The Inukai Family Boys & Girls Club in Hillsboro, Oregon, sits about 20 miles west of Portland. As one of ten Boys & Girls Clubs in the Portland Metro region, it provides after-school and summer programs for about 200 kids, most of whom come from low-income families. For the young people who attend, it’s a chance to develop leadership skills and participate in a range of activities, from the visual and fine arts to STEM, finance and nutrition classes.
The club also offers sports and recreation, which until recently was a bit ironic, considering that the nearest green space was almost a mile away. Instead, the building sat adjacent to a little-used 4,500-square-foot parking lot.
The lack of a suitable play area for the boys and girls of Inukai caught the attention of Ted Labbe, a conservation biologist and volunteer with Depave, a Portland nonprofit that transforms over-paved areas by breaking up asphalt and replacing it with natural vegetation. Since it was founded by Labbe and a friend more than a decade ago, Depave has worked with local schools, churches and businesses to turn concrete eyesores into lush landscapes replete with rain gardens, vegetable beds, tree groves and bioswales.
To repurpose the Inukai club’s parking lot, Labbe gathered a team of about 100 volunteers last fall to rip up the paved lot and make room for a revamped play area. Features of the new space include a rain garden, a stage, bike racks, garden beds and picnic tables. At the end of this month, more volunteers will assemble to plant additional vegetation, with the grand opening of the new green playspace set for April 12.
Depave’s mission of re-greening urban spaces through the lens of community engagement is spreading. To date, the organization has completed about 70 projects in the Portland area (which collectively cover roughly 165,000 square feet of asphalt) and now counts five affiliate programs in its network, spanning from Cleveland to Canada. They believe their model has the potential to be scalable almost anywhere. And as the Green New Deal talks gain steam in Washington, communities have been beefing up efforts to address the impending threats from climate change.
That includes New York’s Hudson Valley, where Arif Khan, one of Depave’s founders, now lives. Khan says he has seen a growing need for de-paving projects in his new community and has been consulting with municipal governments along the Hudson River. He believes that Depave’s model of tactical urbanism sits at the forefront of a bigger push to prioritize open spaces for people instead of paving them for cars.
In cities like New York, for example, local neighborhood groups and business improvement districts have for several years been installing temporary parklets for use in warmer months. Also known as “street seats,” the idea is to repurpose parking spots into tiny but vibrant green spaces with public amenities like outdoor seating and food vendors. Similar street-seating efforts exist in cities across the U.S.
But what makes Depave’s efforts stand out from typical parklets is that rather than constructing a new space on top of existing infrastructure, volunteers remove the concrete and asphalt first. In this way, Depave’s projects improve the environment. Because they’re impervious, paved surfaces divert stormwater into a region’s waterways, carrying with it toxic pollutants like oil, antifreeze and pesticides. Depave estimates that their efforts divert more than 4 million gallons of stormwater away from storm drains annually.
“Parklets are all well and good but they are a band-aid, not a permanent fix,” says Labbe, adding that “elected officials are discussing how to scale up more general de-pave strategies to address the worsening climate crisis.”
In addition to benefiting the environment, de-paving projects can inspire civic engagement. In its first decade of existence, Depave has worked with more than 4,800 volunteers around Portland.
The act of de-paving satisfies a social need just as much as an environmental one, says Labbe, and a project’s success directly depends on a community’s involvement. “You can’t [de-pave] without a willing and engaged community,” he says.
More: Embracing Diversity In The Great Outdoors
Tag: Green Living
The Big Idea That’s Growing Green Business in America
After a lifetime of eating with disposable knives and forks, Michael Caballero, a 25-year-old industrial engineer at FedEx, looked the plastic cutlery in his workplace cafeteria in a new way. “I think in terms of process,” he says, tallying the environmental upheaval required to manufacture each fork — the extraction of oil from the ground, the overseas shipping, the refining and molding in a factory, the waste created by its packaging — a massive amount of pollution created for just a few minutes of usage before being tossed in a landfill.
Today, thanks to EcoTech Visions, a Miami incubator for green enterprises, Caballero’s 18-month-old company, Earthware, Inc., is building better disposable silverware. At EcoTech Visions’s current headquarters in Liberty City, Fla., Caballero is a member of a class of 26 “ecopreneurs” who receive 15 months of support and have access to office space, manufacturing equipment and other environmentally-minded folks. In the co-working space, architects and designers chat with electricians and engineers — a technical collaboration that’s rare but vital to successfully manufacture products, from battery-run motorcycles and aquaponics systems to plastic-based handbags and aloe salves.
APPLY: EcoTech Visions is an NBCUniversal Foundation 21st Century Solutions grant winner. Apply to the 2016 program today.
The buzzing incubator is the vision of Dr. Pandwe Gibson, an African-American businesswoman who wanted to spark a sea change in commerce by supporting green jobs, particularly manufacturing ones. Because the consequences of environmental harm are so visible in southern Florida (as atmospheric temperatures rise, the sea levels follow, causing the Atlantic’s high tides to annually creep nearly one inch closer to the art deco real estate along Miami’s coastline), city residents are eager to embrace products that won’t further damage the Earth in the process. When Gibson first came up with EcoTech Visions three years ago, she used her iPad to share the idea with anyone who had time to listen to her elevator pitch. Since its launch, the incubator has created 15 new jobs, won grants for nine of its companies to work on prototypes and helped three other businesses obtain seed funding to kick start operations.
Last year, EcoTech was one of NBCUniversal Foundation’s 21st Century Solutions grant challenge winners, supporting progressive community solutions. “What we love is that it has the four Cs — it’s a catalyst for out-of-the-box solutions, it offers a destination for collaboration, it’s building a community for idea-creators and problem solvers and it’s driving local change by expanding small businesses and jobs,” says Beth Colleton, senior vice president of corporate social responsibility at NBCUniversal.
