Green Apartment Trends: Coming to a Community Near You!

As the green movement marches on, apartment buildings are starting taking notice. Green building has been largely focused on houses and remodeling, leaving the renter out of options for greening up their home. In fact, living in an apartment or shared housing situation decreases your carbon footprint greatly versus having a house.

As a renter of a house, I’m continually frustrated at the helplessness I feel at not being able to remodel my house to be more energy efficient. Yes, we recycle, limit water use, and use green products, but the house still has a long way to go before it is environmentally-friendly. The fact is that I don’t have the money to remodel a place I will move out of in a year or two. Most people don’t want to invest the time and money into making a place sustainable when they’ll leave eventually.

The Green Apartment Trend
Green apartment complexes are springing up to meet new demands for a sustainable place to live for renters. These complexes vary in their execution of what they consider to be green, but generally they are more energy efficient through building materials or alternative energy. They also will tend to encourage environmental practices, like having safe bike storage or offering free electronics recycling. Some places will even donate a percentage of their property management fees to an environmental cause.

The Boutique Apartments in Denver, Colo., is one such green apartment company that is trying to change the face of renting. They own eleven buildings throughout the city—each with a different theme, all with the same commitment to green living. They install energy efficient kitchen appliances, water heaters, and boilers. They use white roofs instead of black ones to keep the buildings cooler in the summer, thus using less air conditioning. Bamboo floors were installed instead of oak floors, as bamboo is a more sustainable resource.

Green AND Beautiful
The aesthetics of green, sustainable apartments in general are also unique and beautiful. I’ve always been depressed by the uniformity of giant apartment complexes: white walls, identical floor plans—boring. It seems as though the leaders in the green apartment business are interested in making beautiful spaces for their tenants with recycled art, funky appliances, beautiful low-VOC paint on the wall in an actual color. It’s these little touches that will make the green apartment trend blow up.

Some states are starting to give incentives to those that build apartments in a sustainable fashion. Even without the incentive, these buildings will eventually pay for themselves through energy savings. Renters are looking for the X factor when scouring complex after complex, and this is it.

Home Staging: It Gets Results and It’s Green

Despite the down economy, home stagers are busier than ever, as today’s realtors insist that staging is the most cost effective way to maximize home sale profits. It also happens to be one of the most sustainable ways to attract buyers.

Home staging is not tasteful decorating. In fact, when potential buyers walk into un-staged but tastefully decorated homes, the personal style of the existing homeowner distracts them from envisioning the space as a home of their own.

Home stagers, like retail display designers, aim to enhance a product’s appeal. Although the scale is different, the principles are the same: maximize the space, eliminate distractions and increase the traffic flow.

Sustainable Ways to Successfully Stage Your Home

Approach the big purge with mindfulness and commitment.
De-cluttering is an essential step that cannot be missed. Homeowners usually find this phase of the process tiresome, tedious and frustrating but it is a critical one, nonetheless. Trimming ship is the first step towards punching up profits. I advise my clients to reduce everything on display by half and then to recycle unwanted items by selling them or donating them. Three worthy, tax-deductible recipients are Goodwill, local homeless shelters and the public library. Also keep in mind that animal shelters and vets love used linens!
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Tips for Starting a Cooking Habit

With the economic crisis and the sustainable living trend picking up, more and more people are coming home to eat. But what if the idea of cooking freaks you out? You just know you’ll cut off your finger or start a neighborhood fire. Or maybe you just don’t know where to start or don’t have the time. How can you start a cooking habit?

1. Get the tools.

Invest in a few cookbooks. What kind of food do you like to eat at restaurants? American, Thai, sushi? Browse some cookbooks and open the book randomly to a few recipes. Would you actually make or eat what you see? You can always take it home and try out a few things and return it if you find that the cookbook author’s style just doesn’t suit you.

Check out online recipes and sites. Many food magazines have websites that post most of their recipes. Read more

Filling the Gaps in Energy Production with Cogeneration

In the late 1970s, John Gofman, co-inventor of plutonium, had second thoughts about his work with nuclear power over the years. He authored a book entitled Irrevy, in which he argued that the use of nuclear power for electrical production amounted to a bad tradeoff of inefficient and expensive power generation for an insoluble toxic waste problem and generations upon generations of unknown cancers and genetic defects.

While the portion of domestic electricity currently produced by nuclear energy is marginal, at that time there were quite a few more nuclear power plants and nuclear energy production. A perfect storm of Three Mile Island and Chernobyl together with movies such as The China Syndrome gave impetus to an anti-nuclear movement, of which, Gofman was a pre-eminent spokesman, which changed all of that.

