Every once in a while we come across an idea so fresh and simple it seems incredible that it has not been thought of before. The Rainwaterhog is just such an idea – the H2OG system is a modular rainwater harvesting system that is a ‘game-changer’ in the water harvesting and storage industry. The easy-to-install system “boldly fits where no water storage has fit before” and is expandable, reusable, and 100% recyclable.
Eco-celebrity David de Rothschild has decided to show the world what to do with its discarded plastic bottles. For his recent project, the Plastiki Expedition, the adventurous environmentalist plans to build a 60-foot boat made out entirely out of recycled materials and then sail it across the entire Pacific Ocean! The ambitious excursion aims to capture the world’s imagination while drawing attention to the state of our oceans, the idea of waste, and the unacceptable reality of pollution.
Chrysler recently revealed the GEM Peapod, a Neighborhood Electric Vehicle that uses no gasoline and emits no pollutants, making it perfect for city driving. Those of you who read our Car of the Future series may recall that smaller vehicles are more efficient, easier to park, and consume less resources, which makes them strong candidates for the future of personal transportation.
Recently Chrysler revealed a lean green supercar that can hit 0-60mph in five seconds flat! The Dodge EV features an emission-free 200 kW electric motor and has a driving range of 150-200 miles, leaving GM’s Chevy Volt in the dust. The sleek all-electric vehicle is not intended to compete with consumer-oriented cars – it has its sights set on the Tesla Roadster!
This year’s London Design Festival was an incredible event that showcased some of the world’s most acclaimed designers in addition to a host of upcoming talents. From innovative furnishings and lighting solutions to clothing and accessories, this year’s event featured a variety of cutting-edge concepts in sustainable design. Read on for our highlights from the event!
With one day left in the contest, Project H is in the lead to win $10,000 from Ideablob, but their lead is narrowing and THEY NEED YOUR VOTE! As we broadcasted last Monday, the product design nonprofit Project H Design is hoping to win the $10,000 to fund their Design For Education project in which they’re designing math toys for a school for the Kutamba School for AIDS orphans in Uganda. It’s becoming a closer and closer race by the minute, so please take 2 clicks of your mouse to vote for Project H (founded by Inhabitat’s own Emily Pilloton). Voting ends Tuesday night at 11:59 pm Central Time.
Calling all architects in New York City who like concrete!
From October 1st through the 3rd, Columbia’s Graduate School of Architecture is organizing a series of conferences on materials. This year the conference will be focused around concrete. In an exclusive partnership with concrete company Lafarge, the conference will turn the spotlight on future developments and potential uses for this ever-surprising material, exploring the boundaries between materials science, engineering, and design. Leading architects, engineers and academics will come together around the theme of concrete to discuss environmental restrictions and the quest for aestheticism at a time of intense urbanization. Are you an architect in the tri-state area who is interested in innovations in concrete? If so, come check out this conference at Columbia University. To register for the event click here >
This past weekend Silicon Valley erupted in a fantastic celebration of sustainable design as green building experts from all disciplines converged in San Jose for West Coast Green. From architects, contractors and interior designers to eco entrepreneurs and clean tech mavens, this year’s exposition focused an incredible spectrum of skills towards the common goal of greening the built environment, the world’s largest source of greenhouse gas emissions. The conference itself showcased an incredible set of sustainable strategies including solar power provided by SolaRover, recycled carpeting and finishings, compostable food and beverage containers, and carbon neutrality. Read on for our highlights from the show!
For the past several years, the city of San Francisco has made strident efforts push forward and transform itself into the greenest city in the United States. Taking this goal one step further, Mayor Gavin Newsom recently announced an incredible plan to transform the city’s Civic Center into a sustainable resource district”. San Francisco’s renewed green heart will feature solar panels, wind turbines, and living roofs, reducing the city’s carbon footprint by 2,225 tons – the equivalent of 1,286 San Francisco households!
No, we’re not breaking news about an eco-revolt in Paris, but the Generali tower designed by international firm Valode & Pistre definitely marks a coup for sustainable design. Slated for completion in 2012, the soaring new office tower will incorporate an unprecedented level of environmental systems and features, and represents the culmination of EPAD’s modernization campaign to make La Defense one of the most remarkable business centers in Europe. The renewed business district will be known both for its economic grandeur as well as it environmental and architectural progressiveness.
Composed entirely from damaged PET bottles and an eclectic assortment of found bottle caps, CAPtivate is an innovative lamp designed by London based studio and gallery Lula Dot. A gorgeous re-use of recycled materials, the design took center stage at 100% Design as part of [re]design’s “Lighten Up” exhibition (the follow up to 2007’s Sit Up exhibition).
Nothing says eco luxury like a sumptuous ‘faux fur’ blanket made of 100% organic cotton to swaddle yourself or your loved ones in. Eco chic layering has taken on new, cozy dimensions with this luxurious Pomeroy throw from …
It’s not every day that a fashion show leaves you hungry for more, particularly when it comes to organic ingredients of the most delectable kind. This how I felt after the exquisite Eko-Laborative exhibition during NY Fashion Week. The designs were so rich and provocative, I was convinced that I had chanced upon a whole new cornucopia of eco-chic style. Staged as a fashion-forward collaboration between Ekovaruhuset’s ‘House of Organic’ and the new design collective, Eko-Lab, Eko-Laborative was a fine example of slow design effectively putting the brakes on fashion week madness. As a curated demonstration of sustainable style that blends organic and fair-made with true textile artistry, the designers behind this timely exhibit really had something wholesome cooking in their lab of eco-friendly fashion.
