Michael Weschler for The New York Times
It is Thursday, and the New York Times Homes section takes usually takes us into million dollar designer digs; it is a nice change to see a modest 435 square foot home for three that cost far less. It doesn't look small, and according to the Times, actually appears spacious, airy and serene. A friend describes it: “To me, what’s lovely about this space is that someone born in India and someone born in Holland, both with a design sense, have created a space that feels very Japanese, that reflects the Japanese ability to live in small spaces gracefully."
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Rewind the clock to September 2005, and you would see that the term "sustainable growth" carried a very different meaning than it does today. Many businesses struggled with how to incorporate sustainability into their operations. Further, businesses were not engaging each other to share best practices and learn from each other. To address this problem,
Business Roundtable launched
S.E.E. Change (Society, Environment, Economy).
As discussed in previous posts, S.E.E. Change promotes better business and a better world by motivating committed companies to minimize their global environmental footprint and to improve the environment through new products, technology or services that create value for society and shareholders. This objective remains the same today.
Through S.E.E. Change, Business Roundtable members implement a variety of sustainable growth initiatives and demonstrate that by working together, we can address our nation’s most pressing challenges in a positive, constructive way.
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We found Afrigadget
mid last year and were delighted with the inspired content. The craftmanship, creativity and ability to overcome amazing odds catalogued there, is such a wonderfully welcome counterpoint to the negative news Western media normally serves us.
The site underwent a revamp early this year and we’d encourage you to give it the once over. Amongst of our faves, buried in the archives are the very enterprising
mobile phone booth! And the
homemade paraglider made from plastic bags, purloined rope and baling wire. ...

With rumors of an outbreak now spreading to schools in Florida and Maine, it’s no surprise that students and faculty on the copy crisis team at the Robert Moses Middle School are hard at work trying to solve the crisis that was
first reported late last week when reports of a strange, contagious disease hitting school photocopiers reached TreeHugger.
Apparently, symptoms include a propensity to chew up trees at an amazing rate while using gobs of energy and releasing tremendous amounts of CO2 leading to increased levels of global warming.
But back at the school in North Babylon where the disease was first reported, they’re busy piling giant blocks of ice on top of their apparently distressed machine as it seems to be spiking a fever that could get out of control.
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TreeHugger loves folding and flat-packing chairs for their ability to
fold up (or even
hang up) to get out of the way, so we like the space-saving designs from
Philippe Malouin. The Hanger Chair, (pictured above) an elegant combination of coat hanger and folding chair, makes a lot of sense: not only is it good for hanging your jacket on when sitting in the chair, it can help keep your coats wrinkle-free and hanging in the closet when you aren't sitting on. Smart.
And what kind of space-saving table do you sit at in such a sleek chair? Why, an inflatable table that seats 10 and is strong enough to stand of, of course. Hit the jump to see what we mean.
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Put this one in the "Greater than the sum of its parts" file: Teruhiro Yanagihara's "Half Way" sofa consists of a handful of modular pieces that come together in a variety of ways to provide just about any kind of seating you need. New last spring, the pieces combine to form various chairs, loungers, ottomans, sofas, and back again, depending on your seating desires.
With the tagline, "Bigger than for one, a little tight for two," it appears that it was designed for extra-spacious lounging for one or cozy seating for two, though we could see it employed in more flexible ways. It wouldn't be difficult to use this less-is-more system to replace a couch, chaise, lounge chair and ottoman, and just about anything in between; wouldn't it be cool to be able to use something like this to replace the multiple pieces you have in your living room now? Hit the jump to see what else it can do and let your imagination run wild.
::Teruhiro Yanagihara via
::pan-dan...
While 70 percent of the world’s surface is covered by water, it is estimated that only 1 percent of those total water resources is available for human use. Currently, between 500 million and 2 billion people are living in conditions of water stress. It is estimated that this number will rise to about 5.5 billion people by 2025.
Meanwhile, experts expect water use to increase by 22 percent over the next two decades.
These numbers should scare us all.
The business community has a responsibility to address the growing global challenges posed by water scarcity and water quality—both because water-related risks are significant for business and because we take our social responsibility seriously. Eight percent of U.S. energy demand is used to treat, pump and heat water. American businesses help confront the worldwide water crisis in the same ways we address energy efficiency: by bringing innovation and management discipline to reduce each company's water footprint and to maximize business opportunities to deliver enhanced quality and quantity of water.
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For many of us, the kitchen is one room in the house that can benefit most from design elements that help reduce clutter and create more space; as the focal point and gathering place of many homes, you can never have too much space. That's the idea behind Turkish designer Fevzi Karaman's modular concept: everything you'd need for a small kitchen is there, but neatly folds up and gets out of the way when you don't.
It probably wouldn't serve a family of five very well, but would be a great way to make the most of a small apartment. Hit the jump to see how a stove, sink, recycling bin, dish storage and more all fit in there.
::Fevzi Karaman at Coroflot via
::Unclutterer
See also:
::How to Green Your Kitchen,
Compacta All-in-One Kitchen Island and
::Casulo: An Entire Apartment's Furniture in One Small Box...

