# All Green City... Possible?



## kakaching (Dec 3, 2009)

Hi, just wondering if a city constructed with fully sustainable materials possible?
A while ago I Read about fully recyclable plastic bricks called Polli -bricks that can replace normail materials... but it doesn't seem like its happening..
Is it not possible with current technology?


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## dmarney (Jul 26, 2008)

do you mean recyclable, or recycled, because a house made out of recycled things is cool, but i dont understand a house that you can recycle :S


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## mhays (Sep 12, 2002)

Using "green" materials is just one factor. Efficiencies in transportation (starting with zero cars) and heating/cooling would be huge. Using less materials is also crucial. This can be accomplished by sharing walls, having smaller living spaces (vs. the 2,500 sf US model), and so on.


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## transman (Oct 23, 2008)

mhays said:


> Using "green" materials is just one factor. Efficiencies in transportation (starting with zero cars) and heating/cooling would be huge. Using less materials is also crucial. This can be accomplished by sharing walls, having smaller living spaces (vs. the 2,500 sf US model), and so on.


i agree,recycling materials instead keeping on consuming new materials is a smarter idea and its also economically responsible biulding a entire city based on recycled materials would be possible if developers and politicians played a major part in urban design like masdar city in the UAE.


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## Scba (Nov 20, 2004)

It's called a forest. Go live in a tent.


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## wasil (Jun 25, 2009)

Check out Masdar City in United Arab Emirates (UAE)


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## Jim856796 (Jun 1, 2006)

If you're taking about an all-green city (or town), I think about Greensburg, Kansas. It is rebuilding as a environmentally-friendly town with every building to be built to LEED-platinum standards after a tornado in 2007 that completely wiped it out.


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## Fuzzy Llama (Jan 24, 2009)

In my Very Humble Opinion caring for the house to be built used "recycled materials" is crap.
First of all - houses last more than people. Properly built house (i mean brick and mortar) can easily stand for 300 years serving a lot of people in this time. So environmental building costs are negligible. It should draw much more focus on the resources uses by a house during its life. Proper insulation, proper usage of solar energy, urban layout minimizing the use of car - that's what matter.

Second of all - materials used in house construction are natural. Brick, mortar, concrete, tiles - all comes from the ground. The problem is with insulation - but since it should last for long it should all but NOT biodegenerate.

Please, people - get real


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## niterider (Nov 3, 2009)

Fuzzy Llama said:


> In my Very Humble Opinion caring for the house to be built used "recycled materials" is crap.
> First of all - houses last more than people. Properly built house (i mean brick and mortar) can easily stand for 300 years serving a lot of people in this time. So environmental building costs are negligible. It should draw much more focus on the resources uses by a house during its life. Proper insulation, proper usage of solar energy, urban layout minimizing the use of car - that's what matter.
> 
> Second of all - materials used in house construction are natural. Brick, mortar, concrete, tiles - all comes from the ground. The problem is with insulation - but since it should last for long it should all but NOT biodegenerate.
> ...


Indeed. Incorporate green measures of course, but some 'greens' can only view options as 'all or nothing'.

The most 'sustainable' areas are often the old city/town centers around us. Any why? Because they're built as high quality, long lasting, durable, well designed places where people want to live, and to a relatively (but comfortably) high density but most importantly in this regard, to long established urban design principles which make them successful places.

Wait 100 years and see how many modern 'eco' developments last the test of time....or become redundant.


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## mhays (Sep 12, 2002)

Fuzzy Llama said:


> In my Very Humble Opinion caring for the house to be built used "recycled materials" is crap.
> First of all - houses last more than people. Properly built house (i mean brick and mortar) can easily stand for 300 years serving a lot of people in this time. So environmental building costs are negligible. It should draw much more focus on the resources uses by a house during its life. Proper insulation, proper usage of solar energy, urban layout minimizing the use of car - that's what matter.
> 
> Second of all - materials used in house construction are natural. Brick, mortar, concrete, tiles - all comes from the ground. The problem is with insulation - but since it should last for long it should all but NOT biodegenerate.
> ...


I partially agree. 

The US typically builds over a million (!) residences per year. Most are very large, and primarily wood framed. The volume of materials is obscene. 

Related to that, we also abandon a huge number of houses per year -- because sprawl is too cheap, because inner city neighborhoods have degraded in many central cities, and because woodframe tends to degrade, particularly past the century mark. Renovations are a good solution, but in large swaths of many cities, few people are willing to do this, as construction costs are usually much higher than potential property value. 

