Spring's here, Ã…hlens says in ads, meanwhile promising it won't burn anymore perfectly usable clothes. Popular Swedish department store Ã…hlens announced it would stop the common practice of gathering unsold clothes that are at the end of the sales chain into containers and shipping them to be burned, reported Dagens Nyheter last week. Instead, Ã…hlens said it would work with non-profits Stadmissionen and Myrorna to put the clothes to better use. Of course, this begs the question of how a clothing shop could have ...
Read More......
Photo: Winnifred Bird I thought the term sounded familiar, so I searched TreeHugger for "plastic resin pellets" but surprise, surprise, the first few hits were ads for Chinese producers of the stuff. These are tiny pellets that you may find in teddy bears. They are actually used to make a whole lot of other things, all plastic. And, researchers are finding them all over the place, especially on beaches and in the oceans. As Hideshige Takada, professor of organic geochemistry at Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology, with colleague Yukie Mato and four other Japanese researchers first showed, these darn pellets suck up a range of persistent organic ...
Read More......
The SHED by Chuck Witmer, Silver Spring, Maryland, with permission Why have garden sheds become so popular in recent years? It is true that they are an economical way of gaining more space without having to spend a lot of money renovating, and a lot more people are working from home and need a quiet spot. But I think it is also because they permit a kind of architectural experimentation that people don't get to do in their house- you can take a few more risks when it is a separate space and the building codes don't apply. ...
Read More......
Photo via: Seattle Sports This month I was given the pleasure of putting two of Seattle Sports new solar/crank-powered flashlights/USB chargers to the test. Let's see how they stacked up to a few of their competitors... ...
Read More......
Photo via: Seattle Sports This month I was given the pleasure of putting one of Seattle Sports new solar/crank-powered radio and iPod speaker to the test. Let's see how it stacked up to a few of its competitors... ...
Read More......
Terrafugia The recession is taking a bite out of all of us, but if you have an extra $194,000 laying around, maybe under the mattress, you can afford a new flying car that's scheduled to drive, take off and land in 2010....
Read More......
Photo credit: Women's Bean Project It all started with $500 worth of beans and a desire to help disenfranchised women break out of the cycle of poverty. Two decades later, the Women's Bean Project employs 40 chronically unemployed and impoverished women annually to make and package products such as bean-soup and chili mixes (including one made with certified-organic bea...
Read More......
Photo: ingridtaylar via Flickr Oil spills just got messier. According to a biologist at Queen's University, the detergents used to clean oil spills may be more harmful to fish than the oil that gets spilled. Biology professor Peter Hodson warns that the oil-dispersing detergents that do such a bang-up job of degrading and diluting oil in the long term increase th...
Read More......
"To the untrained eye, it looks like water." This being World Water Day, the issue of water management and conservation (always a big one in this part of the world) got a bit of extra press in Israel today. On the positive side, the morning papers reported that Israel was being praised at the World Water Forum in Istanbul for its exceptional rates of recycled wastewater and desalination. On the not so positive side, a group of environmentally-concerned lawmakers organized a visit to t...
Read More......
Image: photo by author The fellow next to you on the plane is behaving strangely. Does it seem that he is protecting a belt that is producing an evident thickness around his waist? You remember the last time you observed a similar anomaly, when the Pringles-addict across from you on the train kept checking the chips supply, which appeared to be peeping regularly. If your thoughts turn immediately to terrorism, you would be wrong: there is another explanation. But this one is a real threat to your homeland security too....
Read More......
