Toilet testing February 10, 2008

Titled Maximum Performance, and abbreviated as MaP, engineers William Gauley and John Koeller have systematically tested over 600 toilets since 2003. While the sheer number of test subjects is astounding, so are two other facts: the co-authors live in Ontario, Canada and California, and the testing was done using very realistic soy-based test media.

Gauley and Koeller appear to be concerned with the occasional customer dissatisfaction with newer low-flow toilets. They are out to identify, in their words the "bad apples;" the toilets that require multiple flushes for solid waste. (Here enters the soy-based test media. Viewer beware, this is either disgusting or hilarious depending on your point of view.)

All giggling aside, the most recent edition of their report is absolutely comprehensive. The appendices to the report list line by line the toilets that do and do not meet the 350 gram test threshold.

The full report is available for download at the following web sites:
Canadian Water and Wastewater Assoc.
California Urban Water Conversation Council
Alliance for Water Efficiency

Resource recovery January 29, 2008

As part of our ongoing fascination with all things environmental and efficient, about half of our office toured the Washington and Ramsey county Resource Recovery facility in Newport MN, just a few minutes southeast of our office in downtown St. Paul.

All five of us were quite captivated during our tour, which included a stop in the control room and the tipping floor, and we saw the refuse-derived-fuel getting compacted into trucks headed for Mankato and Redwing.

Our tour guide, Mark, informed us that only about 10 percent of municipal solid waste is organic or food based; the remaining 90 percent is primarily packaging. (We saw a lot of plastic, cardboard, and paper.)

We were also surprised to hear that most of the media attention on waste-to-energy facilities is negative. It's baffling, considering they've kept the equivalent of about 250 Metrodome's full of waste out of landfills. As, Mark said, that would be a big hole.

And, yes, that's vinyl siding headed for the incinerator in the photo. We were a little concerned about dioxins from combustion (see previous post on plastics), but one fact helped ease our consciences: Just one family using a backyard burn barrel will emit more dioxins per year than a 200-ton-per-day waste-to-energy facility. Wow.

Ramsey county and Resource Recovery
Reduce.org
Green Guardian: a Twin Cities waste and recycling resource
Recycling Association of Minnesota
Xcel Energy bulb recycling program
Plastic bag recycling in the Twin Cities

But it's everywhere!?! January 24, 2008

Plastics seem to be everywhere in the news these days, from plastic water bottle guilt to the nastiness of PVC to China's recent nationwide ban on plastic bags.

As part of our office's ongoing research, Michelle Pribyl re-presented a session from last year's AIA convention on toxins in the environment, originally given by Dr. David Wallinga. Dr. Wallinga is a staff member at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, a Minnesota based research and resource center focused on issues of agriculture and commodity across scales of government and sides of the globe. Among their "observatories" is a collection of topics collected as a "Health Observatory."

Dr. W's presentation is available on their website, listed below, and includes all sorts of depressing statistics and photos on the devastating impact of exposure to toxins, many of which are found in plastics. Surprisingly, minimal exposure has been found to be just as harmful as extreme exposure, due primarily to the slight hormone changes that can affect metabolism and reproduction.

Dr. Wallinga's report is available here under the heading Plastics and the Environment
Also worth checking out is their Smart Plastics Guide

NY Times on plastic bottles:
The (Possible) Perils of Being Thirsty While Being Green, Jan. 5, 2008
Canadian retailer bans some plastic bottles, Dec. 8, 2007
Turn on the Tap, Aug. 22, 2007
Water, Water Everywhere, but Guilt by the Bottleful, Aug. 12, 2007

Happy holidays! December 16, 2007

Click on the flake for for a special holiday greeting

Pedal power

Mayor Dr. Berthold Tillmann visited the University of Minnesota in October of last year to talk about the prevalence of bicycling in his home city.

An astonishing 300,000 Muenster residents conduct 35% of their daily travel by bike. While the city is quite flat (only about 60 miles from the Netherlands) Dr. Tillman's remarks focused on the specific planning strategies for managing traffic, parking, maintenance and cooperation between cyclists, pedestrians, and automobiles.

Of particular note are special bike routes on neighborhood roads, collector streets, and radial throughways, as well as signaling to manage turning, signage to allow bikes to share with pedestrians and cars, and a 6,000 bike capacity parking facility at the main train station.

The impact of cycling on the city helped Muenster to be named "The most liveable city in the world" in 2004, ahead of finalists Seattle, WA; Changshu, China; and Coventry, Great Britain.

Transcript of the mayor's remarks
Information on cycling in Germany

Image above courtesy of the Muenster city planning office.

Naked horizon December 02, 2007

Welcome to Minnesota, where everything isn't actually above average. Humorist Garrison Keillor would have us believe we are the model of family, efficiency, and sweet satire. In stark contrast, Smart Growth America pegs the Twin Cities metropolitan area as narrowly below average. Using a four-factor sprawl index, they developed a study to "create a multidimensional picture of the sprawl phenomenon and analyze related impacts".

