Today, a booming economy should be looked at as a savior. But for China, it’s also a burden. That’s because more factories, people, agriculture, and entertainment all require extreme uses of water.

Sherwood Design Engineers hopes to combat this problem within our city-scale project in Langfang, located in Northern China.  We have developed a master plan for a balanced water cycle, which would improve water quality, mitigate further aquifer depletion, and regenerate wildlife habitat in the Northern China Plain. We hope that this plan will set the precedent for all cities throughout China.

Sherwood has recommended that the Northern China Plain eliminate imported water from the South-North Water Diversion Project (see http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/7864390.stm). This project includes eastern, central and western routes that will divert water from China’s Yangtze River to the parched north.  There are many issues related to this plan, including financial and environmental.  A few of these problems are tremendous water shortage in the form of droughts as well as sinking due to over pumping from its aquifers. The new balanced water cycle plan would reduce aquifer pumping and would allow for groundwater to recharge from natural infiltration, recycled water, and diverted peak storm flows.

You can read about China’s water shortages here:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/15/AR2010031503564.html

Stanford’s Center for Sustainable Development & Global Competitiveness invites you to a special forum:

Providing Environmental Services in China

Wednesday July 14, 2010; 6 to 8:00PM
James H. Clark Center Auditorium, James H. Clark Center
Campus Drive West, Stanford University

Speakers:
* Margaret Wong, President and CEO, McWong Environmental and Energy Group. Environmental & Energy Project Opportunities in China.
* Bry Sarte, Principal/Founder Sherwood Design Engineers. Regenerative Urbanism: City-Scale Sustainable Water and Energy Strategies in China.
* Peter Haase, Principal Engineer, Fall Creek Engineering. Rural Wastewater Management in China: Program Development and Sustainability Strategies.

As China rapidly develops the country is devoting increasing resources and efforts to mitigating and preventing environmental damages, and improving environmental quality. Our speakers will discuss their China experiences, and the opportunities and challenges in bringing and adapting Western technology and expertise to China. There will be a brief reception after the forum.

Directions/maps
Questions?—contact Duc Wong, 650-725-2390

As we mentioned previously, Sherwood’s John Leys was invited to speak in Ottawa last week on the topic of alternatives to the Lansdowne Live project. Here’s a nice writeup of the event in the Ottawa Citizen, including this mention of Sherwood:

John Leys, of Sherwood Engineering, an American firm with experience in developing brownfield sites said it wouldn’t take long to clean contaminated soil.

He pointed to the McGill University Health Centre in Montreal where it took 15 months to remove 700,000 tonnes of soil from a 43-acre site — three times as big as Bayview.

Controversy has been brewing in Ottawa over a proposal to turn a brownfield site into a stadium, to be called Lansdowne Live. John E. Martin, an Ottawa businessman, has invited Sherwood Engineers to join a group of politicians, government officials, architects, developers and community leaders to a private breakfast meeting this Thursday, Aug. 27, to discuss the situation. Sherwood will be presenting a case study based on our experience turning a brownfield site into a stadium in San Francisco. We will let keep you updated about the project as the dialogue continues.

Daylighting urban streams has long made sense aesthetically, but now the environmental, traffic calming, and air pollution benefits can be quantified based on new studies of the famous Cheonggyecheon running through downtown Seoul.

From the New York Times:

Cities from San Antonio to Singapore have been resuscitating rivers and turning storm drains into streams. In Los Angeles, residents’ groups and some elected officials are looking anew at buried or concrete-lined creeks as assets instead of inconveniences, inspired partly by Seoul’s example.

By building green corridors around the exposed waters, cities hope to attract affluent and educated workers and residents who appreciate the feel of a natural environment in an urban setting.

Environmentalists point out other benefits. Open watercourses handle flooding rains better than buried sewers do, a big consideration as global warming leads to heavier downpours. The streams also tend to cool areas overheated by sun-baked asphalt and to nourish greenery that lures wildlife as well as pedestrians.

But four years after the stream was uncovered, city officials say, the environmental benefits can now be quantified. Data show that the ecosystem along the Cheonggyecheon (pronounced chung-gye-chun) has been greatly enriched, with the number of fish species increasing to 25 from 4. Bird species have multiplied to 36 from 6, and insect species to 192 from 15.

The recovery project, which removed three miles of elevated highway as well, also substantially cut air pollution from cars along the corridor and reduced air temperatures. Small-particle air pollution along the corridor dropped to 48 micrograms per cubic meter from 74, and summer temperatures are now often five degrees cooler than those of nearby areas, according to data cited by city officials.

