green walls

Summer in the city means a rise in pollution from the 'urban heat island'. Cities remain warmer than suburbs from the lack of evaporation and vegetation but implementing landscaping on roof tops is providing relief. By building green roofs, landscaping the roof tops with sedum and other vegetation, negative environmental impacts from the urban heat island are greatly reduced-- see more here

Energy savings on the operation of power generating plants show a reduction of carbon dioxide. More days at the beach also result from the reduction in storm water runoff. Less pollution, less erosion and reduction of green house gasses, all from combined efforts of landscaped rooftops. Green roofs also provide opportunities for local food production. These landscaped roof tops are beautiful and practical, lasting up to twice as long as regular roofs. Urban ecology has far ranging consequences and green roofs are providing a new eco-friendly direction.

This is what happens when my husband goes away... he really does keep me sane, you know.

Until recently, I could brag that our office only used *at the most* three reams of paper a year.

And then the children went on a drawing binge.

It's driving me bonkers- on one hand, I cringe, "Don't waste paper!!!" then cringe at myself: "How dare you call their artistic pursuits wasteful?" So I stack the drawings in a corner, guiltily...

Today I was pondering over how to finish our casa ti interior. I've always envisioned it with sleek, organic, simple plywood, which I thought would look really good with the more industrial concrete flooring. But I like to consider all options, and even published a post on how to make SIPs stew.

And then I thought... "Why not recycle those drawings?"

They are mainly scribbly ink drawings on notebook paper left over from college days, or grabbed from our office shelf. So the overall effect would be clean, white, but with scribbles and occasional bursts of color... I could easily attach it directly to the SIPs walls, then maybe minwax / beeswax it once hung... just for... fun!

I still see the end result eventually being plywood... but to in the meantime reuse the paper / childrens "art" for our house? Fantastic!

We already blogged the winners of last week's Solar Decathlon in Washington, DC on our front page. However, I just wanted to take a second to point everyone towards a very interesting and very related post over at EcoGeek. The post is "Green Roofs? How About Green Walls!"

EcoGeek offers links to a number of Solar Decathlon teams that incorporated green walls into their contest entry houses, and he argues that green walls might be the next big green thing because of the insulation potential and their ability to mitigate stormwater runoff.

Check it out!