Residential Solar Power

Environmental concerns are rampant issue that everybody is concerned about lately.  There has been an ecological imbalance that several scientists and researchers are working on to find ways and develop alternative energy sources to regain the balance and one of these is solar power. One thing that they discovered is that now you can also utilize the solar energy right within the home using residential solar panels and do your job to help improve the environment.

In installing residential solar panels, the following factors are worth considering:

* You should know how much sunlight your home receives throughout the year. In a few areas where sunlight is not available for most of the days in the year, installing residential power may not be a good idea. Installing solar panels in such places will be expensive and will require several solar and heavier power storage arrangements.

* You should know how many appliances you are going to power using the solar energy. For higher wattages, the number and cost of residential power will be higher.

* You should also check if you can take advantage of government’s grant for installing residential power. If you are eligible for such a grant, installation of residential solar panels at your home will become much more cost effective and rewarding.

* You should check with all the available resources, possibly on the Internet to find out the latest technology of residential power. Buying solar can be worth every penny only if you buy solar after extensive research about your alternatives and after weighing all the pros and cons related to installing residential panel.

* Check you pool system.

After you have enough information and well-equipped about the residential solar system and taken everything into consideration, you are now ready to make a decision on buying solar panels. You can also take into consideration these factors to help you save a long term budget and saving a huge amount of cost on you electricity bills. This way, it will not only help you save money for the future but a better world for you and your children’s sake.

Green Christmas

Everybody is busy with this season. Christmas is the spirit of remembering Christ’s birth and showing love by means of giving gifts to others.

Perhaps, the most unique way of showing the real essence of Christmas can also be shown through taking care of our nature and environment. Christmas season and our environment co-exist. With a little effort and imagination, we can reduce the environmental impact of the holiday season.

How about spending less on Christmas gifts? Look for locally made gifts - many gifts in today's marketplace come from halfway around the world, and the impact of transportation contributes significantly to greenhouse emissions and global warming. Local craft fairs and artisan shops are a good source for gifts that come without the added costs of transportation. 

Support gifts made from recycled sources. It is not just fun and exciting thing to do, by supporting these businesses; it will help reduce the waste stream while promoting the concept of making best use of available materials.

No to 'battery-operated” gifts – Based from studies and EPA, about 40% of all battery sales occur during the holiday season. Discarded batteries are an environmental hazard. So, why give gifts that have an impact on our environment as well as our children’s health?

Buy toys that are more of educational rather than the famous toy robot on their favorite cartoon movie. Let us teach them to use more their skills in reading and thinking than playing and promoting violence.

Christmas is a time for giving and a time for family. What a great opportunity to start a family tradition of giving back to the earth and instilling the values of sustainable living to your children, friends and community. Start an annual, earth-friendly Christmas family tradition! It will also get you outdoors for a few hours to build an appetite for the big dinner.

Start an annual activity in your family to get to know nature more. Count the birds. Donate some cage in your local zoo. Or even adopt a pet. This will help you discover something from each member of the family and they would appreciate nature more.

Mountain climbing with the family members is the best way to bond for this season.

Giving some pledge of planting a small tree together is the best way to show you value nature. Donating Non-Biodegradable and Biodegradable trash bins is also an excellent move.

Use LED (Light Emitting Diode) lights for house and Christmas tree lighting. Do you know that LED is 95% less energy than larger, traditional holiday bulbs and last up to 100,000 hours when used indoors?

Aside from rampant fire caused by defective Christmas lights, turning off and outdoor house decorative lighting at bedtime, would save you a lot of energy bills and help save our energy crisis as well.

Live potted trees - if you buy a small tree in a large pot, you may be able to reuse the tree for 2- 3 years without having to plant or re-pot the tree. 

Reuse gift wraps where possible. You can also ask your kids to think more artistically by making some colorful gift wraps out of old newspapers and magazines.

Lastly, promote an activity in your family, community and friends where you can make them aware about our current situation in global warming and at least ask them to think of something that they can contribute to help save our environment. At least volunteer to plant a tree, go solar, clean our environment and air, etc.

