Here is a shout out to Film Biz Recycling. They do great work and help reduce the waste of the film industry, which quite possibly is one of the most wasteful industries out there because film builds real world environments and immediately after the shoot need to get rid of them. Film Biz Recycling is …
At Eco Brooklyn, we do energy-efficiency retrofits that involve huge amounts of air sealing, air barriers, vapor barriers and insulation. We aim for the super stringent Passive House building envelope standard and net-zero energy consumption. This is as radical it gets in energy conservation. Sealing the home in an airtight shell requires a bit …
It seems like just in the past week the trees of New York have decided to shed most of their leaves. Around EcoBrooklyn, leaves are floating down onto our green roof and some of our projects in the yard. The smell of fallen leaves overpowers the smell of city, and it’s a welcome scent indeed. …
The two best building systems I know of right now are the Earthship and Passive House methods. Right now Eco Brooklyn is lucky enough to be involved in two jobs that involve both systems, one a NY earthship and the other a NY Passive House. Earthship building is best for non-urban parts of the world. …
I have tolerated Mayor Bloomberg because he has done some good things for New York’s ecology. He isn’t the mayor of Copenhagen, Denmark. Now that is a city worth looking at in terms of ecology and social planning. But Bloomberg could have been a lot worse. His plan NYC is an acceptable plan, the bare minimum any …
When I was 25 I paid a lot of money to have my fortune read from a palm leaf. Turns out a wise man way back when in the depths of Eastern India scratched down on palm leaves the destiny of every soul who was to incarnate on the earth. So I tracked down this …
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 this …
Eco Brooklyn’s Gennaro Brooks-Church discusses our clay wall application. Creating a better seal on bricks and more insulation, Eco Brooklyn applies clay to walls all over New York City. Most recently we applied clay in our Harlem Passive House and in the downstairs apartment in our Brooklyn Show House. Check out this great video!
Here is an idea for a New York back yard. Your typical container is the same shape as your typical back yard in Brooklyn and NY. Why not put a shipping container into the earth as a cellar or underground room?
Here are some examples of rammed earth and rammed clay walls. We did one recently in Brooklyn and it was really cool. Rammed earth forms with cross strength braces: They call this rammed earth but it isn’t really. It is more like concrete with low levels of cement.
