Custom Made Eco-Friendly Furniture by Urban Woods
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- Urban Woods reclaimed wood table.
Retailers and designer agree that the peace of mind and quick turn around time of our sustainable, domestic production beats their former sources over seas. Americans are starting to request “made in the USA” again for their household purchases and the fact that they can get exactly the dimensions and finishes they need in a relatively quick time period is a big selling point.
All pieces at Urban Woods are made of reclaimed wood and finished with water based stains and low VOC finishes.
Get what you need at www.urbanwoods.net
Reclaimed Wood Furniture Made in Los Angeles
Reclaimed Douglas Fir at Urban Woods
When it comes to sustainability and the making of sustainable furnishings one must consider the degree of sustainability of the ingredients. Is it constructed from FSC (Forest Stewardship Council) wood (the FSC promotes responsible management of the worlds forests), Bamboo (actually a rapidly growing grass) or the most sustainable of materials, Reclaimed Wood from local sources?
Urban Woods is always striving to create a more sustainable product. In fact our products are beyond sustainable. By eliminating waste wood from landfills where they are left to decompose and release carbon into the atmosphere, reclaimed wood is “rescued” and repurposed for a second life.
See the full range of furniture made in Los Angeles from reclaimed wood and inquire about custom furniture options made by Urban Woods.
think on the brink
The Th!nk eclectric car company is on the brink of bankruptcy again and the Norwegian government is not likely to give the EV maker any money. According to the Norwegian news source Dagbladet the government will not step in, saying that helping one company but not others was not sound policy. Th!nk’s claim that it needs $15-30 million in government-backed funds within weeks to avoid bankruptcy was apparently not enough of a reason for the government to step in and it looks like at least half of Th!nk’s 250 employees will be laid off in January. Think CEO Richard Canny said his company was “in a dire situation.”
The fledgling automaker is being hit hard by increasingly tight supplier demands and is finding working capital tough to come by at the moment, so daily production of the Th!nk City has been temporarily put on hold. But investors may step up their investment and save the future of the Th!nk. One of Norway’s wealthiest people, Stein Erik Hagen, has said he’s willing to double his investments in the company if other major investors do the same.
So, what happens to the Th!nk City cars? The 100-150 that have been started will be finished, but Canny didn’t guarantee that everybody who ordered one will eventually get it.
http://www.dagbladet.no/2008/12/15/nyheter/think/innenriks/konkurs/4052066/
Kirei Board…Beautiful
Kirei Board inlaid in Palisades dining table.
Kirei Board is a beautiful, sustainable creation manufactured from reclaimed agricultural fiber from the Sorghum plant grown around the world for food. The stalks of this plant are usually burned or thrown into landfills after harvest. The stalks left over after harvest are heat-pressed with a non-toxic adhesive to form lightweight, strong, unique Kirei Board. By using them in the production of Kirei Board this material is removed from the waste stream, reducing landfill need and air pollution, while giving rural farmers a new source of revenue from a previously unused waste material.
Kirei Board is used throughout the Urban Woods furniture collections and utilized in many custom applications by Urban Woods. The Trousdale Collection features Kirei Board accents and panels together with reclaimed Douglas Fir creating a perfect blend of sustainable materials.
Check out the “friends” link on our home page to see Kirei Board used in unique ways.
Ford: Detroit- out / Brazil- in
So, do we bail out Detroit or not?
What do we do about the UAW?
This is a video of a new Ford plant in Brazil. One look at this and you will instantly be able to tell what is wrong with the manufacturing plants of the US car makers and why there will probably never be another one built in the US. It will also point out why more will go off shore.
http://info.detnews.com/video/index.cfm?id=1189
Ben & Jerry’s serves up Green Ice Cream
Ben & Jerry’s has teamed up with Greenpeace to unveil an environmentally-friendly freezer being called, “The Prius of Refrigeration.”
The freezer, which will eliminate dangerous F-gas emissions found in standard freezers, runs on about three cigarette lighters’ worth of propane.
Greenpeace is hoping their initiative, called “Greenfreeze,” will catch on in the U.S.A. as it has in Europe.
Today, Greenfreeze technology is in use in more than 300 million refrigerators worldwide, but it was not allowed into the United States until earlier this year when the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency authorized Ben & Jerry’s to run a test trial of units equipped with Greenfreeze technology.
The impact the project expects to have will be equivalent to taking 850,000 Hummer H3 SUVs off the road.
Greenpeace engineers developed a new climate-safe refrigeration technology known as Greenfreeze in 1992 and gave it away to any company that wanted it.
The technology was developed by two scientists, Professor Harry Rosin and Dr. Hans Preisendanz from the Institute of Hygiene in Dortmund, Germany, who were looking for a refrigerant which neither destroyed the ozone layer nor contributed to global warming. They settled on a mix of the hydrocarbons propane and butane.
“The beauty of Greenfreeze,” Dr. Preisendanz told the UNEP magazine “Our Planet,” back in 1996, “is that anyone can have the technology. It cannot be patented because all we have done is find the right mix of two existing common gases. The technology is totally free and can be used by the whole world, whether rich or poor, for a whole range of uses.”
“The irony is that the chemical industry also searched for a substitute for CFCs but only in one direction - to find substances they could patent.” he said.
Ben & Jerry’s acquired the freezers as part of a two-year EPA-approved trial program of the “Greenfreeze” technology.
