Category Archives: Green

More butts on bikes

Bike ride

The Shift Up Bicycle Podcast is about getting “more butts on bikes” and recently launched a series called “Bridging the Gap” to discuss the issues facing female and female-identifying cyclists. As of now, 75% of trips by bike are taken by males, and since human-powered transit is an important part of a solarpunk future, growing the number of trips taken by bike is critical, especially for underrepresented communities.

Arleigh, AKA Bike Shop Girl, meets with guests each week to talk shop, discuss advocacy tactics, and encourage people to find ways to bring more people into the cycling fold. You can find more information at her new website, Bike Here, which is particularly aimed at the new cyclist.

Some other great resources for both new and veteran cyclists are Just Ride by Grant Petersen, and Bikenomics by Elly Blue. Just Ride is a refreshing take on the important parts of riding a bike, dispensing with the helmet and Lycra-clad image that intimidates many new cyclists. Bikenomics makes a case for how bicycle infrastructure can quickly pay for itself by increased economic activity and wellness. I’ll add them to the Resources Page, but you might also want to cruise around Microcosm Publishing as a lot of their books and zines are particularly applicable for solarpunks regardless of your interest in bikes.

Image is “Bike ride” by Jaime González via a CC-BY 2.0 License

Urban Ore – What the future of Zero Waste looks like

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The Institute for Local Self Reliance podcast recently chatted with the founders of Urban Ore in Berkley about how they divert waste from the landfill and are able to make a living from the old adage: “One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.”

While a lot of what Urban Ore sells is architectural salvage, they also have clothing, books, sporting goods, and many other items. Urban Ore mostly gets their salvage from the municipal waste stream in Berkley, so it’s an interesting case study in better ways to manage garbage in an urban environment. It makes a true Zero Waste future not seem so crazy after all for us solarpunks.

Urban Ore also has a really interesting employment compensation structure where everyone, including the owners, gets an hourly wage. The base wage depends on the job employee does, but they make more on top of that based on sales pro-rated to how much they were working that week. No specific commissions are given, just a profit sharing bonus tabulated each week. I think this is a good company to look at for ways to plan equitable compensation for solarpunk jobs.

For other interesting podcasts, check out the Resources page.

Have you heard of any other groups or companies doing similar work? Sound off in the comments!

Glee Gum – A solarpunk gum?

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As a solarpunk trying to reduce my impact, I’ve been looking for easy switches to more sustainable products. I chew a lot of gum, but when I started doing more research I found that most gums on the market contained plastics that don’t break down in the environment. While I’m not plastic-free, I wanted to find gum that tasted good and didn’t leave a permanent mark on the planet. Enter Glee Gum.

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I found a store in town that had it and grabbed two different flavors to try: peppermint and lemon-lime. I stick to sugar-free as my teeth need all the help they can get, but Glee also makes sugar gum. Like most fruity gums, the lemon-lime loses its flavor pretty quickly, but the peppermint has better staying power.

Glee is a bit softer than the Trident White gum I’m switching from and it doesn’t end up getting super hard if you chew it for more than 30 minutes like the Trident did. The main disadvantage of Glee Gum is that it is a bit stickier than most mainstream gums. The advantage is not having to deal with empty blister packs of gum.

Empty blister pack of gum

Glee Gum comes in either recyclable cardboard boxes, plastic pouches, or giant 400 piece tubes if you order it in bulk from their website. I decided to order a tube of peppermint from the website after my initial testing was complete. It was shipped in a cardboard box stuffed with newspaper. They even included a little sample of sugar-free watermelon gum! I was super-excited that all the packaging was recyclable and the cost per piece of gum is about the same as the Trident White I was getting at the grocery store, even when I include shipping costs.

Glee Gum Coupon CHEWMORE – Save 15%

Glee has an extensive “Learn More” section about how they make their gum here, and I think they’re making a great product in a really responsible way. You can find a local store that carries Glee Gum on their website, or get it on Amazon here. You buy it online from their store which I think is the only way to get the giant 400 piece tubes.

Do you chew Glee or know of some other good options for solarpunk gum? Sound off in the comments!

Re-purposing malls as solarpunk co-housing

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One of the best ideas for solarpunk co-housing I’ve seen is Bluelightning42’s post about re-purposing malls on Tumblr. While there has been the mixed use redevelopment of the Arcade in Providence, Rhode Island, and NewLab, an incubator+housing in Brooklyn, I’ve seen little else done in regards to this concept.

Bellevue Square Mall courtesy of Debs (ò‿ó)♪

Business Insider ran a story last year as part of it’s “Death of Suburbia” series talking about the roughly 25% of shopping malls in the US at risk of closing. I think the main issue is that most malls aren’t in particularly easy to access areas, but with a large enough community, I think you could get a public transit stop (if there isn’t one already) and car-sharing to provide off-site transportation. If you want to see the really cool architecture in some of these malls, Seph Lawless has been getting amazing photos of abandoned malls.

