Design & Architecture

Wood fired stoves were very common houses a hundred years ago; the (Canadian) thanksgiving dinner I had a few weeks ago was cooked on one, in a house in the country where it heated both the room and the food.

Now Rüegg has brought the wood stove back into the kitchen, with a design that can work for cooking like a stove top, or open for barbecuing or just looking like a fireplace. Mocoloco calls it a an oven, a grill, and a heating system all-in-one.

Science & Technology

Some things have no business being packed up and shipped at all, like software serial numbers. But until we learn to teleport fragile objects, we're going to have to protect them for the journey. This ambitious concept called Bacs harnesses the bacterium acetobacter xylinum to self-assemble around an object, encasing it in a biodegradable paper-like shell. For this innovative notion, designer Mareike Frensemeier took third place in Cargo Packs 2020, a design challenge staged by Bayer MaterialScience.
By slathering an object with the special culture and then offering it a sugary meal, the bacteria metabolize the glucose into a "fibrous nano-scaled cellulose network."

Cars & Transportation

Photo: Flickr, CC

The Difference Between Snail Mail and Email
One of the benefits of smart grids that we too often overlook is the fact that they'll greatly reduce the need for power utilities to send trucks (and often big ones) out in the field to gather data and fix problems. The most obvious example of this is the remote reading of meters instead of having to send people to read meters, but it will also help with maintenance and repairs since the grid will tell trucks exactly where to go to solve problems, reducing the number of miles driven.

Cars & Transportation

Image credit: Railex

Last week I wrote about the Stobart Refrigerated Train shipping produce from Spain to the UK via the Channel Tunnel, providing an alternative to hybrid trucks or slowing down freight as a means to saving gas. But while it was impressive, commenter Andrew pointed out that the "first-of-its-kind" headline may have been misleading. In fact, four 55 car state-of-the-art refrigerated train have been shipping refrigerated produce from Washington State and California to Albany, NY. The entire operation is incredible.

Science & Technology

Image via Vers

It's no secret we like gadgets covered in wood - something about the feeling of permanence. Plus, wood makes for a solid protective cover for something like an iPhone. While not all wood cases are sustainable - like the un-TreeHugger zebra wood case we saw awhile back - Vers is a company that is working to make this wood iPhone case one of the most sustainable on the market. They've joined up with The Arbor Day Foundation to create an offer tough for any iPhone-toting greenie to refuse.

Business & Politics

When it comes to China's efforts to curtail greenhouse gases, Dr. Yang Fuqiang, director of global climate solutions at the World Wildlife Fund, has an optimal vantage point. He began his career as a researcher at the National Development and Reform Commission, the Chinese government's main economic planner, before continuing in the realm of energy and the environment. We spoke with him recently in Beijing, a few weeks before President Obama's upcoming visit.

This is the second part of our interview; also see the first part of our interview, about US-China collaboration.

TreeHugger: What's the best way China can address its carbon emissions in the short term?
Yang Fuqiang: They have two chances. One is Obama. Maybe China will give him some gift. The second chance is Copenhagen. China might say we have our binding targets for our emissions domestically, but not internationally.

Design & Architecture

270 Million Tons of Plastics in 2007
Bioplastics are certainly not a panacea - they have their problems - but if we are to someday move to a world free of fossil fuels (by choice or by necessity), we'll need something to make plastics. Researchers from Utrecht University conducted a study that was commissioned by the associations European Bioplastics and the European Polysaccharide Network of Excellence (EPNOE), and their findings were pretty interesting.

Business & Politics

The highest point in the Maldives is about 2 meters above sea level. Photo: Wikipedia.

Maldives President Mohamed Nasheed is becoming one of the most vocal national critics of climate change inaction -- with good reason, his nation is going to be underwater in less than one hundred years because of it. At a two-day meeting in the Maldives of leaders from Kiribati, Bangladesh, Nepal, Vietnam, Barbados, Bhutan, Ghana, Kenya, Rwanda, and Tanzania, to form a common position ahead of the COP15 talks, President Nasheed was again particularly critical of the intransigence of the world's rich nations: