Alexander López said:
"Sweet! I would only add an umbrella on top. and its height makes easier to store recumbents! Amsterdam could use these......" [read]
Chris Hurst said:
""Clean" coal is the stupid part of Obama s energy policy,the rest looks OK to me.The first good point in a vote for Obama is out of Iraq,the next i..." [read]
MandyPandy said:
"Because cars need our food more than we do......" [read]
Chris Hurst said:
"But it is better than "Frisco"..." [read]
HopHunt Free Traffic said:
"Thanks for sharing these good panda photos.
We are happy to see that there are may good people who take good care of our forest and wildlif..." [read]
Berkana said:
"Great tits may be coping well with global warming, but regular tits may need support.
^.~..." [read]
With gasoline prices rising so, we expect consumers to increasingly shop online to reduce their personal climate "footprint" and save money. Especially if the green products selection is good.
To explore this question a bit, we checked out the Amazon green product listing where one can find many of the familiar "green" items and then some. A total of 713 items were "tagged" as green by customers. Click and scroll, click and scroll.
We love product service systems, where you borrow or rent instead of own. On April Fools Day we showed Puppy The World, a PPS where one can rent a dog; Now we present Neko JaLaLa, or the Cat Café. You don't get to rent the cat, but you get to join them for tea while catz loll around. After all, cats are like tribbles; rubbing them makes you feel good. It is only in the morning that you pay with your skin. One customer says "When it comes to having cats, it's a burden. I work and I don't have the time to take care of them in a responsible manner," but thinks cat-gazing is "a way to relax and let go of my stress." Others note that it is a big help for people without time or space to have their own.
"I always used to play with cats back home, but now I can't, since I live on my own," says Yuka Sato in the CSM. "I wish I could live together with cats like this."
And, for Cute Overload and Lolcatz fans, we provide links to two Japanese websites for people who cannot get to the cafe and just want to look at cute cats. http://hatchan-nikki.com/ and http://scomu.jp/makocat/)
TreeHugger adores product service systems; Though the name is easy to trip over, the concept is brilliant: that there are ways to rent products or services on-demand, and then just pass them on where you're done.
That is why we fell in love with the concept of Puppy the World, a store in Japan where you rent a dog by the hour or the day. It's called Doggurentaru; Tokyomango tells us that "You can choose small, medium, or large breeds and rent them for $19/hr, or $100 a night. They have everything from chihuahuas to labs to border collies to papillons." ::Puppy the world via ::Tokyomango and ::Boingboing See also the existing American version at FlexPetz
We love libraries here at TreeHugger. They’re a perfect example of a Product Service System (PSS) where you get the service of an item without having to own it and all the cost and upkeep time that requires. In the past we’ve discussed Toy Libraries and Tool Libraries. But it seems we’ve forgotten to mention Clothing Libraries.
The ones I’m familiar with are like the Belmont Clothes Library in Western Australia. A volunteer run organisation with over 1,500 fashion garments on its books it loans out, for free, male and female apparel to unemployed people, so they can look smart for crucial job interviews. We were reminded of this when reader Joe F. left a message on our Q&A post on Green Business Suits. Joe is offering his collection of pre-loved business suits to a worthy organisation, like Belmont. Anyone know of something similar in the USA that Joe can donate his suits to?
Velorution, a bicycle shop in London reckons visitors to the UK capital should make like a local and get about on a zippy folding commuter bike. To this end they offer a rental service for folders. Here’s the deal: “There is no faster way to do it than by bicycle. Order one of our models and we will deliver it to your room; at the end of the day, just leave it to the concierge and we will pick it up; couldn't be easier. If the weather is not friendly, we can rent you smart weatherproof jackets and trousers. Don't waste time in traffic jams!” You can choose from a Strida, Brompton, Dahon or even an iXi.
Clear Channel Outdoor is the world's largest outdoor advertising company, designing advertising displays for anywhere from airports and taxis to malls and including some of New York's Times Square displays. We learned that one of the most sustainable and innovative Product Service Systems like the Bicing, is the fruit of this company’s international street furniture division. Read what Jordi Sáez, regional director of Clear Channel in Catalonia, has to say about Bicing and sharing bikes.
