Awesome Vertical Garden With Recycled PET Bottles At Poor Family Home In Sao Paulo

by Paula Alvarado
from http://www.treehugger.com/

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Photos: Rosenbaum.

Brazilian design studio Rosenbaum collaborates with TV show Caldeirao do Huck in a segment called Lar doce lar (Home Sweet Home), which helps families in need re-designing their homes to improve their lives and self-esteem.

In its latest work for a family living in the outskirts of Sao Paulo, the firm included this neat vertical garden made from recycled PET bottles.



Although the idea is cool in itself, it's so much better knowing that it's part of a project to improve the lives of three women (mother and two daughters) that live in a one bedroom home with an income of 200 Reais (130 US Dollars) a month.

Putting together an urban farm was not the designer's whim either: the women already had an eco conscience and grew in small containers made from recovered food packaging.



The arrangement is of course thought for vegetables that don't take a lot of space to grow, like spices and medicinal herbs.

Its structure is pretty self-explanatory from the pictures, but the response from the public was so positive that the designer published a little tutorial showing how to cut and hang the bottles.


The whole design for the house is gorgeous, more pics of the reformed kitchen, room and living room can be seen at the designer's website.
Just like mentioned in my previous article about Adobe for women, it's encouraging to see designers' skills used for these types of purposes instead of focused in creating more stuff.

Real Live Vertical Farm Built In South Korea, Churning Out Lettuce

by Lloyd Alter

from http://www.treehugger.com/

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Image Credit Rural Development Administration
We have been showing conceptual vertical farms for years, but in Suwon, South Korea they have one working and producing vegetables. It is a little three storey demonstration project in a nondescript building (image here), operating much like Dickson Despommier has described in his book, The Vertical Farm, right down to the airlocks and sterility he suggests is required.

Image Credit Rural Development Administration
Fabian Kretschmer and Malte E. Kollenberg write in Spiegel Online:

Every person who steps foot in the Suwon vertical farm must first pass through an "air shower" to keep outside germs and bacteria from influencing the scientific experiment.....Heads of lettuce are lined up in stacked layers. At the very bottom, small seedlings are thriving while, further up, there are riper plants almost ready to be picked. Unlike in conventional greenhouses, the one in Suwon uses no pesticides between the sowing and harvest periods, and all water is recycled. This makes the facility completely organic. It is also far more productive than a conventional greenhouse.

The authors tour many of the vertical farms that we have shown on TreeHugger, and note what has traditionally been considered the major difficulty:

The main problem is light -- in particular, the fact that sunlight has to be replaced by LEDs. According to [agriculture researcher Stan] Cox's calculations, if you wanted to replace all of the wheat cultivation in the US for an entire year using vertical farming, you would need eight times the amount of electricity generated by all the power plants in the US over a single year -- and that's just for powering the lighting. It gets even more difficult if you intend to rely exclusively on renewable energies to supply this power, as Despommier hopes to do.

But that is no longer necessarily true. Speigel Online has missed the recent work of vertical farm pioneer Gordon Graff, who's thesis at the University of Waterloo looked at the issue of energy and lighting, and has made a plausible solution for dealing with it. Here is what he proposed:

A vertical farm must be able to produce enough food to cover the cost of its day to day operations and, ultimately, the capital cost of the building's construction (or renovation). While this is clearly dependent on some factors outside the realm of architectonics, such as the market price of food and current state of grow-lighting technology, the physical arrangement of the building can have a profound impact.

For the purposes of the thesis, Graff concentrates on one form of hydroponic system, a a drum system like the Omega Garden, seen on TreeHugger here and here. In terms of yield per kWh it is probably the most efficient system available. He packs it all into a 14,700 square meter building.

The drums are stacked three high,

The drums are then are arranged on the production floor. An automated system extracts the drums and moves them to the ground floor via special dumb-waiters for harvesting.

On the ground floor, the contents are harvested and shipped and the drums are then returned to the growing floors. While the drum system is the most efficient available in terms of electrical consumption, it still adds up to a huge number.