Treehugger loves multifunction furniture as a way of getting more out of smaller spaces, and has loved Michelle Kaufmann`s Glide House since it was
first unveiled. So we were happy to learn that she practices what we preach, and has filled her own Glidehouse with "transformers"- furniture that changes, stores or generally does more than just sit there.
Some are familiar, like that ottoman on the right, which is really a Pandora Cube from Room and Board. She also has a Flou bed, which Michelle says offers "a better way to store things under your bed than just stuffing your stuff underneath; the mattress can be lifted up to reveal a storage space beneath and the bed also comes with shelving on the sides for books."
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TreeHugger loves skinny houses; they don't take up much space and they really demonstrate the talents of the designers. Luke Tozer of Pitman Tozer Architects experiments on himself with only eight feet to work with, widening out in the rear. To top it off, as Building Design writes:
"But that’s not enough: the house had to have as low a carbon footprint as feasible. But setting yourself hard tasks has never provided an excuse for failure: you have to make it all work, and Tozer has come out of it all with a beautifully planned and built house — a tour de force of the architect’s skills."
So it has 150 foot boreholes for heat pumps, pumping into space insulated with lambswool. Under the garden is a rainwater storage tank which supplies the toilets. Neighbours are fighting proposed rooftop photovoltaics....

TreeHugger loves
stairs as bookshelves and as
storage as a way if getting more stuff into less space, but we have never imagined one like this, designed by Tim Sloan of
Levitate Achitects. It is an alternating step design that rises twice as steeply as conventional stairs, turned into an extraordinary library. The architect told Kristin Hohenadel at
Apartment Therapy:
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This is a transformational idea: one that hopefully will "catch on" all over the world. Maybe even around the "Third Coast" ( Great Lakes).
California is proposing a series of new "marine protected areas" where fish are given enough refuge to reproduce and develop stable populations - populations with a normal age/class distribution.
At meetings in Pacifica today and Thursday, state officials get a first look at plans for "marine protected areas" along 360 miles of the Pacific Coast between Santa Cruz and Mendocino.
It is the second phase of a multi-year effort to eventually cover the entire coast with zones where fishing is banned or restricted. In the first phase, 29 preserves were created in 2007 between Santa Cruz and Lompoc.
Via::
Sacramento Bee, Preserves sought for undersea life, Image credit::ibid...

As long theorized, evidence has emerged that too extensive planting of Bt producing cotton in one setting can result in resistance to Bt by the ubiquitous Boll Worm. So how to mitigate against this? Pay
some farmers not to use Bt modified crop seed? Encourage organic cotton farming round and about the Monsanto style plots? The solution seems like it would be a long term challenge if the economic benefits of using Bt producing cotton are high for the farmers.
University of Arizona entomologists looked at data from six experiments to monitor pests in fields sown with transgenic cotton and corn in Australia, China, Spain and the United States.
They found evidence of genetic mutation among bollworms (Helicoverpa zea) in a dozen cotton fields sown in Mississippi and Arkansas between 2003 and 2006...The mutation entails a slight change in the bollworm's DNA to help it resist a toxin that the cotton plant exudes thanks to a gene inserted by biotechnologists.
These GM toxins are produced in nature by a widespread bacterium called Bacillus thuringiensis, which goes by the abbreviation Bt. The type of Bt toxin to which these bollworms have become resistant is called Cry1Ac.
Via::
TerraDaily, "First evidence emerges of pest resistance to GM crops: scientists" Image credit::Wikipedia entry for Helicoverpa zea...

