Food sovereignty has emerged as a leading sense-making framework for the nascent conceptualization of an agroecological urbanism – a radically new paradigm for urbanization, grounded in political a…
Source: www.tandfonline.com
Celebrate Arbor Day with us at this month’s Living Green workshop! Learn about all the benefits of trees for your landscape, for our communities, and for the planet. The program will cover proper tree selection, placement, watering, pruning, and more. The hands-on portion of this fun workshop will be an opportunity to participate in an Arbor Day Celebration tree planting in the Monarch Haven and Reading Sanctuary Garden located at the Red Mountain Branch Library in the NE corner of the parking lot. The program includes a short overview of the Mesa Climate Action Plan and our commitment to making our city a greener community. Trees are a great solution for heat mitigation, and they help improve our air and water quality. Plus, they absorb greenhouse gasses and pollutants.
Read the full article at: events.mesalibrary.org
Researchers from the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD) have developed a process that allows for the production and degradation of almost any object within a circular economy using additive manufacturing …
We need to find a way to reduce waste, and the answer could be moving to a circular economy, which seeks to design out wastage by making use of byproducts and reusing materials. “The circular economy is an excellent way to deal with many of the major crises that we are facing,” says Anne Velenturf, a circular economy researcher at the University of Leeds. “Producing stuff takes a lot of energy, and if we make better use of our products then we also save much of the carbon embodied in them.” Half of the world’s insulin comes from this factory in Kalundborg, Denmark, and its production relies on vast fermentation tanks full of yeast broth. Manufacturer Novo Nordisk passes its spent yeast slurry to Kalundborg Bioenergi to make biogas. “Any leftovers, you can put on the fields as fertilizer,” says Kalundborg Bioenergi CEO Erik Lundsgaard.
As great as the circular economy sounds, getting there will require profound transformations in how we do business. It could start with how we design products, suggested Faith Legendre, a circular economy solutions strategist at Cisco. She suggested that more companies could put leaders in charge of designing for circularity, and that companies should have a plan for and be held responsible for what happens at the end of a product’s life. Planning for disposal needs to happen while the product is being conceived, she said, not tacked on afterwards. Achieving circularity will require a combination of both rules and incentives for companies, the panel participants agreed. Legendre suggested that innovation centers and technology incubators could include criteria that judge new product ideas based on what happens at the end of its lifetime. She’d also like to see circularity incorporated into financial ratings systems. But ultimately she thinks regulation will be needed as well. Until producers are held accountable for the full lifecycle of their products, she said, they will continue to make decisions that contribute to sending those products to the landfill. Anne van Riel, head of Sustainable Finance Americas at ING, said that consumers can also help drive change by choosing to buy more sustainable products and to invest their retirement funds in responsible companies. “I wouldn’t underestimate the power that consumers have,” she said.
Read the full article at: news.climate.columbia.edu
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Solar PV module manufacturer and energy storage provider Q Cells has unveiled a new financing structure to boost value in C&I and community solar projects. The company announced an investment into a solar + storage portfolio developed by Amped Solutions through its new ‘Grid Equity’ financing structure. Under the framework, Q Cells will provide capital investment in exchange for the rights to future grid services revenue expected to be generated by the portfolio in California. “As part of our growing suite of complete energy solutions, we’re excited to offer our customers and partners investment capital under a new Grid Equity structure,” said Shane Kim, president of Q Cells North America. “We believe it can be a valuable co-development tool to help them boost the economics and bankability of their solar-plus-storage projects.”