American Media & The Green Movement
Modern media shapes nearly everything in our culture. The TV set, the daily newspaper, the internet and radio stations have become the central meeting point for curious minds. It is not hard to understand why the messages that the media puts out into society can have a tremendous impact on everything that society does. Modern [...]
Read More »The Future is Green: Equity, Fair Trade, Health and Happiness
Filling out the big top 10 is the catalyst — both good and bad — in all of this: people. Each of us plays a role in the way the world works, and we each have the power to change it; that’s why we can’t underestimate the value in human equity, fair trade [www.sundancechannel.com] labor [...]
Read More »The Future is Green: Natural Habitats and Culture and Heritage
Today, we’ll move away from the stuff that surrounds our lives every day and open up the aperture a bit, to look at how our green future interacts with natural habitats and wildlife, and culture and heritage. Again, it might not seem like there’s a huge connection here, but there really is. And it’s terribly [...]
Read More »The Future is Green: Local and Sustainable Food and Sustainable Water
We take a step closer to our everyday lives today with something we all need, every day (and several times, at that): food and water. We can’t make this more plain: what you choose to eat and drink every day makes a huge, huge difference, so making the sustainable [www.sundancechannel.com] choice has huge potential to [...]
Read More »The Future is Green: Sustainable Transport and Local and Sustainable Materials
We started our peek into our bright green [www.sundancechannel.com] future by looking at two very big, very large scale hurdles to clear: zero carbon and zero waste. Today, we’ll focus on more tangible ideas that are easier to put in to everyday context, since they’re things we use every day: sustainable transport [www.sundancechannel.com] and local/sustainable [...]
Read More »Christmas Week: Using the Greenest Wrapping
We generate 25 percent more trash during the holidays, and a large part of that can be attributed to the gifts we buy and ostentatiously wrap up before giving them away. Once given, you know how it usually goes: there’s the “Oh, what could it be?” stage followed by a moment of admiration and then [...]
Read More »The Future is Green: Zero Carbon and Zero Waste
With the year winding to a close, many of us take time to reflect on the months gone by and to gaze into our own personal crystal ball to see what the next year might hold. The future is green, from TreeHugger’s point of view, and there are more new ways to insure this is [...]
Read More »Christmas Week: Using the Greenest Decorations
Decorations, especially the holiday variety, are one of those green conundrums: tradition dictates that we light up the interior and exterior of our homes, cut down a tree (though you don’t have to do that [www.sundancechannel.com]) and hang decorations all over the tree and all over the house. The stuff we decorate with only comes [...]
Read More »Christmas Week: Getting the Greenest Gifts
TreeHugging mantras like “do more with less” and “waste not, want not” can be difficult to keep up during this holiday season typically marked with excess and extravagance. This is especially true with gift giving; we buy things from exotic locales around the globe and do a lot of shopping online, which adds up to [...]
Read More »Christmas Week: Getting The Greenest Tree
The Christmas tree is the (sometimes) living embodiment of so many things this holiday season, from family togetherness to religious significance and, let’s face it, the giving of gifts (more on that later this week). Amazingly, though many trees (even the fake ones) look nearly the same, there are definitely greener [www.sundancechannel.com]er options out there [...]
Read More »Designer Spotlight: Ross Lovegrove
Like many of the great ones, Welsh designer Ross Lovegrove is something of an enigma. He has a very wide variety of tastes, and an equally wide range of skills when it comes to creating interesting, functional, thought-provoking designs that continue to inspire praise, criticism and even a little head-scratching. He once told Wired [www.wired.com], [...]
Read More »Downsize It: The Furniture Edition
This week has been all about getting more (and paying less) by cutting back, so we’ll return to a familiar theme — that “design makes a difference [www.sundancechannel.com]” — to help illustrate the point. Smart design can help save space, save resources, and, ultimately, make your life better and your (smaller) space more functional. 1) [...]
Read More »Downsize It: The Allure of a Simplified Life
Now that we’ve established that downsizing your footprint isn’t indicative of poverty (or even a lack of style), it’s easier to see some of the benefits from going smaller and doing more with less. And there are lots: not just environmental (though we’re most concerned with those), but very concrete benefits, like more money in [...]