It might not look like it, but inside this box, there's an armoire, a desk, a height-adjustable stool, two more stools, a six-shelf bookcase, and a bed with a mattress.
Casulo, the brilliant, modular setup designed by Marcel Krings & Sebastian Mühlhäuser, hides furnishings enough for an entire room -- or, heck, an entire apartment -- in a small 31"x47" (that's 80 cm x 120 cm) box. Two people can lift, carry, and assemble (and then disassemble, when it's time to move) each piece of furniture within the Casulo in about 10 minutes -- it requires no tools for assembly -- and every part of the boxy exterior is used, negating any need for extraneous, wasteful packaging. Smart.
Casulo won the "Abraham & David Roentgen Award" in November 2007 for its "cleverness, finesse and qualitative realisation of the idea" and we think it's quite well-deserved; what a perfect solution for frequent movers and small space dwellers alike. More pics, plus a video, of the unboxing process, after the jump.
::Casulo via
::DesignSpotter...
Images courtesy of Eric Staudemeir
We continue our
series looking at the
Venice Beach Eco Cottages, a set of 3 homes built sustainably from the ground up. In this post, we will examine the cottages' building process, as told to us by the entrepreneurial duo behind the project, Karel J. Samsom and Cynthia Foster....

"Mission creep" in the design of portable electronic devices has ushered in an an era of resource consumption polarity. For personal-scale electronics; less is truly becoming more in so many ways.
For television, however, the opposite seems true. Starting in the 1950's, televisions have stayed on a trend line toward bigger and heavier. Perhaps the most egregious trend in this regard is for the construction of Mega-home theaters with real theater chairs, and an internal broadcasting system to flat screens in all the major rooms, supplanting the wall spaces that portrait paintings held in the colonial and Victorian eras. Television is the fattening buffalo in the room - too big to stand on his own any longer - that must be mounted on the wall.
For the visionary designer, there is hope that these polar opposite consumption cases can converge, to where average annual per capita material consumption attributable to electronic devices decreases greatly from where it is today. See our examples and discussion below the fold....

That's the question asked by student designer Theo Zeniou in his work, on display at an exhibition by
Buckinghamshire New University’s MA furniture design and technology graduates, on display at the Vitra showroom this week in London. Zeniou's imaginative work gives furniture a second home on the wall, giving it both dual purpose as 3D art and getting it up and out of the way when not in use.
His artful designs are a great space-saving solution, and include the small office setup above -- it's easy to see where the chair is, but can you figure out where the table comes from? -- and an ingenious stool that doubles as a flower on the wall. It's all functional art, fun to use and easy to put away; hit the jump to see the stool and what the office setup looks like on the floor. ::Theo Zeniou via
::Dwell Daily...

You would think that a row of 10-year old Sequoia or "redwood" trees, with prospects of living hundreds of years, would hardly be able to grow fast enough to shade a nearby residential solar panel array, which has a design life of only 30 years. But, in California, legal precedent is being tested over just such a struggle. At the 'root' of the debate - and at the root of the law - is contention over which entities, trees or SPV's, have the greatest potential for climate mitigation.

In a case with statewide significance, the Santa Clara County District Attorney's Office is pursuing a Sunnyvale couple under a little-known California law because redwood trees in their backyard cast a shadow over their neighbor's solar panels...

"It's not that we think trees are more or less important than solar collectors. It's that our state's leaders have said under the following circumstances, solar takes precedence," said Ken Rosenblatt, supervising Santa Clara County deputy district attorney for environmental protection....

Stuck with a tiny balcony? Looking for a smart way to maximize space? Look no further than the design by
Christian Lessing, whose modular furniture system adds clever multi-tasking to a previously useless (or less used) space. It's got modules for seating, tables and flat surfaces that are handy for plants, especially if it's out on a balcony or adjacent to a window; though it's designed for balconies, this design is a great way to maximize space anywhere.
We could see this doing good work in a breakfast nook or similarly small space; sit for a quick meal and then turn it over to your plants while you're gone all day. Clevr.
::Christian Lessing via
::Josh Spear...
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