And even with the loss of some vehicle lanes, traffic speeds have picked up because of related transportation changes like expanded bus service, restrictions on cars and higher parking fees.

“We’ve basically gone from a car-oriented city to a human-oriented city,” said Lee In-keun, Seoul’s assistant mayor for infrastructure, who has been invited to places as distant as Los Angeles to describe the project to other urban planners.

There was much excitement last summer with the passage of Senate Bill 1258 (Lowenthal) in July of 2008. The bill called for the California Department of Housing and Community Development (DHCD) to draft new standards for graywater use (note that the spelling is generally “gray” in the US and “grey” in the UK)  in CA that will probably take effect in 2011. Of particular excitement was the explicit mention of “indoor and outdoor uses”.

For close to 2 decades, graywater reuse has been regulated by Appendix G in the CA Plumbing Code with the California State Water Resources Control Board having ultimate administrative authority. The only express reuse application noted in the UPC is an underground irrigation distribution field, which is configured in an eerily similar fashion to a septic leach field. While there is an ‘alternative methods and means’ section in Appendix G, the permitting process proved so cumbersome and expensive that there are only a few permitted graywater systems in all of California, while there are hundreds and likely thousands of unpermitted systems.

The DHCD is in the process of developing and adopting new code to govern the reuse of graywater in California. SB 1258 calls for stakeholder input, which is critical because the DHCD has limited experience dealing with this issue. Unfortunately, the DHCD chose the International Association of Plumbing and Mechanical Officials’ (IAPMO) Chapter 16, which is more restrictive than Appendix G, as the starting point for this new legislation.

However, the stakeholder input process has met with some success in evolving IAPMO’s standards. Lara Allen of the advocacy group Greywater Guerillas summarized the following highlights of the new draft:

1. Washing machines are exempt from permits for residential use as long as they follow specified guidelines.
2. Mulch basins are a legal way to infiltrate greywater (before gravel was specified that is mined from river beds - mulch is wood chips and can be sustainably generated locally)
3. “Simple systems” are defined in the new code and there is language that could lead to local interpretation of exempting these systems from a permit. We still urge HCD to go further and exempt “simple systems” from permitting.

The legislation is still in draft form, and the code writers could make it either better or worse, so interested parties can participate in the ongoing stakeholder input process to encourage the DHCD officials to write an even more user-friendly code. Check out this web site for opportunities to become involved.

There is a critical paradigm shift that needs to occur among graywater regulators so that application systems are not seen as close cousins to leach fields, but rather as efficient irrigation distribution systems.

There are a lot of interesting web sites tracking these developments. Art Ludwig of Oasis maintains a great web site that tracks the history of graywater legislation in California. Check it out here.

Speaking at a conference organised by his Foundation for the Built Environment, Prince Charles said slums like Dharavi, featured in SlumDog Millionaire, offer a better model than western architecture for housing booming urban populations, reports the Guardain reports.

Slums, shanti towns, and informal settlements have environmentally and socially sustainable attributes including using local materials, walkable neighbourhoods, and a mix of employment and housing. Prince Charles described this as “an underlying intuitive grammar of design that is totally absent from the faceless slab blocks that are still being built around the world to ‘warehouse’ the poor”.

A vegetable oil powered car won the race from the Bay Area to Las Vegas. (New York Times)

