Daily Green Wrap-Up 21.July, 2012

Plastic waste is a problem all over the world. And it is especially troubling in the Philippines where plastic waste piles up in Manila’s Payal landfill, unable to decompose. But one inventor thinks he might have found the answer to this chronic problem.
The three greenest buildings in the United States aren’t necessarily LEED Certified, but they are alive.
The Living Building Challenge, a project of the International Living Future Institute, isn’t just about using specific building materials or taking advantage of passive solar. Instead, the Living Building Challenge governs everything from the kind of property a building can be built on (no old-growth forest, for example) to the amount of water and energy that they can consume (”Living Buildings” are net-zero water and run on 100 percent solar energy).
So, you’re a regular AutoblogGreen reader and think you can’t learn much from an infographic called “Green Cars 101,” right? Well, how about this little tidbit: in a compressed natural gas car, the fuel is “compressed to less than 1 percent of its volume.” Or this: “A small solar energy system (1 to 2 kW) can provide 15,000 electric miles a year” to your plug-in car.
Do you think that American families have too much stuff? Researchers at UCLA’s Center on Everyday Lives of Families (CELF) have a new book, Life at Home in the Twenty-First Century: 32 Families Open Their Doors, focusing on just that. The study of 32 middle-class families concluded that they’re living within a sea of material goods while spending very little time with each other. So click ahead to read about our overconsumption and let us know what you think – do we have too much stuff?
We desperately need more young farmers in this country.
“If we do not repopulate our working lands, I don’t know where to begin to talk about the woes,” U.S. Deputy Secretary of Agriculture Kathleen Merrigan told The Washington Post this April.

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