Rezoning the mall (where needed) as mixed-use would allow some small stores on-site for groceries and other small items. I know that I would love to be able to just walk down the hall to grab some Swedish fish out of a bulk bin in the middle of the night (I’m so healthy). You could leave the food court going too with shared communal kitchens and restaurants run by the people living there.

Garden courtesy of cuprikorn

Most of the parking lots could be reclaimed as greenspace, leaving a small area for car-sharing vehicles and the bus stop. A community garden could spring up where there was once only asphalt. Depending on the bike infrastructure in your city, you might also be able to build spur trails from the mall to other interesting parts of town.

Most malls have some natural lighting, so why not make some of the skylights stained glass to keep up the solarpunk vibe? With the huge roofing area of a mall, you could generate power for residents by adding solar panels and small wind turbines. There might be enough area that you would qualify as a small-scale renewable power plant. I would want to update the HVAC system to heat/cool with a geothermal heat pump to maximize the efficiency of the building along with the other requisite insulation and lighting efficiency upgrades.

Stained glass in Kaohsiung City courtesy of MiNe

So, do you have any ideas about how a repurposed mall could be a great place to live? Are there any concerns that you have regarding the idea? Sound of in the comments and let us know!

Photos are from Flikr users under a Creative Commons License

Prettyy!! Want! {Nature/ 1 of 3} by Debs (ò‿ó)♪
MiNe-KissX_103-0082RG by MiNe
Garden by Cuprikorn (this picture is under a different license: CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Solarpunk transformative living

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Solarpunks should definitely check out LifeEdited, started by Treehugger founder Graham Hill. Their first prototype apartment was built in NYC to see how much life you could get out of a relatively tiny apartment. They managed to reduce their impact on the environment by fitting a 2-bedroom apartment with room to serve a dinner party of ten in a 420 square foot space!

After an even smaller second apartment, they’ve designed an entire off-grid house with solar panels, battery backup, composting toilets, and since it’s in Maui, plenty of room for surfboards. While all three projects had substantial funding, the underlying techniques used to enhance the spaces are applicable anywhere and and serve as a great inspiration on how to more efficiently use the space you have.

LIFE EDITED_MAUI_JAN2018_IMG_8645 LifeEdited Maui

All of the furniture in the apartments and house is multi-purpose. In a place like New York City, where price per square foot is so high, even for renting, the high price of a transforming Murphy bed/couch from Resource Furniture would quickly pay for itself, although if you’re more inclined to DIY, then you can find Murphy bed kits for $200-300 without the mattress.

Transforming tables and folding chairs are often easier and cheaper to get. We have a dining table with leaf that we can remove when we want to save space. This gives us enough room when family visits for eating, but the ability to have a smaller table when it’s just two or three of us. My parents have a gate-leg table for family visits with chairs that fold up and fit inside the table so it only takes a small amount of room unless needed. A gate leg table and a Murphy bed would be great if you like having friends over for dinner but live in a small space.

I shouldn’t find the composting toilet in the bathroom to be the most exciting feature, but I do.

Composting toilets eschew the current trend of flush toilets by treating waste in a waterless or low water manner, composting the waste instead of using clean water to flush it miles away to a treatment facility. I’ve mostly seen them used in off-grid cabins and tiny houses to date, but hope that systems with remote waste collection will allow for usage in more urban environments in the future. Especially in the U.S. where we treat all of our water to drinking water quality (a whole post in itself), using clean water to flush waste back to be treated again is just silly.

Do you have any cool pieces of transforming furniture? Have you used a composting toilet? Let us know about any pluses or pitfalls below, and thanks for stopping by!

via LifeEdited

Photographs by Shawn Hannah

A few Murphy bed DIY kits/plans (I have no affiliation with any of the following; just thought they might be helpful to start your search if you’re interested.)

And a set of plans for a gate-leg table and chairs: http://woodarchivist.com/3259-folding-table-chairs-set-plans/

Solarpunk jobs webinar (updated)

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EDF Jobs Webinar

If you’re looking for a solarpunk job, the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) is running a webinar on March 1, 2018 to help you get the lay of the land. You can sign up here.

If you’re looking for more info on solarpunk jobs, check out my review of Green Jobs: A Guide to Eco-Friendly Employment.

UPDATE: In case you missed it, the webinar was recorded and is now on Youtube. You can view it here: https://youtu.be/WyRdhecH0X8.

Image is from EDF email about the webinar.

Solarpunk and how climate affects diet

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Climate One is an excellent podcast put out by the Commonwealth Club of California on a weekly basis that I would recommend to all solarpunks. It features luminaries discussing the environment regarding our energy and water future. The most recent episode, “Climate on Your Plate,” is a remix of several previous episodes on the subject of climate change and our food systems.

