A new infographic details municipal efforts to make cities more environmentally friendly.

With the definition of “green” still fuzzy when it comes to products, it’s even more difficult to measure the efforts of cities attempting to decrease their carbon footprint. What are water consumption policies like? How many cars on the road? What types of recycling programs and waste reduction efforts are underway? Are there any green building or alternative energy incentives?

HouseTrip set out to find out and measure the efforts of the world’s top “green” cities. Motivation for the project came from wanting to help draw attention to the importance of cutting global pollution generated by cities. With more than half of the world’s population now living in urban areas, cities are beginning to become leaders in environmentally responsible living. Data collected from the Siemens Green Cities Index and other sources provided the information to develop the infographic.

The inforgraphic shows which of these most progressive cities are doing what in the world of green: London, New York, Vancouver, Copenhagen, Amsterdam, and Stockholm. So what are these cities up to? Just 44 percent of New Yorkers own a car, for example. Compared with 95 percent of the rest of Americans, that’s a pretty huge difference. Head over to Amsterdam and you’ll see more bikes than people—one bike for every 0.73 people in fact. Copenhagen is among the cities embracing the benefits of green roofs, with legislation requiring green rooftops on all new buildings, which will add 5,000 square meters of vegetation. Vancouver and Copenhagen recycle 55 percent of all their waste. Vancouver generates 90 percent of its energy from renewable resources; Stockholm is at 60 percent.

Keep in touch with Jill on Twitter @jillettinger

Images: HouseTrip

The post How Green is Your City? appeared first on EcoSalon.

A trip to Amsterdam requires adventures in the kitchen upon return.

I was destined to fall in love with the appeltaart.

When I travel I have a tendency to fall for local foods. It may be the most basic of foods in that location, but when you’re an outsider, it’s exotic. And so I identify a local dish that’s easy to find in a variety of places and I order it wherever I go. It could be called a weird travel quirk, but when you find a local food that you love and you stick with it.

And so it was with the appeltaart.

The famed appeltaart at Winkel

On our first afternoon in Amsterdam we were wandering the neighborhood in search of lunch and a double espresso. In the middle of summer, with the sun shining and every cafe known to man having an extensive outdoor seating area, this is not hard to do. So we randomly picked one that had a nice wooden table right next to the entrance and sat down.

Towards the end of our salads, I realized that everyone else was ordering huge pieces of apple pie covered in whipped cream. When every table around you is ordering the same thing, you know that you must do the same.

It wasn’t until later that I realized that we had serendipitously ended up at Winkel, the one cafe that an acquaintance had tipped me off to as having the “best apple pie in Amsterdam.” Some foodie affairs are just meant to happen.

What ensued was a week long obsession with appeltaart, and an even larger obsession with trying to make it myself once I returned home. Fortunately, there’s this thing called the internet. Thanks to Food Nouveau who carefully laid out not only the Winkel appeltaart, but also the one served at ‘t Smalle Cafe (another Amsterdam favorite), I now had a recipe to work with, and maybe I could kick this feeling of being sad about leaving Amsterdam. I even went out and bought a springform pan; sometimes travel also reminds you of what your kitchen is lacking.

As with most recipes, I had to give it my own spin, so this appeltaart is heavy on the cardamom and completely gluten free. It took a bit of experimentation to get it right, my first crust being much too dry. But thanks to some tweaking and incorporation of almond meal (a go to gluten free flour when I am baking) the end result is a tart that’s a little softer than the Amsterdam classic, but still retains the right amount of sweet thanks to the combination of crisp apples and raisins. A traveler’s rendition of a classic dish.

This is not your American Apple Pie, so throw those expectations out the window right now, and keep in mind that it’s best served with fresh whipped cream and a double espresso, of course.

Anna’s Dutch Appeltaart with Cardamom

Ingredients:

Crust:

• 1 1/4 cup sorghum flour
• 1 1/4 cup rice flour
• 2 1/4 cup almond meal
• 2 1/2 teaspoons xantham gum
• 2 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
• 3/4 cup sugar
• 2 large eggs
• 1 teaspoon cardamom
• 375 grams butter (about 1 1/2 cups, or 3 sticks)

Note: this recipe is meant for a 9-inch springform pan, resulting in a very big appeltart. If you’re using a smaller pan, you may want to cut the recipe in half, or just bake two.

