Blogs & Ecology

Unpackaged is a small, charming shop that sells affordable organic and fair trade dry foods--unpackaged. You bring your own container or buy a reusable one. It sounds like old news to North Americans, but here in the UK it is unique. The owner, Catherine Conway, is very serious about her business and has made great efforts to push the envelope, using a low carbon delivery service, publishing a newsy and informative monthly newsletter, and becoming a community resource for the area.

Pikachu is full of helium, which the New York Times describes as "a finite and increasingly scarce resource, produced extremely slowly by decaying uranium and thorium." Like anything else, (gas prices anyone?) when it gets scarce and expensive, people start thinking about using it more carefully.

So this year, instead of just releasing it into the air, the are going to try and recover it.

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Source: TreeHugger

Rome based designer Marco Capellini has become a well-known name in the Latin ecodesign movement.

Creator of the organization Remade, which promotes design with recycled materials in seven countries; and Matrec, an online resource for recycled materials, Capellini was in Buenos Aires for a conference organized by the city’s Metropolitan Design Center.

An example of a combinatorial library chip, part of a magnetic smart materials library. Via UMD

A new discovery by researchers at the University or Maryland’s A. James Clark School of Engineering may mean a significant reduction in the use of lead in electronics, without having to devise whole new ways of creating electronics.

GreenBuild is just huge, 800 booths, 30,000 people, there probably are more green vendors and green architects in this room than there are green clients in America. One doesn't even want to think about the carbon footprint of bringing everyone to town for this thing, but they just had to change the name of Architecture 2030 to 2035.

The start was inauspicious....

Photo: AFP from Guardian

John recently noted that the recycling business is in the toilet in the US; Jaymi wrote that the same thing is happening in Britain; now they are drowning in paper that used to be shipped to China but that nobody wants now. The Confederation of Paper industries says in the Guardian:

The late Tim Horton never let anyone push him around, and neither does his eponymous coffee chain. They just body-checked and high-sticked the City of Toronto into submission on its plans to reduce waste, so much of which comes from that one hugely successful chain.

The City calls it a "compromise".

"This allows industry and leaders like Tim Hortons to sit down with the city on how we are actually going to reduce the volume of garbage going into our garbage dumps," said committee chairman Glenn De Baeremaeker "How do we get 365 million coffee cups out of the garbage stream and into the recycling stream?"

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.

Lets call recycling what it is- a fraud, a sham, a scam perpetrated by big business on the citizens and municipalities of America. Look who sponsors the National Recycling Coalition: behind America Recycles Day: Coca-Cola, Pepsico, Anheuser-Busch, Coors, Owens-Illinois, International Bottled Water Association, the same people who brought you that other fraud, Keep America Beautiful.

Recycling is simply the transfer of producer responsibility for what they produce to the taxpayer who has to pick it up and take it away.

...

"Frugal is the New Black" say the trendsetters. This isn't news to TreeHugger readers, nor is it particularly original; during the World Wars, that is how one lived. Sometimes people needed a little encouragement, so the the creatives got to work designing posters, telling people to save instead of spend, fix instead of buy new, grow instead of shop at the grocery, all messages that resonate today.

Have a look at a few of them in our inaugural slideshow of Frugal Green Living: Posters for the Movement

...

Charles Jencks called it Adhocism: "the art of living and doing things ad hoc- using materials at hand, rather than waiting for the perfect moment or "proper" approach. As a principle of design, it begins with everyday improvisations, such as bottles for candle holders and tractor seats on wheels for dining chairs."

Designers are still doing it, but now it's called recycling.

Studio Jo Meesters created TESTLAB, "an experimental ongoing project about rejuvenating and reusing discarded materials." The furniture shown above is entirely made out of 34 discarded wooden beams and 16 leftover blankets....

Image source: Flickr

Image courtesy of Flip & Tumble

Bringing your own bag to the grocery store/bodega/retailer/wherever is pretty much a must these days—Whole Foods has even stopped giving out bags. And well they should--bringing your own reusable bag or tote is too easy and waste-preventative not to. Flip & Tumble knows this, and they’ve come out with a bag that’s not only uber functional, but stylish to boot....

Images: Ingrid Goldbloom Bloch

There’s recycling and then there’s recycling madness. Designer Ingrid Goldbloom Bloch has a penchant for using almost anything she can get her hands on. From a young age she would visit hardware shops with her dad and since has always found some way of combing unlikely materials into usable pieces.

Neatorama recently featured one of Ingrid’s designs, a set of underwear made from recycled soda cans. One can only imagine the chaffing!