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Lifecycle Building Challenge 2
June 18, 2008 Post a Comment
Urban Habitat Chicago is a co-sponsor for the Lifecycle Building Challenge 2, so please check out this great competition, help spread the word, and be part of an innovative solution.
The challenge
This free national, web-based competition invites engineers, designers, architects, planners, contractors, builders, educators and students in any field to submit innovative ideas related to deconstruction — creating buildings that can be easily taken apart so that you can reuse the building materials.
Enter your innovative designs and ideas!
Register and submit your idea before July 31, 2008.
Objectives
- Create designs that facilitate local building materials reuse
- Consider the full lifecycle of building materials—design through deconstruction and reuse
- Focus on quality and creativity of designs and concepts
- Develop strategies that maximize materials recovery
- Reduce the overall embodied energy and greenhouse gas emissions of building materials through reuse
- Decrease environmental and economic costs
- Address real world issues
Learn more
Check out the website for more information!
Why we’re a sponsor
Urban Habitat Chicago is sponsoring this competition because we believe it helps demonstrating the viability of sustainable concepts and practices in urban environments.
See other related work we’ve done:
Why Cloth Diapers?
April 3, 2008 Post a Comment
Why parents should chose cloth vs. disposable diapers
We as parents or parents-to-be need to look to our past for answers to today’s problems.
How did we get here?
What has happened in our lifetime that has made the world worse off and what can we do about it?
Every new baby needs diapers to tackle the job of collecting their messy waste. In the days of our grandmothers and our grandmother’s mothers you never needed to call reusable diapers “cloth diapers.” You’d just call them diapers. Introduced during my lifetime came disposable diapers and every year less and less parents opted for cloth while more and more endured the extra expenses lining the pockets of diaper-producing corporations for the sake of convenience. Was this a convenient choice for our Earth? No, it was so very harmful.
Today as I see in the faces of the many couples who take my cloth diapering classes that things are beginning to change for the better. More and more parents are taking the cloth diaper plunge despite the worries of their non environmentalist friends and families. They get asked ignorant questions like “How much work do you want when you have a new baby?” “Why add the extra work it takes to use cloth diapers?” “Won’t your house smell?”
Introducing Lisa Joy Rosing
March 3, 2008 1 Comment
I am going to be writing a guest blog series for Urban
Habitat Chicago. My environmental focus is on
reducing trash, returning to the methods used before
disposable products were invented, “reusables” and
diet.