But the lights aren't the only thing sucking up juice; plants transpire a huge amount of water, and the skyfarm has giant dehumidifiers to recapture it. Gordon writes:

Conventional greenhouses and other indoor agriculture facilities currently avoid reclaiming transpired water, electing to simply expel it to the outside world and consume more water to replenish irrigation levels....the incidence of water stress is widely projected to increase throughout much of the world in the coming decades. One study has calculated that if present trends continue, 1.8 billion people will be living in absolute water scarcity by 2025, while a full two thirds of the human population will face water stress.With agriculture currently accounting for some 72% of human water use it seems likely that such steps to reduce water consumption will become a desirable provision of vertical farming in the future.

In California, an acre of lettuce sucks up between 1800 and 3500 cubic meters of water; the Skyfarm consumes 14.4 cubic meters, 1/240th as much. That is a very compelling reason to sit up and notice vertical farming.

That adds up to a lot of electricity. But fortunately, there is a readily available source being trucked all around Toronto: organic waste from the City's green bin composting program.

97 tons of collected waste would be fed each day into anaerobic digesters that produce methane gas, which then runs General Electric Jenbacher gas-fired generators.

click image to enlarge.
The carbon dioxide rich exhaust is then purified and fed into the atmosphere of the skyfarm to increase food production and convert it back to oxygen through photosynthesis.

Nothing is wasted; even the little bit of nutrition-depleted waste water is run through "Living Machines", a self-contained biological wastewater treatment system designed to purify water using microorganisms, algae, plants, snails, and fish.

click image to enlarge
It is a sophisticated system where Toronto's green bin food waste is fed in one end and lettuce comes out the other end, along with digestate that is a rich fertilizer for conventional farms outside of the City.

I will not go into the pages of financial pro forma analysis, which is based on development costs of $110 million and the hypothetical sale of 25 million heads of lettuce per year into the local market; that is a lot of lettuce just to grow lettuce. But it does show that the economics can work, and as transport costs rise, our water supply gets worse and food costs increase, the economics will only get better.

Gordon's vision of the role of vertical farms in the city is powerful and persuasive. He describes how wasteful and inefficient our current system is:

Urban citizens consume food, water, and other commodities, their buildings and appliances consume electricity, and their vehicles consume fuel - the latter two also involving the consumption of raw materials in their manufacture. Without the complimentary metabolic functions of producers or decomposers urban agents must obtain these resources from sources found outside the community, while also creating wastes of little use to the community, forming the traditional input and output externalities of urban life.

Instead, the vertical farm is part of a closed system.

Vertical farming would increase a city's resilience to the more long- term, systemic alterations that human society is widely expected to experience in the coming decades. With vertical farming's maximally efficient resource use and functional segregation from the natural world, cities could achieve food security amidst the environmental transformations and resource shortages that would cripple a conventional urban food network.

If I have one complaint about the project, and the role of vertical farms in cities, it would be that Gordon did not think big enough. The creative leap that Gordon makes is to tie the vertical farm into the city's organic waste system, but there is a really good reason to put this in the middle of a sea of condominiums: It could act as a giant purification system. Imagine if all of those buildings had vacuum waste systems delivering organic waste, urine separating toilets to deliver phosphorus, gray water systems to supply the plants, which then return pure water through the dehumidifiers. It feeds the city and processes its waste in a closed loop.

Gordon Graff defending his thesis. Image Credit Lloyd Alter
Gordon Graff's thesis is not fully resolved. Architecturally it is not the eye candy that makes so many vertical farm proposals so delicious. But so far as I can tell (and I have looked at a lot of vertical farm proposals) it is the first time that anyone has made a plausible case for why one would want to put a vertical farm in the middle of a city, and shown how it might really work technically and economically. The vertical farm is no longer just pie in the sky.

20 Vertical Farming Pics, Designs & Concepts

One couldn’t say that the concept of vertical farming isn’t controversial, but they could say that it has serious merits that need to be considered on both sides of the issues.

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What is a vertical farm? The basic premise, as you see in this image, is to be able to grow food in urban areas by creating tall buildings where, instead of each floor having offices, each floor is in essence its own super greenhouse, where different crops can be grown to feed people within its own community. The idea is to not only be able to feed the community, but to protect the land that’s being damaged by over-farming and making sure that there will still be enough food for an ever growing population.

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Of course, not all designs would be the same, but this model of a design for the city of Seattle helps us to see how it would work. It’s integrated into a city plan so that it fits in, and has areas where people can go inside to not only tend to the plants, but could actually buy their produce at the same time.

