Large institutional investors can help make big strides in environmental progress by using sustainability metrics in their investment strategies, which can aid returns.
Category: Cities
Cradle To Cradle City Design
New cities in China are being built using cradle to cradle design to create spaces environmentally and community mindful.
4 Principles For Future Cities
By 2050 six billion people are estimated to be living in cities. Eduardo Paes is the mayor of Rio de Janeiro and believes in four principles for smart urban infrastructure upgrades.
Efficient Urban Planning
There are innovative and flexible designs in the work at MIT to address overcrowding in cities, by using folding cars, “quick-change” apartments with robotic walls, and energy saving lighting fixtures.
‘Smart Materials’ Open Source
Smart materials are coming into daily use – including fabrics that light up, paints that conduct electricity, pigments that change color in windows and walls, or kitchenware depending on temperature.
The New Power Of Mass Participation
A new power is seen on the rise that can be mobilized to solve some of the major challenges in the world. This new power is based on distributed, crowd-sourced models, such as Airbnb and Kickstarter.
Collaborative Consumption
A number of online ventures are changing the rules of human behavior toward collaborative consumption – a powerful cultural and economic force reinventing what and how we consume.
Apartment & Vertical Gardening
Vertical gardening designs make use any available space along a sunny wall to grow vegetables, herbs, flowers, and root crops in suspended containers.
Fresh Air With 3 Common Plants
Areca palm, Mother-in-Law’s Tongue and Money plant are three common houseplants that can be arranged in specific areas at home or in the office to produce indoor air that is measurably cleaner.
Breathing ‘Thermo Bi-Metals’
Doris Kim Sung uses thermo bi-metals – designed to resemble human skin, shading a room from sun or self-ventilating, and reducing energy used.
Self-Healing Porous Asphalt
Erik Schlangen designed a new type of porous asphalt, which when cracked can be “healed” by induction heating the steel fibers embedded in bitumen, which melt back to the road’s original shape.
Rainwater Harvesting
Rainwater harvesting is one of the oldest and most effective forms of water collection and can help decentralize the water supply. The rain is drained from the roofs into barrels, cisterns, or tanks.
‘pAge’ Book – Water Filter
pAge is the Drinkable Book filled with pages coated with silver nano particles that can filter water, while also teaching proper sanitation & hygiene. One page can filter up to 100 litres of drinking water.
Gramofone Fighting Poverty
Iqbal Quadir started a mobile phone operator connecting 80 million rural Bangladeshi and encouraging bottom-up development, using connectivity to increase productivity and fight poverty.
‘One Laptop Per Child’ Project
Nicholas Negroponte started the One Laptop Per Child project to distribute the “$100 laptop” to children around the world – as a way to connect and teach children technological skills early on.
Freedom For Sustainability 