Home / treehugger.com rss archive / September-12-2007


Body Glove Biostretch: Oh No It Don't Come Easy
One surf product that I am really excited about is the Body Glove Bio-Stretch wetsuits, one layer jackets and Life Jackets/PFDs. After many years of struggle, testing, roadblocks and dead-ends, Body Glove has come up with a product that is as environmental as any wetsuit can be, and thats saying a lot. Two years ago Body Glove debuted the [eco- lifejacket] made from a material they dub Bio-Stretch. Biostretch has the same feel and texture as neoprene, the material typically found in wetsuits, but biostretch has no rubber thus no petroleum products. With the promising sales of Life Jackets/PFDs, the team dove into trying to incorp...

HippyTree
One of the new comers in the big-boy world of Action Sports Retailers is HippyTree. These rebel artisans turned entrepreneurs have a history of incorporating art and nature into the built environment. Their t-shirts reflect this ideal, as can be seen in their logos and designs. Beginning with their roots in both nature and surfing, Hippy Tree began with calendars and printed tide charts in 2003. The calendars are made from 100% post consumer paper and feature images of coastlines around southern California. Organic t-shirt blanks are purchased from Article1, and then designs are printed on the tees...

Sock Dog Kit: Rescuing Orphan Socks Everywhere
Here's a concept that is ingenious by virtue of its stark simplicity: Designers Martino Gamper and Sato Hisao will be showing their Sock Dog kit, a remarkably unfussy method of converting orphan socks into toys, from Sept 21 at Super Design Market, part of the London Design Festival. Best of all, you're never completely giving up hope on reuniting your sock with its lost mate.All socks present and accounted for? There's always the Sock Exchange. ::

Prismera Designs: Recycled Stainless Steel Jewelery
Prismera Designs' Floria and Florium collection is a sublime marriage of organic and industrial forms. Designer Laura Su, a graduate of the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design, has fashioned delicate yet structurally exacting botanical silhouettes, cut from recycled stainless steel.Prices start at $40; 10 percent of all profits from this collection goes to Keep America Beautiful. More stunning designs below the fold. ::Prismera DesignsSee also: ...

YOLO Colorhouse Goes Outside to Play
YOLO Colorhouse takes its environmentally sensitive aesthetic outside with its new line of zero-VOC, Green Seal-certified exterior paint, designed to account for the changes in natural light over the course of a day. "Our process for developing the colors included tweaking them for full sunlight as well as shade," explains Lowe, the company's co-founder, in a press release. "We experimented with each hue by applying them on all the sides of a little outdoor structure, now called 'the Color Shed,' and observed how the colors changed throughout the course o...

Schoolgirl's "Smog Hog" Cuts Air Pollution
Photo credit: joushbouselAmy Clucas, a 14-year-old (14!) schoolgirl from Christchurch, New Zealand, is the lead inventor of a device that knocks out air pollution.Her "Smog Hog" uses water to trap pollutants from a fire as they gust up a chimney, preventing them from entering the environment.Smoke from fireplaces is one of the two largest contributors to New Zealand's air-pollution problem, according to The New Zealand Herald, referring to a recent report that said air pollution was claiming nearly 1,100 lives a year across the country....

Genetically Engineered Sugar on Its Way
Photo credit: uwehermannLook out for genetically modified sugar in a shopping aisle near you by next year. American Crystal, a large Wyoming-based sugar company, has announced it will be sourcing its sugar from genetically engineered sugar beets beginning this year and arriving in stores in 2008, according to the Associated Press.Spotting those GE sweeteners won't be easy: You won't find any labels trumpeting this detail, because; like GE corn and GE soy, products containing GE sugar will be on the dow...

Kattbank: An Odd Multi-Tasker for the Cat Lover
Though sort of an odd pairing, Kattbank is a multi-tasking bench that might be perfect for cat owners short on space. Realizing that nobody wants to have to stare at a litter box in the living room (or wherever it is), they designed this clever bench that makes it easy to tuck the litter box out of sight. It helps make use of your space -- no square footage is taken up by the litter box -- and also helps keep the floor clean of random litter (there's a grid inside that essentially functions as a door mat for kitty paws). While the idea of sitting where your cat uses the bathroom isn't the most appetizing for us all (though with proper ventilatio...

Fortis Arbor Wood Mosaic from Flux Studios
TreeHugger has seen (take a deep breath) myriad carpet tiles, solar tiles, recycled glass tiles, recycled rubber tiles, cork tiles, air purifying tiles an...

