If you’ve been taking your home green, you know how ideas can feed off each other. Someone gets picky about paper recycling; someone else becomes the food waste arbiter; pretty soon everyone has their eco-role and the household’s carbon footprint is shrinking.
Kimpton Hotels and Restaurants realized early on that green grows like that. The hospitality chain, with roots in San Francisco, has a history of putting eco-friendly ideas in place. Even before green hotel or green restaurant designations were developed, Kimpton was experimenting with eco-friendly practices at its San Francisco properties, such as the Hotel Triton, where motion sensors turn off lights and 60 percent of the waste gets recycled.
The Department of Energy announced $10 million has been awarded to 16 cities for 40 new Solar America Cities Special Projects. The funds, made through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, will enable the cities to increase solar energy use in their communities through innovative programs and policies that the government believes can be replicated across the nation.
The cities chosen for these awards came from the group of 25 large U.S. cities that are part of the DOE’s Solar America Cities program, which recognizes the participating cities as partners highly committed to solar technology adoption at the local level. Those cities already have been given millions of dollars in funds and technical assistance to accelerate solar adoption.
By Eric Thomas
SAN FRANCISCO (KGO) — How would you like to have all the benefits of a backyard vegetable garden without having to do all the weeding, trimming and labor yourself? A San Francisco company is tapping into the growing number of people who want their food grown locally, but with someone else providing the elbow grease. >> Read the full story
San Francisco-based Wells Fargo said this past week that its business customers have made enough deposits on via the Internet that they surpassed $1 trillion during the year’s second quarter.
As of May 1, Wells Fargo business customers – excluding those from the former Wachovia Corporation – had electronically deposited 468 million-plus checks worth $1,003,355,000, according to a news release.
Somewhere in between the sleep-away camps, beach excursions and baseball games of summer, kids and parents alike generally see the appeal of the sand-free floors and refrigerated air of a good museum. Institutions across the country know this is a great time to squeeze some education into kid-friendly, entertaining exhibitions; here’s a list of some of the best nature-oriented attractions for vacationers who’ve felt a bit too much heat this month.
I’m currently the construction manager for Sustainable Spaces in San Francisco. Sustainable Spaces is a home performance retrofitter that offers turn-key solutions for homeowners to improve the health, comfort and energy efficiency of their homes.
The first step of our process is a GreenUP, a comprehensive home energy assessment conducted by Home Performance Specialists trained in building science. This results in a personalized roadmap of each home, which then guides our specially trained construction crews on how to most effectively retrofit the home’s heating, cooling and ventilation systems.
My role is to work with construction crews and our clients during the construction phase to ensure that each job runs smoothly, our crews can work safely, and that every solution performs optimally and every client is satisfied with the work completed.
How it helps:
Our clients, homeowners, feel the benefit of our work first. Depending on what work was performed they will typically lower their energy bills, improve indoor air quality and occupant health, and will live more comfortably in their homes.
Learning not to waste – whether it’s food, electricity or water – is not only good in these economic times, but even more important, it’s beneficial for the environment.
The Nalgene Least Wasteful City Study, released this week, ranks the country’s 25 largest metropolitan areas on wasteful behavior. San Francisco led the group with the least wasteful habits, while Atlanta ranked at the bottom.
Nalgene’s least wasteful city study, which was produced from a survey of 3,750 Americans in the top 25 largest cities that sought to probe their “mindset”, asking them about their green habits like whether they used public transportation and reusable grocery bags or composted and reused containers — resulted in San Francisco taking top honors as the most mindfully-least-wastefully green city:
Keetsa is a San Francisco-based sleep store that wants to challenge the old traditional ways of buying a mattress with new types of products and a new way of doing business.
Photo: Green Apple Network
From Green Right Now Reports
Green Apple Festival and Earth Day Network have released the 2009 line up for the free “Green Apple Thank You Concerts” for volunteers in major cities across the country over Earth Day Weekend (April 17 through 19).
Performers at the flagship event “Earth Day on the National Mall” in [...]
Sony Electronics is inviting Bay Area residents to recycle any brand of outdated electronics by bringing them to a drive-up recycling collection event on March 28 from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. at the Shoreline Amphitheater in Mountain View.
Drivers of the first 2,000 cars to drop off unwanted electronics will receive a voucher for a Sony product valued at $100, which can be redeemed at Sony Style stores at the Valley Fair or Stanford shopping centers, according to a press release.
The 