Urban Archives - Ambient Green

State Park Native Plant...

Golden PondUnited States

The visitor center provides information about creating pollinator and native plant gardens for hummingbirds, butterflies, and bees.

They recommend:

Growing native plants in your garden
Planting a diversity of flowering species
Not using pesticides or herbicides
Providing sunny, bare soil areas for ground-nesting bees.

Pollinators are a vital part of maintaining our ecosystems. Many crops, plant species, and nearly every flowering plant on earth require help with pollination. ‘Somewhere between 75% and 95% of all flowering plants on the earth need help with pollination – they need pollinators.

Pollinators provide pollination services to over 180,000 different plant species and more than 1200 crops. In addition to the food that we eat, pollinators support healthy ecosystems that clean the air, stabilize soils, protect from severe weather, and support other wildlife (Pollinator Partnership).’

Drought-Proofed Public Park

BurbankUnited States

Our park uses recycled water for irrigation, in order to prevent a drain on drinking water for the community in times of drought.

LEED Gold Stadium Renewable...

PhiladelphiaUnited States

The Philadelphia Eagles football stadium has embraced a number of sustainability practices in its overall operations, along with gaining a LEED Gold Certification from the US Green Building Council.

As part of this, the stadium utilizes solar panel installations on several areas of its structure and throughout the north public parking area, which is lined with solar canopies. There are reportedly 11,108 solar panels used. Fourteen wind turbines also line the top of the stadium.

These technologies provide approximately 1/3 of the stadium’s energy, creating 4 MW per year. More can be read on Lincoln Financial Field’s energy practices and usage here:

City Solar Parking Kiosk

HoustonUnited States

Our city has solar panels on all of the parking kiosks.

Building Indoor Solar Faucets

HoustonUnited States

I have seen a few installed Sloan solar faucets, which use the ambient INDOOR light to power the faucet sensor, turning it on and off automatically.

City Cigarette Butt Recycling

PlanoUnited States

Our city has a ‘Cigarette Litter Prevention Program’, and has posted these small canisters in many areas in order to collect used cigarettes. Not only does this help to keep the streets clean, but it also serves to benefit the connected recycling process. While the cigarette butts are small, the organization has seen that their total accumulation is significant, and can be used to recycle into ‘plastic industrial products’.

University “Solar Garden” Installation

MartinUnited States

These solar flowers were co-designed by students from UT Martin’s Engineering and Visual Arts departments.

University Solar Emergency Call...

HoustonUnited States

Our campus features scattered emergency call boxes that are powered by solar panels.

Restaurant Energy Smart Lighting

LondonUnited Kingdom

All of our restaurants are fitted with Energy Smart LED lights, with back of house spaces being sensor sensitive so they switch off when there is no one around.

Backyard Bee House

HoustonUnited States

We were given this small bee house to try to encourage bees to stay and thrive in our area. Along with a garden planted to attract pollinators, we hope to see more bees in the future, since there have not been many for the past few years.

The house has been posted along a safe part of our fence to lessen the possibility of harm from wind and other factors.

Apartment Recycling and Sorting

SeattleUnited States

My apartment building offers a composting option in addition to the general waste and recycling bins.

National Plastic Bag Tax...

BogotaColombia

This is one of the nice reusable bags we had received at a local store, after legislation regulating plastic use was enacted in Colombia in 2016. Due to the large amount of plastic waste ending up in surrounding water bodies, Colombia has banned all plastic bags smaller than 30×30 cm, and placed a small charge on others that can still be purchased in stores (with a plan set to increase the tax each year until 2020).

By the middle of 2018, this initiative had served to decrease plastic bag consumption by 35%, and raised around $4 million in taxes [see articles below]. Success from these efforts is spurring other similar initiatives and will hopefully continue to drive progress toward mitigating damage from plastic moving on.

More on Colombia’s Plastic Initiatives:

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Small Urban Renewable Energy...

CypressUnited States

I passed a site of small wind and solar installations on the campus of a branch of our community college. The wind turbines are vertical axis (VAWT).

Multi-Material Recycling at Local...

MiamiUnited States

I was not aware of some of the options for disposing of more complex materials (including light bulbs, batteries, and other items) until seeing some of these separated bins at our Home Depot. For the past few months now, I have made sure to put aside those items as they stop working and make a quick trip over to drop them off.

Energy Intelligent Building Controls

Ville de QuebecCanada

Our restaurant has an extremely well integrated and efficient mechanical and electrical system design, allowing us to better control and minimize high peaks of electricity consumption. These are the control panels of different pumps, circuits, and hoods. In the foreground, the variable-frequency controllers and drivers of the restaurant’s air supply unit are used to modulate the fans for supplying fresh air, and the air for exhaust. This also maintains a comfortable ambient pressure, even if the door opens quickly or a kitchen hood starts.

Unique in Quebec’s catering industry, the air extracted from the building passes through a heat exchanger in order to preheat the fresh air, greatly reducing the heating requirements of the building. Each of the four hoods in our facility easily draws more than 1,000 cubic feet per minute (CFM) outside the building.

Since all of this air must be replaced by fresh air from the outside, a lot of heat is created, especially when the weather brings extremely low temperatures. Our heat recuperator therefore avoids one of the main energy expenditures of restaurants.