convenient and is safer than good tap water. From a trickle of Perrier in the early 1980s, consumption of bottled water in America rose to 27.6 gallons per capita last year, according to the International Bottled Water Association.

The public water supply is much more stringently regulated by the Environmental Protection Agency than bottled water is by the Food and Drug Administration. The E.P.A. requires multiple daily tests for bacteria, for example, with the results available to the public; the F.D.A. requires weekly testing, which does not have to be reported to the agency, to the states or to the public.

“The rationale for buying bottled water is a fantasy that has a destructive downside,” Dr. Solomon said. “These companies are marketing an illusion of environmental purity.”

The same article reports that a small number of restaurants are beginning to take action by serving filtered tap water in place of bottled still water and using homemade carbonation for the bubbly variety. One of the movement’s outspoken leaders is Alice Waters of Chez Panisse in Berkeley, CA (my hometown!), and California seems to be leading the way generally, with NYC’s Del Posto and Birdbath Bakery among the few local exceptions. It will be interesting to see the public response to what would ideally become a fast-growing trend; though it is helpful that high end gourmands are leading the way, I suspect this is a marketing conquest that will not be overturned easily. (On a related topic, NY State’s current bottle bill does not allow for recycling of non-carbonated beverage containers, and the industry wants to maintain status quo on that as well.)

RecycleThisNYC is holding a FreeMeet this Saturday at the Harlem YMCA!

FreeMeets are a great way to give new life to stuff you no longer need, and also to find something you may be looking for. It’s all about keeping useful items out of the landfill and promoting recycling in general. A fun video about last year’s FreeMeet at Habana Outpost in Fort Greene can be seen here.

FreeCycle NY and FreeCycle Brooklyn are also great resources for sharing used stuff (they are Yahoo groups and require opening a free account here). I have found new homes for furniture and other items I no longer needed and gotten plants for my building’s garden this way. Making less garbage feels really good!

Tour de Brooklyn 2007 is this Sunday!
This year’s route includes Park Slope, Green-Wood Cemetery, Sunset Park (highest elevation in Brooklyn, great view of the harbor!), Bay Ridge, Verrazano Bridge, Dyker Beach Park, Bensonhurst Park, Drier Offerman Park, Kensington, Prospect Park South… and ends at the Prospect Park Carousel. Worth getting up absurdly early on a Sunday!

Registration (it’s free!) and other info here.

Dan Miner is the Coordinator of Beyond Oil NYC and Energy Committee Chair of the New York City Sierra Club. He is also very involved with promoting urban Permaculture, presumably from the viewpoint that in the era Beyond Oil (which may be sooner than many people think) we will need to produce much more of our food locally. I first heard Dan speak about Peak Oil at a GreenHome NYC monthly forum in 2005, and his presentation was very compelling. Dan is also the author of a recent report entitled Moving New York City Toward Sustainable Energy Independence. Gotham Gazette named it Report of the Day, and the President of New York Divinity School calls it a “must read”. Here’s a taste:

Many of us are worried about the long-term consequences of climate change, and there’s growing support for the warnings of climate scientists that we need to cut carbon emissions by 80% by 2050 to avoid climate catastrophe. On the other hand, most Americans are not cutting their energy use significantly. Defenders of business as usual claim that energy frugality will harm our economy, while failing to consider that inaction now guarantees wrecking the economy later with heat waves and flooding. Part of the problem is the perception that the climate impacts of our oil addiction lie far in the future, preventing a public consensus of urgency. Without that, the bold political action we need today is impossible.

Check out a summary here, or download the whole report here.

Riverkeeper has created a great report on CSO (Combined Sewer Overflow) which illustrates the extent of New York City’s sewer system overflow problem and outlines a number of very simple and affordable solutions. While none of the ideas presented are new to sustainability advocates, what has changed is the level of receptiveness in our city government. As the article states, DEP (Department of Environmental Protection) is still focusing on end-of-pipe solutions, which are more costly and less effective; but PlaNYC has opened dialogue about the potential of source controls – parks, trees, green roofs and rainwater harvesting – to absorb rainfall before it overburdens the sewers. In fact, Riverkeeper’s report proposes treating rainfall as a beneficial resource rather than a problem:

Stormwater Can Make the City More Sustainable.
Source control regards stormwater as a resource to be utilized for much broader sustainability purposes, rather than a waste that must be disposed. By giving life to vegetation, stormwater can help prepare the City for the effects of climate change, decrease summer temperatures, promote energy efficiency, improve air quality, and make communities more livable. A major commitment to source control would help advance a number of ambitious and laudable goals that Mayor Michael Bloomberg wants the City to attain by the year 2030.

