Forgot Password?
Home arrow GreeniacsArticles arrow Environmental News arrow Communities Striving for Sustainability
Written by Miranda Huey   
Share |
Friday, 07 November 2008

Communities Striving for Sustainability!

It's no secret that eco-friendly practices and lifestyles are gaining popularity around the world. However, more people want to do good for the environment not only on their own, but within entire towns and cities centered around sustainable living. Unified by using collective means to do environmental good, these “ecovillages” are actually extremely diverse, and range from the most remote rural towns to the most populous urban cities.1

Within urban areas, two popular movements for green communities have come about: cohousing and new urbanism. Green communities often combine these two strategies in the pursuit of sustainability.2

Cohousing is when residents within a housing complex share common spaces and collectively plan their community. The idea behind cohousing is sharing things which tend to be used only rarely by individuals. Often, there is a common house, which can contain exercise facilities, guest rooms, laundry space, children's playrooms, and lounging areas. This tactic reduces the waste of energy, space, and natural resources common in single-family housing units.3

New urbanism is a reaction against the environmental unsustainability of suburban sprawl. The idea behind it is that most cities have zoning laws, which keep businesses and homes miles away from each other, forcing the majority of people to travel mostly by car, rather than biking or walking. As a result, new urbanists emphasize mixed-use buildings, with residential housing units located right above businesses. Another central goal of new urbanism is to reduce the amount of roads within cities, and expanding sidewalks, plazas, and squares to encourage walking and community interaction.4

In rural areas, green communities are popping up in recently disaster-devastated areas, since people are inspired to work together to rebuild in an environmentally friendly fashion. The rural town of Greensburg, Kansas, for example, had basically been demolished entirely by a tornado. Now, this tiny town of 700 is becoming such a picturesque green community that the National Building Museum recently dedicated an exhibit on the process occurring in Greensburg. The town wants to power the town with wind energy, use street runoff and rainwater catchments to irrigate the plants, and construct all public buildings under the strictest requirements for efficient design.5 Sounds impressive for a small town by itself, but it doesn't hurt that they're partnering with Leonardo DiCaprio to produce a reality series on the process of creating a sustainable town.6

Green communities can also be found in some of the most surprising places around the world. When people think of China, “green” isn't the first thing that comes to mind. However, China's Olympic Village was actually the first neighborhood in the world to achieve certification from the U.S. Building Council's LEED for Neighborhood Development. There are 42 buildings, where the 17,000 athletes resided. Right now, the same buildings are being reused by new residents who want to live in this neighborhood.7 The village was constructed with only environmentally friendly materials, is powered by solar heat and geothermal heat pumps, and consumes only about 1/30th of the energy as that of conventional buildings.8 For more information about China’s greening efforts in the Summer 2008 Olympics, check out the Greeniacs Article "A Green Demand at the 2008 Summer Olympics".

Another major environmentally friendly project is in the oil-rich Abu Dhabi, a place where many would have expected it least. Slated to be completed in 2018, the futuristic Masdar City aims to be the first city to be carbon neutral, and to burn neither gas nor oil. Cars would be banned, but underneath the city one could find a personal rapid transit system, powered by solar energy, which would take you anywhere you wanted to go. It also plans to use water as many times as possible, and to have 80 percent of its water recycled. On top of that, it plans to have all waste either recycled or converted to energy. That includes human waste.9 Although Masdar City has some pretty ambitious goals, if even some of them were achieved, it would inspire the world about the potential of green communities.

Green communities in general open up amazing possibilities for the future of environmental living. Whether these communities prove not only to be environmentally sustainable, but also a sustainable way of life for the individuals living in them, is something that only time will tell.

Browse all Greeniacs Articles Browse all Greeniacs Guides        Browse all Greeniacs Articles
_______________________________________________________________________________

1http://gen.ecovillage.org/.
2http://www.newurbannews.com/CohousingInside.html.
3Id.
4http://www.cnu.org/Intro_to_new_urbanism.
5http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5jtYr0WEfgWkEyuODkGeUdT0Hi9cAD941IPC80.
6http://positiveripple.blogspot.com/2007/07/greenburg-kansas-di-caprio-eco-town.html.
7http://www.usgbc.org/Docs/News/Olympic%20Village%20press%20release%200808.pdf;
http://responsiblechina.com/2008/08/25/beijing-olympic-village-is-worlds-first-green-neighborhood/.
8http://www.nbcchicago.com/news/green/Beijing_Air_Improves__Olympic_Village_
Earns_LEED_Gold.html.
9http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=90042092.




