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Pollution
Sneaker Life Cycle Impact
May 22, 2013 04:10 PM - Andy Soos, ENN
The American term sneakers refers to footwear with a flexible sole made of rubber or synthetic material and an upper part made of leather or canvas. Sneakers were originally sporting apparel, but today are worn much more widely as casual footwear. A typical pair of running shoes generates 30 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions, equivalent to keeping a 100-watt light bulb on for one week, according to a new MIT-led life cycle assessment. A life cycle measures the environmental impact of the raw materials, processing, and transport to the final market as well as waste disposal. But what’s surprising to researchers isn’t the size of a shoe’s carbon footprint, but where the majority of that footprint comes from.
Brandon Cheshire, Owner & Chief Technical Officer at Arizona-based SunHarvest Solar, recently spoke with Sierra Club Green Home about the benefits of going solar. During the interview, they discovered that his home is not only solar powered, it’s carbon neutral. This means it’s completely energy independent and emissions-free. Here’s how he did it...
Each day, our industry sits down and whittles the unsightly knots off the tree we call solar energy. We, as a group, spend more time than we should pointing to one of a growing number of reasons why solar energy isn’t taking hold in America: that perhaps our government incentives were cut too quickly, that our state’s SREC program is broken, that the net metering requirements aren’t strong enough...
Let me start this article by admitting that before writing this article I have never actually grown my own garden. At one time I may have assisted my parents by pulling weeds or picking some jersey fresh tomatoes, but the idea of having a garden of my own has always seemed daunting. This year I [...]