Growing up near a lake in hot, humid Florida, mosquitoes were as familiar a sight as fresh orange juice at the farmers’ market. I’d spend entire summers desperately scratching the little red bumps that would pop up everywhere from the tips of my ears to the tops of my toes. In college, I learned about the harmful chemicals in the average bug spray, which usually contains DEET, a compound that’s been shown to affect our nervous system and can be toxic to plants and wildlife. So I opted for natural repellents, lathering on lemon and eucalyptus oil for camping trips and cookouts. Still, the mosquitoes prevailed.
But there’s another way to keep the pesky biters at bay that’s both better for us and the environment — one that can be found soaring among the streetlights and treetops at night, and tucked away in nooks and crannies during the day.
The solution? Bats.
The startup BatBnB is on a mission to put bat houses in backyards across the country — and to change people’s preconceptions of the winged critters in the process. Coined as a “natural solution to backyard pest control” and designed with a bat’s unique biology in mind, the sleek wooden boxes attach to the side of a house, garage or barn. The largest model can host up to 200 of the flying mammals.
When it comes to pest control, bats are master feeders — a single one can devour up to 1,000 mosquitoes in an hour. And that’s good news not just for the sake of our skin, but also for the farmers across the country who rely on bats to eat crop-destroying bugs, including beetles, moths and grasshoppers. A 2011 study estimated farmers save at least $3 billion — and potentially a lot more — in pesticide use when bats are allowed to do their thing.
But today’s bats face numerous challenges that have seen their populations fall worldwide. In the United States, it’s estimated that half of bat species are in severe decline; several are on the endangered species list. Most of the threat comes from the destruction of their roosting habitats. But bats are also increasingly falling victim to wind turbines, and a fungal disease known as white-nose syndrome kills millions more.
“Bats are largely roost-limited, and we’ve cut down the ancient forests that included lots of trees with hollows,” Merlin Tuttle, an ecologist and bat expert who consulted on the design of the BatBnB houses, told Mother Nature Network. “A lot of those bats now are pretty desperate for homes, and bat houses do provide a pretty good alternative.”
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Made from sustainable wood, the long, flat bat houses are elegantly carved and designed to mimic the mammals’ natural habitats. As they researched, co-founders Harrison Broadhurst and Christopher Rännefors learned that bats are picky sleepers, preferring toasty temps and tall, narrow roosting chambers. So they outfitted the houses with interior grooves for the bats to hang onto and vents to control temperature.
The appreciation for bats runs deep for BatBnB’s founders. Rännefors grew up building bat houses with his dad, and Broadhurst’s mom, a biology teacher, incorporated bats into her lessons. Despite a positive ecological impact — bats pollinate flowers and disperse seeds in addition to ridding us of disease-carrying mosquitoes — Rännefors and Broadhurst know that the stigma of bats as human bloodsuckers persists. So as part of their mission, they work to educate consumers on the benefits bats bring. Call it a bat rebranding.
“Bats are radically misunderstood, threatened and undervalued for their insect-eating skills,” Rännefors told Fast Company. “[We hope] more people will respect them.”
Thanks to BatBnB’s efforts — which count proud bat-house owners in 47 states and seven countries — it seems they’re on the right track.
More: People Are Helping Animals Cross Highways — and That’s Great for Humans, Too
Tag: eco-friendly
Four Tips To Build an Eco-Friendly Garden
Gardens are good for the environment and, arguably, good for the soul. But you’re undercutting your good work if you’re still using, say, a gas-powered lawnmower or irrigating your lawn more than it needs.
Here are four ways to make gardening more eco-friendly.
USE A BARREL
Just think for a moment about all the water that hits your roof during a rainstorm. Now imagine all that water being put to use.
Using a rain barrel is a great way to capture much of that roof runoff.
Typical rain barrels can hold 40 to 90 gallons of water. All of that can be used to water plants or wash cars. It’s also great for your wallet, as you will be able to decrease your municipal water usage.
If you don’t know what size of rain barrel to buy, use this formula to help you calculate how much rainwater you can collect based on the square footage of your roof and the annual rainfall in your area.
