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This weekend we get a special treat: we’ll be taking delivery of over 250 tropical plants and installing two indoor living walls. It’s the culminating step in a complete renovation of Area Yoga Studio in Downtown Brooklyn and promises to transform the character of the space.
Arranging and installing the plants presents [...] The book Handmade Houses, A Century of Earth-Friendly Home Design, by Richard Olsen is inspiration for any green builder. With a clear focus on Big Sur homes Olsen highlights homes that were built along the same style as the Slow Food Movement, where meaning, lifestyle and experience are just as important as the finished “product”, [...] Check out this dude. A real druid. A magical builder. Sunray Kelly [Building] is all about the human consciousness to me. Its about our evolution more than the buildings themselves. Sitting in NY city watching this fellow green builder in the woods of Washington, I can’t help but long for those sounds of birds [...] As NY Green Contractors, we work hard to turn NYC green and we love any opportunity to share our labors with the public because it spreads awareness of green building. The Earth Day New York organization has created a great way for New Yorkers to celebrate Earth Day as well as learn more about [...] We are renovating a Yoga studio in Brooklyn Heights, one of New York’s many historic and wonderfully preserved landmark neighborhoods. This beauty is preserved thanks to the diligent work of the Landmark Preservation Commission (LPC). Eco Brooklyn, Inc., a green contractor, renovating a new yoga studio in Brooklyn Heights, NY. You could almost [...] Interactive designer Marco Castro has recently developed an innovative idea about how to efficiently increase green space in overcrowded urban settings through an interesting new reinterpretation of the term “green vehicle”. The “Bus Roots” project is working to establish rooftop gardens atop buses in New York City and around the country so as to [...] The folks from GardenUp just stopped by the EcoBrooklyn Green Show House to tell us more about their great new products for gardening. They’ve created a simple vertical system based on hydroponic technology that is great for small spaces, easy-to-use and highly efficient – perfect for city living. An example of one of GardenUp’s [...] Here is a poignant 17 minute film about an old man on an isolated farm in Iceland. His wife dies and he buries himself with her instead of going to an old people’s home in the city. He cannot bear to live without his two loves: his wife and the nature around him. It is [...] Being a New York green contractor we consider urban farming to be an important consideration for every project. Given every building has walls and a roof it is always worth asking wither they are well suited for vertical or roof farming. Sub-Irrigation Planting Systems (SIPs) are a perfectly sustainable answer to urban farming, according [...] Here is a great local green builder from the Bronx. His name is Steve Ritz and he is a classic example of how green building is much more than the daily activity. He may grow vegetables but like he says, he is not a farmer. Like so many green builders he is driven by [...] Here is a short video we threw together of the Passive House renovation in Harlem. The video mostly discusses the budgeting of the project. Now that the construction is for the most part done I think that our initial budget of $175/sq.ft is not sustainable. Of course it is great for the client in [...] Here is a crap article by the New York Times arguing that in order to stop global warming we need to pick between either sacrificing (consuming less) OR picking greener options of consumption (so we can consume the same). My response? Duh! We need to do BOTH. And even then we may not have [...] Check out this petition on change.org. We think their proposal to turn an abandoned tract of land into green space will benefit many New Yorkers. The Rockaway Beach Branch Committee is petitioning the New York City Council to turn an abandoned 3.5 mile stretch of the old Rockaway Beach Branch railroad into a green [...] We’re Brooklyn-based green builders dedicated to turning our local neighborhood green, but we’re always following the latest developments in global standards for more sustainable living. The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) met in Durban over the past two months in order to hammer out a plan for extending the Kyoto Protocol. [...] As New York green contractors we follow the latest developments in NY building codes very closely. Yesterday, the New York City Council enacted three proposals from the Urban Green Task Force. The new codes, effective July 1, 2012, mandate more stringent regulation of waste, recycling, and pollutant filtration, representing a step forward for green [...] New York green contractors and homeowners are applying a modern innovation to an age-old technology. The body creates two types of waste, so the logical approach is a toilet capable of two types of flush: a gentle gurgle for liquid waste and a more generous gush for solid waste, resulting in water conservation through [...] Eco Brooklyn recently obtained a copy of McGraw Hill’s Green Building: Square Foot Costbook 2012. Construction cost data books are intended for use by planners and builders who would like to get a quick, rough idea of how much a job might cost. I think it’s pretty cool that green building is at a point where resources like [...] Eco Brooklyn’s show house is now home to a beautiful new landscape which has been certified by the National Wildlife Federation as a Certified Wildlife Habitat. Nestled among many homes in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, NY this garden provides a home for a wide variety of shrubs and perennials that have invited in a number [...] On a beautiful fall day in early October, Eco Brooklyn, a New York City green contractor, took to the South Plaza of Union Square in downtown Manhattan to check out New Green City, an event hosted by GrowNYC. The event hosted many contributors, ranging from non-profits and schools to entrepreneurs, government agencies, and corporate [...] As a New York green contractor the truth is that our work is very much about things not in NY. Each time we salvage wood from a dumpster we aren’t saving a NY tree. We are saving a Canadian of Brazilian tree. As a company we may be acting locally but our vision is [...] A typical thing happened today in the life of Eco Brooklyn. One of our workers noticed a dumpster full of wood and called it in to the office. I dispatched our “Rescue Truck”, Eco Brooklyn’s veggie oil pickup, to go salvage the wood before it was carted off to the dump. This wood has [...] Small changes on a large scale make a huge impact. This is a simple concept and if applied it will improve the countless number of buildings that make up our total global infrastructure. NYC claims around 975,000 buildings and they account for 79% of this cities green house gas emissions. When it comes to [...] We went by to check on a deck we built in Manhattan last year. It looks good! It was raining which made the deck glisten more. We made it out of salvaged Douglass fir joists from an old building. We sanded them down and oiled them up with natural oils. Check it out: [...] Hemp is actually one of societies oldest cultivated plants and has only in the past century gotten a bad name mostly due to political and financial interests wanting to dissuade its use. But recently it is becoming more popular again as a building material. Check out these videos on the topic. They show how hemp is [...] We love buildings made out of shipping containers. They are a green builder’s version of the cardboard box that every child turns into their own world. We very much look forward to building a shipping container home in brooklyn. Or maybe our first shipping container building will be our Eco Brooklyn office and salvage [...] I just read Garden Up, Smart Vertical Gardening for Small and Large Spaces by Susan Morrison and Rebecca Sweet. Humans have become very good at building up with cement and metal. We cover large parts of the planet with buildings of all sizes. We all see the value of building upwards in this way [...] Here is a very useful document outlining the New York Tree Planting Standards. It is what Eco Brooklyn references when planting trees in sidewalks. The city and Eco Brooklyn agree on one crucial thing: that the open space around the tree should be as large as possible. They want it because it lets the [...] We all know there is a lot of green washing when it comes to green building materials. Below is a great definition of green building materials by the recycling department of California. It should help you determine for yourself whether something is green or not. —————- Introduction The concept of sustainable building incorporates and [...] EPA Makes Final Decision: Newtown Creek is Added to Superfund List Release date: 09/27/2010 Contact Information: John Senn (212) 637-3667, senn.john@epa.gov (New York, N.Y.) The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) today added Newtown Creek in New York City to its Superfund National Priorities List of the country’s most hazardous waste sites. The final listing [...] Copenhagen has become the model for making streets bike friendly. I went there about 15 years ago as part of a construction and city planning tour to check out the city and it was amazing. At the time they had a 15 year plan to drastically reduce their cars and turn the city over [...] |
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