Think about how your understanding of recycling affects your lifestyle - we generally drop the recyclables curbside, go back inside and literally wash our hands. For many of us, personal knowledge of what's beyond the curb is from the memory of a grade-school tour or college lecture.
I'm probably also safe in assuming that very few of our readers have seen the inner workings of a modern landfill or incinerator. More of us, I know, will have been to the loading dock of a recycling center. But, how much do we really understand about how leading edge recycling centers operate? The technologies they might use?
There have been many changes since that school tour. Your father's junkyard or tip no longer exist as you knew them. And, recycling centers near urban centers can have a wide variety of updated technologies.
Offering a Second Life-styled glimpse into the the post curbside world of waste management, Waste Management (the corporation) goes live today with ThinkGreen. Got an itchy click finger? Dive into the bowels of a landfill or tour the recovery center. When you return, we do have a bit more to say.
This is Part 2 of our interview series about Barcelona’s bike sharing system Bicing. You can read the first interview with Mayra Nieto from the Barcelona City Council here. To find out what Bicing users thought of their relatively new public transport system, we went into the streets and asked them. With 194 stations and over 100.000 users it wasn’t difficult to fget hold of them.
For ten months now, Barcelona’s citizens have been riding and sharing 3.000 cute white- and red-coloured bicycles throughout the city. There are over 100.000 subscribers now riding the bikes, from high-heeled women to guys in business-suit and trendy Barcelonans across all generations. Over 3.000.000 times has the service been used since its launch in March. The name of this bike sharing system: Bicing. (Read our previous article here.)
We tried to find out more about this new phenomenon that brings hope to make Barcelona a world-class bike city and decided to do a series of interviews. Part one is an interview with Mayra Nieto from the Mobility Division of B:SM, the Barcelona Municipal Service.
TreeHugger: When and how did you first consider the idea of starting a bike sharing system in Barcelona?
Mayra Nieto: Before Bicing, the bicycle had grown to become one of the everyday ways of transport in Barcelona over the years. During 2006, 35.000 bike journeys had been registered, of which 88% were internal (start and finish in Barcelona). The city counts 128 kilometres of bike lanes in its urban network. An additional 22 kilometres are planned to be installed for the year 2008. Moreover, 53% of Barcelona’s road network is car-free. With the installation of the Bicing, the Barcelona City Council wanted to take the next step towards prioritising its sustainable policy and the promotion of public transport within the city centre. ...
Last year, we wrote about Greenprint, a software program that allows you see the whole document, easily click on what you want to keep and what you want to disappear, and then prints it. Not only does this save forests; it also saves money on paper, disposal and ink cartridges.
ONx Sistemas de Información is a Mexican software development company that has launched EQDZ Pro Content Management System, a Web-based program designed to help companies cut down paper use by eliminating the need to print reams of documents. The software specifically targets companies that are required to deal with ISO quality standards and all the forms involved with that process.
"A company that is subject to a quality standards requires forms to register information and papers to administer its procedures," said Héctor Sánchez, director general of ONx. "This software helps those companies avoid using paper entirely to complete the process." ONx Sistemas de Información
...
We covered the brilliant work of Bioregional before, such as the BedZED eco-housing project and the Laundry, a paper recycling system. Bioregional has developed another recycling scheme at a more local scale, specifically for London and has also applied it to Surrey so far. Local Paper for London is based on the simple principle of cycling the paper locally.
How does it work? (graph after the jump) The company sends their paper for recycling at a local mill in Kent. Then it buys back their own, now recycled, paper for the office. It is less hassle and cost saving for the company and guarantees a buyer of the recycled paper. Bioregional explains that “it is important, not only to recycle your waste paper, but also to close the loop by buying paper made from your recycled waste. This is because there needs to be a stable market for recycled products so that it is economically viable to collect and recycle the waste. So the more people who buy recycled products – the cheaper it becomes to get your waste recycled”....
If Google is anything, it is ambitious. 'To organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful' is the simple, honest, ambitious goal Google sets for itself everyday. Google has found tremendous success in this bold approach, and is now showing similar leadership in renewable energy.
