boek Duurzaam bouwen in Vlaanderen

Source: DO Vlaanderen

Het Departement Duurzame Ontwikkeling van de Vlaamse Overheid heeft een boek gepubliceerd waarin 10 duurzame bouwprojecten beschreven worden die op de ene of andere manier door hen financieel ondersteund werden.
Het is een mooi Voorbeeldboek Duurzaam Bouwen in Vlaanderen - Momentopname in 10 projecten geworden.

Klimaatverandering

Klimaatverandering is een interessante blog met allerlei berichten over de klimaatverandering geschreven door Bart Verheggen, een Nederlandse atmosferische wetenschapper. Een goed startpunt in duidelijk verstaanbare taal voor wie nog vragen heeft over wat we wel en nog niet weten over de klimaatverandering. 

Container gardening

Another untraditional form of gardening or farming, apart from urban farming, is container gardening or vertical gardening. There are many initiatives and some are less sustainable than they seem, as is shown in the Low-tech Magazine. But on this blog, the Belgian honorary professor Willem Van Cothem, who is a specialist in desertification, poverty and dryland gardening, tries to collect all kinds of interesting and useful information on container gardening.

Urban Farming examples

Source: Potage-Toit

New York with its more than 600 projects, is leader in the field of urban farming. Jan Vannoppen, managing director of VELT, the Flemish organisation for ecological living and gardening, was in NY from Octobre 3-7 to visit some of these projects. He blogged about his visit on MO (in Dutch).
More information on urban farming projects (mainly in the US) can be found on the website of Urban Farming.
Examples of window farming can be found here. Examples of urban farming in Belgium can be found on the website of Greenmarx or in the blog of Potage-Toit (in French and Dutch) about an urban farming project in the centre of Brussels.

The AI PassivHaus in Scotland

Source: AI PassivHaus

The AI Passivhaus in Scotland was the first certified passive house in England (in 2009). It partly is a renovation of a barn and partly a new, underground building to reduce the visual and environmental impact on the landscape to a minimum. Very interesting is their extensive blog on the construction process with a huge amount of pictures.

Betonkernactivering voor woningen

BlueCasco is een Nederlands concept voor prefabwoningen waarin betonkernactivering voorzien wordt in de wanden. Een modelwoning is gebouwd in Lelystad en wordt gemonitord door de TU Eindhoven. Meer informatie vind je in dit artikel van Duurzaam Gebouwd.

How to save food without using a fridge?

Source: Savefoodfromthefridge

The Korean designer Jihyun Riyou is inspired by the traditional oral knowledge of saving food without using a fridge, knowledge that has been used in her country in the past. She designed a whole system to save fruit, potatoes, herbs, vegetables, ...without using a fridge. All details can be found on her site. She also keeps a blog to share her ideas and where she asks everyone to share his/her knowledge.

A nice view on our virtual water consumption

Angela Morelli is an young information designer and she made a very nice infographic on how much virtual water we consume every day. Virtual water is not the water we visibly use at home to bath, clean and cook, but the water that has been used to produce all the food and stuff we consume every day. Just scroll down to enroll the whole story.
Other infographics can be found on her website.

Adaptive reuse of buildings

Source: WebUrbanist

As the number of existing buildings is already huge and most buildings do not perform well environmentally, adaptive reuse of buildings might be one of the ways to improve the environmental performance of the built environment.
WebUrbanist presents some examples of amazing adaptive reuse and of building conversion projects.

Principles for nearly zero energy buildings

source: Ecofys

The recast of the Energy Performance of Buildings Directive (EPBD) in 2010 introduced nearly zero energy buildings (nzeb) as a future requirement for all new buildings in the EU from 2021 on (public buildings from 2019). In this frame ECOFYS and the Danish Research Building Institute made a study on the principles for nearly zero energy buildings.
Report and summary can be found on the website of Ecofys or on the website of BPIE (Building Performance Institute Europe).

Building with bamboo

Simon Velez, Colombian architect, Marcelo Villegas, engineer, Oscar Hidalgo, architect, they all discovered the opportunities of bamboo as a building material.
As Simon Velez says in the video below: 'We should combine mineral materials, such as concrete, with vegetal materials, such as bamboo. We are too much carnivorous architects and should be more vegetarian architects."

Simon Velez and Marcelo Villegas also concentrate on other materials such as straw bales, poured earth and on simplified structures.

Other examples of bamboo construction can be found at Chiangmai Life Construction.

The Blue Economy

The Blue Economy is going a step further than the Green Economy. 
According to Gunther Pauli, founder of Ecover and author of 'The Blue Economy', the Green Economy leads to green solutions that are more expensive than the traditional ones, thus only feasible for the happy few (the rich ones).
The Blue Economy aims at looking for solutions that are both sustainable and affordable.
The Zero Energy Research Institute (ZERI) has been set up as a world wide network of researchers and entrepreneurs searching for this kind of solutions. Already 99 cases have been collected and every week a new case is presented.

 

Energy Cities' 30 proposals for the energy transition of cities and towns

In the framework of the Energy Cities' Annual Rendezvous 2012, 30 mayors from 30 European countries made 30 proposals for the energy transition of their cities and towns. With these proposals they want to showcase a collection of groundbreaking practices to the Rio +20 UN Conference on Sustainable Development.
Their video message to Rio +20 can be found here.

C2C Islands

  

The Cradle to Cradle Islands project was an Interreg IVB North Sea Region Project with 22 partners from six countries around the North Sea.
Main goal was to develop innovative solutions in the field of energy, water and materials using C2C principles as a guide.
The project just came to its end. All presentations and conclusions can be found on the project website.

Smart cities inspiration blog

Thuis in de stad (= Home in the city): an interesting and inspirational blog with very distinctive items on urban sustainability (urban farming, sustainable mobility, childfriendly cities and so much more).
Both in Dutch and English 

Maatstaf Duurzaam Wonen en Bouwen

De nieuwe Vlaamse Maatstaf Duurzaam Wonen en Bouwen: duurzame woningbouw staat online. De maatstaf wil bouwteams een handleiding geven om duurzaamheid te integreren in het hele bouwproces. Het kan zowel voor nieuwbouw als voor renovatie worden toegepast, voor individuele woningen, groepswoningen en appartementen.
De maatstaf moet nog aan de Vlaamse Regering worden voorgelegd ter goedkeuring, maar staat nu toch al online ter beschikking.
Het behandelt 9 thema's: (1)management, (2) transport, (3) water, (4) landgebruik en ecologie, (5) vervuiling, (6) materiaal en afval, (7) energie, (8) gezondheid, comfort en sociale waarde en (9) innovatie.