Butterfly Energy Works

Butterfly Joins St. Louis County SAVES

Susan — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 17:31:44 +0000

Butterfly Energy Works is now a registered energy assessment provider with the St. Louis County SAVES™ program. SAVES provides low-interest loans for energy efficiency improvements to your home. The program requires that your home be audited prior to your improvement, so that your money is not wasted on unnecessary work, and we specialize in thorough and thoughtful residential energy audits. Our reports are designed to address your building materials, heating & air conditioning, appliances, insulation, lighting, and the potential for renewable energy applications. We have already established audit relationships with many contractors in the St. Louis area, and are thrilled to participate in another avenue for responsible and sustainable building and living.

The St. Louis County SAVES™ program restarted in January with mandatory certified audits and quality control procedures in place. At that time, Butterfly Energy Works chose to join the program, providing our high quality audits for homeowners and contractors.

St. Louis County SAVES™ is a financing program for homeowners in St. Louis County – designed specifically for energy efficiency measures. Qualifying homeowners can borrow up to $15,000 at very low rates, averaging around 3.5%, for improvements that address the energy efficiency of your house. Homeowners interested in implementing sustainable energy practice projects through this program, please contact us. We are certified and approved, and would be happy to get you started.

Butterfly Energy Works 314-961-8418

Sustainability and the Built Environment of the St. Louis Region Exhibition

Susan — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 22:37:13 +0000

Saint Louis Artists’ Guild and the USGBC present:
Sustainability & The Built Environment of the St. Louis Region
The USGBC, celebrating its 10-year anniversary in 2011, is excited to partner with the St. Louis Artists’ Guild. The USGBC will honor three participating artists with the “Sustainability 2011 Award.” The award criteria have been adapted from the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) green building certification system. St. Louis Artists’ Guild describes Sustainability and the Built Environment of the St. Louis Region as “an all-encompassing, all-media exhibition exploring where we stand, as a culture of consumption, and where we may be headed in the future.”
Butterfly Energy Works is honored to have been selected to present “Energy Audit,” a beautiful selection of thermograms, for display during this exhibition. Prints of these will be available for sale; please email us at
thebutterfly@butterflyenergyworks.com for pricing. This exhibition is one of a series, entitled “Aggregate,” which will fill the galleries of the Artists’ Guild for the winter. “Sustainability” will be on display in the main galleries of the Second Floor. Please come join us!
Opening: Friday November 11th, 2011 6pm-8pm
Exhibition Dates: Friday, November 11th 2011
to: Friday, January 6th, 2012

Two Oak Knoll Park

Second Floor Gallery
Clayton, MO 63105
Gallery: 314-727-6266
Susan at Butterfly: 314-961-8418

Zero Net Energy

Susan — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 19:27:03 +0000

USGBC Presentation
“Zero Net Energy”
The USGBC: Missouri Gateway Chapter program for September was “Zero Net Energy Case Studies”. This program came from work done by the ZNE subcommittee, chaired by our Gary, of the USGBC Technical Committee. The room at Alberici was packed with an estimated 120 people.
The purpose of the program was to give the members examples of projects which had as goals to get to Zero Net Energy. ZNE is much like vegetarianism – there is a wide range of definitions, all of which have their defenders. There were two projects shown. The first was a virtual project done by HOK St Louis to to determine the feasibility of a ZNE commercial building in the St Louis area. The second presentation was done remotely through WebEx technology. It was the story of the Richardsville Elementary School in Kentucky. The school is the first ZNE school building in the country. Students moved in last fall, and it is both a wonderful place to be a student and a living part of the curriculum.

Green Blogging

butterfly — Wed, 17 Aug 2011 12:19:34 +0000

Where: Schlafly Bottleworks

7260 Southwest Ave

Maplewood, MO 63143
(314) 241- 2337

When: Tuesday August 16th, 6:30 to 9pm

Join us this month to meet the faces behind local green blogs including:

Jeff McIntire-Strasburg who blogs about everything at blog.sustainablog.org, one of the longest-running green blogs on the web.

Mary DeWeese who blogs at sprawlstainable.com about her own suburban adventure to reduce energy consumption by 50% in two years and to grow some of her own food.

Kate Frowzy who blogs about household toxics and the challenges of green housekeeping as a mom of 7 young children living in the city for Better Life, the local green cleaning products company, cleanhappens.com/blog.

Melissa Richert Brown is a brand new mom and blogs about bike commuting, health and wellness, and her family’s attempts at living a green life at hergreenlife.wordpress.com

Suggested donation $3

A Savior For Polluted Water

butterfly — Wed, 17 Aug 2011 12:09:15 +0000

Banana peels don’t get a lot of respect. Though we here at Shots have never actually heard of anyone slipping on one, it seems they’re stuck in the cultural lore as a nuisance, or even a hazard.

But a Brazilian researcher, who also happens to be a banana lover, has taken an interest in the lowly banana peel and is helping to remake its image. The banana peel, it turns out, can take water dirtied by heavy metals from mining operations or other activities and turn it to clean drinking water.

Magic? No, actually, it’s chemistry. Gustavo Castro is an environmental chemist at São Paulo State University who says he’d heard for a long time that the peel of the banana was the best part of the fruit, where most of the nutrients and proteins reside. So he decided to investigate its chemical composition to see if these banana peel boosters were right, he told the American Chemical Society in a podcast.

What he found was that banana peels contain nitrogen, sulfur and organic compounds such as carboxylic acids. Castro was especially pleased to find these acids because they can bind with positively charged metals that leach into rivers from industrial operations.

To test the peels, Castro and his colleagues chopped up and dried a bunch of them and mixed them with water from Brazil’s Paraná River, which was polluted with copper and lead. The peels performed as well or better than many typical filtering materials, like silica or carbon. What’s more, the peels are a cheap waste material. Castro found they could be used up to 11 times before they stopped working as purifiers.

The findings were published earlier this year in the journal Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research, a publication of the American Chemical Society.

Of course, with any brave new idea there’s always a word of caution. The banana peel can’t get rid of bacteria in water, so don’t strap one around your faucet just yet.