A vertical forest is expected to be completed this year in Milan. There are two tower apartment complexes which contain a total of 400 residential units. The facade of the buildings will be covered with 730 trees, 5,000 shrubs, and 11,000 perennial plants. It is expected to have the same ecological impact as 10,000 square meters of forest.
Aside from fighting smog and producing oxygen, the foliage is expected to provide insulation to the residential units.
It’ll be really cool to see how these trees grow in order to maximize access to sun, water, and nutrients. Also, a step towards a sci-fi solar punk future – I’m in.
I sure hope the structural engineers planned for the buildings to increase in mass as the trees grow.
Well, or else for maintenance labor to keep the trees rigorously trimmed to prevent too much increase in mass. Or both? (The wikipedia article says the engineering team consulted botanists and horticulturists in planning how much weight the buildings could bear, so it seems likely that the fact that trees grow would have come up.)
This is a pretty cool idea regardless and I hope they get it right. I wonder if anyone will do anything like this in New York.
This falls in the “I really hope they do it but I’ll believe it when I see it” category for me.
It’s been up for 2 years, inaugurated in October 2014, and still going strong. It’s won multiple awards.
Sweden is so good at recycling it ran out of trash (x) | follow @the-future-now
It’s amazing what a culture can do when it puts people and the environment ahead of squeezing a few more pennies out of every dollar.
This is so important. Positive outcomes and techniques once shown to be effective can be repeated around the world creating a positive feed back loop. Let’s get stuck in Solarpunks
Please remember that Lush is a fair trade company. This means that all they pay ALL of their workers a livable amount, and don’t take advantage of workers and harvesters in third world countries like many brands do. They test none of their products on animals as well.
Please keep these things in mind! Just know there is a reason that they cannot sell their bath bombs for 99 cents each. Doing so would mean that hard workers are being under paid.
other reasons it’s expensive:
constant checks on their resources – They will drop any company that they are partnered with if they learn that they are gathering ingredients in an inhumane way, harming the environment, or puts their people at risk
charity work – if you’ve ever heard of Charity Pot, it’s called such because 100% of the cost (not proceeds) go to charity. It’s not what’s left over after they’ve paid the workers or bought the ingredients, it’s every single cent.
kitchens instead of factories – They dont have a big warehouse of stock. They don’t have processing plants. What they have are buildings with industrial kitchen equipment, where all products are made by hand.
fighting animal testing – a lot of companies say that they dont do animal testing, but they don’t do anything to prevent animal testing and may use ingredients sourced from animal testing. Lush leads protests, creates bills, and spreads information, as well as only work with those who don’t use animal testing, in order to fight the system
helping their sources- If they find out that something is wrong with one of their companies, they’ll do what they can to fix it. That means, if something is broken, they will fix it, even though it’s just someone that they’re partnered with.
delicate products – everything they sell has an expiration date, because it’s all made out of fresh ingredients and they use as little preservatives and unnatural things as they can. That and bathbombs break, all the time. They can’t sell it if it has any damage larger than a dime.
this is… actually really nice information to know? im too broke to be able to afford their products, so the only access to any info about them i have is either word of mouth or if i were to actually look up information about them.
i always assumed it was some status symbol thing like apple but im always happy to learn that things arent like that!
I’m fairly certain America hinges now on propaganda that everything is okay and we’re still a first world nation when actually, our country is slipping further and further, and we’re really just. The best third world country out here. Not even comparable to most first world countries, so we fucking aren’t one anymore
Sounds like we live in a police state where the rich tax the poor not to feed or protect them but to fund programs and legislature that defunds their resources and encourages them to die. The rich get richer and the middle class shrinks and suffocates while the entire country falls apart because corporate power greed refuses to see the consequences of their actions.
I wish I had the faith to believe what goes around comes around, but I think it’s time to understand that we’re the ones that need to come around and take action. The rich aren’t going to do jack shit for us anymore. Even the rich that care about people on the bottom don’t have the courage to help people en masse
Economically speaking, one of the foundations of a 1st world country is a strong middle class (source, my BBA in Economics and International Business), and it’s been abundantly clear that America’s middle class has been shrinking. Wages have been stagnant since pretty much the 1970′s, American CEO’s wage disparity is the highest in the world when compared to the average of their workers.
Basically, the us *isn’t* a first world country anymore. Our economy may still be one of the highest (I’m not sure if China has overtaken us yet), but our infrastructure is crumbling. Roads and school and bridges are in dire need of repair, our education system is laughable when you see how much money we have available for it. Military spending is out of control, often on things the military doesn’t even need or want. All in the name of continuously soaring profits for the highest echelon of society, who never needed it to begin with.