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Thinking of vertical farm in terms of super stores fits a model like this one, where the ground floor has everything a traditional supermarket would have,

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While upper levels would contain areas for growing produce. This particular example tries to highlight how power might be created for all the energy needed to grow crops in urban areas, as the designs for vertical farming wouldn’t be able to provide natural light for all of the crops, so they’d need enhancement from artificial lighting. It’s one of the major criticisms of trying to have vertical farms.

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As you can see from this image of what the inside of the vertical farm in Seattle might look like, not only are there people who tend to the plants, and in some cases can pick their own produce, but it’s a place of beauty and tranquility that many in urban areas have to leave the city to enjoy.

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In a city like New York, for instance, one could see a design like this in either lower or upper Manhattan, where they have dense populations and no land areas to grow their own products, making it expensive to get produce into the city.

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This is another design for the Roosevelt Island area of New York City, built not only to be productive, and not only to help generate its own energy with a combination of solar and wind power, but can also be a popular meeting place in the city, with a supermarket, restaurant, and even kind of a virtual indoor park in the middle of the city.

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This design was made for the city of Toronto, and was estimated to be able to feed around 35,000 people a year. It would be a 58 stories high, becoming the fourth highest building in the city if made, but it’s design is still sleek enough to fit in with the culture of the city. And,

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this gives us an idea of how the builders see different products being produced on the different levels.

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In this design for a city like Dubai, where fresh water isn’t as readily available, seawater is sued to cool the greenhouse and also create humidity, which not only helps the plants grow, but then produces more fresh water that can be used for not only the crops, but if produced in significant amounts could be used for the city’s water supply.

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The initial testing of the vertical farm system is already in place in a much different way. One test is in El Paso, TX, where above you see how this type of farming concentrates certain types of plants close together, yet requires less water and needs almost no fertilizer for the crops to grow.

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Another real test is presently going on at Paignton Zoo in the United Kingdom, where they’re trying to cut the zoo’s overall costs by growing their own produce. Both of the last two examples are outside, yet they still qualify as vertical farms because the idea is growing produce in limited space, not expanding space.

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Could you imagine a city like Las Vegas, which is not only landlocked but also has no true vegetation growing around it for hundreds of miles, being able to grow their own produce in a building like this one, which was designed as a prototype for them? This design could easily capture enough sunlight, though there would still have to be modifications to keep the temperatures down, especially in summer months.

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Not all urban areas are the same around the world, however. Vertical can still take up a lot of area, and as this image shows, it can be a planned community where everything is self contained and the farm can be a mixture of internal and external, as well as retaining certain elements of a culture.

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This was an idea for a vertical farm in Vancouver, which was drawn up in 2003. This idea even comes with a plan for a grazing plain and a dairy farm, right in the city. The energy for it would come from wind turbines and geothermal heat pumps.

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There are no end to the types of designs that vertical farms could be. This is another one for Dubai, this time in the middle of the city, being powered by wind turbines and, once again, creating its own water.

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This one, the pyramid vertical farm, is a favorite of the guy who helped come up with the concept, Dickson Despommier, a professor of environmental health sciences and microbiology at Columbia University. It’s not only a vertical farm, but a tourist attraction as well as a peaceful park of sorts.

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Something like this, a proposal that won 3rd place in an international competition, is the concept of an actual farming community right within the confines of a large city, in this instance Manhattan once again, where residents who would normally inhabit the city still live there, but share the space with farmers on alternate levels around the city.

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Even designs like this could be used, where, instead of taking over land that could be used for residential or commercial space, one could build vertical farms right into the waterways, where they would still be a popular attraction.

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If cities needed to be redesigned to fit a changing environment, a design like this one for the city of San Francisco would not only be environmentally friendly, but this one is estimated to be able to feed over 7 million people.

The world of vertical farming could offer so much to the world as it concerns food, the environment, and our living space issues, as its estimated that we could have as many as 9 billion people on the planet by 2050. It will take a lot of planning, and a lot of energy, but if most of these buildings can be somewhat self energy sufficient, vertical farming could be viable within a relatively short period of time.

