Solarmania – 7 Interesting Personal Solar Paneled Objects
The advent of the the personal solar panel probably started with those solar powered calculators way back when. I remember I used to rip those little sun suckers out of as many calculators as I could get a hold of and try and make something cool… it never worked out.
But nowadays, solar powered accessories are all the rage. You find them on public trashcans, parking meters, boats, even stadiums. Here are just a sampling of some of the things we have slapped solar panels on and called them better.
Solar Sunglasses
Why hasn’t this been thought of sooner? It just makes so much sense, sunglasses = sun = solar energy, right? Something tells me you would have to be ON the sun (or at least looking directly at the sun) to even squeeze a watt out of those sexy little guys. I’d still rock them just for the green fashion prestige.
[via yanko design]
Solar Tent
Now that is just one cool looking tent. Makes me think of a big orange solar paneled armadillo. Not very practical for hiking, but with the remote finder that actually lights up the tent and other ‘gadgety’ accessories, it would make for a great concert tent.
[via engaget]
Valcucine’s 100% Recyclable Kitchen
If you love Italian design and have the money for it, then have i got a kitchen for you! Valcucine has come up with a 100% recyclable kitchen made primarily from Aluminum and Glass, both 100% recyclable materials. Not only that, but the kitchen is extremely durable allowing it to last for years and years bringing to mind all of the 3R’s, Reduce (limited materials and replacements due to its durability), Reuse (so durable, it can be used for years) and Recycle (100% recyclable at its end life).
Featuring a Modern Italian design, the Invitrum by Valcucine features recycled aluminum, mechanical connections (no glue needed!), and easy to clean glass surfaces. Several other designs are also available all boasting a recyclable design and incorporating renewable woods and water based lacquers.
The wooden and glass elements are varnished with water-based varnishes that drastically reduce the emissions of solvents and completely eliminate very cancer-inducing aromatic solvents. All the colorants used do not contain heavy metals, including extremely toxic lead. All glass parts are tempered for very high resistance and safety.
Plyboo Bamboo Plywood and Durapalm Palm Tree Sustainable Flooring
I love bamboo. Its beautiful, its durable, and its a great sustainable and renewable resource, so I am pretty excited about Plyboo by Smith and Fong. Certified by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) and available for LEED credit by the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC), these surfaces and flooring are all about sustainability. Made from FSC certified bamboo and palm, these flooring and paneling alternatives have a beautiful and unique modern but warm look.
Smith & Fong’s Plyboo flooring, plywood and veneer are derived from Moso bamboo harvested from a forest that requires no irrigation, fertilizers or pesticides. Each year, only 20 percent of the plantation’s bamboo (or only the five-year growth) is cut, ensuring the forest canopy remains intact and the ecosystem is not disturbed.
Both the Durapalm and Plyboo flooring, veneer and plywood use a urea formaldehyde-free adhesive called PlybooPure™ and pass the California Air Resources Board (CARB)’s formaldehyde regulations for composite panels. It also earned the world’s first non-wood FSC certification for its bamboo resource in China, providing third-party validation of a truly sustainable industry. Additionally, Smith & Fong retain a relationship with the actual bamboo farmers, to ensure the quality and sustainability of the operation.
Forest Choppin’ Junkmail
Personally, I’m not a fan of junkmail for three reasons:
1. It’s annoying
2. It’s annoying
3. We kill trees for this?
I love the advent of online paperless billing, autopay and anything that keeps bills and ads out of my mailbox. Not only is this probably better for my safety (identity theft is not something I want to deal with), but I also have a fondness for trees and forests.
Tonic’s Mailstopper (formally Green Dimes) takes care of that by removing you from direct marketing lists, allowing you to select (and remove) yourself from mail order and company catalogs, and monitoring lists to keep make sure you stay off and junk mail free.
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Recycled Felt Pillows by diffractionFIBER
I got a great email the other day from Beth of diffractionFIBER, a pillow artist on Etsy. Each of her pillows are hand-made to order and are not only unique and beautiful, but they are also green. The designs are created with a recycled plastic bottle felt, helping to reduce plastic waste.