According to their exhaustive data, while we're ahead of Kansas City, Indianapolis, and St. Louis, we fall behind half of the major cities in Texas (really!), Los Angeles, Seattle, Denver, Chicago, Salt Lake City, Milwaukee, New York, and of course Portland.

The executive summary begins: "Much as Justice Potter Stewart said of pornography, most people would be hard pressed to define urban sprawl, but they know it when they see it."

Look out those car windows on the way home. You'll probably see plenty of the following: "The landscape sprawl creates has four dimensions: a population that is widely dispersed in low-density development; rigidly separated homes, shops, and workplaces; a network of roads marked by huge blocks and poor access; and a lack of well-defined, thriving activity centers, such as downtowns and town centers. Most of the other features usually associated with sprawl - the lack of transportation choices, relative uniformity of housing options or the difficulty of walking - are a result of these conditions."

Read the report: Measuring Sprawl and its Impact

image used with permission: Metropolitan Design Center, UMN

An Architecture of Decency November 21, 2007

The beautiful work of the Rural Studio was featured on Public Radio's Speaking of Faith last week, they called it "An Architecture of Decency". Along with the program, the companion website is really worth checking out. It has photographs, slideshows, videos, uncut interviews, blogs from the production crew and host, as well as a very cool interactive map showing where all of the Rural Studio projects are located. They've really done a great job of capturing the tremendous spirit behind the Rural Studio.

"The mission of the Rural Studio is to enable each participating student to cross the threshold of misconceived opinions to create/design/build and to allow students to put their educational values to work as citizens of a community. The Rural Studio seeks solutions to the needs of the community within the community's own context, not from outside it. Abstract ideas based upon knowledge and study are transformed into workable solutions forged by real human contact, personal realization, and a gained appreciation for the culture."

Link to "An Architecture of Decency"
Link to the Rural Studio's website

Urban Interventions November 09, 2007

The web is abuzz in light of photos released last week that claim to capture the identity of infamous graffiti artist Banksy (click here to get the scoop). Probably the world's most well known street artist, Banksy's socially conscious and site specific graffiti has made him a darling of the international art world. But while his work easily fetches thousands of dollars at auction, his true identity has remained shrouded in secrecy, until now... or maybe not. One theory is that Banksy simply designs a piece with stencils and employs a coterie of volunteers to hit the streets and "install" the artwork.

As long as we're on the topic, we'd like to share the work of a street artist who has chosen to work with a friendlier alternative to aerosol cans and stencils. "Eco-minded street artist Edina Tokodi is putting a new spin on green guerrilla tactics in the trendy art enclave of Williamsburg, Brooklyn." She has dubbed her work "living-graffiti" and invites the passerby to touch and interact with the mossy animals cropping up on the streets of New York. Click here for photos and more via Inhabitat.

When LEED isn't enough November 02, 2007

From Environmental Building News:
"As the world's first LEED Platinum building, the Chesapeake Bay Foundation's Philip Merrill Environmental Center is loaded with green features: photovoltaic panels, rainwater harvesting, composting toilets, and bamboo flooring, to mention just a few. However, moving the organization's staff of around 100 into the new building meant that many employees who had been able to walk to work in the older downtown facility now have to drive roughly ten miles to get there...the additional energy use from more employees driving to work may well exceed the energy savings realized by the green building."

"That's right - for an average office building in the United States, calculations done by Environmental Building News show that commuting by office workers accounts for 30% more energy than the building itself uses. For an average new office building built to code, transportation accounts for more than twice as much energy use as building operation."

This is rather scary, and the whole article is worth a read. The basic message is that locating buildings in an urban, interconnected context is energy efficient.

The complete article:
Environmental Building News, vol.16 , issue 9 (Sept. 2007)

Spotlight on affordable housing October 24, 2007

The Metropolitan Council recently announced that the Twin Cities will need to add 51,000 units of affordable housing by the year 2020 and the issue is understandably getting a lot of media attention right now. The Star Tribune picked up the story on October 19th and Kerri Miller (host of Midmorning on MPR) recently invited the Mayor of Brooklyn Park, the executive director of the Minnesota Housing Partnership, and the Chairman of the Metropolitan Council in to discuss affordable housing and the publics perception thereof.

The piece in the Star Tribune and some of the callers on Midmorning demonstrate that many people still associate affordable housing with increasing crime rates, falling property values, and "problems for the community." We at Cermak Rhoades believe this mode of thinking is outdated. As cities across the Metro region plan for more affordable housing, we urge them to consider providing quality housing at a spectrum of costs that people can afford.

One interesting piece of research that is new to us comes from the Maxfield Research Group in Minneapolis. The report compared property values of 12 Twin Cities neighborhoods where an affordable housing development had recently been built to neighborhoods without such a development. They concluded that "there is little or no evidence to support the claim that the tax-credit family rental developments in our study eroded surrounding home values."

You can find that report here.
"Low-income homes must be built, but where?" - Star Trib 10.19.07
Midmorning debate on affordable housing 10.23.07