If you’re in any way part of the American environmental movement, you love and admire Interface’s Ray Anderson, like I do. He’s been the leading voice in putting our carpet industry on a sustainable course, as everyone will admit. His thoughtful, provocative, and evocative speeches have inspired designers, architects, manufacturers, and other CEOs alike, and his books continue to help reshape business thinking everywhere. Selfishly, we want him to go on forever, because we need to be inspired by someone who practices what he preaches. And make no mistake about it, Ray’s presentations are as powerful as any Baptist preacher’s sermons. His soft, southern cadences ring in our ears long after he’s left the room.

So it’s very difficult for me to share this news with you. Ray has been diagnosed with cancer. He explains his condition in his clear, no-nonsense manner in a video message he recorded on Tuesday. His office confirms that Ray is “feeling healthy” and that he is “maintaining his schedule and keeping commitments” and is staying “focused on the work that he loves.”

Photo:  Mark Steinmetz

Recently, our editor in chief wrote about a free e-waste pickup program put into effect in New York this month by The 4th Bin. Considering that the city threw out some 250,000 tons of electronic waste in 2005, it’s an important and much-needed service. There was only one hitch with the initial plan: the pickups were limited to Manhattan. This morning, however, the 4th Bin announced that it will begin servicing  NYC’s most populous borough later this month. Brooklynites and Manhattanites looking to safely dispose of any unwanted or outdated electronic equipment can schedule a pick-up online using this form. But don’t procrastinate: the deadline for signing up is January 15.

Previously: Recycle Your E-Waste in Manhattan—For Free

Just before Christmas, the Chicago Department of Environment launched a redesigned Web site for its Chicago Climate Action Plan. The new site details some of the city’s goals for greenhouse-gas reduction (an 80 percent decrease from 1990 levels by 2050, with incremental reduction markers in the meantime), and it provides informational resources to residents: PDFs on the effects of climate change, suggestions for ways businesses can reduce carbon emissions, and a checklist of money-saving energy reductions.

CCAP’s isn’t the only city-run environmental site, and it’s not as comprehensive as, for example, New York’s PlaNYC page, which seems to be the gold standard in the field. But it ranked high in our quick survey of similar Web sites, many of which seemed surprisingly bare-bones; apparently most cities, even big ones like Los Angeles and exceptionally progressive ones like Portland, can’t or won’t commit to high-quality online resources of any type, let alone environmental ones (and you can forget about savvy Web-design). In that company, CCAP fares pretty well—easy enough to navigate, with relatively attractive graphics and a decent amount of information. It’s not spectacular, but it’s certainly a step in the right direction. Here’s hoping other cities follow suit.

We knew architects liked the Chartwell School after it was voted one of the Top Ten Green Projects for 2009 by the AIA. Apparently, students like it too.

Last week, UC Berkeley’s Center for the Built Environment (CBE) picked Chartwell, an elementary school in Seaside, California, as the recipient of its 2009 Livable Buildings Award. The prize, given for outstanding environmental design, relies on polls of building occupants to gauge happiness with air quality, lighting, acoustics, and a variety of other conditions in the workplace. Those results, along with net energy emission (Chartwell strives for zero) and general design quality, are considered in the jury’s final decision. Read more…

Sargasso Cloud, by Philip Beesley, is a room-sized sculptural environment produced by students during a two-week summer workshop in Denmark. Photo: Terri Peters

Timed to coincide with the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen this month, the exhibition Climate and Architecture aims to relate architecture and sustainability to the larger context of climate. This is a daunting task, and, fortunately, the exhibition takes a uniquely personal approach. Rather than presenting alarming statistics or a selection of green projects, it invites visitors inside to see, hear, and feel climate variations for themselves. The show asks, “Does architecture have the power to make you feel different? How does a building’s interior ‘climate’ relate to our own bodies and to the world around us?” Read more…

Dean Kamen is best known as the inventor of the Segway, but lately he has been tinkering with an ambitious array of technologies related in some way to sustainability. His distributed power generation and water purification systems, for instance, might help developing countries leapfrog the need for conventional infrastructure. He’s also delving into small-scale combined heat and power (CHP) systems, solar technology, and carbon capture and sequestration. And he’s turned North Dumpling, his small island off the coast of Connecticut, into an off-the-grid demonstration plot for renewable energy and energy efficiency.

During his keynote address at last month’s Build Boston, Kamen talked up his firm’s portable water distiller and Stirling engine power generator, among other recent innovations. He also made a vigorous pitch for his For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology (FIRST) foundation, which promotes science and technology in schools and organizes an international robotics competition. After the keynote, I spoke to Kamen about renewable-energy technologies, the pros and cons of nuclear power, and the characteristics of a smart grid.

What do you make of the U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED certification system?

