The Green Minds
Knowledge To Get Into a Green Frame of MindArchive for Self-learning
Summer Energy Conservation
In April 2007, Mayor Bloomberg released PlaNYC 2030, the long-term sustainability plan for the City of New York. Within the Plan, the City committed to lead by example by reducing energy use and greenhouse gas emissions from City operations 30% by 2017. Subsequently, in July 2008 Mayor Bloomberg released the Long-Term Plan to Reduce Energy Consumption and Green House Gas Emissions by Municipal Buildings and Operations (The Long-Term Plan), which outlined the steps the City should take to reach its ambitious goal. You may visit the City’s Energy Management website to learn more about the comprehensive efforts the City is taking to reduce energy use.
As part of the City’s overall energy conservation efforts, the Department of Education (DOE), in partnership with the Department of Citywide Administrative Services Division of Energy Management (DCAS DEM) is implementing energy efficiency programs in existing school buildings. Program areas include: energy benchmarking, building audits and retrofits, improved operations and maintenance, Peak Load Management, metering and monitoring imitative, summer kitchen energy conservation and renewable energy. Each of these programs is described in more detail below.
Building Energy Benchmarking
DOE benchmarked its buildings’ energy consumption using the EPA’s Energy Star Portfolio Manager. Principals, teachers, parents and students are encouraged to review DOE’s benchmarking data by creating a free account and sending their username to sustainability@schools.nyc.gov. In the e-mail, please indicate the name and address of the school’s data you would like to access.
Building Audit and Retrofit Program
DCAS DEM uses the benchmarking data to prioritize schools that will receive energy audits on an annual basis. Energy audits assess current building performance and find cost effective energy conservation measures (ECMs) that will improve the energy efficiency of the building(s) and reduce the City’s annual energy costs.
Operations & Maintenance Initiative
The Long-Term Plan estimated that improved operations and maintenance (O&M) of existing municipal buildings could reduce 195,000 metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions annually and millions of dollars in energy costs. Since schools comprise 40% of the City’s total municipal building square footage, DOE was one of two agencies to participate in a year-long O&M pilot program at 10 schools. The program will be expanded citywide over the next few years. One of the program’s goals is to educate building users about the simple steps they can take to conserve energy, both in the cold winter months and in the warmer summer months. Click on the following links to find winter and summer energy-savings tips Winter Energy-Saving Tips and Summer Energy-Saving Tips. School custodian engineers and building managers can get additional tips from US Department of Energy Operating and Maintaining Energy Smart Schools Online Training program.
Peak Load Management Program
DOE participates in the New York Power Authority’s (NYPA) Peak Load Management Program (PLM), designed to help NYPA avoid electrical system overload and prevent power outages during very hot summer days. Currently, 18 school buildings participate in the program.
Summer Kitchen Energy Conservation
In 2009, DOE’s Division of School Food introduced the Summer Kitchen Energy Conservation pilot program in 57 schools citywide. The program was designed to unplug (if feasible) school cafeteria refrigerators and freezers during summer break. As a result, DOE and the City reduced energy use by 100,000 kilowatt-hours and saved thousands of dollars in electrical bills. This summer, DOE will expand the program to all schools that are closed for the summer.
Renewable Energy
DOE is exploring renewable energy opportunities with DCAS DEM and the New York Power Authority.
Energy Efficiency in New School Buildings
DOE is also committed to reducing energy usage in new school buildings. The School Construction Authority (SCA) implements all major capital improvements and new construction for DOE. As part of the City’s Local Law 86 SCA developed the NYC Green School Guide.
Resources
In addition to energy initiatives at school buildings, DOE encourages students and school community involvement in energy conservation initiatives through school participation in Green School Alliance and other non-profit programs.
Green Schools Alliance Programs
As a charter member of the Green Schools Alliance (GSA) ( www.greenschoolsalliance.org ), DOE encourages student, teacher, and principal participation in sustainability initiatives, including energy conservation, through the following GSA programs:
Green Cup Challenge
Green Schools Resource Fair
One Million Acts of Green
Student Climate and Conservation Congress (SC3)
Junior Energy
Junior Energy’s mission is to work in classrooms and schools to help children discover how they can positively impact the planet by engaging their parents, family, friends and neighbors in small, simple actions.
Alliance for Climate Education
Alliance for Climate Education (ACE) delivers in-person, science-based, multimedia presentations on climate change designed for high school age students that inspire all school community to go green. This no cost 45 minute presentation also addresses certain New York science standards from the Living Environment: Core Curriculum. For more information, visit the ACE website.
How Green Is My iPad?
With e-readers like Apple’s new iPad and Amazon’s Kindle touting their vast libraries of digital titles, some bookworms are bound to wonder if tomes-on-paper will one day become quaint relics. But the question also arises, which is more environmentally friendly: an e-reader or an old-fashioned book?
To find the answer, we turned to life-cycle assessment, which evaluates the ecological impact of any product, at every stage of its existence, from the first tree cut down for paper to the day that hardcover decomposes in the dump. With this method, we can determine the greenest way to read.
