A great series on the recycling industry in China from the writer of Shanghai Scrap. We need to build a closed-loop material economy, and there are pieces of it around today. This is one of them. Mountains of fist-sized shards of shredded cars, sorted manually by women who are earning more than your average Chinese college grad. Amazing photos.
Category: linkstream
A running log of all the links/bookmarks I share.
Groceries at -19C
Now this is winter biking. Cold and sunny… and three feet of snow that isn’t going anywhere in Edmonton, Canada. From Miss Sarah Chan.
Location Efficiency and Housing Type
According to this EPA study, regardless of the type of housing, living in an area with good transit access saves more energy than building a “green home”. Of course, living in a mixed use, transit accessible apartment that’s also energy efficient uses the least energy, but it’s important to realize how limited the potential for cost-effective energy efficiency is in a sprawling suburban context.
A Weekend Bike Tour to Fort Collins
I’m organizing an overnight bike tour from Boulder to Ft. Collins and back the first weekend in April (weather permitting of course, who knows what it will do). If you’ve got route suggestions or know anyone in Ft. Collins that might be interested in letting some weary cyclists camp in their backyard for a night and take showers… we could cook them dinner or take them out as thanks! And if you know anyone who might be interested in giving bike touring a bite-sized try, let them know.
Population density vs. cycling rate
David Hembrow looks at the correlation between population density and cycling rate for a range of cities. Or rather, he points out the remarkable lack of correlation. Clearly there’s an intrinsic relationship between population (# of people) the distances people need to travel to access that population, and the density of the population, but even for cities with densities comparable to the US (1000-2500 people/km^2) cycling can be a very convenient mode of transport.
Activate the Future
BMW is running an ad campaign on the future of mobility. Of course, they call it a “documentary”. It’s amazing how close they come to imagining a future in which we don’t use cars in cities. But of course, since they’re a car company, they can’t quite get there. The fundamental attribute of cities that makes them work — density — is also what makes them incompatible with cars.
Bidder 70 goes on trial
Tim DeChristopher goes on trial Monday. He faces 10 years in prison and $750,000 in fines for punking the last-minute auction of federal oil and gas leases in southern Utah in the last days of the Bush administration. The auctions were later determined to be illegal. He will not be allowed to use a “necessity” defense, or even mention his reasons for disrupting the auction. If found guilty, he should be pardoned.
Why Isn’t Wall Street in Jail?
Nobody from Wall St. but Bernie Madoff is going to jail. No wonder the banksters continue their trillion dollar white collar crime spree. They and their regulators are one in the same. Favorite quote from a congressional staffer: “You put Lloyd Blankfein in pound-me-in-the-ass prison for one six-month term, and all this bullshit would stop, all over Wall Street. That’s all it would take. Just once.” Meanwhile we jail a mom in Ohio for trying to send her kid to a better school across town.
Car Free Kid Questions
When your 3 year old asks ‘Mom, can we get the kind of car that we keep at our house?’ What do you say? Which of the motivations can be explained well to a 7 year old? If some of your reasons for not driving are environmental, it’s hard to avoid the difficult question of judging other people for their behaviors. (via No Car Go)
The Selfish Automobile
A good overview of the cost of cars in terms of money, space, and time at Planetizen. Transportation costs are already unaffordable (>20% of household income) for the lowest income 40% of the US, and drivers only pay a minority of automotive costs directly. Over the last half of the 20th century, the proportion of household income dedicated to transportation doubled. Cars use ~20x as much spacetime (s*m^2) as bikes for the same commute, and ~200x as much as a pedestrian. Interestingly the direct car costs mentioned are only about half what AAA estimates ($4100 vs. $8500 per year).