It’s great that there’s an organization out there that’s helping to quantitatively assess and give people guidance on how to be green, because while everybody knows it’s a good idea, nobody seems to know exactly how to assess it—there are so many intangibles and so many complex unintended consequences of doing things.

In your own experience, which design elements you have found to be key in reaching zero net-energy consumption?

There are some areas where there’s such low-hanging fruit that people just don’t go after it, like good insulation and good seals, so you’re not  trying to heat the great outdoors. I also think a relatively substantial piece of low-hanging fruit is combined heat and power. If, for example, you took one of our Stirling generators and used it in the home, it would make use of one hundred percent of the electricity, and you could expect it to make use of eighty or ninety percent of the waste heat. When people buy electricity from Boston Edison, thirty-five percent of the coal they burn is making electricity, which means that sixty-five percent is doing nothing but killing fish in a river somewhere because you can’t move the heat around. So I think any place where you can make use of waste heat, you should generate your electricity on-site with a CHP unit. Read more…

If you live on Manhattan island and you’re feeling as guilty as I am for throwing out your old laptop and other electronic devices—or hoarding them in your small apartment because you don’t want to add toxic chemicals to landfills here or in China—relief is coming soon. Starting January 4 and continuing all month, you can opt in to free e-waste pickups either at your home or at your place of business. The program is being instituted by The 4th Bin, the folks who sponsored the successful 4th Bin competition last fall (check out my note on the winners). All you need to do is fill out the forms posted on their site, and you’ll learn what happens next.

In addition, the group is working with City Harvest, the organization that feeds 1.4 million New Yorkers from high-quality foods donated by restaurants, farms, and manufacturers. To that end, The 4th Bin will take your old cell phones and PDAs and direct any proceedings from these collected devices to the well-regarded food bank; click here for details.

In 2005, New York City alone threw out some 250,000 tons of electronic trash. That’s a frightening number when you think about e-waste’s potential for poisoning our groundwater, as well as for squandering some highly-sought-after industrial materials like copper. Behind the new bin design and the upcoming collection program is Valiant Technology, a young tech-support firm founded seven years ago by four socially conscious friends. Their initiative was originally propelled by the city’s announcement that, come July 1, 2010, our e-waste will need to be recycled (the sanitation department will no longer pick up your old TVs, computers, cell phones, other electronic gadgets.) This program will surely have resonance in other cities just as rich in e-waste as we are here in New York. What’s your solution?

Update: NYC E-Waste Pickups Expand to Brooklyn

The average person in an industrialized country emits one metric ton of carbon dioxide each month. Man, that’s a lot. At least, it sounds like a lot—but, as with many big, scary environmental statistics, it’s difficult to visualize precisely what that number means.

Not any longer. CO2 Cubes, an installation by the artist Alfio Bonanno and the architect Christophe Cornubert, makes it painfully clear just how much carbon dioxide we’re all producing. At 27 feet tall (and wide and deep), each Cube represents the amount of space occupied by the aforementioned metric ton of CO2 (which, depressingly, the average U.S. citizen emits in only two weeks). The Cubes will arrive in Copenhagen just in time for next week’s UN climate-change conference, where they will display a variety of real-time data and video streams on screens programmed by the designer Travis Threlkel of Obscura Digital.

The installation organizers hope to get individuals to reduce their carbon footprint by at least one metric ton a year—not an unrealistic goal. If you’re ready to get started, check out this list of simple things you can do to reduce your footprint now.

Related: In “Carbon Neutral Now,” James S. Russell looked at two recent architectural projects that combat climate change aggressively.

The Aeron Chair has about 200 parts—all of which have to be analyzed to determine its carbon footprint. Photo: courtesy Herman Miller

There’s a reason why big companies are almost duty bound to take the lead in sustainable design. To get a handle on the complexity of the task—whether it’s designing a zero-energy building system, or truly closing the loop on a task chair—requires time, money, and expertise. Recently I spoke to Gabe Wing, Herman Miller’s Design for the Environment manager, about the unique challenges of achieving carbon neutrality for products.

Is carbon neutrality for products even possible and, if it is, what has to be done to get there?

We’ve been working in this area for several years. With products, there are some pretty significant challenges to approaching carbon neutrality. The first thing you have to do is determine how much energy is used to assemble and extract all the raw materials from the ground through your production and delivery. Then you need to look at how you handle end-of-life disposal. To go into that process is a significant endeavor and the best way to do that today is through some proprietary software packages. Read more…

The City College of New York (CCNY) announced this afternoon that it will offer a new interdisciplinary master’s program called “Sustainability in the Urban Environment.” The 31-course program, which begins next spring, will incorporate architecture, engineering, and science into the curriculum, and will lead to a Master’s of Science in Sustainability. (Read more about it here.)

Having noticed similar initiatives from other universities in recent months, I got to wondering:  How many graduate programs in sustainability are there, anyway? Read more…