This week Google announced a R&D initiative with the goal to create a gigawatt of renewable energy that will be cheaper to produce than a gigawatt of electricity generated by coal-fired power plants. Coal is dirty, and the best way to free us from our fossil fuel addiction is to make renewable energy cheaper, on a grand scale. Google coined a somewhat geeky equation RE<C, (Renewable Energy Cheaper Than Coal) that sums up the idea nicely. To give you an idea of the scale, a gigawatt is estimated to be enough power for a city the size of San Francisco....
Positiveflow is a design and research group, aiming to encourage a more conscious use of energy for more sustainable living. The Milan based group believes that design projects can help give a visible and clear identity to energy, which in turn reduces its use.
Moreover, Positiveflow argue that ‘we live in a society in which we have a passive relation with our needs for energy and demand’. They tackle this attitude by designing new products and services that allow for more participation and ‘promote best practices, with attention to innovation, aesthetics and playability’....
Reports from bothcoasts are announcing that car-sharing companies Zipcar and Flexcar are going to merge. Technically, it looks like Boston-area-based Zipcar will absorb the smaller Seattle-based Flexcar; together, the new company will have 5,000 vehicles and 180,000 subscribers in 48 cities from Seattle to London. The company will retain the Zipcar moniker, and Flexcar CEO Mark Norman, above left, will stay on board as president and chief operating officer (Scott Griffith, above right, remains Zipcar CEO).
Flexcar has concentrated on the West Coast market, while Zipcar operates mostly in the East, as well as in London, Vancouver, B.C., and Toronto. In two overlapping markets, San Francisco and Washington, D.C., the combined fleets will offer more cars and more locations to its members. United under a single brand, the company hopes that the continent-wide coverage will help it scale up its service and ultimately help convince more people that they don't have to own their own cars. Stay tuned for more; TreeHugger likes the idea of car sharing so we hope that the new Zipcar will also be an improved one as well. ::Zipcar and ::Flexcar via ::AutoblogGreen...
Here is a little Sunday afternoon geeky viewing for our life cycle assessment aficionados or not-so-aficionados. While looking for LCA news, we checked out YouTube to see if anybody had dared to publish a video about the cradle-to-cradle methodology. We happened upon this video project by Nick Bradford-Ewart and Pablo Alvarez explaining the history and life cycle of a paper clip. The write up explains that, “The presentation of simple facts that describe the massive amounts of energy and resources involved in this process is intended to provide a shock that will lead the viewer to consider reusing so many of the everyday products that are thrown away with little thought.” Although the computer-generated narrator is a little bit difficult to understand, the idea is interesting and the six-minute video is worth a watch, or better said, it's worth a listen since the image stays practically the same the entire time.
Invented in the late 1800’s the paper clip has a virtually endless life cycle, while tens of billions are out there worldwide. Perhaps because they are so little and abundant we tend to take for granted their existence and the importance of re-using them. More about paper clips here and recycled ones here. ...
The first thing we love about NEWTEON is their humble marketing strategy:
Thanks to a wide range of clean vehicles, NEWTEON offers adequate solutions for sustainable mobility.
Adequate solutions. Now here are some people who realize that this technology is in its mere infancy. Guys, we would like to offer you spectacular solutions for sustainable mobility, and we fully expect to soon, but today what we can really deliver on is adequate solutions. The rest of the world should be so honest.
The French version actually offers solutions adapted to your needs, so one can make of it what they will: either Newteon marketing is needing a better English translator, or perhaps they have really adapted to the need in the English world to say things straight in the age of greenwashing. ...
Founded on the premise that it's dumb to buy everything you need when you can just borrow it from your friends and neighbors when you need it, Neighborrow is part Freecycle, part Netflix/Swaptree and all product service system goodness. It allows you to pool your resources with your neighbors, and then borrow a food processor when you need one; when you're done, you just pass it back, and round and round we go. Founded by Adam Berk in his New York City apartment, the site gives users the opportunity to both list what they're willing to share and what they're looking to use; you network with your neighbors to get 'em all done without having to resort to paying retail. Users are rated, so you know how reliable each one has been, and the site keeps track of where your stuff is, how long its been there, and when it's due back. Learn more about them at ::Neighborrow and read an interview with founder Berk in ::Gristmill...