GO NATIVE (WITH YOUR CHOICE OF PLANTS)
Pro-tip: Pine trees are pretty, “fir” sure (get it?). But they don’t belong anywhere near your Florida beach home.
Instead, use native plants when you build your garden. Drought-resistant plants native to your area means that you can water them less. “Going native” can save your water consumption by as much as 60 percent, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.
In New Orleans, a program pays homeowners to replace pavement with native plants on their property, as part of a larger project to help mitigate flooding in neighborhoods where green space is limited.
Local plants also attract local fauna, which is great for pollination. For example, agave plants native to the American Southwest produce massive flower stalks that hummingbirds find irresistable.
GET SMART ON IRRIGATION
If you rely on irrigation to water your lawns and gardens, then you know the amount of water wasted when your lawn is irrigated the same day of a massive rainstorm.
But there are smart ways to irrigate your lawn without overwatering. It just takes a little advance planning.
Evapotranspiration relies on sensors to measure how much moisture is in the ground and irrigates based on the exact needs of your lawn.
But if investing in fancy sensors is not your thing, or you want a more DIY approach to setting your irrigation schedule, here are a few tips:
- Irrigate early in the morning or late at night to lessen evaporation
- Try a drip technique, in which you line your garden with a soaker hose that slowly drips water directly on the roots of your plants
- Capture gray water to reuse in your garden. You can even rig your home so that water from your washing machine or shower flows directly into your garden
DON’T TOSS THE SCRAPS
You know that entire plate of food you’re throwing away after Thanksgiving? Here’s the problem with that:
When we discard uneaten food and scraps, it goes directly into landfills. As it rots, it releases methane, which is almost 30 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.
Western Australia, for example, dumped nearly 700,000 tons of organic waste in 2012, each ton releasing about one ton of greenhouse gas, mostly in the form of methane. In America, we throw away way more than that — about 30 times more, in fact, with roughly 25.9 million tons of food waste filling American landfills each year, according to a 2009 report by the U.S. Agriculture Department.
That is food — or wood chips, or grass clippings, or leaves, or even t-shirts — that could easily be composted and made into fertilizer for your garden.
And composting also helps the soil in your garden. It can help clean up soil contaminated with pesticides, and it helps retain moisture so that you don’t need to water your plants so frequently.
A Green Hardware Store on Every Corner? It’s Not As Far-Fetched As You May Think
The house in Boulder, Colo., was beautiful. The floors were cork, the carpets were made of recycled plastic bottles — the whole place was being redone on sustainable, environmental principles. “It was mind-expanding,” says Jason Ballard, the co-founder and CEO of eco-friendly home improvement retailer TreeHouse. The house belonged to Ballard’s instructor in a wilderness EMT program. Ballard was staying there shortly after college, and he was inspired by his instructor’s efforts to remodel his home to make it more environmentally friendly. “It was such a lovely vision of what was possible,” he says.
But the more Ballard learned about sustainable home improvement, the more he realized how difficult it was to find attractive, well-designed products. That insight — and that vision of what was possible in the home — led Ballard to create TreeHouse, a company that’s aimed at transforming the home improvement market and, with it, the home itself. Among the wares and services available are recycled glass countertops, electric lawn tools and solar-panel installation. Ballard says customers often call his company “the Whole Foods of home improvement — and it’s not too far from the truth.”
Ballard has always had an eco-conscious mindset. His grandfather was an early role model. “He wouldn’t have called himself a conservationist,” Ballard says, “but he gave me both a conservation ethic and a tremendous sense of wonder about the natural world.” He studied conservation biology in college, where he started to learn about the enormous impact our homes have on the environment. “All we hear about on TV is gas-guzzling SUVs,” he says, “but the real problem is the buildings we’re living in every day.”
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Private residences are the biggest users of energy, the biggest users of renewable and nonrenewable materials, the biggest producers of landfill waste and the second-biggest users of water. Most exposure to toxins also takes place in the home. “I realized that if I wanted to make an impact with regard to these existentially challenging issues, then the best area for me to focus on was, in fact, the home,” says Ballard, who’s currently completing a Social Impact Fellowship with GLG, a membership-based learning platform. Through GLG, Jason and his team have learned about inventory management, retail strategy, in-store user experience and customer data management to help the company implement best practices across multiple locations.