It would be great for every US city/metro/state to adopt growth management policies to reduce sprawl, which would encourage renovation and infill. It would also be great for the 3,000 sf "typical" house to become passe. Combined, these would be great progress. 

It's important to use less-destructive materials. It's also important not to use that as an excuse to use more materials. 

But you're still right that energy use, etc., is a huge factor. Reduced square footage would reduce baseline "need." Better insulation, better lighting, more shared walls (like townhouses), and so on would improve the efficiency of meeting "need," at whatever level. 

The cost of square footage just keeps going. Big yards too. People spend obscene amounts on furniture and finishes, as well as heating, cooling, lighting, etc. There's also a current US obsession with "updating" one's home every so often, with furniture, appliances, flooring, etc., that matches the current decade. With large, manicured yards, people typically have vast armories of yard implements, many motorized. 

Using cars less, and having fewer, is also crucial. Fuel is just one part of that. The way we design cities and buildings to accommodate cars (from roads to parking spaces) and the materials and transportation used to produce them (every few years for many people) are major factors too.


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## Chadoh25 (Dec 28, 2007)

*Rebuilding after Disaster – Greensburg Becomes a Green Town*

*On Friday, May 4, 2007, an EF5 tornado cut a two-mile-wide swath of absolute destruction through Greensburg, Kansas. This was the largest tornado in recorded history, and it reduced Greensburg to rubble. Eleven people were killed in Greensburg that evening, while 22 other tornadoes swirled violently across the state. Every building in Greensburg was damaged or destroyed.

Under such dire circumstances, it would have been easy for the townspeople to give up and walk away. But that’s exactly the opposite of what happened.

Just one week after the tornado, while residents were still surrounded by debris from shattered buildings, 500 people attended a town meeting o figure out how to rebuild their community. Residents came together in a spirit of collaboration and hope — perhaps surprising for people who had lost everything in a single storm.

Neighbors came, too, including Daniel Wallach and Catherine Hart, whose home 35 miles away had escaped an EF4 tornado by only 2 miles that same evening.

The Wallachs wanted to help their neighbors recover from the disaster. “My wife and I took a concept paper about a green initiative to this gathering,” he says. Their concept paper described a new Greensburg — not the town as it once was, but a re-envisioned sustainable community

Social Entrepreneur and Environmentalist

Wallach describes himself as a social entrepreneur. “I have done work as a non profit. I have done business work. I was a student of philosophy. My wife and I ended up in rural Kansas to get away from it all, and moved, quite literally, to the middle of nowhere for the past several years.

“We were both thinking about going back to our own work, and we had some ideas. I have always been an environmentalist, and I was thinking about creating a website related to green sustainability. That was literally a month before the tornado hit.”

The Wallachs, themselves, had experience with loss. Catherine was recovering from a brain tumor, and Daniel suffered the effects of health issues incurred in childhood. Their choice of rural Kansas as a place to recuperate had been deliberate. “Neither one of us was able to work for ten years,” he says. “So, we were tending to our inner environment, if you will, and understanding the connection between that and the external environment.

“Environmental illness is a symptom of being disconnected from the earth. That was what brought us out here to nature.”

The Wallachs felt compelled to reach out to their neighbors in need.

Reinventing the Town’s Identity

While researching the prospects of selling natural fruits and local foods in rural Kansas, over the past several months, Wallach had visited a number of small towns. As is happening across the nation, most small towns in rural Kansas are losing their population — and their identity.

“It is really obvious that a small town that thrives has a distinct identity and a strong community,” he says. “So as I was lying in bed thinking about how to help, I knew that this green initiative potentially could be the identity for this town.”

Yet, he anticipated obstacles. “About 40 years ago, this area, like the rest of politically conservative America became very politicized around environmental issues. And environmentalism became a red state/blue state issue. So I was concerned about that when I went to the town with this concept paper.

“But instead of meeting resistance and skepticism,” he continues, “the first thing I heard was the city administrator and the mayor saying, ‘We want to rebuild it in an environmentally friendly way.’ ”

Even the governor of Kansas was interested in a sustainable future for Greensburg. So the Wallachs presented their proposal to the Governor’s office, gaining “a tremendous amount of momentum and synergy” in the process.

Relying on his nonprofit experience and background in community organizing, Daniel then made a proposal to the mayor of Greensburg, the president of the city council, and the city administrator. “Since they had their hands full, I offered to help spearhead the initiative by establishing this organization,” he says, speaking of the Greensburg GreenTown nonprofit he founded.

“The response was overwhelmingly positive. So we went out and did a huge amount of informational interviewing with people,” he adds. “If it was truly going to be a sustainable community, the folks in the community had to help define that. It was a combination of helping paint a picture of the vision and combining that with feedback from the people about what they wanted and did not want.”

