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Suburban design has clearly reached its sad and tragic end, but finding a way to make something out of the mess it’s left behind all over North America and the world is a massive and intimidating project. It seems as though for every suburb there’s an environmentally-sensitive plan for how things could be better. Well, [...]

Oh how we wish we had access to a green roof, or a regular roof we could retrofit into a green roof. At any rate, this seems to be the only way we’re ever going to be able to reconcile our cosmopolitan and environmentalist lifestyles with one home. That’s why we not only enjoyed but [...]

Last week Milan’s annual furniture fair – the world’s biggest – wrapper up its 48th edition in fairly typical style. Although, if one thing about this sexy showcase for new furniture designs seems to be changing it’s the proportion of green and environmentally friendly models being unveiled every year. 2009 was another big year for [...]

China gets a bum rap (and with good reason) for all kinds of humanitarian and environmental shortcomings and offenses, but there’s some good amidst all this bad. After all, a rapidly modernizing nation with inexhaustible financial and human resources can get just about anything it wants done (like, for instance, the 3 Gorges Dam project). [...]

Maybe if U.S. currency wasn’t green, the whole concept of the “green revolution” and corporate “greenwashing” wouldn’t sound like such a disgusting corruption of vital ideals in the name of marketing. Here we are, though, in a country full of eager green buyers with disappearing green bills, so it’s not surprising that some extremely brown [...]

True, the last thing we’d expect to see in a recession is designers and manufacturers opting for significantly more expensive materials. And yet, that seems to be exactly what some big brand names in mainstream fashion are doing. And not all these forward-thinking moves are being made by typically responsible companies.
Perusing TreeHugger’s listicle of 5 [...]

A few years back we were at a birthday party for a friend’s younger brother, and one of his friends gave him a turtle made of milk jugs. The boy started to cry, then the girl who gave him the turtle started to cry, and accusatory looks were exchanged between every parent faction and things [...]

The other day we bumped into a friend at a red light. He was driving a solar-powered car, and we were in our spiffy new solar boat. The interaction went like so:
Solar Car Boy: “Hey, nice solar boat, what kinda mileage do you get with that thing?”
Listicles: “Oh, you know, 20 nauts per sunrise.”
SCB: “Wow, [...]

We remember going to a supposedly green hotel once and not really understanding how they reconciled the air-conditioning units in every room with their supposedly eco-friendly mantra. Well, for next time we go on vacation (if there’s a next time…) we’ll take this listicle from Planet Green along with us: 9 Questions for “Green” Hotels. [...]

Amidst all the seriousness of outgoing presidents, incoming administrations, green living and less harmful car design, it’s easy to lose sight of the clever creativity and ambition of the people at the forefront of the DIY movement. As we enter an era of localism, artisanal production, retrofitting and sustainable design, these inventive combinations of recepticles [...]