EcoTech Visions played a vital role in helping Earthware produce a durable alternative to the 16 billion pieces of plasticware thrown away in America each year (its cutlery is made with a corn-based resin that decomposes in just six months) and grow to its current state. Perhaps most importantly, the incubator covers the entry-level costs that can prohibit a business from entering the market — office space and manufacturing equipment — while Caballero still works at Fed-Ex to make a living. Without the support, he would have needed to front the money for Earthware’s first injection molding machine (which spits out products in the shape of pre-made molds) and a consultant to help him pick the right one; instead, Caballero pays a small rental fee to EcoTech in order to use the machine they purchased on his behalf.
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Additionally, the incubator introduced Caballero to other locals that could bolster his burgeoning enterprise, including sustainability advocates and potential customers, like the local school board, which recently put out a request for compostable cutlery bids. “The whole goal is to become a leading provider of compostable, sustainable products, using Miami as a hub into Latin America and the Caribbean,” footholds to an international expansion, Caballero says.
Clean tech and green manufacturing, as sectors, could provide the biggest hope of restoring jobs that have been lost due to the historic decline in American manufacturing (nationwide, about 5 million have disappeared since the millennium). Unlike other compostable products, which ship foreign-made cutlery to the U.S., Caballero’s eco-friendly business aims to create high-paying, manufacturing jobs right here in America; the two dozen other companies at EcoTech Visions will only add to this green wave of business. Caballero believes green industries will be most successful if others join the movement. The demand for sustainable products is already there, he notes, but supply will only match those levels if more entrepreneurs and manufacturers arrive on the scene. Even though they’ll technically be his competitors, there will be enough supply that prices will fall and consumers generally will see planet-friendly products as the new standard.
EcoTech Visions is looking to expand nationally, starting with Los Angeles next. If it achieves its goals, not only will Caballero be just one of countless American manufacturers producing environmentally-conscious items and providing jobs around the country, but the incubator could find itself leading the United States into the green industrial revolution.
EcoTech Visions is a recipient of last year’s 21st Century Solutions grant powered by the NBCUniversal Foundation, in partnership with the NBCUniversal Owned Television Stations. The grant celebrates nonprofits that are embracing innovative solutions to advance community-based programs in the areas of civic engagement, education, environment, jobs and economic empowerment, media, and technology for good. Apply here for a chance to be one of the 2016 winners!
From LED Lighting to Waterless Toilets: Buildings and Cities Are Prioritizing Sustainable Solutions
Environmentalists do what they can to practice a sustainable lifestyle. They ride their bikes to work, drink out of reusable water containers and use less energy in their homes.
But what about buildings, which consume more than 40 percent of the world’s available energy, according to EcoWatch? According to the environmental news site, while a $79 billion investment opportunity would be needed to scale and create sustainable technology for buildings in the U.S., energy savings could amount to more than $1 trillion in a decade.
Some businesses and cities around the world have already started to prioritize sustainable solutions:
The Waterless Toilet: For families living in slums who don’t have access to sewage systems or improved sanitation, x-Runner Ventures is providing these families with waterless toilets. According to x-runner, the waterless toilet is helping to improve daily lives and create a cleaner, healthier environment for the entire family.
Mirror-enhanced skylight: EcoNation is helping buildings conserve energy and save money with The LightCatcher. The LightCatcher is a technology-based system that captures incoming light on rooftops, then light is reflected, filtered and amplified in a light shaft before it’s spread throughout a building. According to EcoNation, the LightCatcher ecological footprint is up to 6.6 times smaller than any traditional lighting systems.
Providing Incentives: Wecyclers in Nigeria are pushing for environmental reform by creating an incentive program for families. By using the SMS-based incentive program, families who recycles up to a kilogram of plastic bottles, plastic sachets and/or aluminum cans, can receive redeemable Wecycles points over their cell phones. Families can redeem their points for cell phone minutes, household goods and basic food items.
Check out the full list here of innovative and sustainable ideas that are making their way into cities and buildings.
This Amazing Home Creates More Energy Than It Uses
What will the homes of the future look like? Will they have voice-controlled nifty appliances? A robot maid like “The Jetsons”?
Honda has a very smart — and very innovative — idea for the house of tomorrow that’s not quite on the level of George Jetson and his space-aged brood, but it’s exactly the direction American home-building needs if we’re going to slash our enormous, and unsustainable, energy consumption.
The carmaker built an experimental 2,000 square-foot Honda Smart Home on the University of California, Davis campus. Currently, a UC Davis employee is living in it, and for the next three years, the employee will monitor the power usage to see if the house is practical for the average American.
MORE: Tricked Out Zero-Energy Homes Aren’t Just for the Rich and Famous
What’s so amazing is that the home draws power from renewable sources, such as solar panels. As Fast Company puts it, the residence is so energy efficient that it pumps out more power than it uses — which means a homeowner could potentially sell energy to the power company. According to this infographic, the average home uses up 13.3 megawatt hours annually, whereas the Honda Smart Home puts back 2.6 megawatt hours on the grid. The home surpasses California’s 2020 target for zero net energy residential homes.
And wave bye-bye to air conditioning and heating bills with the geothermal heating and cooling (who isn’t interested in cheaper electric bills?). The Honda home slashes water consumption to a one-third of most American homes, and cuts more than 11 tons of CO2 annually compared to conventional homes and cars. And because Honda is behind it all, there’s garage space for a Honda Fit electric vehicle that gets charged from the house’s solar power (check out the video below).
This house may not have as many bells and whistles as the sci-fi cartoon, but if we want to reduce our reliance on planet-harming fossil fuels, Honda’s house of the future might be the kind we should be living in today.