Norway gives Billion Dollars to protect Amazon Rain Forest
Norway will give Brazil US$1 billion to preserve the Amazon rain forest, Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg said Tuesday, as long as Latin America’s largest nation keeps trying to stop deforestation.The Amazon loses the equivalent of one-and-a-half football fields of forest every minute to logging, ranching and farming, the Brazilian environmental group Imazon has estimated. READ WHOLE ARTICLE HERE***
Beijing LEEDS the way to Sustainability
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U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson presents the LEED Gold Award to Chen Zhili, head of the Beijing Olympic Village. (Photo courtesy BOGOC) |
The Beijing Olympic Village received a LEED gold award from the U.S. Green Building Council. LEED, which stands for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, certifies that buildings have met a set of criteria for sustainability and energy efficiency.The LEED gold award was presented to Chen Zhili, head of the Beijing Olympic Village, on Wednesday by U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson. Chen said the presentation affirmed the cooperation between China and the United States in clean energy technology for Olympic Games.
More than 16,800 athletes, coaches and officials of national teams are living in the residential section of the village - in 22 six-story buildings and 20 nine-story buildings that were constructed using environmentally-friendly paint and other materials.
The Beijing Olympic Village uses solar cells and geothermal heat pumps to supply energy to the buildings. The buildings feature solar heat, solar hot water, solar thermoelectric cogeneration, and intelligent control devices. They consume just 1/30th of the energy consumed by conventional buildings, according to the contractor, Guoao Investment Company.
Through a heat exchange system, the Village is projected to draw 7.89 million kilowatt hours of renewable energy from the Sun during the Olympics and slightly less in the years after the Games are finished and the buildings are used to house other residents.
The system taps energy from Qinghe sewage treatment plant and upgrades it through heat pump devices for winter heating and summer cooling. The technology can save energy by over 40 percent compared with ordinary air-conditioning systems.
In the Village, solar energy collecting tubes have been installed on rooftop gardens. The system can meet hot water demands of 16,000 users during the Games and some 2, 000 households after the Games. The project can save 5 million kilowatt hours of electricity a year,
The wastewater in the Village is being recycled and the 200 tons of water recycled daily is used for landscape watering in the Village.
Kids on Cell Phones
According to France Telecom, the brains of young children absorb twice as much as radio frequency energy from a cell phone as those of adults. Their research appears in the July 7 issue of the journal “Physics in Medicine and Biology” and it confirms that peripheral brain tissues of children seem to be higher exposed than the peripheral brain tissue of adults.” “Children are not simply small adults,” Joe Wiart, the research director, explained in an interview with “Microwave News.”
“Their skin and their skulls are thinner than those of adults, and their ears are smaller too,” he said. “Given these differences, the higher SAR for children is not surprising.”
SAR stands for specific absorption rate, a measure of the rate at which radio frequency energy is absorbed by the body.
These new findings apply to children who are eight years old or younger. Above the age of eight, the SARs in children are much like those of adults, according to Wiart.
“I agree with Joe,” said Niels Kuster, the director of the IT’IS Foundation in Zurich. A team led by Kuster and Andreas Christ recently completed a project for the German Federal Office of Radiation Protection, which like Wiart, found that regions of the brains of young children can have exposures that are twice those of adults - or even higher.
Even more striking, Kuster and Christ concluded that the “exposure of the bone marrow of children can exceed that of adults by about a factor of ten.”
They also report that children’s eyes are more highly exposed that those of adults.
Whether or not children are at a greater health risk than adults has been debated since at least the year 2000, when a UK panel chaired by Sir William Stewart advised that parents limit their children’s use of mobile phones.
Since then, other government groups, especially those in France and Germany, have issued similar precautionary recommendations.
Norway’s Sustainable Music Festivals
Norwegian music festivals lead the way to sustainablility by becoming the first music festivals to sign on with the UN Environment Program for climate-friendly events.
The Canal Street Festival in Arendal, Norway and the Hove Festival on the island of Tromoya, outside of Arendal, are lowering the carbon footprint of the entertainment industry through a partnership with UNEP’s Climate Neutral Network. The two big music festivals are the first to sign the UN Environment Program known as CN Net.
The Canal Street Festival, a jazz event taking place from July 21 to 27, is using certified green energy sources for their concerts. They also introduced organic cotton and paper bags in the city and they are selling organic and fair trade T-shirts.
The festival continues through Sunday and features John Mayall & The Bluesbreakers, and The Waterboys, many bands of local, European, and U.S. renown, boat cruises, kids’ events, a parade and nightly jam sessions.
The Hove Festival, which featured Jay-Z, Beck, The Raconteurs and the Kooks among their major acts last month, invited their audience, staff, and participants to pay for their individual carbon footprint caused by their travel to the event. They also provided solar-charging points for their mobile phones, LED lighting systems powered by wind and solar power, and they set a target of 50% for recycling materials used during the event.
Funds raised by the offsets are going to support Clean Development Mechanisms in China approved by the United Nations under the Kyoto Protocol.
UNEP’s Executive Director, Achim Steiner, said, “The greening of live musical events represents an opportunity to lower the carbon footprint of not only the entertainment industry, but those of millions, if not hundreds of millions, of people worldwide.”
He continues, “The Hove Festival and the Canal Street can serve as models for musical and entertainment events everywhere. Climate change tops the charts as the number one challenge facing this planet. Unless all sectors of society step up to the bar and address this challenge, we will all be singing the blues.”