Lili & Oscar: Cutest. Peripherals. Ever.
Meet Lili and Oscar, just about the cutest, funkiest peripherals in the history of the universe. (Excuse us as we commence to squeal like schoolgirls.) Octopus-like Lili is a 1.3-megapixel Webcam, complete with a microphone, while starfish-shape Oscar has four ports for plugging in USB 2.0-compatible devices.Produced by the U.K-based United Pepper in a fair-trade workshop in Vietnam, Oscar and Lili's easily recyclable bodies are manufactured using cotton, sand, kapok (a material derived from tree fiber) and paperboard. Even their packaging comprises 100 percent recycled and recyclable polypropylene (PET). The products' development was overseen by Oxfam...

Municipalities Try to Tax Car-Sharing
We love the concept of car-sharing, which allows individuals to go car-free without being relegated to the side of the car-centric areas in which many of us live. Unfortunately, not everyone shares our enthusiasm. On the heels of a similar attempt in Chicago just last year, King County, Washington (which encompasses Seattle), will start taxing car-sharing services as if they were rental car companies. In King County, that means that car-sharing customers will be taxed an extra 9.7 percent above and beyond the usual state and local taxes. ...

Scallop Shells: Coming to Any Icy Road Near You?
Though it may not make much difference in the Northwest Passage or Arctic ice cap (wink, wink) there are still many of us who will have to drive on icy roads this upcoming winter. The side effects of using salt to melt the ice (a fairly common practice, especially in the Northeast US) are not so good, with rusted out cars and dispersal of the sodium chloride into the surrounding environment at the top of the list.The Aomori Ecological Recycle Industrial Association in Japan decided there was a better way, and came up with...

TH Forums Highlights: Car-Free Cities, Sustaining Design + More
1) Flexing the Forums' polling muscles, user ug333 wonders about the practicality of creating car-free communities and cities in the US: "I have always wondered what would happen if someone started buying land in the United States (and other places as well, but this is my frame of reference) and started building a car free city from the ground up. Would ...

Sock Exchange at San Francisco Laundromat
We love systems that promote recycling, sharing, re-using. We love personal product systems, freecycle and freeganism. How could we not love the idea of a sock exchange, photographed by Todd Lappin at a laundromat in Bernal Heights, San Francisco. ::BoingBoing...

Oil And Gas Infrastructure Attacked In Mexico
This is bad news on several fronts, and environmental relevance: now and into next year. First the spills: nothing good about large volumes spilling and burning fossil fuel - during hurricane season. Second, these attacks add impetus to the energy independence/security mindset, heading into the coming US elections. Mexico being a significant supplier of US energy, our bet is that the security driver will begin to outrun climate, in part because of these incidents. Third, for industry in general, these attacks will raise interest in keeping uninterrupted operations by relying more on renewable energy. The attacks underscore a familiar pattern: the focus on cheap labor and cheap energy to the exclusion of social stability leads to a broadening of many forms of risk....

Freakonomics on Global Warming
Stephen Dubner, co-author of the wildly successful book Freakonomics, writes a column for the New York Times and asks "What Should We Really Be Doing About Global Warming? A Freakonomics Quorum." Quorum (I thought the word was being used improperly but one definition is "a select group) members include Ben Ho, assistant professor of economics at Cornells Johnson Graduate School of Management and former energy and transportation economist for the White House Council of Economic Advisers, Colin Camerer, professor of business economics at Caltech and a leading light in behavioral economics and neuroeconomics, Adam Grosser

What's Cooking in the Counter Intelligence Lab at MIT
The Counter Intelligence unit of the MIT Media Lab "explores technological approaches to functional, cognitive, and social support in the home, with a particular focus on the kitchen." They note that "our kitchens are far from complete and perfect. They remain dangerous and messy places and in world that is increasingly vying for our attention, we are abandoning the hearth for a meal on the run. Our goal is to reverse this trend--to make the kitchen the center of family life by providing technologies that improve functionality and engage us cognitively and socially."We loved the Augmented reality kit...

Flute, Exbox and More: Giles Miller's New Cardboard Designs
Giles Miller is at it again. The erstwhile "King of Cardboard" (that's an unofficial title, by the way, that he's earned after wowing us with his laptop case and coffee table) has added to his corrugated kingdom with a new collection of designs that could have ended up as a box. We like the "Flute side table" and "Exbox Chair" (above) not only for their ability to sex up a recyclable, renewable material like cardboard, but for fitting in to the paradigm for

Tope: A New Green Material for Wallets from db clay
Using a material they call "Tope" (pronounced like "rope" but with a "t"), db clay has designed a new line of wallets called Version 3. Developed as an eco-friendly alternative (details below the fold) to both vinyl and leather, Tope provides the durability both materials are known for, without the toxins and heavy metals, and we love the results. The textured patterns and smart use of color make for a snazzy alternative to plain black and brown we see in many wallets, but the real star of these is the Tope....