This is one of those stories we should’ve done aeons ago. But we keep getting distracted by all the news of fresh endeavours. There is nothing new about tool libraries (the famous Berkeley Tool Lending Library was established back in 1979 and now contains over 2,500 tools), but it is easy to get entranced by the siren song of new gizmos. And ironically that is the point. Our consumer society is predicated around us owning all this 'stuff.' When really what we want is not so much to own it, but to use it. Libraries are perfect examples of this. We read books without having to buy them. Community toy libraries, which we have noted, provide the same delightful function. Little Johnny tires of that train set, so you swap it for a box of Lego. A tool library is no different. For those rare times when you need a ladder, rubber plunger or circular saw you just borrow it from the library. In some places there’s a nominal change, whilst in others the service is free. Either way it beats all of us owning wheel barrows, pipe snakes or post hole diggers and never using them. ...
Who is Fred Butler? And what does he/she have to do with your laundry? "Fred Butler®" is the registered trademark and penguin mascot of a new dry-cleaning product-service which is the brainchild of German industrial gas giant, Linde. Linde's concept augers change and causes journalists at the Oakland Tribune to ponder the end of friendly and personalized corner laundry service amidst reports that the Europeans are moving in to take over the American dry-cleaning industry. What is behind the buzz?
Dry-cleaning is a dirty business. The current dry-cleaning solvent, perchloroethylene, was heralded as a huge advance when it was introduced to replace the explosion-susceptible flammable solvents which preceded it. For decades, this chlorinated hydrocarbon has efficiently removed the greasiest burger drips and stickiest splashes for customers concerned about their fine textiles. But the solvent is a danger to groundwater and suspected of causing serious health damage--at least among workers at dry-cleaning shops. Bans on the solvent are progressively forcing dry-cleaners to look for alternatives.
...
We have a lot of books, and getting rid of them is tough. We have tried eBay, garage sales and Freecycle, but books are different, They are the ultimate "long tail" product; somebody is interested in it but how do you find them?
Jeff Bezos knew this. There are more books than any store could stock, or that one neighbourhood could absorb. Books are small and dense, catalogued by a universal numbering system and relatively easy to ship; he built Amazon around them and the rest is history.
That is what is so interesting about Swaptree, a new trading system for books, CD's and DVD's, all products that have a code number (in books it is an ISBN) so that their computer's algorithms can catalogue, track and assign a value to them.
...
Renting bikes is definitely one of the most successful PSSs (Product Service Systems- access over ownership) in Europe.
Lyon, Paris and London amongst others have already added the bike to their public transport systems. Still, when at the end of March the first Bicing stations appeared in Barcelona, most people here were a little sceptical; will they be used? Is it just another act for the upcoming elections? Will they put enough stations around the city for it to work? Will the bikes survive in a city where even pedals get stolen of your bike?
Well, two months later EVERYBODY is talking about the Bicing and most importantly driving one! It works. With 1500 bicycles and 100 stations, connecting other public transport stations such as metro, train, buses and major car parks, the red and white bikes are to be seen all over town. 30.000 (!) people have subscribed online, in these first 2 months, which is what you have to do to be able to borrow a bike. ...
Hire Things started out in October last year as Let Use It, changing its name in response to user feedback. It takes the middle ground between eBay (for sale) and Freecycle (for free), offering goods for hire. Instead of owning goods outright you only pay for the time you need to use them. A classic product service system (PSS), but rather than the items belonging to a business, in the typical rental model, they are owned by the average you and me. Currently operating in New Zealand, the founders have plans to expand into other markets like Australia and the UK in the next couple of years. They may find the British market a little competitive as there are already similar services on offer there. One is Cahooting, whose mission is to “help make the world become a more fun and sustainable place, by reducing unnecessary production and pollution !” (Whereas Hire Things seems to have a slightly less altruistic philosophy. “Use it as an excuse to buy that thing you’ve always wanted because you can make your money back hiring it out to others!”) Another British model is called Anything for Hire, where you can get what you’ve always dreamed of since being a kid: castles and even dragons. Hire Things, via Springwise (see also their related trendspotting article on Transumers.)...
