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Here is one-stop shopping in London that will satisfy the hearts and pockets of the most particular and design-minded. Almost forty UK designers-makers and small green companies have joined together to open a pop-up shop, for seven weeks only, with a very esoteric selection of fair trade, ethical, organic, and eco-friendly products. This well-chosen assortment of holiday delights will solve many shopping dilemmas this season ( except for what to buy my mother) without compromising on style or our conscience.
Given the surfeit of goodies, it is hard to know where to start. Couldn’t resist the envelopes made out of o…
The global Make Cars Green campaign is an ambitious 10-point plan to steer drivers towards more environmentally-friendly habits, including checking tyre pressure regularly and reduce loads. The campaign builds on the principles by the FIA Make Cars Green declaration, together with Bridgestone, and outlines how policy makers, industry and consumers can all play a constructive role in the future. But with the current economic downturn, isn’t it too little too late? Many of the concepts are ob…
Picture: Invention of color, by Hélio Oiticica. Photo by Carol Reis for Inhotim.
The amazing Cultural Institute Inhotim is a museum complex formed by a set of galleries (pavilions) in the middle of a botanical garden. It’s located at Brumadinho, a town 450 kilometers (279 miles) from Sao Paulo and 320 (199 miles) from Rio de Janeiro, in the state of Minas Gerais, Brazil.
Surrounded by a 600 hectares Natural Reserve and 45 hectares of gardens with botanical collections, its galleries host a vast collection of contemporary art from Brazilian and international artists from the 60’s on.
It may have slipped by your news reader during the dog days of summer, but don’t think for a second that the AFT’s recent adoption of a green schools and colleges resolution is anything less than a landmark event; because with 1,400,000 members the AFT has the membership muscle to back up their call for greener schools in America….
In just months we went from common thieves stealing power cables and iron fences to a market that couldn’t care less for reclaimed materials. The price for scrap anything is in the toilet, and likely to stay there for a few years. No more green washing about recyclable water bottles - please.
On the good side: you no longer have to worry about your catalytic converter disappearing.
A sudden collapse in worldwide demand for re- cyclables, particularly from China, has scrap dealers from Sacramento to San Diego stockpiling curbside collections as never before and charging walk-in customers for their throwaways…Stacks of baled paper, plastic and metal…
Lake Baikal, the “pearl of Siberia”, is the world’s deepest lake. Because of its age and isolated location in Siberia, it contains unusual collections of freshwater flora and fauna and 1,700 plant and animal species. It has also been the subject of great controversy as activists fought to reroute a petroleum pipeline from its shore and then fought to relocate a nuclear enrichment centre. Indeed, Marina Rikhvanova, head of the Baikal Environmental Wave, the leading environmental group, won the distinguishe…
In our previous article about Casa Decor, the international interior design show taking place this month in Barcelona, we weren’t sure they stuck to their self-implied title Pathway to a Sustainable Environment (or “Rumbo Sostenible” in Spanish). However, amongst the non-convincing projects and confusing messages, the design of the restaurant makes a refreshing difference. Designed by Barcelona-based Nancy Robbins Design Studio, we’d like to invite you to take a closer look at a prec…
These “Silver Fragrant Seamless Skintight Panties” and “Anti Odor Healthy Socks” have nanosilver ions, from Tsung-Hau Technology.
Nano-scale materials are now being widely used in industry without major research available about the both the environmental and safety risks some of the materials may pose, says Britain’s Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution.