Bridging the Red and the Blue
One thing that Wallach came to understand was that, though “environmentalism” smacked of liberalism for many residents, it was a concept they could fundamentally support — once politics got out of the way.

“For me,” Wallach says, “it became abundantly clear that the people of Greensburg had a tremendous amount to offer to the environmental movement. They were the missing link. We had come to this political stagnation as a result of the politicization of the movement. And if we could re-frame the issue and get the people involved, then we could do incredible things.”

Talking with Wallach, it seems surprising that Kansans would have rejected environmentalism as a “liberal” cause. “I discovered that people out here in rural areas are far more connected to nature and to their roots. Early Kansans lived with the sun,” he says. “They collected rainwater. They were the first to use the windmill. They’re innovative. They’re conservationist. They hate waste. They’re the original recyclers. All of these things make them environmentalists. They won’t call themselves that because it was politicized; yet it is what they are. So, Greensburg GreenTown was my opportunity to help build bridges between the red and the blue.”

Asked to explain how he thinks the environmental issue became so politicized, Wallach says, “It’s about tribalism. The issues become a person’s identity. To be entirely environmentalist — or anti-environmentalist — is actually an identity. So you have to uncouple that and say, ‘You cannot politicize the water. You have as much or more concern for your family or your children and their well-being as anybody, so why let somebody else own these issues?’

“As I became more a part of the community, it became obvious that these people were no different than where I originally came from, and we had a lot of common objectives. My favorite thing about working with people in crisis, or coming out of crisis, is that they are much more open-hearted and connected to their natures.”

Envisioning a New Community

While rural communities around the nation are losing population, and storefronts sit empty, what hope could there be for rebuilding Greensburg?

Greensburg's new community center is LEED certified. Photo: Courtesy Daniel Wallach
“It was a good time for the community to reexamine things,” Wallach says. “One of the things that was often talked about is the fact that, like rural communities elsewhere, with so many elders in the population, Greensburg was dying.

“Agriculture has become so centralized, so mechanized, that there are very few jobs left in it. It is said now that the average farm has to be 2,000 acres to be viable economically. How can you have any kind of community when you’ve got one family every 2,000 acres? It doesn’t work. The people of Greensburg understood that their way of life was dying, and they were clinging to philosophies that were contributing to their demise. So how could that be reversed?

Wallach expects to change that trend by helping support the building of an eco-community that will attract visitors and provide a better way of life for residents of Greensburg.

“When we talk about the green initiative, we are very well embraced by youth. It gives them enthusiasm and a vision of living within a community in the future. For 40 years that hasn’t happened in this community. Young people just moved away. And they didn’t come back, because they couldn’t afford to.”

“What is most significant in this whole thing is that there truly was a community comeback. You have all these different leaders, who normally may be territorial and adversarial, but were very much on the same page. They all got the vision of a modern, green community. However they came to it, they did so.”

The Greensburg Community Center includes energy-efficient features, such as this overhang. Photo: Courtesy Greensburg GreenTown
The town’s businesses and the municipality are eligible for disaster funding, which provides only 75 percent of a building’s previous value before the disaster. Residents who had no insurance were eligible to receive only $26,000. That leaves a huge gap in funding to rebuild — let alone to build with improvements in energy efficiency that cost more up front but save money later on.

“It’s a little hard to be progressive when rebuilding under the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) guidelines,” Wallach says. “But I think, actually, that Greensburg has helped to shift FEMA’s thinking to understand that you need to look at the long-term view and return on investment.

NREL (the National Renewable Energy Laboratory), which is a program of the Department of Energy, is a huge player here, providing technical and planning support. They really helped us shape our vision and get us the resources we needed. Residents, businesses, and municipal entities all had access to the best minds in the world on energy efficiency and design.”

One project funded by NREL is an online map that shows where green building is happening in Greensburg. Wallach adds, “That is kind of a vision of where we want to go. We want to be a virtual community, where people can come, first virtually and then in real life, to an education center where they can learn about technologies, ideas, and concepts of sustainability and green living.”

Greensburg GreenTown

“Greensburg is like a living science museum,” explains Wallach, who serves as the executive director of Greensburg GreenTown. “It is a place where people come and immerse themselves and experience a sustainable community. We have several green buildings: the school, the hospital, a John Deere dealership, and other commercial and municipal buildings. We’re making them like exhibits in a museum that the folks can tour.”

This silo home is a bed and breakfast for visitors to Greensburg. Photo: Courtesy Daniel Wallach
“Although a number of houses are being built sustainably, we didn’t feel like residents would appreciate having frequent tours in their homes,” Wallach says. That sparked an idea.

