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ASEC: Throwing a Better Party
While the Action Sports Retailers trade show oozed cool, the Action Sports Environmental Coalition was on a whole new level of cool. Founded by Frank Scurra, the ASEC organizes all action sports organizations and companies together around green projects. Their goal: green the industry without making it seem like work. At the ASR, I had a chance to chat with Scurra about action sports, and throwing a better green party.It definitely did not seem like work at the Green the Green room at ASR. The room was filled with really cool green companies, and even better, they brought samples. While the ASC itself was ...

Mexican University to Install Solar Photovoltaic System
The Metropolitan Autonomous University (UAM) of Mexico City recently announced plans to build a solar photovoltaic system to supply 50 kilowatts of electricity. The UAM, with the assistance of the Institute for Electrical Research (IIE), will be the first institution in Mexico with its own solar PV system. The new system will power its Iztapalapa campus and connect to the grid. According to the university, the project will serve as a research tool to evaluate the application of solar PV on buildings in Mexico.Clean-energy policy has stalled on a national level in Mexico partly on account of the many permits needed, a lack of accessible transmission lines and a ...

Jane Goodall Endorses Kenmore's New High-Efficiency Appliancess
The curtain has risen over Sear's Kenmore Elite dishwasher with Ultra WashHE technology, the SteamCare Washer and Dryer lines, along with a somewhat incongruousat first blush, anywaynew alliance with the Jane Goodall Institute's Roots & Shoots Program. (Members of the youth group will be stationed at various Sears stores, distributing flyers with tips on how to save water and energy at home.)The Ultra WashHE (from $799), according to the company, uses only 75 watts of energythe same required to turn on a light bulb. It also uses 34 percent less energy and 41 percent less water than s...

In the Kitchen with Alice Waters
What would it be like to have Alice Waters come over to cook lunch for you? Well, we would probably have a full-body asthma attack, but the New York Times who lucked out with the opportunity merely fussed over her two cans of Diet Pepsi and wondered if she should hide her box of Kellogg's Raisin Bran.She also got to tag along with Waters as the food activist shopped at Union Square's Greenmarket. Also discussed: Waters' new book, The Art of Simple ...

More on PARK(ing) Day
As we reminded you earlier, tomorrow is PARK(ing) Day - an international event that "challenges people to rethink the way streets are used and reinforces the need for urban open space." As Lloyd put it a few weeks ago, "Now it is beyond an artistic intervention; it has turned into a movement and a holiday, September 21." We want you to help document PARK(ing) Day events the world over, showing us by photo and comment what can be done in one day to turn places for cars into places for people. ...

Brewing Up Change at Your Coffee Chain
This summer, while walking down Highway 35 into Minden, Ontario, I paced out the distance between pieces of garbage in the ditch beside the road; it averaged about 12 feet. Fully half of the garbage was from Tim Horton's, Canada's hugely dominant coffee chain, named after a hockey player who died wrapping his De Tomaso Pantera around a tree while drunk and on amphetamines, great role model here. Adria Vasil of Ecoholic fame writes in Now Magazine that all of the coffee chains have ecological issues, but at least Starbucks is the largest purchaser of Fair Trade coffee in America, and that it also leads with ...

To Do Tomorrow: Park(ing) Day
PARK(ing) Day 2006, Manchester, U.K.Get ready to get your sod on for Park(ing) Day, Friday, Sept. 21 (that's tomorrow!), an event that first began when Rebar, a San Francisco collective, transformed a metered parking spot into a park almost two years ago. More than 70 percent of most cities' outdoor space is dedicated to automobiles, but only a fraction of that land is available as open space for people.To discover what public art projects and street interventions are going on in your neck of t...

An Evening with Wangari Maathai in NYC, Sept. 25
Wednesday, September 25, 7pmAn Evening with Wangari MaathaiAmerican Museum of Natural HistoryCentral Park West at 79th Street NY, NY 10024 LeFrak Theater, first floorProgram Code: EL092507$15 ($13.50 Members, students, senior citizens)Nobel Peace Prize laureate Wangari Maathai is a celebrated political activist, feminist, and environmentalist. She is the founder of the Green Belt Movement, an environmental group in Kenya that has restored indigenous forests and assisted rural women by paying them to plant trees in their communities. Since 1977, it has planted mor...