With several quirky designs, some geek pillows with your control-alt-delete keyboard buttons would look great on any techie couch. At $35.00 for many of her pillows, they won’t break the bank, and you will end up with a one-of-a-kind, unique handmade piece.
Pacific Plastic Trash Island
A very troubling recent find in our ocean was a huge ‘island’ of trash twice the size of Texas and more than 30 feet deep. Just imagine a 3 story Wal-Mart sprawling from the Mexico border up from California and Arizona, through Nevada, Idaho and the whole west coast (including Oregon and Washington) and you have and idea what I’m talking about. The overall area of this behemoth is twice that of the Continental United States given its depth. Now imagine that there are TWO of them: the Western Garbage Patch just north of Hawaii, and the Eastern Garbage Patch just east of Japan.
I can’t say it was that recent, as it was predicted by NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) back in 1988 and has been tracked (and growing) ever since. So why has it taken so long to get out to the public and why are there still people who don’t believe in it’s existence?
Sharkwater Movie Review
Awhile back I was all excited about an independent documentary coming out presenting the true face of sharks and their precarious future. Luckily it was screening in Seattle, so I was able to catch it in its full movie screen glory. I checked Netflix a few days ago and noticed that it is out and available on DVD and even Blu-Ray (it was filmed all in HD, so the Blu-Ray is defiantly worth it).
Sharkwater is an epic visual journey into the oceans exposing the beauty and the peril of sharks worldwide. Rob Stewart’s aim was to create an anti-Jaws, in other words, an attempt to dispel the myths and urban legends associated with sharks (an odd little side note is the extreme regret by Peter Benchley, the creator of ‘Jaws’, for having caused an almost hysteria driven hunt and destruction of sharks everywhere leading him to be an outspoken shark conservation advocate).
- Genre: Documentary
- Running time: 89 min.
- Director: Rob Stewart
- Studio: Alliance Films
- Producer: Rob Stewart
- Cast: Rob Stewart, Paul Watson, Dr. Erich Ritter, Susan Backlinie, Godfrey Merlin, Mark Butler, Dr. Boris Worm, William Goh, Vic Hislop, Dr. Samuel Gruber, Rex Weyler, Carlos Perez Cembrero, Patrick Moore, Lisa Anastario, Larissa Gilligan
I found the movie to be visually stunning, with several long cuts of gorgeous underwater vistas, schooling hammerheads and more. The cinematography is very well done and is not unlike those you would see in the BBC’s Planet Earth with life-like sharpness and amazing colors so you feel as if you are immersed underwater. The main focus of this movie centers around the barbaric practice of shark ‘finning’. Near and dear to my heart, it is the practice that, thankfully, is gaining some recognition (probably in part due to this movie).
The ‘plot’ is interesting, and includes some time on the Sea Shepard Society’s boat with Captain and ‘Rouge’ Conservationist Paul Watson (who now have their own show on Discovery called ‘Whale Wars‘), but seems a bit choppy at times. There is a bout with ‘flesh eating bacteria’ and a run in with corrupt officials and organized crime syndicates, both which failed to captivate me in their intended way.
Moving away from the traditional documentary genre, the well intended storyline follows much like a generic Hollywood movie with the integration of a ’sexy protagonist’, an seemingly insurmountable obstacle to overcome with action scenes and mounting suspense. Problem being the ’sexiness’ verged on vanity, the action scenes appeared exaggerated, and the suspense was contrived. I believe the film would have been much more enjoyable if it would have allowed for the natural suspense of the situations to carry through giving it a more real, raw, and un-masked feel. It’s as though the movie was formed to fit the Hollywood framework rather than allowing the message, the destruction, and the journey to tell the story.
That being said, the overall message is not lost and cannot be ignored. Winning countless awards and film festivals from around the world and rating a very impressive 8.0 on IMDB and 81% on Rotten Tomatoes, it still remains one of the most beautiful, entertaining, and greatest shark movie I have ever seen. Well worth the rental or purchase price and great for the whole family. It simply must not be missed. I plan on including this film in my Blu-Ray library, and it will sit right between BBC’s Planet Earth and Discovery Channels Shark Week series.
