EcoHome
Tools for living sustainably in the urban environment
How do you choose to live comfortably and sustainably in the urban environment?
First you understand your environment, then you assess your impacts upon it, and
finally you reduce your impacts to a level that the environment can sustain.
It's not an easy task! Here you can explore how to tackle it step by step,
referencing the example of a typical residence in Seattle which is home to
people who want to live comfortably, economically, and sustainably.
Understanding your environment
- The whole planet Earth
- The USA
- Washington State
- Seattle
- The history of urban development in Seattle
- Sustainable Seattle:
A citizen's group that occasionally publishes a report of sustainability indicators
- A typical residence (historical documentation and context)
Assessing your impacts
- Ecological Footprints
- Fluxes: Resources and waste
- General techniques for site/home assessment
- The Seattle Example
- A typical house
- Baseline footprint
- resource use
- Introduction to meter reading
- waste production
- our greatest local and global ecological impacts
- our values and priorities
- financial incentives for the transition
"The Appraisal Journal studied the resale value of homes with energy-saving features and found an average of $20.73 increase in resale value for every $1.00 in annual energy cost savings."
Moving towards sustainability
- A typically innovative house?
- Composting
- Landscaping and yard waste
- Gardening
- Electrical efficiency
- Heating efficiency
- Water use efficiency
- Energy production
- Water catchment
- Waste reduction
- Automobile innovations
- Increasing density
- Visions of the future
Further information
Helpful links
Unit perspective
- 2.5 Mgallons = 1 non-Olympic swimming pool; 40 pools = 1 billion gallons