Blogs & Ecology

Long-awaited in New York City is the "environmentally conscious" Greenhouse Nightclub on Varick Street in New York City's Soho neighborhood, which had a "soft" opening last week. Greenhouse comes right on the heels of GustOrganic, the first "100%" USDA certified organic bar.

MTV Takes Aim at Water Conservation
Back in September I wrote about MTV’s Switch campaign taking on greenwashers, now it seems the channel is also turning its attention to our toilet habits. In an apparent appeal for the “selective flush”, MTV’s new ad which will run across ...

Photo credit: Getty Images/Peter Dazeley

The bathroom is the room where we begin and end each day, with a variety of cleaning routines designed to help keep us healthy. Odd then, that the room in which we clean our teeth, our skin and the rest of our bodies (not to mention dispose of our waste) is often filled with toxic chemicals, and, even then, not very clean itself. So, how do you stay clean, promote good health, and go green in your bathroom?

Looking for an Eco-Friendly Toilet?
It seems there's a dire need for eco-friendly toilets: around 36 billion rolls of toilet paper are trashed every year—that’s about 15 million trees’ worth. So whatever the reason for America’s longstanding aversion to bidets may be, it’s high time we got over it and stopped wiping (and wasting) and started scrubbing (and saving).

Though Amy Winehouse, the pop singer I erroneously reported would open Holland's "sustainable" WATT dance clublast week was nowhere near Rotterdam (Iggy Pop & The Stooges were the opening act), there were revelers enough to light up the dance floors and gaze upon the gray water toilet flushing system in ...

Back when we were tooting our own collective Discovery Communications horn about the launch of the first TV channel dedicated to green living, Planet Green, we gave you a brief glimpse of the new series Stuff Happens. Now that the start of the 13-part series is drawing closer, here’s a bit more about what you’ll be seeing.

Bill Nye Shows Us Where Our Stuff Comes From, And Where It Goes

Nankai Electric Railway has introduced 73 waterless urinals at 18 stations on the Nankai and Koya train lines in Osaka, Japan. The urinals are the first of their kind in Japan and provide savings of around 22,000 metric tons of water and 12.7 metric tons of CO2 a year.

Eichler Bathroom from the sixties- big and bright

Lets face it, our bathrooms are a disaster. They are small, dark, superficially sterile, poorly ventilated with a toxic atmosphere, that suck up water and energy in huge quantities and just throw it away, heat, water and useful resources, down a pipe for someone else to make it go away somewhere else. The modern American bathroom is a monument to poor design, rotten functionality and extravagant waste of resources squeezed into a miserable tiny little package.

Only yesterday our Queen of Tech asked "Any more downloadable designs coming in the near future?" That is the term we give to a lot of flatpack designs that could easily be transmitted by computer, and to many cardboard and paper designs. Sure enough, this came down the pipes right after her request- a downloadable design that you can download right into.

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Turning waste into fertilizer in Boston

We have written before about the need to change our waste water system that mixes black and gray water and flushes it away; commenters were not impressed and wrote "Composting toilets are NEVER going to make it into the main stream market. Debating it is silly." But the debate is happening anyways; Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow writes an excellent article in the Boston Globe on the subject.

Everest on left in cloud. Photo: Warren McLaren

Dawa Steven Sherpa stood on the top of Everest late last month, (as did Apa Sherpa for the 18th time!) as part of the Eco Everest Expedition 2008. Their expedition was about the highs and lows of humankind’s achievement. For not only can we stumble through the rarefied, oxygen depleted, air of the world tallest peak , we can pump the higher atmosphere full of climate changing greenhouse gases.

TreeHuggers everywhere are working to lighten the carbon load on the planet. Some of us are doing a little, others a lot. Whether it’s through offsetting your flights, taking public transport or by buying energy efficient light bulbs, there are some simple things we can do that can make a big difference.

Take two essential household appliances and stick them together, and what do you get? This entry to the Greener Gadgets Design competition: the Washup washing machine-toilet by Sevin Coskun. With a space-saving design that includes graywater recycling, the wall-mounted Washup stores water used in the washer in the toilet, to be reused for flushing. As the washer is located above the toilet, loading can be completed without awkward back bending. Another plus? The Washup's positive message about graywater recycling, which is usually not so visible. via ::