• A race from San Francisco to Las Vegas has a twist - all cars start with just one gallon of a fuel of their choice and they must scavange for the rest of their fuel on their home made vehicles.  A vegetable oil fueled car won the race, where the only other finisher (only 5 vehicles started) was a wood burning car.
• The New York City Parks Department, which managed Shea Stadium, is removing bathroom and lighting fixtures for use at other Parks Department facilities, among other items, prior to demolition of the stadium. (via greenbuildingsNYC)
• Toyota won a fuel efficiency challenge last week in a race in the UK, with its Yaris 1.4D-4D (diesel) car achieving 70.49 MPG for the 400 mile race. The best gasoline car mileage was the Toyota Aygo with 68.6 MPG. Too bad neither of the vehicles are available here in the US.
• Global warming is creating a negative feedback loop by reducing the amount of water in peat bogs, leading them to dry out and decompose, which thereby releases more carbon to the air.
• Check out the solar potential for your home easily with this map (if you’re in North America that is…)
• After the energy crisis in the 1970s, a lot of money was invested finding new fossil fuel resources, but just a few million were granted to a research group in Berkeley to reduce energy demands. They realized widows were a big energy sink and basically created the market for low-emissivity windows, paving the way for the glass towers of today.
• The UK announced an employment program that will train workers to insulate attics, in a new program called the Conservation Corps.
• Michael Pollan writes an open letter to the next President about how to reform food laws so that Americans gain a healthier diet, reduced dependence on foreign oil, and greater national security.
• The Vietnamese catfish has been having a huge impact on the American catfish industry.  But are they on the same playing field from an environmental and food safety standpoint?
• A vast natural gas reserve is located below New York, Pennsylvania and West Virginia, but accessing it may cause contamination of the water supply.
• Traffic could be impacting our health in one way not many of us would suspect. A study done in San Francisco showed that 1 in 6 residents of San Francisco may be suffering from higher stress rates from the increased noise levels due to traffic, and that puts them at risk for heart disease, high blood pressure and other stress-related illnesses.
• Gainsville, Florida, may adopt feed-in tariffs, which would guarantee to buy all power produced by solar PV systems at a set price for the next 20 years, creating a more stable market for solar power.  This program is an alternative to a net metering program, which is more expensive to administer.

• Corruption seems to be accompanying the rise in wind turbines across rural New York.
• And New York City might be getting a boom in wind power, hopefully without the corruption, as Mayor Bloomberg tries to bring wind turbines to the top of bridges and skyscrapers.
• Two solar power plants are going to be built in California with a combined generation of 800 MW, similar to a large coal fired power plant.  Two private companies are building them for power to be sold to Pacific Gas and Electric.
• California is close to passing the nation’s first anti-sprawl legislation.
• Lance Armstrong’s house in Austin uses 38 times the amount of water as the average household.
• Courts reject EPA’s attempts to limit states’ abilities to pass more stringent standards than the EPA with regards to monitoring industrial emissions.
• An area over the size of New York State is devoted to lawns and golf courses in the US, using on average 1/3 of all residential water.
• Australia may begin investing heavily in geothermal power, as it looks to have some very significant resources in that area.  And NPR gets into the nitty gritty of what’s the deal with geothermal power.
• A lowdown on energy saving power strips.
• A firsthand account of starting a worm bin.
• The Queen of England’s Scottish summer house has gone off the grid, using micro-hydro to provide power and converting the boiler to run off of wood chips, as well as many other green innovations.
• Halfway through the Olympics, blue skies start to appear.

Image of the Queensboro Bridge topped with turbines, as imagined by artist Andrea Polli

• Delta goes green by eliminating their paper newsletter. Not so impressive, but they already have an on-board recycling program and have many options to allow customers to purchase carbon offsets. Jet Blue is going green too, attempting to do energy saving things like using one engine instead of two during taxiing, using ground power instead of engines for power at the gate, and eliminating paper tickets.
• There is some improvement in sulfur dioxide emissions and water quality measures in China, but overall, pollution has increased over last year.
• Climate bill dies in the Senate - we’ll have to wait until next administration for any kind of movement on the cap and trade issue.
• Alain Robert scaled the NY Times Building in NYC as a protest against global warming for World Environment Day. He was detained by police on the 52nd floor. I was alerted to the action by swarming helicopters since our office is across town.  Another man climbed the building later that afternoon.
• Adnam’s brewing company is creating “East Green”, a carbon neutral beer available in the UK only. Among the carbon saving features are using locally grown barley and reusing steam from the brewing process for the next batch.
• If you have to have a lawnmower (that isn’t a push model), follow these instructions to convert it to solar powered.
• A portion of Times Square got turned into a park on Thursday in honor of World Environment Day.
• It is more efficient to turn off your car than to idle if you are going to be idling more than 10 seconds.
• Guerrilla gardening greens up pockets around New York City.
• GM is closing four of its truck and SUV plants due to rising gas prices. And they may cancel production of the Hummer.
• Some major American corporations have been meeting regularly with environmental groups for the past couple of years to develop proposals for federal limits on carbon emissions.
• Best Buy is testing an electronics disposal program at their stores.
• Fiji Water is trying to green their image, despite being criticized for promoting bottled water, from Fiji at that.
• Price does matter, and as a result, driving miles have gone down an estimated 4.3% nationally over this time last year.

Photo of a successful guerrilla gardening effort in London from The Guerrilla Gardening Homepage