Learn more about the GLG Social Impact Fellowship, including information on applying.
After college, Ballard worked in green building for a while, learning all he could about the market. “What I noticed was that everyone had the same set of problems,” he says. It was hard to find sustainable products, and when he did find them, they were expensive, and only available from a few boutique companies. “The obvious blocker to the whole industry moving forward is access to products at a decent rate, and with some level of curation and education around those products,” Ballard says.
TreeHouse is built on a few core ideas. First, Ballard says, most home improvement products are terrible — poor quality, toxic and unsustainable. Second, most home improvement services aren’t very good, either. Anyone who’s ever embarked on such a project knows that they’re often delayed and routinely run over budget. The industry also hasn’t gone digital yet, making it difficult to get information on the status of your project when you want it. “The whole experience around home improvement needs to be reimagined,” Ballard says. “We are now trying to make not just the products great, but the technology great and the service great.”
TreeHouse aims to make sustainable options appeal to more than just die-hard environmentalists. “If we want healthy and sustainable homes to be the norm, they have to be better than conventional homes. And everything around the process has to be better,” Ballard emphasizes. That’s part of why he decided to start a for-profit company to accomplish his environmental goals. “If you’re in a for-profit business, all of your assumptions are tested all the time,” he says. “It forces you to very quickly arrive at what works to affect change.”
Ballard has ambitious goals for TreeHouse. Today, the company has one brick-and-mortar store in Austin, Texas, and is opening two more this year, including one in Dallas. Within the next two years, he plans on opening still more stores, and expanding beyond Texas. Right now, TreeHouse touches only a tiny fraction of the 80 to 100 million homes in the country, Ballard says. He believes 20 stores — a benchmark he hopes to hit in five years — would drive that figure up to 10 percent. The ultimate goal: Launch 300 stores nationwide to reach 80 percent of all the homes in the U.S.
“Our plan is to run hard at those milestones,” Ballard says. “We don’t have a thousand years to figure this out. We are making decisions in the next hundred years as a species that we will have to live with for the next two thousand years.”
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GLG Social Impact is an initiative of GLG to advance learning and decision-making among distinguished nonprofit and social enterprise leaders. The GLG Social Impact Fellowship provides learning resources to a select group of nonprofits and social enterprises, at no cost.
Homepage photo by Kirsten Kaiser
The Incredible Device That’s Revolutionizing How We Get to Work
Embedded within a sleek red disk that resembles a miniature flying saucer, it consists of three computers, 12 sensors, a 350-watt motor and a 48-volt lithium battery and can be attached to the back wheel of any bike with rear brakes. And if the device’s creators are right, this 26-inch wheel could change the future of urban transportation.
The Copenhagen Wheel, as the hack is known, transforms your ordinary two-wheeler into a electric-powered bike that can travel faster (up to 20 miles per hour) and farther (up to 31 miles per charge) than casual pedal-pushing will move you. Assaf Biderman, the wheel’s lead designer, says the add-ons will make bicycle transportation a more attractive option for commuters, unclogging streets, saving gasoline and cutting emissions in the process.
Biderman starts with a disclaimer: “I’m not a bike geek who wanted to put a motor on a bicycle.” His background is in physics, and as an associate director of Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s SENSEable City Lab, which focuses on how digital technology, sensors and handheld devices can transform urban areas, his vision is about changing the way cities function. Along with a team of a dozen MIT undergrads, he found that bikes were a preferred form of urban transit — as long as the trip was under nine miles long. (That distance varies by city: San Francisco, for instance, may deter bikers because of the hilly terrain.) To lengthen that distance, Biderman built the first prototypes of the Copenhagen Wheel, timed with the 2009 United Nations Summit on Climate Change hosted by Denmark — a predecessor to this year’s more successful summit in Paris.