Plastics make it possible- right? But what makes plastics possible? Or for that matter what makes surfactants, plasticizers, adhesives, coalescent solvents and a host of other products possible? Up until recently the answer was oil, and lots of it. But, the hot field of Green Chemistry has seen remarkable growth in developing oil alternatives. These new chemical synthesis routes may be able to provide green options to the chronically oil dependent industrial age products. Understanding that food crops are not likely a viable alternative to oil, companies are quickly reorganizing and merging to form new entities that can harness the power of cellulose, and turn bio-waste into pure bio-plastic. From Metabolix to Diversa, we have been keeping a lookout for the company that will become the next google. The newest contender, weighing in at $15 million from Kohsla Ventures is Segetis....
Do you love a good read? Does your inner bookworm compete with your inner TreeHugger:
Bookworm: "I love to run my hands over the spine of a finely bound treasure, leafing into the promise of a new story."
TreeHugger: "The cheap mass-produced books on the modern market don't match the aesthetic books used to have, and e-books might be the path forward. But is yet another electronic gadget good for society?"
Probably, you participate in a book-swapping club such as Read It Swap It in the UK or Novel Action in the US. But in these post-Napster days, did you ever stop to ask yourself: "How does the creative artist make their daily bread when people re-cycle the story with the book?" Here is a statistic few people know: 95% of writers cannot support themselves from their craft.
Clearly, the time is right for a paradigm change in reading habits. Now, Blackbetty is beating the path forward. Blackbetty has developed technology which allows a book to be ordered and delivered to your mobile phone as easily as downloading a new ring tone....
We love great new eco business ideas and this is certainly one of them. dvGreen is a brand new sustainable event company who don't sacrifice style and still make things eco. They are the one and only in NYC, organising anything from green weddings to eco cocktail parties or organic birthdays. Recycling, composting, tree-free invitation cards along with carbon offsetting are on their menu. These and many more small ideas like donating or composting leftovers, decorating with organic flowers and table linens result in a big impact when it comes to reducing the ecological footprints of those ‘beautiful, amazing, fabulous parties that just happen to be Green’. Danielle Venokur (hence dvGreen) is the one throwing her magic wand (represented in the logo) to ‘wave and magically create your dream, green event’. And she’s having fun! After working for one of New York’s top floral design houses where she also enjoyed her work but missed the green in the business, Danielle founded dvGreen, a sustainable event design and production company, passionately explained here. The service even goes as far as offering natural hair and beauty product recommendations. Anyone want to get married? ::dvGreen
For more tips on partying treehugger-style, check out TreeHuggerTV How To Throw an Eco-Party
...
Much of the push to "re-engineer" business to "streamline for profits" over the last twenty years is captured in the buzz-phrase Just In Time(JIT). If you were a a business owner, experts urged you to store as much as possible of your inventory in the trucks moving toward your customers from outsourced suppliers, minimizing your own payroll and warehousing costs. A product line manager discovered to have amassed a cache of actual inventory faced dismissal, and so on. As a result, trucks in North America and Europe are, in effect, the warehouse system. Hence, the recent argument that under NAFTA, that Mexican trucking companies should be allowed to bring goods in to the US without transferring. The glue that holds this logistical approach together is comprised of the Enterprise Software System, so-called Business to Business (B2B) linkup portals, and a lot of phone calling and fancy shipping contracts. A seldom acknowledged JIT casualty is the near end of the warehouse full of unsold crap merchandise, dumped via "clearance re-sellers". Those clearance malls along the expressways of America are now most likely getting their inventory JIT, as the retail stores in the mall do. One seldom discussed drawback of JIT is the swarm of half- or mostly-empty trucks driving from supplier to distributor or customers and back; or worse, completely empty trucks going half way across the country to get to the next load. With fuel so much more costly and highways slipping into gridlock, might businesses soon have to go back to classic product designs stored in venerable warehouses? Not quite yet. ...
Via Ducks Unlimited:- "A 2006 study [pdf file at this link] led by Dr. Ned Euliss of the United States Geological Survey Northern Prairie Wildlife Research Center in Jamestown, North Dakota found that wetlands in the Prairie Pothole Region of Canada and the U.S. only comprise approximately 17 percent of the landscape but may sequester twice as much carbon as the surrounding agricultural soils employing no tillage management. Euliss and his co-authors concluded that restoring wetlands on the Prairies may sequester 378 Tg of carbon over a 10-year period and estimated that Prairie wetlands have the potential to offset 2.4 percent of the CO2 emissions produced annually by the burning of fossil fuels in North America at 1990 levels". ...
