Category Archives: Sustainable Living

Agency Seeks to Tighten Rules for ‘Green’ Labeling

From The New York Times, Wednesday, October 6, 2010:

Manufacturers of products that claim to be environmentally friendly will face tighter rules on how they are advertised to consumers under changes proposed Wednesday by the Federal Trade Commission.

The commission’s revised “Green Guides,” last updated in 1998, warn marketers against using labels that make broad claims that cannot be substantiated, like “eco-friendly.” Marketers must qualify their claims on the product packaging and limit them to a specific benefit, such as how much of the product is recycled.

“This is really about trying to cut through the confusion that consumers have when they are buying a product and that businesses have when they are selling a product,” said Jon Leibowitz, chairman of the commission.

Continue reading: Agency Seeks to Tighten Rules for ‘Green’ Labeling

Make Your Own Solar-Collector Night Lights

From greenlivingideas.com:

Whether you have a kid, or you’re tired of encountering your darkened hallway walls at midnight, or you simply like the ambience of soft lighting and you don’t want to leave a beacon burning all through the night… an energy-saving night light is a must have.

It’s true that you can get a perky nocturnal hamster and make a hamster-powered night light, but a somewhat simpler project with equally impressive results is a self-crafted Sun Jar…

Invented by Tobias Wong, the Sun Jar is essentially a Mason jar containing a solar cell, a rechargeable battery, and an energy-saving LED lamp.  Placed in a sunlit area by day, the solar cell inside the Sun Jar charges the battery with solar energy and uses that energy at night to power the LED lamp.

Continue reading: Make Your Own Solar-Collector Night Lights

Extend the Alaska summer: How to put up your veggies for winter

From Alaska Dispatch, Friday, September 24, 2010:

Jenny Vanderweele’s house looks out over Vanderweele Farm fields, so she has a front row seat to the bloom-and-bust summer season. As fall approaches, she spends hours in her kitchen putting up fall vegetables for the winter. Though she also pickles and cans produce from the farm, Vanderweele says freezing is a simple and effective way to preserve broccoli and cauliflower. “The longest parts of this process are getting the water to boil and waiting for the stuff to freeze,” she says. Properly prepared, cauliflower and broccoli should keep for up to a year — or even longer if vacuum packed. “Put it in your freezer and you have a beautiful way to open up some summer in the middle of the winter.”

Continue reading: Extend the Alaska summer: How to put up your veggies for winter

Developer hopes to capitalize on wind power near Delta Junction

From The Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, Sunday, September 26, 2010:

A Fairbanks developer said Tuesday he hopes he can build a 25-megawatt wind farm near Delta Junction despite limited avenues for public aid.

Mike Craft said his firm, Alaska Environmental Power, is working with Golden Valley Electric Association to study how to best feed wind power into Interior Alaska’s transmission grid.

The work parallels planning by Golden Valley for a separate wind farm near Healy.

Craft told a chamber of commerce audience Tuesday he hopes the integration studies will lead to power-sale agreements between his firm and the utility. He said Golden Valley previously agreed to a smaller, pilot sale agreement following construction of two smaller turbines at the Delta site.

“(It) made it possible for us to come on line with these two turbines. That helped us a lot,” Craft said. He said the turbines, the largest built with state aid, have produced 134,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity.

Craft, a builder and residential developer, started looking to enter the wind power business roughly three years ago. He approached public officials last winter for help with his project and received lukewarm responses but said Tuesday he chose to continue and hopes to install 16 GE turbines near Delta.

A Troubling Decline in the Caribou Herds of the Arctic

From Yale Environment 360, Thursday, September 23, 2010:

In late July, a group of Inuit hunters set off by boat along the west coast of Banks Island to search for Peary caribou, which inhabit the Arctic archipelago of Canada. Roger Kuptana, a 62-year-old Inuit who had grown up on the island, didn’t give his fellow hunters much chance of success in their hunt for the animals, the smallest caribou sub-species in North America.

“I think it’s a waste of gas,” Kuptana told me when I visited his modest home in Sachs Harbour, a traditional community of roughly 100 people on the island, not far from the Yukon-Alaska border. “There used to be a lot of caribou around here when I grew up. But now you have to travel pretty far north to find them on the island. It’s not just here. It seems like this happening everywhere.”

As it turned out, Kuptana was right; the Inuit hunters found no Peary caribou, despite three days of searching. The hunters’ predicament is familiar to the Eskimos of Alaska, other Inuit of Canada and Greenland, and the Nenets, Komi, Evenks, Chukotkans, and indigenous groups of northern Russia and Scandinavia. Throughout the Arctic, many of the great caribou and reindeer herds that once roamed the treeless tundra, providing an indispensible source of meat and clothing for aboriginal groups, are in free-fall.

