Seoul’s move of reclaiming its old stream from a freeway and converting the same into an urban garden gathered a lot of applause, and it seems San Francisco is on a similar route, or more appropriately, a freeway. A number of the city’s freeways were left structurally unsound after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, and the teardown of such structures gave the neighborhood of Hayes Valley an elevated landscape waiting to be put to good use.

Such lots may be developed into housing and green lots in the future, but until that happens, the residents of Hayes Valley decided to use the one in their neighborhood for growing crops. The ground was tested for safe lead levels, where one patch was found unsafe. The remaining ground was layered with organic matter and was made ready for plants.

Residents have planted nearly 150 fruit trees that will be available for sale to people in Bay Area, the next step is to grow vegetables in a greenhouse.

Source: Good

Detroit is no more the industrial city it once was, and there can be no better proof than thousands of empty houses that litter the city. The city has over 33,000 empty houses and 90,000 vacant residential lots. As is clearly visible, those are huge numbers, and the city now plans to use such abandoned properties to create an urban farmland that would cover nearly a quarter of the city.

The idea isn’t exactly new, it has been around for more than a decade, and some “urban farms” already exist in the city. This however, seems like a much more concrete and organized plan to get things moving. Detroit plans to demolish over 10,000 houses and dilapidated buildings. Citizens living in areas which are to be converted into farms will be offered a buyout, or will be relocated. Abandoned properties may also be claimed as foreclosure.

An interesting plan indeed, but one of the biggest challenges for setting the wheels in motion will be the arrangement of required funds to see the plan through.

Source: PSFK

The Diamond Lil is a restaurant that comes to you rather than having you going to the restaurant. Created by restaurateur Kai Schoenhals, the restaurant is a 1957 GMC Greyhound bus that was salvaged and its fate turned around from rotting to becoming an eatery on wheels. Schoenhals, along with his partner Daniel Isberg thought that a little inspiration from the Napa Wine Train could go a long way for this bus in the Bay Area.

As a first impression, a restaurant that drives around cannot be green, and be quite a lot expensive. It’s the duo’s solution to this problem that makes this restaurant remarkable. In a way, it powers itself. The fuel for the bus is its own used cooking oil, and their colleagues supply them with more. To add more eco friendliness to the bus, it has interiors built out of recycled materials. It may be 57 years old, but this Greyhound is an entirely new idea.

Source: Good, Automotto

It is common for growing ciites to destroy or remove, or at least, subdue any natural element that would come in its path of “development.” This is more or less true for every single city in the world, even Seoul. The only reason we single out Seoul here is because it has recently taken a commendable step, that of reclaiming a stream that had earlier been wiped out to make way for a freeway.

The age old man-made stream was gradually covered in concrete, and by the mid-seventies, there was a highway on top of it. City planners in an attempt to make the city more environment friendly, pulled down the highway in 2003 and set off to restore the stream.

Two years and $281 million later, the stream was restored, and a 5.8 km long urban garden appeared right in the middle of the city. The park was built wisely, using nearly 75% of the material from the highway that was removed.

Source: Inhabitat

These bulbs utilize a combination of nanofiber-based reflectors and photoluminescent nanofibers, as these fibers come in contact with electric current, they give out white light. The output is 55 lumens of light per watt consumed. The company says the device should be ready for the market in 3-5 years.

Source: Popsci

The town of Levallois-Perret, near Paris in France has come up with a new way to heat water in pools; they use heat from sewage to do that. Sewage in the town’s pipes averages to a temperature of nearly 68 Fahrenheit, and Sophie Deschiens, the town’s Environment Councilwoman thought it was a bad idea to let all that go waste. She looked for solutions, and finally found a way to channel that heat into the town’s pools.

A series of stainless steel plates filled with a heat trapping liquid were attached to the sewage pipes. The heat that these plates gain can then be transfered to the pools. The pools, spas, and jacuzzis in the town’s new aquatic center, are all heated by this mechanism. The project cost $650,000 to implement, and is hoped to recover its costs in a decade.

Savings on the environmental front though, are huge. The town’s energy costs have gone down by 24%, and its green house emissions have been slashed by 66%.

Source: Fast Company

A huge amount of energy is required to keep telecommunication equipment, and by definition the internet running. Right now, it would be very difficult, if not impossible to actually replace the equipment currently in use, because of the prohibitive costs involved, and the huge amount of investment already made to setup the said equipment. Researchers at Bell Labs however, seem to have come with a solution.

The idea proposed by Bell labs could potentially bring a huge leap in the internet energy efficiency, cutting energy consumption by nearly 99.9%, and reducing carbon emissions by 300 million tons.

Currently, most signals are transmitted at high power so that they remain intelligible over the noise signals they encounter. But now, systems can recognize signals at much lower energies, allowing transmission at reduced power. That translates into savings in power, and the jump in efficiency, and all it requires is a few simple changes to code, making the idea economically viable.

Source: PopSci

The ring collection from Jeweler Hafsteinn Juliusson wouldn’t quite qualify as eco-friendly, but it does come across as a great way to spread the green message. Rings in the jeweler/ designers collection come with a stainless steel base, but have the biggest jewel of them all, nature embedded at the top. These rings have Icelandic moss plants as their crowning glory, leading the way for them to be called “clash of jewellery and gardening.”

The moss, like any other plant, needs some care. The wearer would have to water them and take good care of them, pruning though, won’t be necessary as the moss won’t grow very noticably during the time. If taken well care of, the moss could last for nearly six months. The innovative green rings don’t come cheap though, each will cost 485 pounds, and we hope there’s a way to get that moss growing and thriving again after that six months time is over.

Source: Telegraph

Switch to Paper Plates! Again, you may think I have lost my mind, but just follow this logic.

Here in the United States, many rental apartments are now charging for your water usage. In fact, many communities are penalizing people who do not conserve water by adding a tiered pricing scheme based on previous years usage.

If you do not reduce you usage by a certain percentage, you pay a higher rate on all water used above a baseline set by the water company. The same pricing arrangement is also being used for gas and electricity.

Let’s say you wash your dishes in a dish washer. You pay for the water. You pay for the electricity that runs the pump and electronics in the washer. You also pay for the electricity or gas used to heat the water. Trust me, you do not want to wash dishes in cold water because you will not kill the bacteria.

If you wash dishes by hand, you save on the electricity for the motor, but you still pay for the energy to heat the water. On top of that, your hands cannot stand the temperature needed to kill the bacteria. Also, you will probably use more water than the dishwasher does, unless you use not-so-clean water for the rinse.

So conserve water, gas and electric and use paper plates.  You also eliminate plate-borne bacteria.

Biodegradable and compost-able paper plates are readily available and are relatively inexpensive ($0.13 per plate). A quick search of the internet revealed a bunch of places selling them. Take a look at these 10” round bagasse (sugar cane) plates.

This leads us to the next step: composting. Instead of throwing out those used plates in the trash (although they will dissolve at the trash dump), recover some of their cost by creating a compost heap with your food scraps, leaves, garden trimmings, pulled weeds, and of course, the biodegradable compost-able paper plates.

You might ask how this recovers some of the cost of the paper plates. Stay tuned for part 3 and find out.

A lot has been said about the Christmas tree in the last few days, ranging from Christmas trees for rent, to topics more similar to the one on hand, like the Christmas tree made from bike parts, and the one made from 1000 beer bottles. The latter however, did not have recycled bottles, but this tree gets rid of that problem by using recycled Mountain Dew cans.

This tree has been made out of 400 cans, and that the cans are green in color only helps the purpose. Drinking that amount of soda isn’t going to help your health or the environment, but if you must drink it, something creative like this atones for the sin.

The tree was created by Graphic designer David Barstow, who along with a few friends gulped down all those cans of Mountain Dew in three months to make this tree. It is a few years old, but still manages to get attention at this time of the year.

Source: TreeHugger