A houseplant or two can really liven up a home, but Swedish company Greenworks strives to go several steps further. Their specialty is creating customized indoor green walls for homes and offices.
via dornob.com
Eclectic Perambulations in the Noosphere
*NASA research suggests aeroponic growing takes about half the time of traditional growing. For more information, please see NASA and NASA-SBIR.
"Each year, the United Kingdom raises and kills around 800 million broiler chickens for their meat. These creatures are grown in vast sheds with no natural light over the course of six to seven weeks. They are bred to grow particularly quickly and often die because their hearts and lungs cannot keep up with their body’s rapid growth.
Architecture student André Ford has proposed a new system for the mass production of chickens that removes the birds’ cerebral cortex so that they don’t experience the horrors of being packed together tightly in vertical farms.
After this “desensitization,” the chickens could then be stacked into huge urban farms with around 1,000 chickens hooked up to large vertical frames — a little like the network of pods the humans are connected to in The Matrix. The feet of the chickens would also be removed in order to pack more in. There could be dozens of these frames in the vertical farming system, which Ford refers to as the Centre for Unconscious Farming . Food, water and air would be delivered via a network of tubes and excrement would be removed in the same way. This technique could achieve a density of around 11.7 chickens per cubic meter instead of the current 3.2 chickens achieved in broiler houses."
Building a Vertical Farm in an Old Chicago Meatpacking Plant
The Plant is Chicago's first vertical farm. This claim depends on your definition of vertical farm, of course, because The Plant isn't the sort of futuristic vegetation-filled skyscraper you might expect, and it isn't solely agricultural. While food will be grown there, the space will also house small food-related businesses, breweries and bakeries and the like, so it might be more accurate to classify it as a “food business incubator.” Whatever you call it, The Plant is definitely an example of innovative green food production, with the ambitious goal of being net-zero energy and net-zero waste by 2015.
"The 27th story of a building provides a skyline vista, if you’re lucky, or a maybe a coastal view. But in Milan, residents in the upper reaches of two under-construction buildings, 110 and 76 meters (360 and 250 feet) in height, will see a tree outside their window…a tree they can touch.
The project, Bosco Verticale (or Vertical Forest), is the first in a development called BioMilan which will integrate vertical gardens into the exterior structure of some new Milan buildings, such that the trees and plants will help control the building’s climate, through shading in summer and daylighting in winter, and also help filter the air. Plants are being chosen based on their ability to produce humidity and absorb CO2, dust and urban noise."
