Chinquapin Environmental Studies

This is meant for College dormitories,but we can pull quite a bit from this.

These are several ways that we can conserve water here on campus.

How to set up programs to reduce your carbon footprint

Changing behavior one small step at a time

The facebook page for a lot of sustainability projects in Houston. check it out.

"The Shell Center creates an interdisciplinary program of research, outreach and education to address actions that can be taken to ensure the sustainable development of living standards, interpreted broadly, to encompass all factors affecting the quality of life including environmental resources. It supports the efforts of Rice University's faculty, staff and students to better our planet's economy, society and environment."

I think it would be great to collaborate in the studies with Rice. I also think that we could easily get in contact with a current student so they could come talk to us about their sustainability project.

I think that having a speaker would be good. And since it's so close by it is very convenient that we could personally go to the campus and maybe even sit in on one of their lectures or talks over this project.

This website features a lot of the new significant Architectural works. This page is full of all the works with the tag of sustainability.

Wow! This architecture is amazing! It goes perfectly with what we were talking about in glass and some of the ideas we mentioned, for example building buildings with solar panels or adding solar panels to buildings that already exist. I wonder if we could build a building that will make the green house better off. For example somehow collect rainfall to where we could reuse it to water the plants. Just an idea! :)

These are so cool! I think that if we take ideas from each one of them them we can create another building in Chinquapin (just like the green duplex). One step at a time we can begin to make Chinquapin a much greener place.

This article is about some research being done at MIT to see how it might be possible to use microbes lining cow intestines to break down cellulose and lignin into sugar and make fuel from that. Such compounds are found in grass and wood chips, consequently MIT also looked into termites but they proved to be too small to generate any significant data.

This research sounds amazing but I couldn't help but looking at the poor cow. Part of what sustainability is about is helping the environment and that includes animals. Even though this would be awesome for the atmosphere, they require a lot of enzymes for this fuel to work. This means more cows I believe, correct me if I'm wrong.

Well yea, poor cows, but we would have to think that there are tons of cow guts that I'm sure that is just thrown away. It sounds gross but might as well use what is being thrown away. One thing that came to my mind was that in the long run if Chinquapin decides to also have hows that we would eat, what better than use the guts from them. It won't be much but I'm sure that we could also contact the slaughter house (and I'm pretty sure they kill a good number of cows per day).

This is more research. At UC Berkley, they found a way to engineer bacteria that make fuel such as diesel by themselves. Though the research is still going on to make it more productive.

This sounds very interesting but how large scale do you think it could become?

This website lists the grades that colleges receive for their sustainability on campus.

These architects have work together to create sustainable homes.

Houston gives an options of how to save electricity.