Filling:

• 8 apples (use a harder/crispier variety)
• 1/2 cup brown sugar
• 1/2 cup raisins
• juice + zest of 1/2 lemon
• 1 teaspoon cinnamon
• 1 teaspoon cardamom
• 1 teaspoon nutmeg
• 2 teaspoons cornstarch

Directions:

Start by preparing the crust dough. Cream butter and sugar and set aside. In a separate bowl, mix together all dry crust ingredients.

Add eggs to the butter and sugar, mixture saving about 1 tablespoon of egg to top the crust with before baking. Add in flour mixture in thirds and mix until dough forms a ball (you can do this by hand or in a food processor). Set aside. Note: if you chill the dough, it will be a little easier to press into the pan.

Peel and quarter all of the apples and cut into small, bite-size pieces. Mix in rest of ingredients until apples are well coated.

Grease a 9-inch springform pan. Set aside about 1/4 of the crust, and place the rest in the bottom of the pan. Push out until the bottom and sides are completely covered. Fill with apple mixture and top with rest of crust dough. Brush with egg and sprinkle with brown sugar (optional).

Bake at 400F for about 45-50 minutes.

Want more food inspiration? Check out the rest of our Sunday Recipe series. 

The post Sunday Recipe: Anna’s Dutch Appeltaart with Cardamom appeared first on EcoSalon.

Smool: not a dairy-free dessert, but the Dutch design company responsible for these sculptural watering cans.

With all your statement planters and herbivorous tabletop features, it seems appropriate to have an equally arresting and pretty device to keep their precious cargo in pristine condition.

The Spring watering can is ergonomic and streamlined. You fill the wide spout, and dispense from the narrow one.

The can is made from matt plastic, and comes in tangerine orange-yellow, olive green, grey, and powder blue. Smool being a combination of the words smooth and cool (Amsterdam-based designer Robert Bronwasser says his products are smooth to use and cool to have); this one has an enviably lissom shape and unfussy design.

Drool-worthy is the natural, tree-like appearance, making for arty camouflage amongst household greenery. The price is an equally desirable 15.95 euros (around $18).

Images: Smool

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7 stops to give you a small portrait of the world we live in.

We hope you enjoyed Libby Lowe’s gorgeous glimpse of Vietnam this week! However much smaller the internet makes the world feel, it’s still just as vast and diverse as it ever was. Here’s a 7-stop trip round the globe, courtesy of our archives – a portrait of a world where easy answers just won’t cut it.

While a degree of mistrust is certainly appropriate, for the most part media reports about China’s greening efforts are reporting the truth. In 2009, China’s state council ambitiously stated that it plans on reducing its carbon intensity by 40 to 45 percent by 2020 (from 2005 levels). Its newly released 12th, five-year plan  (China’s centrally-designed map toward continued progress in 2011 to 2015), clearly indicates a continuing commitment to reducing its environmental issues, including big investments in green energy aimed at kicking its carbon habit and expanding what’s now in place. For example, China has not only overtaken the U.S. in carbon emissions, but according to the Guardian, it has also left the U.S. in the dust with its wind-power generating capacity.

7 Things You Should Know About China’s Pollution Problem

DMZ 2km is South Korea’s newest brand of bottled water, selling water from a spring that runs under the Demilitarized Zone, the 4 kilometer-wide buffer zone South and North Korea. What benefits does DMZ 2km water have over the competition? Apparently it’s all about branding, or as some might call it, greenwashing.

“We decided on water from the DMZ because it’s different and the environment there is untouched, so many people think it’s clean,” says Lee Sang-hyo, a spokesman for the company, quoted in the Guardian.

