This is exactly the stuff I work on and it’s so encouraging to see it in The New York Times. In fact, the subject of the article, Sean Neill, is a colleague whom I’ve worked with for a few years. Last March, I helped organize a conference on green leasing; he was a speaker.

Building legislation and green leases aren’t sexy. They don’t make headlines on sites like Treehugger. But they will ensure that New York City remains the most sustainable city in North America for decades to come.

Last year, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg proposed four laws and two programs that would have required the owners of New York’s largest buildings to pay for improvements to make their properties more energy-efficient.

The City Council passed a modified version of the proposal in December that required landlords to audit their buildings’ energy use once a decade and publish the results, but made investments to reduce energy waste optional.

Building owners had questioned the feasibility of mandated improvements, arguing that they often bear the burden of paying for investments without any codified way to share costs with tenants.

Sean Neill, a 37-year-old economist who started a consulting company a year ago to address the murky question of how landlords might pay for retrofits, says change will be very difficult to achieve if it does not address the way leases are written.

Plastic takes thousands of years to decompose — but 16-year-old science fair contestant Daniel Burd made it happen in just three months.

The Waterloo, Ontario high school junior figured that something must make plastic degrade, even if it does take millennia, and that something was probably bacteria.

(Via Arif Mamdani.)

You’ve seen him do a dramatic interpretation of Governor Palin’s incoherent resignation speech, now hear his voicemail chiding Hewlett-Packard employees for breaking the company’s 2007 promise to stop using toxic chemicals in its computers. On the same day the message turned up in their voicemail boxes, Greenpeace activists wrote “HAZARDOUS PRODUCTS” on the roof of HP headquarters in Palo Alto, CA.

Hat tip to Nathan.

You go, Chi-town!

By the way, I wrote about the Empire State Building retrofit here and about NYC’s proposed package of green building legislation here. On Friday, I attended City Council hearings about the legislation. It was standing room only, and the mood was decidedly jubilant (though not everyone is in favor — namely, those who represent the real estate industry). However, it looks likely to pass without major changes.

CHICAGO — The Sears Tower, that bronze-black monument that forms the 110-story peak of the skyline here and stands as the tallest office building in the Western Hemisphere, will soon have another unique feature: wind turbines sprouting from its recessed rooftops high in the sky.

The building’s owners, leasing agents and architects said Wednesday that they are literally taking environmental sustainability to new heights with a $350 million retrofit of the 1970s-era modernist building — and the turbines are only the tip of the transformation. The plan, to begin immediately, aims to reduce electricity use in the tower by 80 percent over five years through upgrades in the glass exterior, internal lighting, heating, cooling and elevator systems — and its own green power generation.

In such a huge tower, with 4.5 million square feet of office and retail space, 16,000 windows and 104 elevators, the project is bound to be one of the most substantial green renovations ever tried on one site, planners said. The Sears Tower is significantly larger than the 102-story, 2.6-million-square-foot Empire State Building, for instance, which is also undergoing renovation to reduce energy consumption.

“If we can take care of one building that size, it has a huge impact on society,” said Adrian Smith, an architect whose firm designed the Sears Tower renovation. “It is a village in and of itself.”

I’m the staff adviser for the CUNY Urban Agriculture Study Group, and we have a blog. If you’re interested in this topic, follow urbanagriculture.

Via urbanagriculture:

“We are trying to demonstrate that sustainable, urban agriculture can be economically viable in the city,” said the company’s greenhouse director, Jennifer Nelkin, 30.

Nevin Cohen, an assistant professor of Urban Environmental Studies at The New School, said Gotham Greens could be poised to catch the food wave of the future in the city.

“Growing food in cities is going to become increasingly important,” Cohen said, “and this is a great model of how we can use currently unused space to produce food.”

Nelkin and the company’s managing director, Viraj Puri, met while working at an engineering nonprofit known as New York Sun Works. There, they helped develop the Science Barge, a hydroponic greenhouse built atop a barge formerly moored on the Hudson River.

The Science Barge showed that a sprawling tract of land isn’t necessary to have a productive farm, said Puri, 27.

“The biggest challenge that we are facing right now is not the technology - we know the technology,” Nelkin said. “It’s moving this technology into the city.”