Renewsable Energy Digest - File #11
Living Walls clean air, cool buildings
NASA takes plants into space to help clean the air -- it's cheaper and more sensible than air conditioning."
Richard Sabin Biotecture
Most fascinating story this morning is an older one that I somehow missed last week - vegetecture - the art of building living walls on buildings. Highlighted in a feature story on Green Walls at CNN, the new architectural trend integrates plants and gardens into the actual structure of new buildings. The vertical gardens are more than just a fad, according to their proponents - green walls can lower energy costs, reduce noise pollution, cool buildings, improve air quality and boost morale in tenants and residents of the buildings.
Even more important, the vertical walls of vegetation can be planted with plants important to local agriculture - feed crops, food crops and the like. And because green, living plants clean the air, if the trend to include green plants as integral parts of a city's architecture, it could become a vital part of air pollution control.
Other renewable energy news...
- EU slaps duties on US biodiesel imports
- North Carolina debates banning mountaintop wind turbines
- Al Gore speaks on climate change at Oxford
- Obama administration delivers $288 million for weatherization
- First national radio show on renewable energy biz launches July 13
- U.S. Secretaries Chu and Locke to travel to China, discuss renewable energy
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