Do Horizontal Farms on Buildings Make More Sense than Vertical Farms? Paul de Ruiter Thinks So

by Lloyd Alter, Toronto

all images courtesy of Architectenbureau Paul de Ruiter

We do go gaga over vertical farms, but they might be just intellectual exercises rather than serious solutions. As Adam Stein noted, talking about New York: "Local food has its merits, but that’s what New Jersey is for.” But there is a middle ground between "fetishist temples of food production" and New Jersey- using the real estate on our roofs. As Sami noted in another post, greenhouses work very well.

That is why I like The Zuidkas, a proposal by Architectenbureau Paul de Ruiter commissioned by the Government Buildings Agency in the Netherlands. It integrates a greenhouse into the roof. And by integrating both office and residential functions into the same building, the greenhouse serves the additional function of being part of a system of air and water purification. Talk about local food- you just go upstairs.

In most cities it would be hard to find a spot where you get sun on the sides of your building all the time downtown, unless you happen to be on an island like Manhattan. Putting greenhouses on the roof make a lot of sense when you are surrounded by other buildings, which is your typical urban solution.

It also makes sense to develop a mix of uses; their energy uses peak at different times. Paul de Ruiter explains:

The merging and advantageous stacking of offices, homes, a school and retail facilities results in a compact model. By including functions with a low-rise typology like stores and greenhouses in the model, the design makes optimum use of the available land. And thanks to the concentration of activities, there is less traffic than would be the case with a building with separate functions.

This compact model also creates an opportunity to develop a more balanced response to the demand for energy over time. In residential units, the energy demand spikes in the mornings and evenings. In the case of offices, the energy demand reaches its highest point at the middle of the day. A building’s energy supply often does not work efficiently, because capacity is regulated to meet the peak-hour demand any time of day, including off-peak hours.

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The design includes a glass shell that covers the configuration of the ground level and naves, creating a variety of climate buffers, that will work as an intermediate zone that naturally tempers the effects of the outside climate. The shell surrounding the building strongly reduces the surface area responsible for the loss of heat during the winter and cold during the summer. The buffer area facing south functions as a sun lounge for the homes. Thanks to the buffer effect, the loss of heat in the winter is reduced. In the summer, the sun lounge cools the adjacent areas thanks to the stack effect. In this process, fresh air is sucked in and constantly circulated. It will be possible to open the exterior shell, to prevent the area behind the shell from becoming too hot.

Another reason to build the offices facing north is the extremely high production of internal heat by computers, lighting and appliances (and their users). This results in a fairly substantial cooling requirement in the summer period. By building the offices facing north, the heat of the sun in the summer has less of an impact on the building, with less energy required to cool the building as a result.

In homes, the production of internal heat is far lower, and the average temperature is often higher. By building the homes facing the south, and including a terrace, the design can actually make use of the heat of the sun, which in the winter makes a major contribution to the supply of heat.

The mix of uses creates waste that is used to produce heat and electricity.

Besides vegetable waste and biomass from the greenhouse, the building will also collect black water (toilet water) and lead it to the co-fermentation plant. In the co-fermentation plant, all biomass will be converted into biogas. This gas will serve as a sustainable fuel for the CHP power installation (bio-cogeneration). The heat that is released in this process will be used to heat tap water as well as the various building areas. Besides generating heat, the CHP power installation will also produce high-quality energy in the form of electricity.

The heat surplus in the summer and the cold surplus in the winter will be stored via a geothermal storage system in thermal masses below the surface. The stored heat will be used in the winter and the stored cold will be used during the summer. The supply and consumption of heat and cold will become even more interesting as an option if the whole surrounding area is involved in the geothermal storage system.
Rainwater will be collected on the roof. The quantity collected – some 4,130 m³ per year – is more than sufficient to supply the greenhouses and flush the toilets. The remainder of the collected water can be used for the washers and various household activities.

I think there is a lot to be said for this concept, as a good compromise between the fantasy of vertical farms and the desire for local green in urban areas. It all works together symbiotically, producing food, cleaning air, generating power. The roof becomes a real productive part of the building, part of a system.

Thanks for the tip to Architectenbureau Paul de Ruiter

UPDATE: They have a website with more information on the project.

DATA

Client Government Buildings Agency
Design April-June 2008

Design Architectenbureau Paul de Ruiter
Design team Paul de Ruiter, Chris Collaris, Haik Hanemaayer, Noud Paes, Marieke Sijm

Advisor Arup Amsterdam: Jaap Wiedenhoff, Christa de Vaan