The City That Can Look To The Sky, Reduced Their Energy Cost, And Improved Their Eco-Footprint

On October 27, 2009 in the southwestern section of Toulouse, France newly installed lamp posts were energized. Starting with a greater than 500 meter section of the Allée Camille-Soula. It’s a very busy street which runs between a sports stadium and a university (Institut de Mécanique des Fluides), in this fourth largest city in the country. The ubiquitous computing (‘ubicomp’) lights are equipped with sensors that detect heat from human bodies. The heat causes the strength of the light to double for ten seconds, returning to a standard ‘dim’ mode when nobody is around. As a result, the energy consumption of night lighting is cut by around 50% with the added benefit of cutting night time light pollution. Unrestricted street lighting is not only a drain on energy resources, but can interfere with the migration patterns of birds, insects and mammals. (more…)

OK! So you want to do your share to go green but you are not sure how to
approach it. How about one step at a time, that’s it!

For instance, if your water heater goes out replace it with a tankless
water heater. You will save money and energy and you will reduce your
eco-footprint.

Need a new shirt? Instead of burning gas to drive to a retailer and buying (more…)

WASTED is a 30 minute show on the Planet Green Channel. The host (Annabelle Guriwitch
and Holter Graham), go into peoples homes and teach them how to cut down on their
waste thereby lowering their ecological footprint.

They developed an internationally recognized, ecological footprint calculator that
measures factors like waste, energy and fuel consumption and translates that data into
land size.

For example, in the episode I watched, a couple in an 1300 sq. ft. apartment in New
York City, calculated like this. Their living space is 0.03 acres, which should be
their footprint. However, their eco-footprint = 49.8 acres, 1600 times the size of
their property. (more…)