I am pretty sure, this is more than just Christmas season if and only we would think and act like that – a better and greener Christmas season ever.

About the Non-Biodegradable Materials

Biodegradable refers to organic material that can be broken down by living organisms.  It is said that this can break down and once again become part of the earth and soil like food scraps and papers.

But most of us often take for granted the term “biodegradable.” Which can be somehow becomes dangerous if it’s already uncontrollable to handle. Have we thought of what is the meaning of nonbiodegradable and its effects on our everyday living?

Nonbiodegradable are wastes materials that cannot be broken down by other living organisms. These are plastics (polyethylene, nylon, rayon, polyester, lexan, pvc (polyvinyl chloride), dacron). Metals such as iron, platinum, steel, tin, aluminum, lead, silver, gold, mercury, zinc etc.  Ceramics like carbon fiber and fiberglass. Foams. Circuit boards and silicon based materials.

In our everyday living, we are using tons of nonbiodegradable materials that we think are useful but in the long run, it will destroy our environment. And we are part of that destruction - whether we are like it or not.

When we disposed materials as such, our nature cannot reuse these materials to fuel the cycle of life and it will remain as pollution in the environment.  All the resources and energy used to make the material in the first place, are trapped within the waste. And because nature cannot breakdown the material; the matter and energy cannot be reclaimed and reused by the environment to generate more organic matter and energy.

This means when we rely on non-biodegradable materials, pollution is being formed and unsustainable efficiency is created. It is just like eating something that our intestines cannot digest, and so we tend to get sick and everything else is not normal.

With different government agencies putting a halt to this, there are different programs and number of places where we can throw our waste.

When we clean our homes and ourselves the products we use end up as waste washed down the drains and into sewers or septic tanks. Sewerage waste is treated which changes most of that waste to carbon dioxide and water with some minerals, waste elements and non-biodegradable materials left over. The treated water is then pumped back into a river or ocean. This means that the non-biodegradable matter in the products we use may eventually end up as pollution in our waterways (source: Waste and Sustainability - Biodegradable and Non-Biodegradable Materials by Trudy Slabosz).

Thus, disposing and having the knowledge of separating the biodegradable and nonbiodegradable is a good start. It is also best to try and make sure any biodegradable material waste is composted and does not end up in landfill. Landfills may include internal waste disposal sites (where a producer of waste carries out their own waste disposal at the place of production) as well as sites used by many producers. Many landfills are also used for other waste management purposes, such as the temporary storage, consolidation and transfer, or processing of waste material (sorting, treatment, or recycling).

Ecosystem: Have We Gotten Too Far?

An ecosystem is a biological environment consisting of all the organisms living in a particular area, as well as all the nonliving, physical components of the environment with which the organisms interact, such as air, soil, water, and sunlight. It is all the organisms in a given area, along with the nonliving (abiotic) factors with which they interact; a biological community and its physical environment (source: Wikipedia).

The entire array of organisms inhabiting a particular ecosystem is called a community.  Ecosystems, plants and other photosynthetic organisms are the producers that provide the food. Ecosystems can be permanent or temporary. Ecosystems usually form a number of food webs. Ecosystems are functional units consisting of living things in a given area, non-living chemical and physical factors of their environment, linked together through nutrient cycle and energy flow.

Ecosystems have become particularly important politically since the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) - ratified by 192 countries - defines "the protection of ecosystems, natural habitats and the maintenance of viable populations of species in natural surroundings"(source: United Nations Environment Programme. Convention on Biological Diversity. June 1992. UNEP Document no. Na.92-78) as a commitment of ratifying countries. This has created the political necessity to spatially identify ecosystems and somehow distinguish among them. The CBD defines an "ecosystem" as a "dynamic complex of plant, animal and micro-organism communities and their non-living environment interacting as a functional unit" (source: Wikipedia).

