I am prepping my house for sale, and it had a pretty badly cracked sidewalk and driveway. Its a pretty common problem, with a straight forward solution: bust out the old concrete and pour new. And it is great that a problem so common has a sustainable solution: fly ash concrete. Fly Ash is a waste product that comes from coal fired power plants. Now coal fired power plants are bad, and the sooner we get rid of them the better, but we do not have the infrastructure in place to stop burning the stuff, and we wont for some time. Around 100-110 million tons of Fly Ash are produced annually, often dumped here or there, with not much attention paid to it until things like this happen.
But millions of tons of fly ash can be used in concrete. The ash replaces Portland Cement, and cement production releases millions of tons of CO2 into the air every year – you have to heat limestone up to 1300 degrees to turn it into cement, and that fire creates the CO2. Concrete is the most common man made construction material used in the planet – 100s of millions of cubic yards are used each year. Every time someone does something as simple as a driveway or sidewalk repair, they can help out the environment by using some fly ash. My own little job used 4.5 cubic yards of concrete, with 15% of the cement replaced by fly ash from Bode Concrete of San Francisco’s sidewalk mix. My man Sal “Rocky” DeGuarda did the job for me, I recommend him for jobs in San Francisco.
You have to ask for it, and your contractors will get it for you. People want to be responsible, because we all want a better world for our kids.
There has been a spate of greener construction coming on line in San Francisco. I toured a few yesterday on the SFAR’s Tuesday Tour, and one of the standouts, represented by Barbagelata Real Estate, is the Arden Homes Development located in West Portal. It is an interesting block of 7 new homes constructed in the former urban grove of the Arden Woods Retirement / Spiritual Healing Center off Wawona Street. I am still torn over the loss of the grove - there are so few urban forests, and this really was a majestic stand of beautiful old trees. But the flip side is 7 homes built within the city limits, close to public transportation, walking distance to shops, restaurants and other amenities, and constructed with some green features. In the end I suppose it was the right decision to build here, but I will miss the grove.
The homes themselves are nice. They have a number of Sustainable Features that are an honest if not 100% stab at green building (Of the 3 toilets I saw, only one was dual flush…why not all three I wonder?), on demand hot water (not sustainable imho), Trex Decking (decent), solar photovoltaic panels (good), energy star appliances & bathroom fans, (applause), etc, etc.
I am happy to see developers give a nod to green building, though much props also must go to Mayor Newsom whose advocacy of green building principles mandated this kind of thinking in new construction. Only mandated action through legislation will force people to build this way. And it really must be mandated in the building code otherwise we will continue to ignore real environmental costs associated with buildings until the balance becomes so great, our children can’t pay the interest and the planet gets foreclosed on.
Kitchen cabinets are freaking expensive, but the kitchen is one of those rooms that gets a horrific amount of abuse and often needs freshening up at least once a decade. Tearing out can be more than most people have the patience and dollars for, so another option is to repaint the cabinets. You can hire a pro or do it yourself, depending on your budget and level of energy, but some nice low/no VOC paint and new hardware can totally change the character of your kitchen – and reusing the cabinets that are there instead of buying new ones is muy sustainable! Here is a short video from a great site, ask the builder, that can get you started.
Marc Ona Essangui is an activist in Gabon fighting both his government and the Chinese company CMEC’s plan to harvest Iron Ore in the ecology sensitive Ivindo National Park. He is the recipient of the San Francisco based Goldman Environmental Prize, brainchild of Richard & the late Rhoda Goldman, two of the City’s brightest philanthropic and humanitarian lights.
Resource exploitation is one of the foundations of growth. The global economy cannot produce all the outputs needed for capitalism to survive without raw material for production. Most of the harvesting of these raw materials happen in far off places like Gabon, and most consumers do not care if some poor black or brown tribe gets stepped on in the name of progress. But it is the basics, things like iron, steel and wood, that goes into our structures when we build. If we don’t become conscious of what we are using on the back end, communities like Marc’s, and in the end our own as well, will fall.
Marc has been a grass roots leader in Gabon, leading his NGO “Brainforest” to advocate for the rights of the people and environment of Gabon in the face of international resource acquisition. His work has lead to threats, arrest and restrictions for both him and his family, but he continues to press for sustainable policies in Gabon & by extension, here in the US.
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