Saturday, February 9, 2013

Boston has Adopt-A-Hydrant, Calgary has this...

Boston's Adopt-A-Hydrant Program.

Calgary's Neglect-A-Hydrant-oh-and-don't-forget-to-ignore-the-bench-too Program:


Straight to Hell

A favourite song from my youth was Straight to Hell by The Clash.

M.I.A. used the Clash track in her huge hit Paper Planes.

Fittingly, it's the soundtrack for the City of Calgary's quasi efforts to divert waste (resource) from the landfill.

The items below are headed Straight to Hell, aka the Calgary Landfill. 
It will not be sorted. Hello, Sorting Stations!
It will not be reused. 
It will not be recycled.
It will not be used for something useful and thereby eliminating the need to extract those materials from the planet. 
It is a resource that will be turned into a waste by City of Calgary inaction. 
It will decompose over the next 1000 years and perhaps with a methane capture system, 1/1000th of the energy via LFG (Landfill Gas) will be recovered. 

The City of Calgary has waste diversion targets that are almost comedic when juxtaposed with on the ground action. While European cities are implementing intelligent sorting and diversion strategies, achieving 95%+ diversion from landfills, our unused resources (aka waste) are going to Straight to Hell. 




Sunday, February 3, 2013

Mini/Micro Homes: 21st Century Sustainable Home Ownership Options

We’ve seen a steady drop in family size since WWII, yet according tohe Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp., the average Canadian house size has increased from 800 square feet in 1945 to well over 2,200 today. And somehow or another, Canadians are also supporting an $8 billion a year self-storage industry to store the toys and knick-knacks that won’t fit in their growing houses. ~Ashley Lubyk