I found a recent study, albeit a small one, done in the UK that brings up an interesting question (even if it doesn’t provide too many answers). New Tricks With Old Bricks, a study done by the Empty Homes Agency, tries to show that an old refurbished home can be just as “green” as a new build. Now by “green” in this particular study they are referring only to the home’s carbon emissions, or as we refer to it across the pond, carbon footprint. While they did include embodied carbon and operational carbon they only studied six homes, and they projected the totals over a fifty year period.
Month: March 2009
Over Forty Years Later and Still Paying
Feeling pretty isolated from the current recession out here in Salt Lake City, I’ve decided to track some of the goings on in Detroit. I have a mild connection with the area after dating a girl during high school and college from Grosse Pointe. I will never forget my first day driving around the metro area. As a country kid from Texas I couldn’t even comprehend most of what I was seeing. I remember pulling up to a red light in my 1984 Volvo 244 DL with all the windows rolled down and my shirt off. (No air conditioning you know.) Of course I was wearing a red bandana wrapped around my head to keep my long hair out of my face while the wind whipped through my windows. This was the summer of 1993.
Redneck Sustainability: Dirt Can Make You Clean
Let’s start with the dirt wash. Working on the ranch one day, my wizened father showed me how dirt can actually make you cleaner. It’s true, and oh so sustainable. What cleanser can be more natural than dirt? Anyway, we had just finished replacing spent rods in a windmill. It was my first time as the “monkey man” on the top of the mill (perched up on the top platform without safety gear in order to latch and unlatch the long wooden rods as they are pulled up and out of the ground). Everything you pull up out of a well is greasy and slick with mud, slime and, well… gook. After sloppin’ this stuff all over for a couple hours and taking in views of red-tailed hawks diving for twittering and cooing quail hiding in scrub oak thickets, the monkey man tries to climb down the metal rungs on either side of an angle iron windmill support without slipping off and dying. (Really mom, it’s not that dangerous.)