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New on the Green Scene
I get quite a few emails a day from green companies and individuals recommending their favorite products and sites, however, I just don’t have the time write feature articles on all of them. With so much great stuff to share, I figured I would just type up a quick summary of each so everybody can still benefit.
Positively Cleveland
Cleveland, Ohio has taken great strides to help turn this lakefront town into one of the nation’s greenest cities, from the environmentally friendly hotels to a number of restaurants who exclusively cook with locally-grown food. To commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Cuyohoga River fire, Positively Cleveland has compiled a list of the 75 “green” things to love about Cleveland.
Forty years ago the Cuyahoga River caught on fire due to heavy pollution, but Cleveland has since turned this unfortunate incident into an opportunity by striving to make itself one of the nation’s greenest cities. After decades of hard work, Cleveland has grown to become a “green city on a blue lake.”
Gobble Green Vegan Food
Gobble Green is an online marketplace where you will find a diverse and frequently updated selection of healthy, pre-packaged vegan meals. Our food kits are packaged in environmentally friendly containers and shipped directly to your home.
Gobble Green is all about the protection of our environment, animal rights, and healthy eating. Gobble Green is right for anyone who is interested in leading a humane and environmentally responsible lifestyle. We are very proud of our menu and our message.
Buy Green
A great new green shopping resource, Buy Green even has its own green standards for the products it carries.
You will find eco friendly clothing, including bamboo clothing, green home environmental products including natural organic products and solar powered lights, just to name a few. Commercial buyers also have a wide selection of products from environmentally friendly bags for retailers to recycled paper products.
Weekend Green Reads – Books on Sustainability
This weekend seems like a great weekend for reading, so I thought I would share some upcoming green books in my queue. I seem to have a sustainable design theme going, although that should come as no surprise to anyone who regularly reads my blog.
Sustainability in design has always interested me, mainly because so many problems with current products on the market can be solved by a tweak in the design. For many, this can entail looking at a product with a whole new perspective- which can prove difficult in many situations. Take for example one of the books, Design Is the Problem: The Future of Design Must be Sustainable.
The author, Nathan Shedroff, considers how paper bags may be worse than plastic for the environment or how a Prius may have a larger footprint than a H2 Hummer. Now these are pretty bold statements, so I am intrigued as to how he crafts his argument.
Another book along those same lines, Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things by William McDonough and Michael Braungart, explores the cradle to cradle process (or C2C, the ‘birth’ of a product all the way through to the ‘death’ and re-birth of the raw materials) and how it can and should be implemented into the consumer stream.
This is a concept of growing interest (you can tell from increasing products advertising cradle to cradle certification), and with good reason. Our ‘disposable’ society needs a shift and the best way to do that is to make products with their ‘end-life’ in mind.
The two previous books are great reads for everybody, geared towards educating and inspiring with varying layers of depth. As an ecologist, my scientific background begs for more granular depth. At times, I like to see the data, the science behind things, the technical stuff. This is where Sustainable Design: The Science of Sustainability and Green Engineering
Providing “…readers with the scientific principles needed to guide their own sustainable design decisions”, and “written to enable readers to take a more scientific approach to sustainable design”, it will be sure to entice all you architects, engineers and scientific types.
Don’t Recycle Soda and Sparkling Water Bottles
As you may have guessed from previous posts about eco plastic bottled water and soda bottle reuse, I’m not a big fan of these ubiquitous containers. With the average American consuming over 600 cans or bottles of soda and sparkling water each year, think of the environmental impact of reducing just a fraction of that.
Enter the perfect replacements – reusable containers paired with water filters and CO2 infusers! I am almost overwhelmed at the reasons why these are such great devices, here are just a few:
- Huge reduction of ‘disposable’ glass bottles, plastic bottles and cans
- Reduction in indirect transport-related emissions (from moving all those very heavy, liquid filled containers)
- Make your own sparkling mineral water and soda (without High Fructose Corn Syrup)
- unlimited flavor combination’s
- no more ‘flat’ drinks wasted or thrown away- just recharge them
- it’s cheaper!
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