Columbia has welcomed a composting machine to campus, a first at a New York City university. Accepting food scraps, such as banana peels, coffee grounds and egg shells, the composter will provide a way to recycle the urban campus’s food waste while also serving as an educational tool.
It is a unique challenge of our generation that many in the developing world have cellular phones and TVs, but lack reliable access to water. Odd, perhaps, given that water is marketed as essential for life, a human right, and heart rending pictures of women and children walking miles to fetch water are routinely flashed to tug at everyone’s heart strings.
“We would like to take on international problems, problems of development, problems in the United States, but have them done with academic content and interest. Instead of people being sent to random places, we would take engineering companies that have an interest in a particular region in solving a problem, and they would bring the problem to the students.”
How can we overcome the main challenges we face in our urban wastewater systems today? Are there opportunities to improve sustainability in water treatment systems in US cities to support local food security?
The results are in for the first study to systematically measure the effects of the city’s fledgling effort to introduce more reflective rooftops in order to reduce cooling costs and the overall heat burden on the city.
Can we manage the needs of 9 billion people for water, food and energy without depleting our resources and ruining the environment? “The solutions,” says Tim Fox, “are all within the capability of existing technology.”
The United States and five other countries agreed this week to fund an effort to cut emissions of methane, soot and other pollutants to start to slow the rate of human-induced climate change.
A new interactive, color-coded map created by a team at Columbia’s engineering school allows viewers to pinpoint and compare estimated energy usage, building lot by building lot, throughout New York City.
The NYC Department of City Planning has proposed new zoning rules to make it easier to retrofit buildings for energy efficiency – including a provision on rooftop greenhouses.
Relatively cheap, simple steps using existing technologies could cut projected global warming by one degree Fahrenheit – a substantial amount — by focusing on sources of methane and soot, concludes a new study by an international team of scientists.
State of the Planet is a forum for discussion on varying viewpoints. The opinions expressed by the authors and those providing comments are theirs alone, and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the Earth Institute or Columbia University.