The Commission was careful to say that there’s no current evidence of major harm to consumers or the environment thus far from nanomaterials, whi…
Things just went from worse to worser in the Southern Ocean: According to a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, seasonal changes in pH and the concentration of carbonate could be compounding the impact of anthropogenic emissions, speeding up the process of ocean acidification by almost 30 years, reports ABC Science’s Bianca Nogrady. Pushing the ocean much further could weaken the Southern Ocean’s ability to absorb large amounts of carbon dioxide and dramatically alter its ecosystem structure, th…
A new energy economy is emerging in the United States. As I note in a recent
Update, the old energy economy, fueled by oil, coal, and natural gas, is being replaced by one powered by wind, solar, and geothermal energy. The transition is moving at a pace and on a scale that we could not have imagined even a year ago. …
If you’re as interested in seeing our schools cutting energy costs and their total carbon footprint as Sen. Clinton and the United States Green Building Council are then there’s no doubt you’ll want to get involved with their upcoming series of webinars aimed to help schools across the country get a better idea of just how valuable some simple investments in green infrastructure can…
The ninth wind farm in South Australia just opened on the Barunga Ranges near Snowtown. Its 47 turbines, installed by Trust Power of New Zealand, (who already operate that countries largest wind farm at Tararua), are said to have a capacity to deliver over 98MW. The company reckon this renewable energy should provide sufficient power for 70,000 Australian households.
Not only was this project completed ahead of schedule, but it allows the state of Australia to claim that they now …
Bike theft is a huge bummer and a always-growing problem in cities where bicycles are used more and more for daily transport. Amsterdam has always had a big theft problem, and 20,000 bike were stolen in the city of Copenhagen alone. Bike sharing programs nearly all share the feature of using RFID (Radio frequency ID) in order to identify bikes and help reclaim them if they are lost or stolen. Now RFID programs outside of bike sharing are on the upswing to try to reclaim stolen bicycles as well as deter thefts, and even reduce r…
Image: The artist Ashley Cecil with her winning entry (Photo: Donald Vish, Oxfam America)
Art can be a powerful tool for social change, disseminating ideas and inspiring people to act together.Oxfam America’s Climate Change on Canvas initiative is doing just that – with the aim of bringing art, activism and concern for climate change together for an exhibition at December’s UN Conference of Parties meeting in Poznan, Poland.
After requesting and reviewing proposals from several emerging artists from all over the nation, Oxfam…
The last half-century has witnessed the most dramatic climate-induced ecosystem-level shifts since the advent of human civilization, almost 5,000 years ago, posits a new study published in the November issue of Ecology. Charles Greene, its lead author and an oceanographer at Cornell University, says that current and projected rates of global warming are “unprecedented” in human history and that we could very well see very rapid periods of intense warming in the near future — rivaling the episodes of rapid cooling, during which temperatures dropped by up…
Writing for TreeHugger does bring some unpleasant surprises. Last year I was astounded to learn that the US State of Utah gets 93% of its electricity from coal burning power plants. (See Coal Released Mercury Ruins Fishing and Duck Hunting.) How could it be any worse? Poland and surrounding central European nations, it seems, have the record for extreme coal dependency.
Financial Times reports that Poland gets 96% of it electricity from coal.
…coal-fired plants supply 96 per cent of Poland’s electricity and help expla…
At least that is what the media releases are saying. Late last month, the Australian Solar Sailor company announced they’d signed a deal with China’s biggest shipping line, COSCO, to fit some of their jumbo jet sized solar-powered sails to a tanker and bulk carrier.
The 30 metre long sails, festooned in photovoltaic panels are expected to catch enough wind to reduce fuel costs by between 20% and 40%, whilst those PV cells will provide the ships with 5% of their electricity. A computer automatically angles the sales for maximum wind and solar efficiency, and if all goes to plan the sails will have recovered their initial cost within four years.
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In October 1958 the Rockefeller Foundation sponsored a small conference on urban design at the University of Pennsylvania, attended by Lewis Mumford, Jane Jacobs, Louis Kahn, I.M. Pei, Kevin Lynch and other notable architects, planners and journalists. It sparked a revolution in urban planning and changed the face of our cities.
Fifty years later, planners, architects and yes, even bloggers have gathered in Philadelphia again to look at the issues that will affect our communities in the next fifty years: Re-imaginging cities after the age of oil.