Here’s some expresses from a recent article about a UN official investigating poverty in the US:
“A United Nations official investigating poverty in the United States was shocked at the level of environmental degradation in some areas of rural Alabama, saying he had never seen anything like it in the developed world.
“I think it’s very uncommon in the First World. This is not a sight that one normally sees. I’d have to say that I haven’t seen this,” Philip Alston, the U.N.’s Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, told Connor Sheets of AL.comearlier this week as they toured a community in Butler County where “raw sewage flows from homes through exposed PVC pipes and into open trenches and pits.”
“Some might ask why a U.N. Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights would visit a country as rich as the United States,“ Alston said. “But despite great wealth in the U.S., there also exists great poverty and inequality.”
Alston also pointed out that the U.S. “has been very keen” on other countries being investigated by the U.N. for civil and human rights issues.
“Now, it’s the turn to look at what’s going on in the U.S.,” Alston said. “There are pretty extreme levels of poverty in the United States given the wealth of the country. And that does have significant human rights implications.”
“The idea of human rights is that people have basic dignity and that it’s the role of the government—yes, the government!—to ensure that no one falls below the decent level,” he said. “Civilized society doesn’t say for people to go and make it on your own and if you can’t, bad luck.””
It turns out that Border Collies are an ideal breed for this specific type of job. Bounding through miles of forest terrain requires not only speed, intelligence, and endurance, but also a willingness to stay focused and not get distracted by wildlife. Border Collies were bred to herd sheep, so they’re not as likely to run after or hurt other animals in the forest.
This system is also more efficient than having people spread the seeds manually. These speedy canines can race through a forest and cover up to 18 miles a day. Humans, on the other hand, can only cover a few miles each day. These pups can scatter over 20 pounds of seeds, depending on the terrain. While robots or drones might be able to disperse seeds too, dogs aren’t as pricey to handle. Most importantly, they leave a lighter carbon footprint.
Francisca and Constanza put special backpacks on the dogs, fill them with native seeds and then it’s off to the races. Once the dogs have emptied out their bags, Francisca and Constanza give them plenty of treats, refill their bags, and release them again to dash around the destroyed forest, sprinkling more seeds in their wake. The end goal of all this, of course, is to restore the damaged ecosystem and have the wildlife return to the forests.
there’s a big difference between “food waste” as in “farmers destroy tons of food to avoid exceeding quotas” or “supermarkets throw away this much edible food because it doesn’t sell”
and “food waste” as in “it is not actually within the capacity of humans to perfectly predict and track household food consumption, so a certain amount of food per household inevitably goes bad and has to be thrown out every year”
the idea that food waste is the product of thoughtless consumers rather than corporate greed is really insidious
Truuuuuuuueeeeeee, other large sources of food waste:
– Restaurants. The fact that the rich expect restaurants to have every article on their menu available at all times means every restaurant has far more food than they need and throws a lot of that shit out.
– Big inhuman organisations with intense bureaucracy. Think hospitals, schools, prisons, refugee camps and the army. Organisations that provide food for a very large group of people but are not allowed (and/or can’t be bothered) to give that food away if there is too much of it.
Some of the most spectacular food waste I’vepersonally witnessed was an army training camp that threw away 250 sealed lunchboxes because the training ended one day early, and a refugee center than threw away over 100 loaves of bread while people in the center where hungry because regulations stated that every refugee got two slices of bread for breakfast.
And I’m supposed to feel guilty about half a tomato rotting in the garbage? Nah, that’s not food waste. That’s just life.
Shifting the guilt to the consumer is an intentional marketing ploy. The same was done when soda companies switched from bottles to cans
Originally soda machines had a place for you to return your bottle which the company would collect, sanitize, and re-use. Consumers paid a deposit when they bought the soda, then got it back when they dropped the empty bottle in the slot. Bars and restaurants also had to pay the deposit and redeem the bottles for a refund
Then companies decided it’d be cheaper to use disposable aluminum cans. Soda is something people often consumed in public places like parks and in front of stores. Increased public trash led to a litter problem. Environmentalists pressured the soda companies to fix the problem by bringing back the deposit and recycling programs. Instead, the companies started anti-liter campaigns that placed the guilt wholly on the consumer
This was decades before curb-side recycling existed. Recycling plants were few and far between, and consumers would have to save up cans then cart them to one of these facilities to recycle them, which few individuals had the time and transpiration to do. The ad campaigns led to people demanding more public garbage cans, which did reduce liter, but those were purchased and maintained at city expense and the contents went to landfills. It also led to the general public believing littering and landfill problems rested squarely on the shoulders of consumers even though the corporations had a perfectly good recycling system that they could have continued
Big business wants you to blame yourself and each other for problems they caused, and they’d rather spend money on guilt shifting ad campaigns than use that money for something good
I was actually never told any of the stuff in that last addition.
wupacing 