Bottled Water Mania: South Korea Sells H2O From Demilitarized Zone

Currently, Haiti is a nation of low-tech human and animal powered farming. It could be the perfect laboratory, much like Cuba was, for developing an ecological agricultural system capable of feeding the people of Haiti. Think about it: unlike our own firmly entrenched system, Haiti is not currently dependent on fossil fuels for fertilizers, pesticides, or power. Since fossil fuels aren’t going to be around forever, I hope some of the progressive people at the USDA and USAID prevail and help Haiti to develop agriculture appropriate to its needs, not the needs of Cargill and ADM.

Haiti’s Future: Food Insecurity And Agricultural Capacity In The Aftermath

…let’s imagine that the U.S. decides to follow the example of Amsterdam, which has just announced that by 2040, no petrol-powered cars will be allowed in the city. It’s electric or nothing. That gives the Netherlands 30 years to get its electric vehicle servicing infrastructure up to scratch, which probably isn’t as long as it sounds – and it leaves the door open for other municipal and national governments to peer through, wondering if that way lies popularity or condemnation.

If internally-combusting automobiles went the way of incandescent lightbulbs and plastic bags, how would America react?

Fueling Nobody: Amsterdam Sets A Brave Example

According to Ecotextile News, Lothar Kruse, a director of the independent testing laboratory Impetus in Bremerhaven, Germany examined the cotton fabrics that came from Indian farms and claimed roughly “30% of the tested samples” contained genetically modified(GM) cotton.

The head of the Indian agricultural authority Apeda, Sanjay Dave, told the newspaper they were dealing with fraud on “a gigantic scale.”

The Ripple Effect Of India’s Organic Cotton Scandal

Although local love for the national cuisine may be failing, an appreciation for good food in France has never diminished, and the commitment to keeping the tie between eating and feeling good is alive and strong. Take Le Fooding for example. Deemed “A taste of the times,” it’s a restaurant guide/food festival/food news site, and one that’s committed more to putting the “feeling” back into food.

“We are about having food with fun, and with a smile,” Le Fooding’s founder Alexandre Cammas told the Los Angeles Times. And herein lies the French paradox: food is directly tied to emotional well being. French people don’t eat because they have to, they eat because it’s a valued part of their day and their culture.

Foodie Underground: Why the French Aren’t Fat

In the environmental movement, there have been many leaders. Names like Bill McKibben, Al Gore, Carl Pope, Rachel Carson, and Annie Leonard come to mind. But few are as personally impacted by the negative effects of climate change as Mohamed Nasheed, elected president of the Maldives in 2008. As one of the most low-lying countries in the world, a rise of merely three feet of sea level would submerge the 1200 islands of the nation that lie to the southeast of India and Sri Lanka in the Indian Ocean. That makes for a political agenda fueled by a sense of urgency.

The impending disaster led much of Nasheed’s policy, both nationally and internationally, and is the subject of the documentary film, The Island President, which has its U.S. release this week. The film takes a very close look at the politics of climate change, following Nasheed during his first year in office and through the Copenhagen Climate Summit in 2009.

The Island President: Mohamed Nasheed’s Personal Fight With Climate Change

Images: Lance Webel, Guardian, Lucas the Experience, Sammmm, Le Xav, Chiara Goia and DonkeyHotey.

The post From The Vault: Complicating Earth, Taking Names appeared first on EcoSalon.

Narrow houses once filled the gap between urban overpopulation and practicality. They’re still practical, but also sleek, sexy, and very in.  

In a sobering departure from McMansions built on mini-kingdom parcels of land, the narrow house is enjoying a renaissance in both urban strongholds like London and Tokyo, as well as width-hoarding suburbia.

There’s even been a book written about the svelte architecture movement. Avi Friedman, author of Narrow Houses: New Directions in Efficient Design, explains that while narrow homes have been part of the urban landscape for centuries – for reasons including a tax breadth for wider properties and dearth of space in walled medieval cities – they’re once again being sought after for their environmental advantages, including greater land-use efficiency, less building material, lower utility bills, fewer infrastructure costs and an overall smaller footprint.

“Since the beginning of the housing boom of the 1950s, the size of the average North American house has steadily grown, while the size of the average family has decreased,” Friedman explains. “Today, a growing number of home buyers seeking smaller, more efficient residential designs are rediscovering a centuries-old housing prototype.”

