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Wal-Mart's Experimental Store Offers Lots of Green Features

Wal-Mart’s new experimenal store, located near Dallas, Texas, offers the usual line-up of products and will employ about 450 people. What is unusual according to the company is, “the new experimental store could profoundly change the way the retail industry designs, constructs, and manages facilities as it relates is unusual is, according to to the environment.” The design incorporates a wide variety of green building features including efficiency, wind and solar power, water conservation and recycling efforts. “We see it as a next step in evaluating the impact we leave on the environment as we look toward smart growth and sustainability in the building of our new stores,” said Mike Duke, executive vice president and chief executive officer of Wal-Mart Stores – USA. “This store will contain many of the best resource conservation and sustainable design technologies currently available to minimize the use of energy and natural resources.” Wal-Mart has contracted with the Oak Ridge National Laboratory to provide testing and analysis on store systems and materials, based on national scientific measurements and standards, for a period of three years. When customers enter the parking lot they will be greeted by Bergey Windpower’s newest turbine – a 150 foot tall […]

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American Medical and Youth Teams Taking Solar Equipment and Medicines to East Africa

Twenty-seven Americans from around the country leave today for Africa with more than just their luggage?they are also taking solar panels, electrical equipment, and medicines. Shunning safaris, they will instead spend 18 days traveling around rural Uganda and Rwanda, installing solar equipment in public facilities like health centers, schools, orphanages, and community and micro-enterprise centers. Organized by Solar Light for Africa (SLA) a U.S.-based nonprofit organization founded in 1997, the travelers comprise three doctors, one dentist, eleven senior-high and college-aged youth, two solar tech experts, a filmmaker, and SLA leadership, including its founder, Bishop Alden Hathaway, the Sixth Episcopal Bishop of Pittsburgh. Once in Uganda, the young people will team up with a similar number of East African youth to install solar systems as they travel around the rural regions of Uganda and Rwanda. Also accompanying the Americans will be Anglican Bishop William Rukirande and Penina Kyembabasi, the personal assistant to First Lady Museveni of Uganda. A highlight of the trip will be the solar-electrification of an entire Ugandan village. In so doing, they will “light up the sky” at night where before there was only darkness. First Lady Museveni selected the village as the launch of a Village Power […]

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