Via USA Today , Kimberly Clark Corporation has a website where you can upload your photos and purchase oval-shaped Kleenex boxes with the images printed on the sides. First analogous object that comes to mind? Those Grecian urns with the erotically posed human figures dancing around the edge. The more innovative we get, the more things stay the same. USA reports:- “… the brand is embracing personalized products. In a world where consumers can customize their Nike shoes, M&M candies and even their Heinz ketchup labels, the Kleenex box is jumping into the fray” Cost is $4.99 plus shipping. Per company policy, no hate messages, violence, nudity or unapproved company trademarks. So much for my Grecian urn idea. Before you jump to a comment, please qave a look at our questions, pros, and cons list, below the fold....
We'll be working on better category archives soon. In the meantime, take a look at the weekly archive if you really want to dig around, or use the search box at the top of the page.
TreeHugger breaks it down for you in a series of in depth how-to articles that will help you green your life. No time like the present!
For ten months now, Barcelona’s citizens have been riding and sharing 3.000 cute white- and red-coloured bicycles throughout the city. There are over 100.000 subscribers now riding the bikes, from high-heeled women to guys in business-suit and trendy Barcelonans across all generations. Over 3.000.000 times has the service been used since its launch in March. The name of this bike sharing system: 
Last year, we wrote about 
We covered the brilliant work of 
If Google is anything, it is ambitious. 'To organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful' is the simple, honest, ambitious goal Google sets for itself everyday. Google has found tremendous success in this bold approach, and is now showing similar leadership in renewable energy.
This week 
Reports from 
The first thing we love about 
Founded on the premise that it's dumb to buy everything you need when you can just borrow it from your friends and neighbors when you need it, 
This is one of those stories we should’ve done aeons ago. But we keep getting distracted by all the news of fresh endeavours. There is nothing new about tool libraries (the famous 
Who is Fred Butler? And what does he/she have to do with your laundry? "
We have a lot of books, and getting rid of them is tough. We have tried eBay, garage sales and Freecycle, but books are different, They are the ultimate 
Renting bikes is definitely one of the most successful PSSs (
Hire Things started out in October last year as Let Use It, changing its name in response to user feedback. It takes the middle ground between eBay (for sale) and 
Plastics make it possible- right? But what makes plastics possible? Or for that matter what makes surfactants, plasticizers, adhesives, coalescent solvents and a host of other products possible? Up until recently the answer was oil, and lots of it. But, the hot field of 
Do you love a good read? Does your inner bookworm compete with your inner TreeHugger:
Bookworm: "I love to run my hands over the spine of a finely bound treasure, leafing into the promise of a new story."
TreeHugger: "The cheap mass-produced books on the modern market don't match the aesthetic books used to have, and e-books might be the path forward. But is yet another electronic gadget good for society?"
Probably, you participate in a book-swapping club such as 
We love great new eco business ideas and this is certainly one of them. 
Much of the push to "re-engineer" business to "streamline for profits" over the last twenty years is captured in the buzz-phrase Just In Time(JIT). If you were a a business owner, experts urged you to store as much as possible of your inventory in the trucks moving toward your customers from outsourced suppliers, minimizing your own payroll and warehousing costs. A product line manager discovered to have amassed a cache of actual inventory faced dismissal, and so on. As a result, trucks in North America and Europe are, in effect, the warehouse system. Hence, the recent argument that under NAFTA, that Mexican trucking companies should be allowed to bring goods in to the US without transferring. The glue that holds this logistical approach together is comprised of the Enterprise Software System, so-called Business to Business (B2B) linkup portals, and a lot of phone calling and fancy shipping contracts. A seldom acknowledged JIT casualty is the near end of the warehouse full of unsold crap merchandise, dumped via "clearance re-sellers". Those clearance malls along the expressways of America are now most likely getting their inventory JIT, as the retail stores in the mall do. One seldom discussed drawback of JIT is the swarm of half- or mostly-empty trucks driving from supplier to distributor or customers and back; or worse, completely empty trucks going half way across the country to get to the next load. With fuel so much more costly and highways slipping into gridlock, might businesses soon have to go back to classic product designs stored in venerable warehouses? Not quite yet. ...
Via 
Via 
