sustainable
Eco Friendly Clothes Shopping – Verdessence
A topic covered often here on The Chic Ecologist are brands and stores which carry eco friendly clothing. Based in Chicago, Verdessence is an on-line retailer opened by Lauren McGinty and Michael McCarthy out of a desire to promote positive change in the world. They were kind enough to send me an item from one of the many eco-friendly brands they carry, a sustainable hoodie by Edun (and no, that is not me in the picture).
Edun is probably best know by its celebrity co-founder, Bono from the band U2. Edun is a socially conscious clothing company launched in spring 2005 by Ali Hewson and Bono with a mission is to create beautiful clothing while fostering sustainable employment in developing areas of the world, particularly Africa.
The hoodie I received was made in Africa (Madagascar to be exact) by sustainable and recycled elements like wool, polyamide, cashmere, and PBT. It has a very modern fitted look and is top notch quality, as I would expect with all the brands Verdessence carries.
I actually initially ordered the Sameunderneath hooded coat (which was brilliant by the way), but I indicated the wrong size. The return/exchange process was very quick and easy making it painless to get a really great item. › Continue reading
What Foods to Buy Organic
I’m preparing to get married in September, and I’ve been working super hard to keep my diet healthy, while still saving money for the wedding. Even if you’re not getting married soon, you’re still probably on a budget with the way the economy is right now, and buying organic food can start to add up when your budget is tight. While it is always a better idea to eat organic food, I realize that sometimes it’s not always an option. After consulting the Environmental Working Group’s lists, and other environmental groups, I’ve compiled a list of fruits and veggies to go organic with, or to bypass if the budget won’t allow. A good rule of thumb is to consider the thickness of the skin. Melons of any type have thick skins and so pesticides have a harder time getting in. Peaches, berries, and other soft skinned fruit however eat the pesticides up like water, and tend to be highest on the pesticide scale.
Don’t forget meats, dairy, and eggs too. While they are sometimes hard to find in organic depending on where you live, they are very important to buy organic, sometimes more important than fruits and vegetables. There are so many pesticides and toxins in what animals are eating, let alone the products themselves.
Foods aren’t the only things that you should be seeking the natural approach for either. If you suffer from allergies or other health issues, environmental toxins may be to blame. It’s a good idea to buy almost anything in your bedroom, organically. You spend (hopefully) 8 hours out of every 24, sleeping in your bedroom. That’s a third of your day, and that doesn’t include other activities that you might do in your bedroom, such as work, or reading! Switching to an organic mattress or pillows might make all the difference in the world.
Solar Car Kits for Kids
A sample solar car concept
Conversely, people who begin learning additional languages as children tend to make a lot less mistakes common to later-learners and in addition, pick up the same languages much faster. Knowledge becomes more deeply rooted if it’s learned early, and bearing these facts in mind, one can also see why many professionals are able to trace their own passions as adults back to what they were brought up with.
With this in mind, it makes sense that the best way to instill green values in society would be to focus on the youth. That said, young kids won’t be too excited to read a dense non-fiction title on all the mistakes made by ourselves and our predecessors. They also wouldn’t be too keen on keeping up with environmental trends and gadgets. But few kids would shy away from being bought a new toy.
Solar Plane Begins 24-Hour Test Flight
Seven years of hard-work recently culminated in the beginning of a 24-hour test flight of the HB-SIA, an experimental solar-energy powered aircraft. This unveiling comes with a sigh of relief as the flight has already been delayed once due to technical issues with the communications equipment. The intentions of the team are to take the plane up to an altitude of approximately 28,000 feet after which the pilot will determine whether the plane can successfully fly during the night with the energy stored during the day’s sunlight.
Powered by 12,000 solar cells, the group hopes that the plane will be a harbinger of things to come – “to have a solar-powered plane flying day and night without fuel,” as the team’s co-founder Bertrand Piccard puts it. Though the group recognizes that solar airplanes won’t be replacing commercial airplanes with jet propulsion engines any time soon, the hope is that the project will be a means of moving towards a world with newer, cleaner technology.
YoGen: A Green Alternative to Emergency Energy
Image courtesy of Easy Energy, Inc.
I generally type at about 65 WPM, and I like to think that this is a quite a bit faster than a typical computer user especially considering that I’ve never actually taken any typing classes. I amassed this WPM on nothing but experience, hooked to a glaring computer screen since the age of five or six (we didn’t have cable and I was easily amused). In spite of my proficiency at typing, I have nothing on the speed at which my friends text. Not yet anyways.
Like my computer experience, kids are now growing up with cell-phones, rapidly pounding out messages that I would’ve actually had to say out loud. Regardless of what can be said about how this might depersonalize our communication with each other, it is an incontrovertible fact that the world is marching along in this direction – steadily becoming more and more dependent on these small all-encompassing tools. I’ve answered surveys where I was asked about one technology without which I couldn’t survive, and without even second guessing myself, I had to say my cell phone. I can always find easily accessible computers, but when it comes to my cell phone, it stores all of my contacts along with my music, pictures, videos and even some reminders of important appointments. I can’t leave home without it charged. And I can only imagine how much more important they would than be to people who lead far busier lives than my own.
It follows than, that in such a world, emergency energy has the potential for substantial business. I myself can’t say how many times I’ve purchased Cellboost to recharge my phone after I had realized that I hadn’t recharged it the previous night. I’ve also found similar technology that relies on you plugging in AAA batteries and the like as a source of energy, a rechargeable substitute for the disposable Cellboost (which is itself not much more than smaller batteries packaged in plastic).