“We decided to build a chain of eco-homes. The first one is a bed and breakfast, and the plan is to have all of them be lodging options, so people who come to Greensburg can stay in an eco-home.

Our intent is to have a dozen different homes, ultimately, so that people can immerse themselves in a variety of different types of construction and features. They will be showcases of sustainable green living, with each one very different from the next,” he says.

“People are really hungry for a positive sustainable future. If you are thinking about building green, it’s a very cost-effective trip to come to Greensburg and see what you like and don’t like, what works or doesn’t work.

“It would have been so wonderful for us, after the tornado in Greensburg, to be able to travel somewhere and see a community that has come back from disaster in a sustainable way. After any disaster, you’re overwhelmed and preoccupied. It’s just human nature to want to get back to what is familiar, rather than trying something new. We want to provide showcases that people can easily see, then go back to their communities and build, knowing what they are getting.”

Chain of Eco Homes Competition

To raise awareness — and with it, hopefully, funds — for the chain of eco-homes, Greensburg GreenTown issued a challenge to people around the world: Design a sustainable, eco-friendly home using one of three energy-efficient wall systems designated by the committee.

The systems chosen include Insulating Concrete Form (ICF), a sustainable timber-based product from Germany (HIB), or the Enviro-Ment Masonry Unit (EMU) from Virginia Limeworks.

With more than 150 entries posted on the Internet, the public was invited to vote to narrow the field to 10 finalists. The winners have been determined by a national panel of judges. They will be posted on the Chain of Eco-Homes Competition website at 2:00 a.m. Eastern time, October 16.

The Grand Prize winner will receive $10,000. Two Runners-Up will each receive $1,000 in prize money.

While there’s no guarantee that any of the winning home designs will be built in Greensburg, it’s highly likely. Greensburg GreenTown is seeking sponsors to help underwrite the costs of the buildings.

What will Greensburg look like when construction is finished? If progress so far is an indication, it will be a beautiful and sustainable community with a personality all its own.

“What is happening in Greensburg is exciting,” Wallach says. “And we’ll really consider it a success if we are a beacon of hope and inspiration for others to build sustainably and live green.”

Julia Wasson

Blue Planet Green Living (Home Page)

http://www.blueplanetgreenliving.co...r-disaster-–-greensburg-becomes-a-green-town/*


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## andrelot (Aug 6, 2008)

Wow, I'd skipe the "control the sprawl" crap. It's the same all over again.

Just a few hints:

(1) Majority of american people lives in suburbs as Census 2000. 52,3% indeed. Their choice outght to be respected and not treated like it was smoking or drug use.

(2) Space expectations chagend. 50 years ago it was totally acceptable for a family to have just one bathroom and for a daughter and son share a bedroom until they were teenagers (and then, it was usually one bedroom for the boys, other for the girls, never mind an own bedroom for you only if you happen to have same-sex brothers)

(3) Brick-and-mortar constructions costs a lot to be renovated, and use patterns change requiring expensive retroffiting. Comercial properties, especially, are more and more demanding of customization and mofification after each use. Even if a shoes' store just change the brand, usually it implies redoing all the interiors, lighting etc. Just take a look of random business in the 20's and now. Costumers expectations are higher than ever for a shopping experience, not only for a place to buy stuff.

(4) Infill policies are against rightful individual choices of families to live where they want. There is nothing wrong in trying to revitalize downtowns (take your chance), but there is everything wrong trying to "curb" new subsivisions so your "damm-bright" plan to spoil families of they suburban comforts can work. Indeed, is a totalitarian approach do restrict develpoment when less than 8% of total US land area are devoted to ANY kind of urban development. It was done in Communist countris, it is done in some quasi-socialist European countries (I'm living now in one of those, it is terrible in this sense) when it comes to housing, but it has no place in US.

(5) Many people take for granted a single house, with a private lawn or open area, a garden etc. Many people want to live the "vibrancy" of the streets. Build compact neighborhoods for the latter, and suburbs for the former.

(6) Don't try to push an anti-conservative, anti-family and anti-American Dream agenda just because you don't like life as Americans have been choosing to live it since, at least, World War II. I'm not the biggest support for any of those, but I deeply respect their rights to live in the 'burbs no matter what. If you want to change their patterns, build something that can attract them. This is how suburbs drained people from crap inner cities plagued by riots, high prices and blight and gave them a renewed hope of living a good live and raising their children amdist lawns and nice parks, not bullets, pimps and drug dealers.


