Promoting sustainable living in our Brooklyn neighborhood and beyond.
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
