Infill Philadelphia: Soak it UP! is a Community Design Collaborative stormwater management and sustainability design challenge now accepting registration for interdisciplinary teams interested in submitting ideas for the retrofitting of three Philadelphia sites, one residential, one commercial and one old warehouse, through November 30.

It’s a way for the Design Collaborative, in collaboration with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and Philadelphia Water Department (PWD) to tap the best minds in the field of sustainability, design, and development policy communities.

“We need quality and really pragmatic solutions, but also innovative solutions,” said CDC executive director Beth Miller. Green stormwater infrastructure is the bees’ knees. “We want to help put a face on it, know who’s interested in it, who’s doing innovative things with it, who has experienced positive change through it and promote its benefits.”

We first told you about the contest this summer, but now the specific…

What would Philly be like if 30K sustainability-minded folks visited for a few days to talk about green efforts? Enter Greenbuild 2013.

Next year, The Greenbuild International Conference and Expo will take place in Philadelphia, officially hosted by the Delaware Valley Green Building Council (DVGBC). Since 2002, the world’s largest conference dedicated to green building has featured speakers, industry showcases, LEED workshops, and tours of the host city’s green buildings.

“This really puts Philly on the map in terms of the all the sustainability going on here,” said Christine Knapp of the Energy Efficient Buildings Hub (EEB Hub), a group based in the Naval Yard, started last year by the Department of Energy with a goal of a 20% reduction in regional building energy usage by 2020.

Building 661 at the Naval Yard, Advanced Energy Retrofit Living Laboratory.

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Philadelphians purchase almost 600 million kilowatt-hours (kwH) of renewable energy each year, the equivalent, according to a City press release, of removing 80,000 passenger cars from the road.

As such, Philly has been designated a Green Power by the EPA. It is the largest city in the country to receive said designation which requires at least 3% of the city’s energy use be generated from renewable sources such as solar, wind, geothermal, biogas and low-impact hydropower.

Green Powers across the US

In 2006, Philadelphia joined the EPA’s Green Power Partnership. From that partnership a number of initiatives (many of which we’ve covered) developed over the years. They include Green2015, in which the City pledged to generate 20% of its energy from renewable sources by 2015, which exists under the umbrella of the Greenworks program, Green City, Clean Waters and more.…

To reduce water impairments caused by stormwater runoff, the EPA developed the Clean Water Act: Stormwater Strategy Summary of 2008 – 2010.

To comply with these regulations, the Philadelphia Water Department has drafted Green City, Clean Waters. It’s a 25-year plan with a goal aimed at reducing the amount of pollutants in our combined sewer system caused by combined sewer overflows by 85%, and to capture the first one-inch of stormwater runoff. Combined water systems are sewers designed to collect rainwater runoff, sewage and industrial water in the same pipe. Sixty percent of Philly’s 3,000 miles of sewers are constructed in this manner.

“Dilution was the solution,” said PWD spokesperson Joanne Dahme about meeting the standards presented in said act.

The program will be implemented through various types of projects across the city. The projects are engineered to capture rainwater, at residents’ homes perhaps via…

Ideas about how to green Philadelphia schoolyards, more specifically, the Henry C. Lea School at 4700 Locust St. in West Philly, were abound this month at Transforming Urban Schoolyards, a design charrette hosted at the Center for Architecture in Center City on May 10th.

Lea school

Concepts focused around redesigning the schoolyard to serve as a front entrance, perhaps on Spruce Street, and moving dumpsters to a less visible area, according to Linda Dottor, program manager at the Community Design Collaborative (CDC), the group that hosted the meeting in collaboration with the Philadelphia Water Department, Environmental Protection Agency and the American Institute of Architects.

Lea schoolyard

Vision of the future?

Teams of designers, students, parents, teachers and educational advocates met for an intensive six-hour day of design and discourse about redesigning…