With the need of protecting ecosystems, the political need arose to describe and identify them efficiently. Vreugdenhil et al. (Wikipedia) argued that this could be achieved most effectively by using a physiognomic-ecological classification system, as ecosystems are easily recognizable in the field as well as on satellite images. They argued that the structure and seasonality of the associated flora and fauna, complemented with ecological data (such as elevation, humidity, and drainage), are each determining modifiers that separate partially distinct sets of species. This is true not only for plant species, but also for species of animals, fungi and bacteria. The degree of ecosystem distinction is subject to the physiognomic modifiers that can be identified on an image and/or in the field. Where necessary, specific fauna elements can be added, such as seasonal concentrations of animals and the distribution of coral reefs.

The health of humans like all organisms depends on an ecosystem that sustains life in general. However, studies show some evidence that most life-support systems are far from healthy, therefore posing a big threat on human health. It is proven also that some gains in life expectancy and quality of life made during the twentieth century are at risk of being reversed in the twenty-first century.

It is being put to blame that our ecosystem degradation would lead to numerous health factors that poses risks for human life like pollution in water, air and land, the climate change, emerging new diseases from different breakthrough on viruses and bacteria, resurgence of old diseases, and so on and so forth.

With this, it also includes different studies and methods being used to discover natural gas, mining and coal; thus leads to an imbalance in our ecosystem. The main culprit – humans and its advanced technologies discoveries.

We can achieve a balance ecosystem only if we know how to take care of it while discovering and unraveling different breakthrough technologies. It is not that easy task though. As we gear towards the 21st century fever.

But let us always remember the saying that “history repeats itself.” And to be able to achieve a balance ecosystem, hand in hand we need to fully understand the causes and effects of the advancement of technology breakthroughs in our everyday living.

The Best Key to Net Positive Development

We often hear about the phrase “net positive development.” What does this really mean?

The book, Positive Development, articulates and advocates a paradigm shift from our ‘managerialist’ approaches to environmental problems to a (positive) ‘design-based’ approach.  It shows how our ideas about sustainable development have been built upon negative premises. It is all about restoring and reviving what has left by the inevitable damage caused by development.

‘Positive Development’ refers to built environments that have net positive ecological (and social) impacts - beyond pre-settlement conditions.  The idea derives from a radical critique of how we plan, design, retrofit and manage the built environment (source: www.sustainability.org.au).

With our environmental management practices, it targets to offset ecological losses with social gains, which we often take for granted in the final design.

A system of development that does not pay its own way over its life cycle can no longer be seen as acceptable.  Ecological restoration or regeneration is not enough, because we have already exceeded the Earth’s ecological carrying capacity.  Therefore, just to support existing bioregions and populations, cities would need to increase regional carrying capacity.  The premise of Positive Development is that built environment design can have net positive ecological as well as social impacts.  That is, we can retrofit urban areas to increase net ecological carrying capacity in cities to increase natural and social capital.  However, this would require a new approach to planning, management and design (source: www.sustainability.org.au).

In the case of how buildings are built, we should bear in mind that aside from producing clean energy, water, soil, air, and food, it should be net positive.  

When you say net positive, it should create ecological and social positive 

development for nature itself. Sustainability enters into the picture by balancing both our ecosystem and 

our nature.

In contrast to restorative design, therefore, Positive Development would aim to expand both the ecological base (life support system), and increase the public estate (equitable access to means of survival).  This will require nothing short of the ecological modernisation of the architecture and planning professions themselves (source: www.sustainability.org.au).

How do we measure impacts? We do it the right way by counting on positive ecological impacts and negative as well and try to balance both.

Thus, governments expend resources in trying to mitigate the impacts of developments proposed by investors.

 Some of the criteria for an ecologically Positive Development would be:

·         Meet a ‘sustainability standard’, where development leaves the ecology, as well as society, better off after construction than before.

·         Be ‘reversible’ (demountable, compostable and/or highly adaptable).

·         Over-compensate for both embodied and ecological waste in production through substantial positive offsite impacts.

Source: www.sustainability.org.au 

Keeping the balance between our ecological system and environment is the best key to net positive development.

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