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## mhays (Sep 12, 2002)

^^ Sure, if your actions don't affect others. But they do. So we have rules. 

Personally, for the US I favor funding priorties and growth management that's more in line with what's typical for capitalist countries, compared to what we have now. (Of course, to you, most of the world is "totalitarian".)

You're not aware of US history apparently....roads and sprawl have been actively encouraged through tax law, higher federal subsidies for certain project types, etc., for many years. Apply equitable treatment and market principles to sprawl and suddenly it's not so "cheap" anymore.


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## kakaching (Dec 3, 2009)

Thanks for the replies.
I checked out Masdar and Greensburg
It's great to see that there are cities starting to change.
Especially in Masdar, their environmental initiatives are very cool but I couldn't find any good pictures.

There's so much wasted plastic, that I think it's great to reuse it into building materials. I really hope that it can be actually done though but I can't find anything made out of Polli-brick.


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## jackhan (Dec 8, 2009)

There is an Expo building being built in Taipei, Taiwan. It will be made out of Polli Bricks. I think it will be about 9 storeys high. There has been a few pictures going around the internet of this expo building. 








This is a picture of the construction right now.









And this is a rendering of what it should look like when it is finished

I'm hoping to see more pictures of this. It could be a new revolutionary thing in architecture.


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## Fuzzy Llama (Jan 24, 2009)

andrelot said:


> (2) Space expectations chagend. 50 years ago it was totally acceptable for a family to have just one bathroom and for a daughter and son share a bedroom until they were teenagers


Nobody says that an apartment in medium-density suburb can't have more than one bathroom. I know that the price talk is totally different in every country, but in Poland with our recently-crazed prices an 100m² apartment with a living room and kitchen space, 3 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms and a balcony cost only a little more than a standard 250m² detached house. But the house is in the middle of nowhere, without any reasonable public transport and hour-long commute times. On the other hand the apartment is placed in neighbourhood which is not totally boring, nearest shop is 3 min by foot, the pub is 10 min and the city centre is 20min by bus. Each day you save 80min on commuting. And don't forget that electricity/water/gas/whateverYouUseForHeating bills are twice as high in the detached house.

And I don't want to forbid anything to anyone - let the people decide. And the people decide, apartments in new developments are sold out before first brick is layed, developers do not moan about recession - a lot people want to live in the city. And nobody will build a detached house suburb in a place where he can build medium rises and make a ton more money out of it.

Of course, detached houses several kilometres from the city are also very popular. That only proves one point - people know where they want to live. And money decides


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## Nouvellecosse (Jun 4, 2005)

andrelot said:


> Wow, I'd skipe the "control the sprawl" crap. It's the same all over again.
> 
> Just a few hints:
> 
> (1) Majority of american people lives in suburbs as Census 2000. 52,3% indeed. Their choice outght to be respected and not treated like it was smoking or drug use.


(1) There's a huge difference between discouraging something and outlawing it. A person who disagrees with sprawl is just as entitled to the right to free speech as a person who likes sprawl is entitled to choose between the different housing options. 

(2) There's a huge difference between respecting someone's right to make a decision and respecting the decision itself. I respect other people's right to make irresponsible decisions like choosing to smoke or to support sprawl, but I definitely don't respect the choices themselves. To get me to respect the actual choice, you'd have to persuade me into believing the decision was a good one, and to do that you'd need to say more than "people like it." We already know people make many choose irresponsible or unhealthful things because they like them. That adds no new dimensions to the discussion.


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## kakaching (Dec 3, 2009)

That looks awesome
totally want to go see it if i can next year.
I went searching around about polli bricks and it seems like quite alot of people are discussing about it.
I think its going to be the next thing if the Expo turns out successful. 
but converting to the use of a new material in construction seems to be a slow process since safety is a big issue.


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## jackhan (Dec 8, 2009)

I think we will have to wait and see how this expo building turns out.
But the process of recycling plastics and turning them into new bottles is a long process.
I'm sure there will be lots more pictures of it since it is in construction now. 
Looking forward to seeing lots more pictures!


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## JPSM (Aug 25, 2009)

Green cities are possible yes....the thing is that they must be slowly built...with sustainable and well planned steps...on bad choice and you can put in jeopardy all the work you had devellopped....

This is not just with recyclable or recycled materials, in fact, this are important parts, yet, you can have a sustainable city without recyclable or recycled materials, take the European monuments, from the medieval ages, for example, all the environmental impact of their built was recovered with the centuries that passed....more important are the correct waste management, increase the amount of electric vehicles, reduce the consumption of fossil fuels...invest un solar pannels, etc....


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