Tag Archives: Greenhouse

Greenhouse Construction and Tax Benefits

LEED or to be more explicit, the Leadership in Energy and environmental Design happens to be an US green building council or the USGBC, that provide a whole set of principles for environmentally sustainable plans, construction and operation of buildings and neighborhood. LEED first came in picture in the year 1998 and has ever since evolved in to the whole and sole parent of the green building construction in the world. It is responsible for making the construction of the environmentally friendly buildings which help save energy, cost and are also very eco friendly in the bargain making the earth a better place to live in.

Tax benefits for the green house effect

Yes, it is true that with the advent of more energy is being saved or conserved for the good of the world and because the green house happens to be a natural answer to the theory of building houses for the people to live in, the face of the earth is slowly changing into something which is more natural and earthy at the end of the day. Tax benefits are some of the positives that the builders often enjoy. This means to say that you wish to construct a green house for your self you might just be lucky to enjoy some of the tax benefits so as to enable you to go ahead with the implementation of your idea without a doubt at all.

Why was the LEED created in the first place?

LEED or the leadership in energy and environmental design was primarily created to successfully accomplish certain aspects pertaining to the green house construction for a cleaner, natural and a better place to live which is not only environmentally accepted but also healthier.

Tax benefits

The one time tax credit offered is not bad at all. This is the major reason why many are opting for the same so as to make the world a green house for all to live happily ever after.

Spain’s Greenhouse Effect

     The shimmering surface is down to an agricultural gold rush that has turned one of Spain’s poorest corners into Europe’s largest greenhouse. An area so arid and dusty that it provided the backdrop for spaghetti westerns, Almería has made a fortune by covering itself with a canopy of transparent plastic. Above all, it is a monument to the way we now grow our food. Almería, and the area around it, is Europe’s winter market garden, spread across 135 square miles.

     Symbols of hastily acquired wealth abound. Farmers glint with gold jewellery. New shopping malls rise above the plastic. Immigrants from as far off as Mali, Colombia or Ukraine offer their toil and their sweat. Instead of trying to sell cars or banks, billboards advertise seeds.

     Antonio Moreno, one of thousands of smallholders who have built this plastic jungle, knows how to put fresh tomatoes on British tables in January or courgettes at Christmas. He grows crops that have no direct contact with nature beyond sun, air and water. “You really should wear shorts in here,” he says in the 45C (113F) heat as he points to tubes from which tomato plants sprout.

     Mr Moreno’s plants will never touch soil – they grow from bags filled with oven-puffed grains of white perlite stone. Chemical fertilisers are drip-fed to each plant from four large, computer-controlled vats in a nearby room. He talks proudly of his vats. They hold, he says, potassium nitrate, magnesium and potassium sulphate, calcium nitrate and phosphoric acid. “The plants get exactly what they need, nothing more and nothing less,” he says. “There is no waste.”

     Swamped

     He will crop tomatoes continuously from October to July. The greenhouses are so successful that they have swamped the plain of Dalías, where people such as Mr Moreno’s father used money earned in French car factories or Swiss restaurants to buy small plots. Now the sheeting is moving up the valleys of the nearby Alpujarra hills, one of Spain’s most bucolic, unspoiled areas. Diggers are also gouging terraces in nearby Granada province.

     “They block up dry riverbeds and destroy mountainsides but nobody does anything, however much we complain,” says environmentalist Juan Antonio Martínez, surveying the scarred hills at Albuñol. “If there is a serious storm, much of this will be washed away.” Continue reading