Now, as the nation faces an energy crisis, not just of gas lines, but of all energy production, the idea of re-introducing nuclear energy with a vengeance has emerged. During the 2008 Presidential campaign, Republican candidate John McCain proposed building 50 new nuclear plants. As the electorate starts to forget why the moratorium on nuclear plants in the US went into effect in the first place and embraces the simplistic argument that 80% of France’s electricity is produced by nuclear plants, it becomes more imperative that we not only examine Gofman’s objections to the ‘nuclear option,’ but take a look at some of the alternatives he proposed.

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Cuyahoga River Fire of 1969, a Spark for Environmentalism

On June 22, 1969, an oil slick and assorted debris caught fire under a railroad trestle on the Cuyahoga River. It was a relatively quick fire, having only burned for 30 minutes. The occurrence was barely covered in the local Cleveland newspapers, and did not receive much attention until a month later, when Time Magazine made it a national issue.

What most people don’t know is that the fire was one of a dozen similar incidents when oil and chemical-soaked debris ignited on the Cuyahoga. And it didn’t happen only in Cleveland – rivers flowing through urban centers often served as sewers for industrial waste.

40 years later, the Cuyahoga fire remains a powerful symbol of an industrialized planet in peril and our impending environmental crises. The event had such a great impact that many credit it as being a catalyst for Congress to pass the Clean Water Act in 1972, and for the creation of agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency.

In recognition of the four decades of progress since the fire, 2009 has been dubbed “The Year of the River” in Cleveland. This year is a celebration of the progress made in cleaning local waterways, and to recognize that additional efforts are still needed to further clean and maintain these natural resources.

Also commemorating the 40th anniversary of the Cuyohoga River fire, Positively Cleveland is has compiled a nice list of the 75 “green” things we love about Cleveland.

Additional Articles and Videos on the Cuyahoga River fire:

• Cuyahoga River Community Planning Organization
• Positively Cleveland – 75 Green Things We Love About Cleveland
• VIDEO: Retired Congressman Louis Stokes talks about his theory for pursuing clean water laws: If we could clean up the Cuyahoga River, we could clean up any body of water in the nation.
• VIDEO: Ben Stefanski II remembers standing at the river with Mayor Carl Stokes the day after the fire, declaring war on water pollution.
• VIDEO: Frank Samsel, retired owner of Samsel Supply Co., wasn’t surprised the river caught fire. He recalls regularly sucking up fats from rendering plants along with fuel and chemical spills.

Telecommuting a Quiet Environmental Success Story

One of the most effective and certainly one of the easiest steps that can be taken to reduce greenhouse gas pollution and cut US dependence on foreign oil – and the balance of trade, national security, economic and other problems directly associated with that dependence – would be the widespread use of telecommuting or telework by US businesses.

The term “telecommuting” and the associated term “telework” were coined in 1973 by Jack Nilles. As Wikipedia puts it, telecommuting involves a management style based on objectives (MBO) as opposed to a style based on direct observation. The term was first used in Peter Drucker’s 1954 book, The Practice of Management, and is based on a consensus arrived at by both management and employees concerning both the objectives of the organization and the employee’s role in implementing those objectives.

Prior to the industrial revolution most of the workforce was headquartered at their homes, which were usually family farms. The new technologies of that revolution – the steam engine, turbines, industrial furnaces, assembly lines, etc. – moved most workplaces to centralized locations within large metropolitan areas. This caused secondary problems such as pollution, urban congestion, crime and social breakdown that we are still dealing with today.

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What Deformed Frogs Say About Our Drinking Water

On Sunday, April 5th of this year, Thirteen/WNET’s Nature Series premiered Frogs: The Thin Green Line. Emmy award winning filmmaker, Allison Argo, blended poetic cinematography with masterful soundscapes in a disarmingly straightforward masterpiece delineating the relationship between sewage water and the growing number of frogs being born with defects.

“It’s uncomfortable to realize that we are part of the problem,” Argo explained to me in a phone interview on the topic, but “It’s also exciting and stimulating to realize that we are part of the solution.” Argo’s ability to maintain an optimistic perspective on this bleak situation is grounded, in part, by the day-to-day lifestyle adjustments she makes. She switched to public transportation for her travels between her Cape Cod studio and Boston, she has been swapping old light bulbs for more energy efficient ones, and she is building a frog pond in her yard this summer.

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