Click on the headline (link) for the full text.
Many more articles are available through the Energy Bulletin homepage
Clothesline rule creates flap
Jenna Russell, Boston Globe
They say they only want to protect their “right to dry.” And in three New England states, advocates for clotheslines – yes, clotheslines, strung across the yard, draped with socks and sheets – are pushing for new laws to liberate residents whose neighbors won’t let them hang laundry outside.
more stories like this
Homeowners’ associations, which enforce bans on clotheslines at thousands of residential developments across the country, say the rules are needed to prevent flapping laundry from dragging down property values. But in an age of paper over plastic, as people try to take small steps to protect the environment, more residents are chafing at the restrictions. And some lawmakers in Vermont, New Hampshire, and Connecticut are taking it a step further, seeking legislation that would guarantee the freedom to let one’s garments flutter in the breeze.
(13 March 2008)
Industry scrambles to find a ‘greener’ concrete
Tony Azios, Christian Science Monitor
It takes a lot of energy to make it, and the world is using billions of tons of it. Makers are finding better ways to do it.
—
We drive our cars on it, we build skyscrapers with it.
But concrete, one of the most common building materials in the world, has an ugly secret: It’s a major source of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, which contribute to global warming.
Roughly 5 to 10 percent of global CO2 emissions are related to the manufacture and transportation of cement, a major ingredient of concrete.
With cement production expected to grow exponentially in coming decades, the industry is trying to address its environmental challenges.
“There is not one single cement company on this planet that is not thinking about how to [reduce emissions],” says Franz-Josef Ulm, a professor of civil engineering who researches concrete at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass.
(12 March 2008)
The concrete industry seems to be more forthright about the problem than other industries. -BA
Open 28 Hours
Craig Neilson, WorldChanging
Anyone who has successfully “got away from it all” will know that time is, to a degree, a social construct designed to coordinate and organize cities and the city-folk that operate them.
The measuring of the time is not set in stone: daylight saving time is a controversial convention and the hours of the day people expect to work or be served are constantly changing.
… You might have caught the news that a study at UC Santa Barbara recently found that Daylight Saving Time does not save energy (costs) in the state of Indiana, USA.
… The assumption made about DST is that by bringing normal waking hours forward (thereby extending evening daylight), society will reduce its demand for energy, enjoying sunlight instead of electric lighting.
Kotchen says that when DST was introduced by Benjamin Franklin, he didn’t foresee air conditioners being used later into long, warm evenings. As a result of this extended use of air conditioning, the study found that counties that observed daylight saving time actually used between 1 and 4 percent more electricity than counties that did not.
… While there isn’t an alternative sleeping pattern that has enjoyed massive adoption (correct me if I’m wrong), there are various ways to arrange a day or a week for human habitation.
One of these ideas is the 28 Hour Day.
Under the 28 Hour Day system, the current week would remain at exactly 168 hours. (24×7=168) However, this 168 hour period would be divided into six 28-hour days rather than 7 24-hour days.
Six days means a reduction in transport requirements (longer work or study days), and more variety of day/night time spent awake. Its proponents say that they get more done, feel more rested, and synchronise with their natural sleeping patterns better.
(10 March 2008)
Related: How Daylight-Saving Time Costs More (Information Week)
World sanitation goals slip; nature can help
Alister Doyle, Reuters
Judged by its sewers, the world is not doing well. Only 3 in 10 people now have a connection to a public sewerage system.
And with the world’s population expanding, a goal of improving sanitation by 2015 is slipping out of reach, despite progress in nations such as China and a few big contracts for firms such as Veolia or Suez to build waste treatment plants in cities from La Paz to Rabat.
Experts say a part of the solution, especially to cut water-borne diseases for the rural poor, may lie in renewed and smarter exploitation of nature — for example through plants or soil bacteria that feed on waste.
(17 March 2008