One of the main takeaways that I think is surprising for most people concerned with environmental sustainability is that grazing animals can be an important component to sequestering carbon and rehabilitating our farmlands. Nicollete Hahn Niman, author of “Defending Beef,” points out that grazing animals have always been an integral part of the nutrient cycles of grasslands. Mismanagement of animal agriculture (see CAFOs) has played an important role in climate change and the reduction of ecosystem vitality in soils. While Kip Andersen, director of “Cowspiracy,” disagrees with the entire concept of animal agriculture, he and NRDC Food and Agriculture Director Jonathan Kaplan agree that eating less meat is a win for the planet.

While eliminating meat from your diet completely might be difficult or impossible based on a number of factors including health and social customs, Brian Kateman, President of the Reducetarian Foundation, suggests that everyone can lower their meat usage a little which can help the Earth a lot. One of the main tools towards this end is implementing “Meatless Mondays” where you eat no meat on Mondays and the rest of the week is up to you.

Also discussed is the role of GMOs and organic food in the development of sustainable agriculture. One of the main dangers of current commercial farming is the overuse of pesticides like glyphosate, a.k.a. Roundup. This often gets lumped in with the use of GMOs as many of them do currently come bundled with pesticide use (Roundup Ready), but GMOs are a technology that is unfairly vilified by many environmentalists. While the overuse of pesticides is dangerous, appropriate use of GMOs to reduce water and pesticide use in organic farming operations is possible.

TL;DR: Cows and GMOs aren’t the problem, the industrial food complex is. To learn more check out “Climate on Your Plate,” a podcast from Climate One.

KitchenMade Measuring Cups Review

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2018-02-07-17-26-43_orig Solarpunk living includes a pretty strong waste reduction component as part of being environmentally conscientious. One of the simpler ways to reduce the amount of waste you generate is to cook your own food. While the greenest measuring cups are the ones you already have, if you are in need of a set, the KitchenMade Stainless Steel 6 Piece Stackable Set is the best I’ve come across. The measuring cups are each made from just one piece of stainless steel, so they are easy to clean and could be recycled if needed. Short of being hit by a truck, I don’t see how they would break and need recycling though.

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Besides their indestructibility, the best feature is the little indents on the sides for smaller measurements. For instance, the 1 cup also has gradations for 1/2 and 3/4 cups. This is great when you’ve been cooking a lot (Thanksgiving, anyone?) and your 1/2 cup is already dirty. The little gradations aren’t deep enough to trap anything from getting cleaned, and I usually just throw mine in the dishwasher. The only real downside to these measuring cups is that the labels for the gradations are written from the outside. Since the labels are stamped into the metal, you can see them from the inside, but you’ll need to read backward to know what the measurement is.

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At the time of writing, the KitchenMade Stainless Steel 6 Piece Stackable Set is $23. There is also a combo of the KitchenMade measuring cups and measuring spoons available for $30.

Green Jobs: A review

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Green Jobs: A Guide to Eco-Friendly Employment (2008) promises the following on its back cover:

> Get up to date on the green movement’s latest trends
> Choose a career that’s good for the environment — and for you!
> Go for extra training, if needed
> Learn about the exciting advantages of “green collar” employment

Let’s look at how it stacks up…

This book was published in 2008, so we get an interesting snapshot of the “green revolution” right before the Great Recession caused a major setback to climate action. Having 10 years of perspective on where things have gone gives a bittersweet read of what the authors expected of the future. A few of the technologies touted in the book have proven to be dead ends, including a particularly bullish look at fuel cells. Refreshingly, there is some treatment of the geothermal industry which is an often overlooked part of the energy puzzle.

As far as finding a career in the green industry goes, this book has a lot of good resources on companies and organizations to investigate, broken down by job type and skill set. Some of the companies are now defunct, but there is enough information here to get you started looking into interesting industries and finding positions that are a good fit for your particular set of skills and training.

Many community colleges and universities now have programs either in green trades or degrees available. Many of these programs were just starting in 2008, so there may be good programs now in your neck of the woods. As a quick example, the solar industry now employs more people than the coal industry, and most of those workers are in the solar installation business. A large number of schools offer training for the skills you need to install solar panels all around the United States. I suspect this is similar in other countries, but I’m not super-familiar with education abroad.

The primary advantage of getting a job in the green industry is having a job that aligns with your personal values. Some other possible benefits include getting help with cycling or using public transit to go to work. Some companies are headquartered in LEED certified buildings as well, reducing your impact and exposure to VOCs further. Most green jobs will come with your standard benefits of 401K, health insurance, etc. as well.

TL;DR: Green Jobs is a good read, and while some of its information is outdated, it is still a solid starting point if you want to get a job in environmentally sustainable businesses/organizations.

Disclaimer: I use Amazon affiliate links to help keep the lights on here at Solarpunk Station. I borrowed this book from my local library, so you might check out yours to see if you can read it for free. If you do decide to buy, using the links here will help keep the site running. Thanks!