sustainabililty

Want to make a difference in the health of the planet, but don't know where to start? Check out the Be The Change Program, which brings together people from across the spectrum to show you how, and help give a frame to your enthusiasm.

Ever wonder what happens to those seasonal banners in malls? Thrown out, mostly. In Vancouver, they make them into stylish shopping bags, the proceeds going to create more green spaces there. And they can go even further, with biodegradable. Check it out!

From the ground, peering up at their vertigo-inducing heights, the green and wooded mountains of southern West Virginia look ancient and undefiled. But from the air, the stark reality of an ecosystem under siege becomes clear. The mountains around Charleston retain their diverse hardwood cover and contours shaped by time immemorial, but things change abruptly 35 miles to the southeast. Replacing the green mountains are flat, bare and terraced plateaus that evoke the mesas of the Southwest, though with added black stripes from the coal seams.

It’s widely known that the majority of electricity used in a typical building goes towards powering the conditioning, and sometimes heating, units. After all, we want to be comfortable in our homes. Air conditioning makes spaces nice and cool, or in the winter, an effective heater keeps the chills away. As technologies in sustainability change, so do our thoughts on the need for air conditioning, heating, and products that help us diminish our use of it. One product that greatly helps us “turn off the air” is Low-E windows...

When it comes to alternative energy, wind power is certainly generating a buzz. Wind power is a simple concept with a great application. Wind itself is the movement of air, and is created because of the uneven heating of the earth’s surface by the sun. Water and land absorb the sun’s heat at different rates. During the daytime, the air above land heats faster than the air above water. When this happens, the warmer air over the land expands and rises, and the cooler air over the water moves in to take its place, creating wind. At night, the exact opposite takes place...

An estimated 80% of life on earth depends on healthy oceans and coasts, but a new report states that Europe's coastal marine regions are largely degraded. So are we acting too late to save important coastal areas?