Measuring a petite 25 feet wide or less, Friedman profiles 28 “infill” or “skinny” houses in cities and suburbs around the world. Meanwhile, here are eight innovative skinny minis that we found. After this, you’re going to want to put your house on a diet.

The Silver House in London measures in at 10 feet wide and 26 feet high. It was once a wine vault, which served the pub next door.

This jack-in-the-box in Antwerp, Belgium is 7’ 10” wide. It was created by architects Pieter Peerlings and Silvia Martens of Sculp(It) as a multi-functional work/play space, with mutually exclusive spaces for working, eating, living and sleeping.

The exterior of this Tokyo home bears a striking resemblance to a flat-screen television. In order to utilize the itty-bitty lot without squashing the house against the street, the façade has been tilted 63 degrees as a welcome change of perspective, while remaining typically Japanese in its minimalism.

This almost-anorexic apartment by architect Jakub Szczęsny is too-thin-to-be-true, for now. It’s still in the concept stage, a cold-cut sandwiched between a hulking tower and an old tenement building in Warsaw, Poland. It will be 60 inches wide when completed. That’s just a taste of what promises to be a very rich and stimulating project. Visit Home-Designing for the full scoop.

I’m 99% certain that I saw this home during a canal tour of Amsterdam, though I was in Amsterdam. You can never be too sure. It is the narrowest in the city, maintaining a rather strong, albeit willowy, presence among more stocky neighbors.

In this neighborhood, the “half” in its address (75 ½ Bedford Street) makes a minimal impact on the price of this house. Given the lineage, too, this lithe Greenwich Village gem is almost priceless. It was a carriage entranceway until it became a cobbler shop, candy factory, and eventual home to actor John Barrymore and poet Edna St. Vincent Millay.

The Sliding House is a truly stunning and daring slice of reedy architecture. You must see it to believe it. The house – built in the far eastern reaches of Suffolk County, England – has movable components that insulate it during the cold winter months, and slide open to drench the residents in the warmth of the region’s oh-so-fleeting summer sunshine.

The Holly Barn in Norfolk, England has a narrow base, but was built as a voluminous, fully accessible two-level space. The husband in the family suffers from chronic arthritis, hence the rooms and hallways are wide enough to accommodate the turning circumference of a wheelchair with subtle curves throughout. In all, it gives the illusion of width, but is less than 25-feet wide.

Images: Home-Designing; Boyarsky Murphy Architects; Luc Roymans; Home-Designing; craigatk; Karlinksi73; DeZeen; Architecture.com

The post You Can Never Be Too Thin: 8 Reasons to Put Your House on a Diet appeared first on EcoSalon.

There are two ways to persuade people that fossil-fueled cars are a blight. The popular method is to offer alternatives while suggesting why you “really shouldn’t” . And then there’s the other way.

Last week, TechCrunch ran an article suggesting that California was going to ban black cars because they soak up the most heat. The Washington Post got hold of it, then Rush Limbaugh added fuel to the flames (most unlike him, I know)  by advising listeners to buy up black cars before they became extinct. Happily, it’s now clear that TechCrunch got themselves in a muddle, and everyone’s looking sheepish. Such is the Audience Wave nature of online journalism.

It’s not hard to spot the flashpoint here – it’s the word “ban”. It’s a brave government that tries to deny consumers the right to drive their beloved internal combustion vehicles, even if it’s just the black-painted ones…and the TechCrunch furor nicely illustrates how quickly the American public gets shirty when its wheels are threatened.

So let’s imagine that the U.S. decides to follow the example of Amsterdam, which has just announced that by 2040, no petrol-powered cars will be allowed in the city. It’s electric or nothing. That gives the Netherlands 30 years to get its electric vehicle servicing infrastructure up to scratch, which probably isn’t as long as it sounds – and it leaves the door open for other municipal and national governments to peer through, wondering if that way lies popularity or condemnation.

If internally-combusting automobiles went the way of incandescent lightbulbs and plastic bags, how would America react?

Image: Sammmm

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