(A note about e-readers: some technical details — for instance, how those special screens are manufactured — are not publicly available and these products vary in their exact composition. We’ve based our estimates on a composite derived from available information. It’s also important to keep in mind that we’re focusing on the e-reader aspect of these devices, not any other functions they may offer.)
One e-reader requires the extraction of 33 pounds of minerals. That includes trace amounts of exotic metals like columbite-tantalite, often mined in war-torn regions of Africa. But it’s mostly sand and gravel to build landfills; they hold all the waste from manufacturing wafer boards for the integrated circuits. An e-reader also requires 79 gallons of water to produce its batteries and printed wiring boards, and in refining metals like the gold used in trace quantities in the circuits.
A book made with recycled paper consumes about two-thirds of a pound of minerals. (Here again, the greatest mineral use is actually gravel, mainly for the roads used to transport materials throughout the supply chain.) And it requires just 2 gallons of water to make the pulp slurry that is then pressed and heat-dried to make paper.
FOSSIL FUELS The e-reader’s manufacture, along a vast supply chain of consumer electronics, is relatively energy-hungry, using 100 kilowatt hours of fossil fuels and resulting in 66 pounds of carbon dioxide. For a single book, which, recycled or not, requires energy to form and dry the sheets, it’s just two kilowatt hours, and 100 times fewer greenhouse gases.
HEALTH The unit for comparison here is a “disability adjusted life-year,” the length of time someone loses to disability because of exposure to, say, toxic material released into the air, water and soil, anywhere along the line. For both the book and the e-reader, the main health impacts come from particulate emissions like nitrogen and sulfur oxides, which travel deep into our lungs, worsening asthma and chronic coughing and increasing the risk of premature death. The adverse health impacts from making one e-reader are estimated to be 70 times greater than those from making a single book.
If you order a book online and have it shipped 500 miles by air, that creates roughly the same pollution and waste as making the book in the first place. Driving five miles to the bookstore and back causes about 10 times the pollution and resource depletion as producing it. You’d need to drive to a store 300 miles away to create the equivalent in toxic impacts on health of making one e-reader — but you might do that and more if you drive to the mall every time you buy a new book.
If you like to read a book in bed at night for an hour or two, the light bulb will use more energy than it takes to charge an e-reader, which has a highly energy-efficient screen. But if you read in daylight, the advantage tips to a book.
If your e-reader ends up being “recycled” illegally so that workers, including children, in developing countries dismantle it by hand, they will be exposed to a range of toxic substances. If it goes through state-of-the-art procedures — for example, high-temperature incineration with the best emissions controls and metals recovery — the “disability adjusted life-year” count will be far less for workers.
If your book ends up in a landfill, its decomposition generates double the global warming emissions and toxic impacts on local water systems as its manufacture
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Some of this math is improving. More and more books are being printed with soy-based inks, rather than petroleum-based ones, on paper that is recycled or sourced from well-managed forests and that was produced at pulp mills that don’t use poisons like chlorine to whiten it. The electronics industry, too, is trying to reduce the use of toxic chemicals, and to improve working conditions and worker safety throughout its far-flung supply chains.
So, how many volumes do you need to read on your e-reader to break even?
With respect to fossil fuels, water use and mineral consumption, the impact of one e-reader payback equals roughly 40 to 50 books. When it comes to global warming, though, it’s 100 books; with human health consequences, it’s somewhere in between.
All in all, the most ecologically virtuous way to read a book starts by walking to your local library.
Source : The New York Times
The Carbon Footprint of The 2010 World Cup
If you thought that those pesky vuvuzela were the worst thing about the 2010 World Cup, wait until you hear about the carbon emissions estimated to be released during the planet’s biggest sporting event. According to a study conducted by the Norwegian embassy and South African government on the eve of the games, this year’s World Cup will emit 2,753,251 tons of CO2 into the atmosphere, which is roughly equivalent to the amount released by one million cars over the course of a year–and six times worse than those emitted during the last World Cup.
Several factors surrounding the 2010 World Cup in South Africa have led to a higher carbon footprint than in years past. For one, far more people arrived to the games on international flights as opposed to by rail or car, which was the case for the 2006 World Cup in Berlin. The Norwegian report estimates that the total emissions from transportation will reach 1,856,589 tons.
According to the study, another 15,390 tons of CO2 went into building infrastructure to support the games. A shortage of soccer stadiums in South Africa meant that new ones needed to be built, meaning cement needed to be produced, and at a high cost to the environment. In manufacturing one ton of cement, a ton of CO2 is emitted, reports SuperMundo.
South Africa’s reliance on “coal burning plants for power means the energy usage of the influx of tourists will result in the release of 340,128 tons of carbon dioxide.
To better paint a picture of just how much CO2 will be released during this World Cup, The Guardian makes some eye-opening comparisons. Apparently, the games will emit as much CO2 as 6,000 space shuttle fights or a whopping one billion cheeseburgers.
That is not to say, however, that South Africa didn’t take measures to reduce the carbon footprint of the World Cup. A rail network was built to more efficiently move visitors to and from the games, easing the emissions from traffic. The government also plans to offset at least a portion of the emitted carbon by planting hundreds of thousands of trees in urban areas throughout the country.
Source : TreeHugger
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