I will be reporting from the conference for the next two days, as will correspondents from Grist, Metropolis, Planet…
DIY Solar Project Takes Shape
When I wrote about Denise and Dan Rojas’ video of their DIY solar collector they’re building from an old satellite dish, commenter Luke asked what they were going to use the thing for. The brief update above gives us some idea, including burning random scraps…
There was a public inquiry and the Chair of the local Council, the Scottish Wildlife Trust and two of Trump’s own independent ecological experts, among others, opposed the development. One said: “I suggested this coastal stretch …
Hard to lay out what has happened more succinctly than these numbers from China do:
Government statistics show that 67,000 factories of various sizes were shuttered in China in the first half of the year, said Cao Jianhai, an industrial economics researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. By year’s end, he said, more than 100,000 plants will have closed…Even before the global financial crisis, factory owners in China were straining under soaring labor and raw-material costs, an appreciating Chinese currency and tougher legal, tax and environmental requirements.
I mean, gas is such a….commodity. There is regular and premium, but one is pretty much like another, and the costs are pretty much the same wherever you go. Water used to be like that, a commodity, but as Elizabeth Royte notes in Bottlemania, as one Pepsico marketing VP said to investors in 2000, “when we are done, tap water will be relegated to showers and washing dishes.” and look how far they have come.
Now the fine people at Fine Fueling are trying to do the same thing with gasoline- elegantly branding and bottling it for the discerning cust…
UK Hardware Store Deepens One Planet Business Commitment
UK hardware giant B&Q was already collaborating with TreeHugger favorites, the Bioregional Development Group, on becoming a “One Planet Business” - committing among other things to stop selling outdoor heaters, give out free tree seedlings to schools, and erecting a 2MW wind turbine at its distribution headquarters. Now the company is taking this commitment a step fur…
In Turkish, the word for a slum is gecekondu, meaning “settled overnight.” A prefabricated house doesn’t go up quite that quickly, but mass production can make homes–of both the conventional and ecofriendly type–available to more people at varying income levels.
Sometimes it is hard to know whether a new product is an actual innovation or just an obvious idea trying to look good.
Such is Green Garmento - a reusable dry cleaning bag - it switches from duffel bag to haul laundry to suit bag to bring home the garments. But will dry cleaners comply? And - do we need more plastic (though it is 100 percent recycled polypropylene) at $10 a bag in order to bring our dry cleaning back and forth? Well, purists will say we should just stop conventional dry cleaning altogether - which isn’t remotely green. …
Desperate times call for desperate measures — and, no, I’m not talking about the financial crisis. Giving new legitimacy to the study of geoengineering, the Royal Society announced yesterday that it would conduct a large-scale review of the various proposed planetary engineering schemes, such as iron fertilization and space mirrors, reports The Guardian’s Alok Jha. (It recently
Clever Austrian engineers connected a heat pump to an exercise bike; you drop a can into the copper coil and start pedalling. If you have had enough beer, you can drop a coffee into the other coil on the hot side. Nice way to end a hard exercise session!
There’s been much worry over the credit crisis limiting investment in renewable energy and more efficient vehicle development. There’s also a fair amount of concern over the 2X+ carbon debit of Tar Sands oil extraction and processing. So much darkness. So little to smile about.
With oil prices falling and with widening awareness of a climate crisis, gilding could soon be peeling off the tar sands facade.
John Sauven, executive director of Greenpeace, said his organization had always known that tar sands were a risk to the climate “but now it’s becoming clear that they’re a risk to the bottom line as well”. ..The NGOs also point to…
For some time now, governments at the federal, state and local level in Australia have been trying to tempt their constituents to go green, via the financial incentive of rebates. Just yesterday, the state government of New South Wales announced it would be providing $62 million AUD to help low income households (specifically pensioners, people in public housing and indigenous people) become more energy efficient. Apparently those millions will pay for home visits by energy auditors, who’ll advise householders how to become energy w…
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Image: The artist Ashley Cecil with her winning entry (Photo: Donald Vish, Oxfam America)
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Sometimes it is hard to know whether a new product is an actual innovation or just an obvious idea trying to look good.