Continue reading: A Troubling Decline in the Caribou Herds of the Arctic

The Battle of the Bulbs

From The New York Times, Thursday, September 23, 2010:

Three House Republicans, Joe Barton and Michael Burgess of Texas and Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, have introduced the Better Use of Light Bulbs Act, which would repeal the section of the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 that sets minimum energy efficiency standards for light bulbs and would effectively phase out most ordinary incandescents.

While the new standards won’t take effect until 2012, the authors argue that they are having a negative impact. Specifically, they say the standards have led lighting companies to close several incandescent light bulb factories in the United States and send jobs overseas — particularly to China, where most compact fluorescent light bulbs, which are more efficient than incandescents, are manufactured.

Compact fluorescents are likely to be the cheapest bulbs on store shelves after retailers stop selling ordinary incandescents.

“The unanticipated consequences of the ’07 act — Washington-mandated layoffs in the middle of a desperate recession — is one of the many examples of what happens when politicians and activists think they know better than consumers and workers,” Mr. Barton, the ranking member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, said in a statement. “Washington is making too many decisions that are better left to people who work for their own paychecks and earn their own living.”

Continue reading: The Battle of the Bulbs

In-ground heat pumps require some expertise

ASK A BUILDER

By CCHRC Staff

The “Ask a Builder” series is dedicated to answering some of the many questions Fairbanks residents have about building, energy and the many other parts of home life.

Q: Recently I read the News-Miner story about the heat pump being installed at Weller Elementary School. Are there different ways to install this type of system and is this something I can do myself?

Ground source heat pumps operate in a way similar to how a refrigerator transfers heat out of an insulated box to the surrounding air of your kitchen. In this case, the heat pump absorbs heat from the ground and transfers it to a home. The heat exchange mechanism between the ground and the heat pump is typically a series of liquid-filled tubes.

There are different methods to get the heat out of the ground each of which require different installation needs.

One system is the shallow horizontal trench, which is being used at Weller Elementary.

In this configuration, the tubes are made into overlapping loops and placed approximately 10 feet in the ground. For people who live in areas of shallow ground water, it is beneficial to get the loop below the ground water table. This requires a large area, so this type of system is probably not feasible in a downtown lot, but would work well on a southsloping hillside with a lot of land available.

Another option to consider is drilling multiple wells.

These would be similar to drilling a drinking water well for a home, except that only the heat in the water is being extracted, not the groundwater itself. It is likely that more than one well would be needed to heat a house.

The third option is to sink the ground loops deep into a body of water such as a pond or lake, provided that the water body is sufficiently large to accommodate the heat demand. Contact the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation before beginning this type of project.

All of these options are for a “closed-loop” system, where freeze-protected fluid is circulated in a closed system of piping. There are also “open-loop” systems that draw ground water directly and then inject the water back into the ground.

In most cases these are not appropriate for use in Interior Alaska.

In terms of a do-it-yourself project (and Alaskans are pretty handy) a heat pump involves digging a deep well or large trench, which will probably require hiring a driller or excavator. The equipment that makes up a heat pump is technical. Hiring someone who has been certified by the manufacturer or by the International Ground Source Heat Pump Association to install these systems is recommended.

Contact local heat pump distributors to get more information on installation.

Alaska HomeWise articles promote home awareness for the Cold Climate Housing Research Center (CCHRC). If you have a question, e-mail us at akhomewise@cchrc.org.You can also call the CCHRC at (907) 457-3454.

Tableware Grown from "Food," Saving the Planet One Cup at a Time

From National Geographic’s Green Guide, Thursday, July 29, 2010:

In the near future, maybe everything we need will be assembled on the spot in machines like Star Trek‘s replicators, but for now, we’ll have to settle for growing cups, plates, and packing material from food.

A few inventors are working on products that use mushrooms, rice husks, and even agar to create new versions of single-use disposable items. They’re less harmful to the environment and break down into nothing.

Ecovative’s rice-and-mushroom packaging, for example, is intended to replace Styrofoam and uses an eighth of the energy required to make a similar amount of the petroleum-based stuff. And product design consultancy The Way We See The World is working to bring edible drinking glasses made of flavored agar–similar to gelatin–to the consumer market.

Continue reading: Tableware Grown from “Food,” Saving the Planet One Cup at a Time

University of Alaska gets $3 million grant for rural hybrid energy

From The Associated Press, Friday, September 17, 2010:

A University of Alaska group will receive $3 million to study options to optimize wind-diesel hybrid energy systems in rural Alaska.

The Alaska Center for Energy and Power, based at UA Fairbanks, was awarded the grant by the federal Department of Energy.

The university says Alaska already has systems pairing wind turbines with diesel power plants but many are not performing as designed due to extreme weather and remote, distributed grid systems.

Research paid for by the grant will investigate technical issues related to power stability, long-term energy storage and control systems to better use fluctuating wind power.

Research also will investigate turbine performance in cold climates and remote locations and challenges such as icing, foundations in poor soils and remote monitoring.