Aerial Rendering of Recylced Island Recycled Island Project
It's an ambitious recycling project to be sure, but Dutch visionaries want to turn the Pacific Garbage Patch into a self-sufficient, green island paradise that draws its resources from the ocean and the garbage floating therein. Read more »
Willem van Cotthem's super-soil harnesses the power of Pampers to turn dirt into lush gardens
When asked to imagine the Earth in 2040, many scientists describe a grim scenario, a landscape so bare and dry, it's almost uninhabitable. But that's not what Willem van Cotthem sees. "It will be a green world," says van Cotthem, a Belgian scientist turned social entrepreneur. "Tropical fruit can grow wherever it's warm." You still need water, but not much. A brief splash of rain every once in a while is enough. And voilà-from sandy soil, lush gardens grow.
The secret is hydrogels, powerfully absorbent polymers that can suck up hundreds of times their weight in water. Read more »
The Dice House looks like part of a Monopoly set, but the design has real-world ambitions. The 30-by-30-by-30-foot concept home, designed by the British architecture firm Sybarite, improves on standard building tech to erase its carbon footprint.
The centerpiece is a photovoltaic umbrella dome that collects roughly 90 percent of the house's energy needs. Made of a common plastic, the pillowy dome traps heat like a greenhouse. That hot air warms water in a tank tucked under the roof, turning out a daily average of 80 bath-ready gallons, even on the darkest days of December. At the umbrella's apex, a generator-equipped turbine produces electricity and, in chilly months, drives heat into the house. Photovoltaic cells studding the 484-square-foot dome floor create additional electricity. Read more »
Nanjing's Upcoming Drive-through Automotive Museum 3GATTI
America's car culture spawned the drive-through restaurant, the drive-through pharmacy, drive-through banking, and such seemingly counterintuitive institutions as the drive-through liquor store and even the drive-through daiquiri stand. But China has the fastest-growing car culture in the world (it's expected to grow 400 percent in the next decade), so perhaps it's fitting that the Chinese are planning the first drive-through museum dedicated to cars. Read more »
Physalia is half-boat, half-building, and all green. This mammoth aluminum concept by Belgian architect Vincent Callebaut is meant to travel Europe's rivers, making filthy water drinkable. At the same time, the ship generates more energy than it uses. Read more »
Most architects design structures with the hope that bugs won't take up residence inside, but design house ARUP (the same architects who dreamed up Beijing's CCTV tower) is hoping all kinds of insects and spiders will check into its Bug Hotel, a special habitat designed to bring helpful insects into London parks. The design just won the City of London's "Beyond the Hive" competition, an architecture contest aimed at creating an aesthetically pleasing and functional place for London's six-legged inhabitants to make their homes. Read more »
David Keith believes strong-arm strategies could soon be our last resort for reversing record levels of carbon in the atmosphere
In the 1992 film Unforgiven, Clint Eastwood spends most of the movie slowly and methodically avoiding violent confrontation with the bad guys before finally turning things around with a bloody burst of gunslinging. That's something like the approach of Canadian physicist and environmental scientist David Keith. Except that his villain is climate change, and while he's still doing everything he can to avoid a fight, Keith is also stockpiling ammo.
"If we do the job we should be doing on cutting emissions, and we are lucky, we won't need geoengineering," says Keith, a professor at the University of Calgary whose start-up company, Carbon Engineering, is developing commercial-scale devices to capture atmospheric carbon dioxide. That's the slow and methodical. "But if we can't control atmospheric CO2 well enough, then we might want to do the solar stuff." That's the gunfight. Read more »
It would be easy to dismiss Mitchell Joachim's fantastical vision for ecological supercities, with their flocks of jetpacks and mass-transit blimps that look like flying monster jellyfish, as science fiction-if he wasn't actually building them
Architect Mitchell Joachim points out, frequently and without prompting, that his futuristic proposals are always based on existing technologies. No wonder he feels the need to say it. Consider some of his ideas: jetpacks tethered together in swarms, houses grown from living trees, low-altitude blimps prowling New York City with chairs hanging below them for pedestrians to hop on and off (24/7 ski lifts on Broadway!), and WALL-E-like machines that erect buildings and bridges from recycled waste. Read more »
For environmentalist Jesse Ausubel, going green means land conservation and energy efficiency-and forgetting "boutique" renewables like windmills and biofuels
It's 2070. You're on a train from New York to Boston. If you could see outside, it would be mostly open landscape. Maybe a nuclear plant or two, but otherwise green space-none of the urban sprawl, wind farms, solar arrays or biomass operations we've been taught to expect from an ecologically responsible future. But you can't see outside, because you're underground, traveling 300 miles an hour on a maglev train alongside superconducting pipes transporting the energy from those nuclear plants. Read more »
Building a Carbon Neutral Paradise eBoy
In the global race to reduce carbon emissions, these eco-minded communities, from Kansas to the Maldives, lead the pack. Here's how they're making their carbon footprints disappear
"Carbon neutral" sounds pretty straightforward-simply remove as much carbon dioxide from the atmosphere as you put in. The trouble is, civilization began emitting CO2 when humans burned the first lump of coal about 4,000 years ago.
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