Imagine every building’s roof covered with vegetation, every city block lined with trees surrounded by plants and flowers, every apartment house using rainbarrel water for its garden… this is not a pipedream (no pun intended), it can be done for less money than the DEP’s unsustainable and less-effective proposals:

For $1,000 invested in the DEP’s end-of-pipe projects, CSOs might decrease by 2,400 gallons. By comparison, the same $1,000 investment in:

•Greenstreets could decrease CSOs by 14,800 gallons;
•Street trees could decrease CSOs by 13,170 gallons;
•New green roofs could decrease CSOs by 810 gallons; retrofitted green roofs could decrease CSOs by 865 gallons; and incentivized green roofs could decrease CSOs by 12,000 gallons; and
•Rain barrels could decrease CSOs by 9,000 gallons

You get the idea. The whole report is available here. Perhaps the most important force for change will be ordinary citizens educating ourselves about the CSO problem and its potential solutions, and letting our elected officials know what we want, as well as implementing ideas ourselves on the local level. How great would it be to see a rainbarrel in front of every home in Brooklyn?

Streetsblog reports that a community-driven traffic calming project, similar to that profiled in a previous post on Portland, Oregon’s Village Building Convergence, will happen here in Brooklyn this summer. It is unfortunate that the choice of location, Third Avenue and Baltic Street, is motivated by tragedy (a four-year-old boy was killed there by a Hummer in February); it is outrageous that the Department of Transportation pledged to build its own traffic calming improvements along this stretch of Third Avenue in 2004, after two boys were killed several blocks away, and never followed through.

So now that the community will be taking the initiative for making its own streets safer, we can envision a Brooklyn version of the picture below:

photo by StreetFilms

Last week I attended a two-day course on Building Science Fundamentals. Why, you may ask, would a non-architect opt to use their spare time (and money) in such a way? Well… aside from having been interested in architecture since childhood, I was encouraged to attend by several (also non-architect) friends in the name of learning more about Green Building. This particular course came highly recommended by Chris Benedict, a NYC-based architect who is known for designing extremely energy-efficient buildings at a LOWER than average cost (and what could be more “Green” than that?). The two lecturers, Dr. Joseph Lstiburek and Dr. John Straube, are considered gurus in their field; I am happy to report that they are also quite entertaining, which is how I was able to avoid being knocked unconscious by the wealth of highly technical information as it flew right over my head. Mixed in with architectural and scientific terms were statements I could easily understand and contextualize, such as the notion that constructing a poorly-insulated building that guzzles energy but cannot breathe and thus provides a breeding ground for mold is… STUPID.

What I walked away from this course with is the idea that a truly “Green” building is one built to consume as little energy as possible, and to last for generations while providing its occupants a comfortable home free of contaminants. The key to all this, according to Joe and John, is the building enclosure – the outside and inside walls and everything in between. Unfortunately, despite all the hooplah around LEED standards and bamboo floors and recycled glass countertops and solar panels, not to mention the hypocrisy of calling a 12,000 square foot single-family home “Green” (!!), very little attention is being focused on this simple solution of creating intelligently-designed, appropriately-sized, well-insulated buildings. Why? Well, I guess to some people it’s not very sexy. But, really… what could be sexier than NOT being STUPID??

Moments after posting today’s Bigger Better Bottle Bill piece (see below), I received an email alert from the NY Times that contained, serendipitously… an article about bottle bills past, present and future. The perfect companion to my previous post!

The bottle bill’s scope, and to some extent the very vision of a more waste-conscious world that first motivated it, has been swiftly trivialized by the ubiquity of bottled water. This year, Americans will drink more than 30 billion single-serving bottles of water. Oregonians will throw out about 170 million empty ones. Those same bottles, filled with something fizzy, would carry nickel deposits. “That was the stupidest thing we ever did,” says a veteran of the original Oregon campaign.

Read the whole story here (it’s long!).

Did you know that the plastic bottles used for non-carbonated beverages such as bottled water, iced teas and sports drinks do not carry a 5-cent refundable deposit like soda bottles do? New York’s Returnable Container Act is now 25 years old, and although this legislation has been extremely effective in increasing recycling (over 90 billion bottles and cans returned!), it is sorely in need of an update – the types of drink containers that are currently excluded were barely on the radar in 1982. Other states are already recycling these items and using the money for public benefit, but although this bill has been introduced in New York State and passed by the Assembly, it has died in the Senate (could industry lobbyists have anything to do with it?)

An updated bill – the Bigger Better Bottle Bill – would require that $85-140 million a year (now being kept by the beverage industries as unclaimed deposits) be transferred to the State Environmental Protection Fund. It would also keep a lot of potential recyclable materials out of the trash, as NYC’s micro-economy of bottle and can collectors are a very efficient crew.

More info about the BBB is available here. Send an email to your legislators here.

My friend Clarence (from Streetfilms) has just returned from the 7th Annual Village Building Convergence in Portland, Oregon. This is a 10-day-long event where “neighborhoods activate to build shared public places that they have envisioned, designed, funded, and will maintain for themselves”. One of my (and Clarence’s) favorite projects is the homemade traffic circles that are not only cool works of public art but also help to calm traffic at residential intersections. Although there is no actual 3-D structure, the painted designs actually DO cause drivers to slow down… maybe so they can admire the artwork!

Anyway, more photos and reporting (plus a film later this week) can be seen here. Wouldn’t it be great to do this in Brooklyn??

photo by Streetfilms