Add your comment
RSS comments

Only registered users can write comments.
Please login or register.

Click here to Register.  Click here to login.
Last Updated ( Thursday, 10 February 2011 )

SEARCH GREENIACS.COM

Green Facts

  • Recycling for one year at Stanford University saved the equivalent of 33,913 trees and the need for 636 tons of iron ore, coal, and limestone.

  • Less than 1% of electricity in the United States is generated from solar power.

  • Americans throw away more than 120 million cell phones each year, which contribute 60,000 tons of waste to landfills annually.

  • Recycling aluminum saves 95% of the energy used to make the material from scratch.

  • It takes 6,000,000 trees to make 1 year's worth of tissues for the world.

  • Americans use 100 million tin and steel cans every day.

  • Recycling 100 million cell phones can save enough energy to power 18,500 homes in the U.S. for a year.

  • Current sea ice levels are at least 47% lower than they were in 1979.

  • You will save 100 pounds of carbon for each incandescent bulb that you replace with a compact fluorescent bulb (CFL), over the life of the bulb.

  • An aluminum can that is thrown away instead of recycled will still be a can 500 years from now!

  • 77% of people who commute to work by car drive alone.

  • For every 38,000 bills consumers pay online instead of by mail, 5,058 pounds of greenhouse gases are avoided and two tons of trees are preserved.

  • If every U.S. household turned the thermostat down by 10 degrees for seven hours each night during the cold months, and seven hours each weekday, it would prevent nearly gas emissions.

  • The World Health Organization estimates that 2 million people die prematurely worldwide every year due to air pollution.

  • Shaving 10 miles off of your weekly driving pattern can eliminate about 500 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions a year.

  • Nudge your thermostat up two degrees in the summer and down two degrees in the winter to prevent 2,000 pounds of carbon dioxide from entering the atmosphere.

  • You’ll save two pounds of carbon for every 20 glass bottles that you recycle.

  • Plastic bags and other plastic garbage thrown into the ocean kill as many as 1,000,000 sea creatures every year.

  • Bamboo absorbs 35% more carbon dioxide than equivalent stands of trees.

  • Americans throw away enough aluminum to rebuild our entire commercial fleet of airplanes every 3 months

  • Every week about 20 species of plants and animals become extinct.

  • American workers spend an average of 47 hours per year commuting through rush hour traffic. This adds up to 23 billion gallons of gas wasted in traffic each year.

  • You will save 300 pounds of carbon dioxide for every 10,000 miles you drive if you always keep your car’s tires fully inflated.

  • Rainforests are being cut down at the rate of 100 acres per minute.

  • A steel mill using recycled scrap reduces related water pollution, air pollution, and mining wastes by about 70%.

  • One recycled aluminum can will save enough energy to run a 100-watt bulb for 20 hours, a computer for 3 hours, or a TV for 2 hours.

  • 82 percent of greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S. come from burning fossil fuels.

  • A tree that provides a home with shade from the sun can reduce the energy required to run the air conditioner and save an additional 200 to 2,000 pounds of carbon over its lifetime.

  • Glass can be recycled over and over again without ever wearing down.

  • A single quart of motor oil, if disposed of improperly, can contaminate up to 2,000,000 gallons of fresh water.

  • Due to tiger poaching, habitat destruction, and other human-tiger conflicts, tigers now number around 3,200—a decrease in population by about 70% from 100 years ago.

  • In California homes, about 10% of energy usage is related to TVs, DVRs, cable and satellite boxes, and DVD players.

  • States with bottle deposit laws have 35-40% less litter by volume.

  • Recycling 1 million laptop computers can save the amount of energy used by 3,657 homes in the U.S. over the course of a year.

  • Washing your clothes in cold or warm instead of hot water saves 500 pounds of carbon dioxide a year, and drying your clothes on a clothesline six months out of the year would save another 700 pounds.

  • In the United States, automobiles produce over 20 percent of total carbon emissions. Walk or bike and you'll save one pound of carbon for every mile you travel.

  • A laptop consumes five times less electricity than a desktop computer.

  • Turning off the tap when brushing your teeth can save as much as 10 gallons a day per person.

  • Refrigerators built in 1975 used 4 times more energy than current models.