Fair Trade Tea Tasting: Zhena’s Gypsy Tea
I wake up in the morning pretty groggy, and the shower’s enough to keep me awake for a few minutes after I step out but like much of America, I need something more than water to keep me going through the day. I’d like to think it’s not true, but I probably am a caffeine-addict with my own alternative to a five dollar cup of coffee every morning – I kick start my day with tea.
I like to think though that I’m not a simple addict, but instead, a tea-connoisseur (ah, the semantics of denial) and have always gone out of my way to drink teas that appeal to me instead of simply getting a regular morning caffeine fix. Generally, this comes in the form of a single-estate tea I’ve either randomly picked up doing groceries – or when I’m particularly feeling curious, over the Internet.
Courtesy of Zhena's Gypsy Tea
I’ve also, less occasionally, dabbled my hand in flavored teas, where the interest isn’t so much in preserving the unique taste of tea from a particular estate but instead in the actual additional flavoring. Although it would be a break from routine, a sampler tin of 16 tea-bags (of four different flavors) caught my eye when I had to pick up a few groceries last week. What particularly perked my attention wasn’t the variety of flavors, or the colorful nature of the stacked tins, but the catchwords with which this tea were labeled: “fair trade” and “organic”. As I turned it over to the other-side, I also found that the tea was kosher. I couldn’t really place my finger on the relevance of the ‘kosher’ tag though as I always thought that such a label would only be applicable to products in some way derived from animals and they haven’t started putting bacon in tea just yet. “Meh”, I thought, “I’ll give em a try.”
Environmentally Friendly Golf Goods
A while back, we had a piece introducing the Mirimichi, the first American golf course to be declared a certified Audubon International Classic Sanctuary. An eco-friendly golf course, backed up by the good name of a popular celebrity. There are of course other golf courses that hold the distinction of being considered as eco-friendly in one way or another across the United States and internationally, and an eco-friendly golf course would strike anybody as a great idea, but what about all those people who want to play but don’t intend to fly to Tennessee or the few select locations that boast their connection to the environment? It can’t be expected that every game be played at a location that meets some picky qualifications, and it needn’t be so.
Biodegradable golf balls and tees made from recycled material give people the ability to at least make an individual effort towards the same ends. With tees that biodegrade within a year or so, and aren’t made of wood, an individual effort can be made to the preservation of trees. And balls that quickly biodegrade in water, instead of leading to the deaths of sea-animals that mistake them for something a little more edible, go a long way to the preservation of marine wildlife. What follows than are a few resources for the avid golfer to upgrade his/her collection: › Continue reading
And the Winners (of the MIT Clean Energy Prize) Are…
The results are in; C3Nano Inc., a team from Stanford University, has won a competition amongst peers, the coveted MIT Clean Energy Prize. Barely three years old, the competition has brought some of the brightest minds from around the world, working with their respective teams, for a single common objective: becoming pioneers in the advancement of (relatively) clean energy.
Solar panels - from ncsc.ncsu.edu
A good idea isn’t enough to change the world, a good idea backed by significant capital and popular support is. The people behind the competition and the participants are well-aware of this reality, leading to the high turn-out of academics with futuristic ideas. And that’s where the competition comes in; the winning team earns $200,000, but more importantly, their idea gains wide recognition beyond the scholarly circle resulting in sponsorships from established organizations.
Understanding Sustainability Conference – Portland
It seems that it’s conference season these days. Another interesting Green event that would definitely be worth checking out is the Understanding Sustainability: Perspectives from the Humanities Conference. The event takes place May 20th through the 22nd in Portland, Oregon. It’s free and open to the public, and sure to be very educational.
Acknowledging the varied understandings of the term “sustainability,” the Understanding Sustainability conference seeks to discuss the way in which the term might be approached in a truly useful and efficient way. Through innovative dialogue and debate, the conference seeks to create or improve on green frameworks for environmental scholarship, activism, research, and policy. › Continue reading
Sustainability Focused Careers Workshop
Image: Tim Patterson via Flickr
Peter was quick to make the point that the idea of a “sustainability job” is more complex than one might first think. There are plenty of sustainability focused jobs and career paths, but sustainability is rarely tangible enough to be a product in and of itself. Rather, sustainability is an issue of systemics. As such, it’s important to recognize that job seekers are likely to be looking at the market from a much wider scope when looking to break into a sustainability based career path. So many jobs can fall into the description of “sustainability related”, everything from green-living businesses, tech, green finance and investing, events, higher education, government, and food just to name a few. The point is that sustainability is something that threads through just about all career paths in one way or another. Instead of looking for a job in outright sustainability, or even a “green-collar job”, people should instead be looking for a sustainability related career, one that supports a variety of values and puts your strongest skills to good use. › Continue reading
Eco-Chic Expo Seattle
Now for a local, small business and community centric alternative to the Seattle 2010 Go Green Conference. Seattle’s Eco-Chic Expo is being held on Saturday, May 1st, at the Ravenna-Eckstein Community Center located in Northeast Seattle. A self described “interactive green lifestyle event”, the event is put together to provide the general public with an interactive day of tips, tricks and products to help people live greener, yet fashionable, lives. The Expo is free to the public and features a number of local companies dedicated to sustainable lifestyles. › Continue reading