Bikes Belong in Ontario!
from right, Rob White of Btac, Dr Charles Tator of Thinkfirst, apologies to the third person whose name I missed....With the Ontario election going on, everybody is trying to make themselves heard and get promises out of the politicians. We attended a press conference set up by the Bicycle Trade Association of Canada, which, not surprisingly, is in favour of a "comprehensive policy program to promote cycling." They note that bikes are the most energy efficient vehicles on the road - "a bicycle can cover a given distance using one-thousandth of the fuel and one-thousandth the greenhouse gases than does a typical car. Assuming only a ...

Quote of the Day: Juliet B. Schor on the Overspent American
Photo credit: zizzy American consumers are often not conscious of being motivated by social status and are far more likely to attribute such motives to others than to themselves. We live with high levels of psychological denial about the connection between our buying habits and the social statements they make.Most Americans would deny that, by their spending, they are seeking status, in the usual meaning of the wordlooking to position themselves in a higher economic stratum. They might point out that they don't want everything in sight, that purchases are often highly select...

Diesel Motorbike Speed Record Smashed
The DIE Moto, the diesel-engined motorbike which we have covered before, has broken the land speed record for a diesel motorbike, with a speed of 130mph.The bike is a Frankenstein vehicle made from a motorbike and a BMW car engine which was salvaged from a scrap yard. It was designed to run on standard diesel, biodiesel, or straight vegetable oil (SVO), but it is unclear which fuel was being used when the record was broken....

Easyjet Steps Up Its Eco-campaign
We are pretty used to campaigns to cut aircraft pollution here at TreeHugger , were just not so used to these campaigns being originated by airlines themselves. Not long ago Mairi reported on calls by UK-based budget carrier Easyjet for an outright ban on older aircraft, among other measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. It seems that these calls were more than just a flash in the pan, and Easyjet is now stepping up its campaign with a promotional email asking customers to write to their Members of Parliament with the follow...

Along The Green Horizon: Big US Electricity Price Increases
Gasoline price increases can always be counted on to grab headlines. Chances are good that electricity prices, too, soon will be very newsworthy in the USA - right about election time. Major drivers: construction materials and process technology for new or upgraded power plants have become drastically more expensive of late; and, there's suddenly much less certainty by investors that the black chips (coal) are worth as much as the greener ones (natural gas and renewables) in this card game. So, bets are coming off the table, encouraged by citizens concerned with climate change.There are other reasons why higher electricity prices are a predetermined outcome. Conservation has...

US Data Centers May Be Forced To Green Their Operations: They're Running Out Of Space And Looking For A Reason To Expand
ONStor, Inc., the leading provider of scalable clustered NAS solutions for the enterprise, today announced results from an independent survey of 369 IT decision makers regarding the status of the "greening" of their data centers. Sixty-three percent [63%] of the respondents reported that their data center had run out of space, power or cooling capacity without warning. Another alarming statistic was that although the power consumption of an enterprise's data center is massive, 40 percent of respondents have not discussed a green initiative within their company; 60 percent reported that they had a green initiative in place, would have one in place ...

Wal-Mart Kids Recycling Challenge Makes A Difference
Well this Wal-Mart bag may be twisting eerily in the early evening wind, but it could be snatched up soon by a kid saving plastic bags as part of the Wal-Mart Kids Recycling Challenge. Initially launched in 2004, theyve encouraged kids across a wide swath of the country to pick up bags and turn them into cash via the recycling contest. Of course, its not a bad way to ensure the Wal-Mart brand name spends less time looking like roadside trash eitherBut every bit helps, and to date students at nearly 2,800 schools have participated, recycling more than 1,400 tons of plastic bags, and earning more than $1.2 mill...

Answer the Call of the Wild with Your Cell Phone
Are you an outdoors lover that enjoys the natural beauty of our national parks? Check out the new mobile service from the National Parks Conservation Association (NPCA). Provided by Sonopia, customers can get updates on their cell phones with the latest news about national parks around the country. In addition, you can download photos to use as your phone wallpaper, ringtones featuring your favorite nature sounds (think chirping birds and howling wolves) and whats even better is that 3% to 7% of your monthly mobile bill goes directly to the NPCA. Calling plans are comparable to...