In An Absolut World...Everything is Downloadable
Absolut is running an interesting campaign called "In an Absolut World" where artists, websites and anyone over 21 years old submit visions of a better world. They range from "there would be a weather remote" to "Undo" would work in real life. Thrillist is having a spam-writing contest, wishing that "in an absolut world, all your spam would be true."TreeHugge...

Man-Made Chemicals Cause 2:1 Ratio of Girls to Boys Born in Arctic
According to a recent study done by scientists from the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme (Amap), man-made chemicals found in high concentrations in the blood of pregnant women in some Arctic villages appear to be causing drastic changes in the traditional gender ratios of their offspring. The scientists point out that the findings may also provide a reasonable explanation for the recent excess of girl babies across much of the northern hemisphere, and are now broadening their investigation across the most acutely affected communities in Russia, Greenland and Canada. The focus now will be to determine the size of the imbalance, which may prove to be significant considering that the inh...

Skin Organic Tees: Queer and Here
The first 100 percent organic clothing line designed for eco-conscious lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender women, Skin features racily cut tank tops and plunging V-neck tees with bold, gritty screen prints with an urban flair, embellished with gold foil and flocking. Skin's current Web site is likely just an interim oneinstead of being able to snap up your choice of shirt with a few clicks, you have to download and e-mail an order form with your selections indicated. For your trouble, however, you get a packet of organic seeds with each item purchased, which, in our mind at least, is a pretty fair trade. ::S...

Belgium Unveils Solar-Powered Climate Research Station
It's been a long time in the making (see earlier stories about here and here), but the Belgium-based International Polar Foundation has finally taken the wraps off its climate change research station - the Princess Elisabeth - which will be the world's first zero-emissions polar science facility. The station, which will become home to 20 researchers, will be assembled on a ridge several miles north of the Soer Rondane Mountain...

And Now for Some Good News: Ozone Layer Regaining its Health
Though rare, we do get the occasional story offering up something other than differing shades of doom and gloom on climate science. Case in point: according to a new study, the levels of hydrogen chloride (HCl) in the atmosphere - one of the chemicals identified as being most harmful to the Earth's ozone layer (alongside chlorofluorocarbons) - have been steadily declining over the past few years after reaching a peak in the early 1990s. HCl is typically spewed from volcanoes or emitted when chemicals used to make various materials - including rubber and plastics - are broken down. Lloyd Wallace and William Livingston, two Arizona-based astronomers, tracked HCl ...

Co-op Housing in Toronto Goes Green
It has been quite a few years since Toronto got a new housing co-op, so it is nice to see that they are coming back and doing it in style.As John Bentley Mays has noted, "Public housing projects have traditionally been architecturally dull and oppressive places, like jails, meant to encourage tenants to move on as quickly as possible." Perhaps Mark Guslits has something to do with it- the head of the Toronto Community Housing Corp. (TCHC) used to be an enlightened real estate developer and architect. He says "We happen to have people here at the corpora...

Quote of the Day: Lisa M. Holmes on Organic Junk Food
Junk food is junk food and why bother to make it organic? But I tend to think there are varying degrees of junk food and I also believe that not all processed food is junk. As the busy mother of two children I like to know that I can offer them an organic alternative to some of the conventionally processed snack foods that take up so much aisle space in the grocery store.Sometimes kids like to have a treat ...

Climate Risk Communication: TreeHugging Amidst The Outrage Industries
We shouldn't do anything about climate change until we can stop those nasty crocks from eating people. Or all the other more important "relative risks," according to the experts serving as Generation II climate risk deniers.So fun to see Lloyd's post of yesterday where Bjorn 'The Bear' Lomborg compared the risk of climate change to the risk of malaria and inferred we needed to conquer malaria first. Not only did he whither under the relentless wit of Steven Colbert; he seems to have missed out on basic principles of risk communication. Risk communication was heavily researched starting in the 1980's, and a ...

Working on the ChainJ Gang: Pedros Canola Lube
Its a good couple of years since we last took a peek at Pedros environmental bike care products. And were pleased to see they havent been resting on their laurels. Earlier this year they were named in Bicycle Retailer and Industry News as one of the Fab Five' of bike companies dedicated to environmental principles. This was about the same time they released their ChainJ lubricant which later went on to score a 9 out of 10 rating from Cycling Weekly. The biodegradable chain lubricant is made from 100% renewable resources, based on ra...