In the years since then, Biderman’s inbox piled up with messages. In late 2012, he discovered that 14,000 emails were sent to the MIT lab from people who wanted to buy a Copenhagen Wheel. Shortly after, Biderman founded Superpedestrian, a robotics company in Cambridge, Mass., that is ramping up production capabilities for the Wheel.
An electric bike, perhaps surprisingly, is a very old idea. Around 1868, a Boston inventor named Sylvester Roper attached a coal-fired steam engine to a frame, a vehicle that could “out speed any horse in the world.” (In 1896, after swiftly pedaling through Charles River Park, Roper died of an apparent heart attack.)
Why did Roper’s bike never take off? When his invention debuted, just after the close of the Civil War, cities were still compact places, essentially big villages that obviated the need for long-distance travel. Around the same time that Roper’s bike coughed into motion, cities started growing skyward and spilled outward into suburbs. At that point, the electric bike may have been useful to those within the city, but the emergence of subways in 1904 and Ford’s Model T in 1908 both usurped the limelight. Cities, for the next century, built their infrastructure to accommodate the car.
Today, rural and suburban areas are declining. The world’s population is once again becoming concentrated in urban pockets. “Cities have been a focal point for centuries, but they are becoming even more so with urbanization of the developing world,” Biderman says. “We are building cities at the fastest rate in history.” That means more and more residents needing to travel daily from a metro area’s outer ring to the city center. Just ask any motorist in Los Angeles or Washington, D.C., if they could imagine dealing with ever-increasing traffic, and you can see why Superpedestrian is readying for tens of thousands of orders.
“You don’t need to be a scientist to realize this is unmanageable,” Biderman says. But he predicts that once people start buying the Copenhagen Wheel, infrastructure for bikes will follow, in the same way that highways were paved once every family had a vehicle.
Biderman adds that the difference in today’s cities, compared to a century ago, is not simply a matter of how congested the streets are. The success of Superpedestrian is also reliant on our technological connectedness. “The relationship between people and the place they live is mediated by machines: creating feedback loops, measuring how things change in real time, and analyzing the data,” he says. The Copenhagen Wheel’s computer system quickly learns how a biker rides, then imitates her pedaling — an experience Biderman has described as “seamless.” “People report that it feels so natural, and they feel so strong,” he says. “The best way to describe it is feeling like Popeye. You pop the spinach, and you’re Superman.”
Today, people live farther away from where they work than ever before. “The car enabled us to do that, but people want to switch out. They want an alternative,” Biderman says. Cities won’t be shrinking, but with Superpedestrian, bikes can take us farther.
MORE: Tomorrow’s Energy-Saving Neighborhood Is Being Built Today in Texas
Correction, 1/11/2016: A previous version of this article said that the Copenhagen Wheel can be attached to the back wheel of any bike; in fact, the device works only on bikes with rear brakes.
5 Very Simple, Practical Things You Can Do to Curb Climate Change
Climate change is a defining issue of our time and there is no time to lose,” proclaimed Ban Ki-moon, United Nations Secretary-General, during last month’s U.N. Climate Summit. “There is no Plan B because we do not have a Planet B.”
Since you’ve already converted from a gas-guzzling SUV and always BYOB (bring your own bag) to the supermarket, try making these tweaks to your everyday lifestyle. They’ll help the U.N. achieve its goal of keeping the earth’s temperature from rising no more than 2 degrees Celsius by 2100 and, in turn, keep the planet from facing even more disasters like famine, disease and water shortages.
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Eco-Friendly Products Often Aren’t as Popular, But This Successful Startup Found a Winning, Green Formula
More and more people may be concerned about the environment, but when it comes to buying green products, there’s much less of a frenzy.
Even though they are better for the planet and work just as well (sometimes arguably better) than conventional products, there’s not much of a market for them. Take Clorox’s Green Works, a eco-friendly housecleaning line introduced in 2008. The products, which claim to be 99 percent natural and have an endorsement from the Sierra Club, sold $100 million in their first year. However, sales fell sharply by $60 million each year thereafter.