Miles Automotive Aims to Bring Affordable, All-Electric Vehicles to Market
Fancy that spiffy new Tesla Roadster but don't feel like shelling out $100,000 to (try to) get your mitts on one? Fear not: help is on the way. While it doesn't exactly fit into the same luxury EV mold as Tesla's fine rides, Miles Automotive's ZX40 4-door hatchback will satisfy your basic driving needs in a pinch. Founded by 79-year old multi-millionaire Miles Rubin, Miles Automotive is a company whose mission it is to bring affordable, low-polluting electric vehicles to the mass market. More importantly, h...

Cardboard Lounger for Cats
I loved the cardboard furniture I saw on MocoLoco and then I clicked through to the source and was surprised to find out that it is for cats! Marmalade Pets uses non-toxic adhesives and recycled content. They suggest that their beds "provide a long term solution to scratching, eliminating the need for harmful declawing operations and/or stressful behavioural modification" (or, as in our case, a complete recovering of all of our furniture) Too late for us, but Jasmin, run to ::Marmalade Pets...

Boxhouse: It's a Renovation
You would never know to look at it, but this is a 1948 vintage 900 square foot house in Boulder, Colorado, reclad in a plywood rainscreen, with an addition made from a custom prefabricated compressed straw panel wall system that was assembled in four hours, that houses a new kitchen, bedroom and bath. Designer Rob Pyatt says "I firmly believe that we can achieve sustainability in the built environment through adaptive reuse, recycling and construction efficiency, and in this way, we can improve the quality of life in our communities and provide affordable, healthy and inspired environments."...

Climate Do-Gooders?
The best strategy to deal with climate change is to make the rest of the world as rich as New York, argues Bjoern Lomborg, the Danish political scientist and author of The Skeptical Environmentalist". In his opinion, what we need to do is to ensure that people elsewhere can afford things like shoring up their coastlines and buying air conditioners. In a September 11 article entitled Feel Good vs. Do Good on Climate for The New York Times, columnist John Tierney, accompanied by Dr. Lomborg, took readers on a walk to an old...

The Untapped Green Within Graying Buildings
We always say that renovation is the greenest form of construction; now we learn from Tilde Herrera of GreenerBuildings that it is a good investment, too. She writes about Seattles 80 year old Joseph Vance Building (covered in Treehugger earlier) and its green makeover by New York developer Jonathan Rose Companies, which has started a Smart Growth Investment Fund to buy existing buildings and make them green. "In terms of the building stock, only 1 percent is new construction annually, so it is critical to focus on the existing 99 percent, which are huge consumers of energy," said Nathan T...

Deptford Design Market Challenge
It sounded like a great idea: let 27 of the hippest and hottest young designers choose a piece of...rubbish...ooops, object, from Deptford market...and see what they can come up with. The Deptford Design Market Challenge, named after an old and vibrant street market in the east end, asked these designers to think about recycling and creating something unique and desirable and functional out of second-hand junk. The result: mixed. The hits: Some were very clever--Stuart Haygarth created a candelabra out of a punch bowl and glasse...

Wasting Away in Traffic: Commutes Starting Earlier
Sean noted earlier that the average American spends a full week per year in traffic getting to work; they are also getting up earlier to do it. Census data documents ever-lengthening commutes at earlier times: 15 million Americans are out the door before six, 2.7 more than in 2000.It is changing people's lives- one example in a USA Today article used to turn in after catching the first few minutes of the 11 o'clock news. He'd walk or jog in the mornings. Now, he goes to bed at 9 p.m. and rolls out at 4:30 a.m. "If I leave home after 6 and there's an accident," he says, "I'm late for work."...

Absolut Downloads: It Is Already Happening at Ponoko
While we talk about the promise of downloadable designs, it in fact is already happening, Ponoko (previously on TreeHugger here) does it all: designers can upload their flatpack designs, purchasers can buy them and shops are hired to laser-cut them out. They call it "the world's first personal manufacturing platform. It's the online space for a community of creators and consumers to use a global network of digital manufacturing hardware to co-create, make and trade individualized product ideas on demand." You can download the wine rack shown above as an example of how it works. ...

Walking Away with a Free Tom Dixon Lamp
There are lots of fun things about the London Design Festival: exhibitions, parties, free drinks, hob-knobbing with beautiful and talented people, but still none of these top the feeling I had yesterday as I walked away from Trafalgar Square clutching a large cardboard box. There might be no such thing as a free lunch, but apparently there is such a thing a free limited edition lamp by Tom Dixon. This celebrated British designer has taken to creating installations with an eco-design twist at the London Design Festival and then giving it all away at the end. Last year it was the great 'chair grab' when 5...