Read More »Downsize It: The First Steps to Living with Less
Call it what you like: Small is the New Big; Less is the New More; Small is the New Black; Less, But Better. There are myriad metaphors and similes to describe a favorite TreeHugger mantra, and even more ways to actively practice it in your day-to-day life and as an overall lifestyle, including big (or [...]
Read More »Downsize It: Living in Small Spaces
Though downsizing may sound like a downgrade, there’s a lot to like about cutting back on space and stuff you need. It’s the ultimate in conservation [www.sundancechannel.com]: with less space, for example, you have less space to heat, cool, clean, furnish and light; with fewer rooms, you have fewer lighting fixtures to run around and [...]
Read More »Designer Spotlight: Honda’s FCX Clarity
It’s not often that “cars” and “sustainable design” get mentioned in the same breath, but we think Honda’s new FCX Clarity is worth the exception. It’s their first production hydrogen fuel cell vehicle, based on the FCX Concept (which we mentioned before [www.sundancechannel.com]), and, in a couple ways, represents a significant step forward in design [...]
Read More »Design Makes a Difference: The Future Is Here
The forward-looking designs of the Electrolux competition [www.electrolux.com] are great for a number of reasons: they are smart, thoughtful concepts that make living green even easier and they solve some persistent problems (and isn’t that what great design is supposed to do?). Got food waste? Want to save water? Looking to breathe easy? They’ve got [...]
Read More »Design Makes a Difference: The Future
Establish a few years back, Electrolux Design Lab hosts an annual design competition open to student designers around the globe, and every year since 2003, the appliance manufacturer’s contest has generated some really interesting, forward-looking, greener-thinking designs. This year, for its fifth installment, the competition’s theme is sustainability; students are invited to design household products [...]
Read More »Design Makes a Difference: The Ideas
Part of the TreeHugger mantra is “design makes a difference.” By changing the way we make things, we can effectively nip the problem in the bud, so to speak; by designing out the need for waste and designing in smarter materials and better production methods, the world can not only cut back on the extraneous [...]
Read More »Word on the Street: Can Car-Sharing Make a Difference?
Now that you know what car-sharing is, and are aware that it can work for some of us (city dwellers, we’re looking at you!), we think it’s important to look a little more closely at the potential benefit that car-sharing can bring the world; not necessarily as a singular practice that will save the planet [...]
Read More »How to Drive Without Owning a Car
If you fit the profile of a car-sharing user — a city dweller who commutes (or works from home), cares about the planet, wants to save some cash and get more exercise — the biggest obstacle might be choosing which service is right for you. There are several variables, and we’ve done some homework to [...]
Read More »Ride the Network: An Introduction to Car Sharing
“If you live in a city, you don’t need to own a car.” So said William Clay Ford Jr., the CEO of Ford Motor Company, and that’s a pretty striking statement, especially from someone who is in the business of selling cars. About 75% of us in North America live in cities, and many of [...]
Read More »Designer Spotlight: Cohda’s Roughly Drawn Chair
Take leftover high-density polyethylene plastic (HDPE — that’s #2 plastic) like milk jugs and detergent bottles, give them to UK-based design team Cohda [www.cohda.com], and watch some pretty magical stuff occur. They run it through an industrial-looking “recycling” machine that they made themselves, and, in a Willy Wonka-esque transition, turn the plastic waste into perfectly [...]
Read More »A World of Ways to Eat Less Meat
Eating less meat is a good way to go green all around, and we absolutely encourage it: to reduce your carbon footprint; reduce your water footprint; and be a healthier person all around. Cutting out the meat is a big, big change, and we don’t want to marginalize that point; it’s a big lifestyle change, [...]
Read More »Your Water Footprint and the Circle of Life
Quite similar in concept to the carbon footprint, our water footprints are defined as “the total volume of freshwater that is used to produce the goods and services consumed by the individual, business or nation,” by Waterfootprint.org [www.waterfootprint.org]. People use lots of water for drinking, cooking and washing, but even more for producing things such [...]
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