Why the dip? Sure, green products tend to be more expensive (because natural ingredients usually cost more). But surprisingly, it’s not the higher sticker price that causes consumers to avoid eco-friendly goods. According to a study, many of us reject green products because we think the quality is inferior to chemically-laden conventional products.
It’s simply a problem of perception.
However, a green beacon has emerged from the fray. The Honest Company, which sells nontoxic baby, cleaning, health and beauty products and was co-founded by actress Jessica Alba, recently made headlines after raising $70 million as it looks toward an IPO. The company is now worth almost $1 billion.
MORE: This Technology Will Let You Recycle Plastic Bottles to Make Anything
The reason for its success? Fast Company suspects it’s because the company has “nailed the formula for eco-friendly products,” in that the items are green — but don’t look or feel like they are.
As the publication reports, the company’s chemical-free baby wipes are superior to any other wipe on the shelves, but because they were “too thin” consumers thought the quality wasn’t as high.
In response, The Honest Company decided to change their wipes to the market standard of 60 grams per square meter. Parents seemed to love the reworked wipes (even though they cost more: $4.95 for a box of 72, compared to $2.37 for 62 Pampers wipes.)
We’re not saying you must put your hard-earned dollars exclusively towards green products. But if you have the extra cash, it’s an investment that could be worth it, especially for the environment.
As Alba tells Sierra Magazine,“all of your purchasing and consuming choices are going to affect the planet and the people around you in some way, be it positive or negative. Just being a thoughtful, conscientious consumer is the first step.”
DON’T MISS: This Student-Invented Device Eliminates Almost All of the Emissions from a Very Common Household Polluter
What Is the Battery of the Future Made Of?
From powering pacemakers to kids’ toys and everything in between, we rely on batteries every day.
But with lithium — the material we use to make batteries — becoming a less viable resource, how are we going to power our gadgets?
Turns out, there’s an alternative energy source that grows quite abundantly: Algae.
Sounds like a crazy idea, right?
Not to Adam Freeman and his team at alGAS in California.
Algae, which forms in large blooms on the water’s surface, can be harmful to fish living below, but it has huge potential in the battery-powered world. The prototype creator says that his algae battery is powerful enough to run anything — even a Tesla!
Not only would an algae battery be incredibly versatile, but it could also charge in a fraction of the time that current, lithium batteries do. Turns out, the incredibly thin fibers found in algae are much more conducive for ions to flow through, making charge time as quick as eleven seconds, according to Tech Crunch.
While this innovation is certainly eco-friendly and time efficient, it is also cost efficient: the lithium imported for batteries not just nonrenewable, but it has to be shipped from China — making batteries more costly.
Although still in testing phases, Freeman says he would be able to make a functioning battery prototype with $1,500 more in funding; $5,000 more and an algae-powered battery it could be ready for mass production.
Between Freeman’s work and this experiment that transformed algae into crude oil, this water plant is on track to become a significant part of America’s renewable energy landscape.
DON’T MISS: The Top 5 Ways to Fight Global Warming
Watch: How One Chicago Restaurant Went Totally Trash-Free
According to the Green Restaurant Association, the average restaurant in the U.S. produces 150,000 pounds of garbage each year. Café owner Justin Vrany thinks this number cannot only be reduced, but eliminated entirely. His Chicago-based eatery has produced an astonishing 8 gallons of garbage (pictured above) in the last two years. According to Vrany, that bag of trash was recently picked up by a local artist, who will transform it into a sculpture — now making Sandwich Me In a zero-waste restaurant.
Watch and see how this restaurant operates with clean dumpsters, and learn the story behind its remarkable owner.
The Company That’ll Change How You Throw a Party Forever
Nothing says “successful party” like a huge overflowing trash can full of paper plates and plastic cups. But ugh, so much waste. Brooklyn performance artist Emily Doubilet took this on as problem she could solve with a new business with a conscience. Her “Susty Party” products are eco-friendly, colorful and manufactured in the U.S. by an Ohio non-profit that employs visually impaired people. She’s one of five $40,000 winners of the Hitachi Foundation’s Yoshiyama Young Entrepreneurs Program this year.