Big Brother is Watching Your Bike
TreeHugger promotes bicycling as the best way to get around, but a big disincentive is the high rate of bicycle theft. The University of Toronto provides particularly rich pickings. Last year the U of T police cut the rate significantly by hiding GPS beacons on high end bikes and tracking them as they were stolen; six arrests have been made as a result. According to the Varsity, "Using cell phone towers and satellites, police track the position and speed of the bike on a computer, or even a Blackberry PDA. When someone steals the bike, police hom...

Farming the Concrete Jungle
Late last month Phoebe Connelly and Chelsea Ross authored an article with the above title in the magazine, In These Times. It is a an excellent treatise on the state of play of urban farming and community agriculture in the USA. They observe that with 80% of the U.S. population living in cities or suburbs, food now travels 25% further that it did in 1980, with some fruit and veggies spending up to two weeks on the road. Most fruit and vegetable varieties sold in supermarkets are chosen for their ability to withstand industrial harvesting equipment and extended travel, not for thei...

Internet via Light Coming To Your Home
Transmitting information in a beam of light isn't new; Alexander Graham Bell patented the photophone in 1880 and thought it was his greatest invention. Free-space optics (FSO) are used now between office buildings and on university campuses to avoid stringing cables. According to the Economist, it may be coming into our homes. It is fast and secure; "since light does not travel through walls, there would be no need to worry about neighbours snooping on your e-mail, or piggybacking on your broadband connection."What is really interesting is the tie-in to our continuing discus...

Bike-Friendly Cities in Action
In our recent exploration of all things bike-related on YouTube, weve so far brought you video of friends moving house by bike, weve seen a tour of Seattles secure BikeStation parking facility, and today we've already showed you footage of one crazy cyclist

Greener Parking from Plant Archtects
Why are parking lots so uniformly awful? Plant Architects questioned the usual surface lot-"typically bereft of aesthetic qualities they just do their job and try not to get noticed. Sadly, they are also usually grey gaps in the neighbourhoods they sit in."Their interventions include trees, of course, to provide spatial definition and temper the heat island effect; solar powered lighting, an irrigation channel located over a storm water retention system and permeable paving. Alternative vehicles would get optimized spaces under the shade of the trees. A few spaces would be lost, but why do we permit ugly black holes in our urban fabric just to park cars?...

Canadian Eco-Couture Rocks
Heart on your sleeve is a small, sweet girlie store selling clothes with "stunning, sustainable style" that are Canadian-made, ethical, and highly affordable. With its wide range of labels, this is the place to catch up on the latest Canadian eco-couture--both local Toronto and from other provinces. The Made in Tieland bags are just that--made of recycled men's ties, sewn together in contrasting colours and patterns so that they match just about everything. Soft and made in various sizes, they are handy for schlepping tons of stuff by day, or smaller-sized for evening. Love Handles is a handmade h...

Breaking the 80mph Barrier - On a Bicycle
We love it when folks go out of their way to confound preconceptions about what can, and cannot, be done on a bicycle. Weve already brought you a video of friends moving an entire house by bike, now weve found a report about speed-freak cyclists going over 80mph on the flat! Similar to Fast Freddy Markhams ride at the Nissan 1 Hour Challenge...

Solar Powered Headlamp from Everlite
I always look forward to getting the new Mountain Equipment Co-op catalogue; they are a remarkable member-run organization, believing in ethical sourcing, product sustainability, offering PVC free alternatives and recycling polyester clothing into Eco-circle fibre. Of course, the catalogue is printed on

Survey: Which e-car is Sexier?
American Chevy VoltEuropean Opel FlextremeWhen the Chevy Volt came out my first reaction was- why does it look like one of those Chrysler pimpmobiles with the mile long hood and tiny windows? Does it make any sense in an electric car to make it look like it has a V-12 under the hood? Then the European version came out, restyled by Opel, and Christine wondered if designers really are in tune with the moods of their respective markets. So which do you think is sexier? (because of the picture size, survey is below the fold)...

Small Steps Matter
There is an interesting discussion going on at Grist about the importance of "small steps". Mike Tidwell wrote an article a couple of days ago suggesting that voluntary actions won't fix the climate, "While I do believe we have a moral responsibility to do what we can as individuals, we just don't have enough time to win this battle one household at a time, street by painstaking street, from coast to coast.". This is not a new discussion , but add to the mix a response to the first article by a group of...