Did you know that recycling a single ton of paper can save 7000 gallons of water, 17 trees, 380 gallons of oil, 3 cubic yards of landfill space and 4000 kilowatts of energy!? Statistics like these were key points at a sustainable print and paper workshop at the London Design Festival’s sustainability hub, Greengaged. The workshop, hosted by UK-based nonprofit enterprise Three Trees Don’t Make a Forest, set out to explore how different print processes affect the paper’s recyclability, and how you can reduce the impact through the design process.
All eyes have been on the General Assembly sessions at the United Nations HQ this past week, and with good reason, there is a heck of a lot of work to be done in getting our planetary house in order. Aiding this mission is a site-specific art installation called, Nine Planets Wanted!, designed by team ZAGO LLC as part of the United Nations Development Programme’s One Planet, One Chance campaign on climate change and social inequality. There is already a wealth of information to digest on global warming, including alarming statistics and abstract data. So to avoid the possibility of information overload, ZAGO thoughtfully opted to create a multi-media lounge where visitors can take some much needed time to ponder the state of the planet by stretching out in recycled beanbags (made from discarded car interiors) and simply be present.
A beautiful and functional piece of kitchen ware, the ‘Eco Cooler’ by DeWeNe (Designs We Need) was introduced at the London Design Festival earlier last week. Cressida Granger, founder of DeWeNe gave a short presentation at London Design Festival’s sustainability hub, Greengaged. In addition to their inspiring Hook & Go trolley, Cressida showed their most recent project, this hand-made terracotta fruit bowl and root vegetable storage pot.
Is there a need for bottled water? On Thursday, we questioned whether Fiji’s eco-friendly efforts were really that green. And it seems that the folks at the London Design Festival were thinking about the bottled water controversy as well. At the Greengaged best practice case studies earlier this month at the London Design Festival, Joshua Blackburn presented a pro-tap water campaign developed by communication design agency, Provokateur. With a desire to bring about positive changes in consumer behavior, WeWantTap is both a campaign and product line. The campaign is simple, though the ambition is big, as Joshua explained: “We want to develop an initiative to take on the bottled water industry.”
Some of the AIA San Francisco Home Tours took us to parts of this city by the bay that are changing so rapidly, they are barely recognizable. The much-anticipated residential development, Arterra High-Rise, is one such spanking new project. The building is in what is part of a larger, 300-acre development known as Mission Bay. This part of San Francisco, along the south waterfront is built almost entirely on fill and represents the residual economic effects of the late 1990s ‘dot-com boom’, much like the mid 1880s gold rush led to the rapid development of what is now the Financial District in San Francisco.
Recycled shipping containers are becoming more and more popular as a viable sustainable building material, and this year’s West Coast Green show house highlights this growing trend. The showroom highlight of this year’s event is Lawrence Group’s SG Blocks Container House, fashion out of five shipping containers and a plethora of other eco-friendly building materials. As a prefab, the home is affordable, cute, and easy to assemble — demonstrated by the fact that the model at West Coast Green was erected in less than 5 hours.
With a structural system reminiscent of Shigeru Ban’s Paper Church, Architect Li Xianggang’s Paper-Brick House showcasing at this year’s annual Architecture Biennale in Venice, Italy is a mesmerizing paper fortress. Composed of paper tubes, paper boxes, and adhesive tape (and some metal connections), the materials work together to mimic a brick house. And something about it makes me nostalgic for the cardboard forts of my youth which only required an empty basement, a lot of boxes, and my imagination fully intact.
Bottled water is anathema to many hardcore environmentalists. Taking water from the land and sky, putting it into containers made from oil, and shipping it around the world defies core eco-friendly values in many ways. Yet premium bottled water producer FIJI Water is aggressively marketing itself as green. You may have seen ads with the slogan “Our Promise, Our Progress” or “Every drop is green” and images of a bottle of FIJI Water next to a big green earth. On the bottle itself, the iconic hibiscus flower is now joined by a prominent green water droplet, and the back of the bottle invites you to visit FIJIGreen.com to find out more about the environmental impact of the water you’re drinking.
Creating a sustainable building was a fusion of old-school building techniques and modern technology in the design for the Pearl Academy of Fashion. Designed by Morphogenesis, an architecture firm based in New Delhi and Pune, the academy is extremely energy efficient thanks to its use of cooling methods traditionally found in buildings in the hot-dry desert climate of Rajasthan. Situated in Jaipur, India, the finished structure is a sight to behold and looks like an incredible place to go to school.
West Coast Green kicked off this morning and we’re excited to reveal this year’s stunning show house: the SG Blocks Harbinger prefab! Composed of five recycled shipping containers, the home features a durable steel envelope that is capable of withstanding hurricanes in Florida and earthquakes in California. A paragon of sustainability, the Harbinger house also features FSC-certified woods, solar panels, rainwater recycling, and an Agilewaves resource monitoring system. Designed by the Lawrence Group, the prefab was fabricated in a month and assembled on-site in just 4 hours and 47 minutes!
We all know that trees are generous givers. They eliminate carbon dioxide, provide a home for little critters, and offer us shade. However, there seems to be one last untapped resource: trees can also produce small amounts of electricity. And now researchers at MIT have begun to develop a way to harness that power so trees can finally do something for themselves: track climate changes that will help minimize damage from forest fires.
This year, Americans will drink more than 30 billion single-serving bottles of water. To raise awareness of the alarming problem of plastic waste, Jasmine Zimmerman created the Bottle House – an open-roofed greenhouse made from hundreds of recycled plastic bottles. It’s an excellent example of repurposing a harmful and overlooked material into one that will grow vegetation, and Jasmine plans to exhibit the greenhouse in empty lots, rooftops, parks, and vacant buildings to help spread the word. We caught up with the structure in Seattle at Bumbershoot 2008, where it was joined by a number of socially and environmentally charged installations and performances.
What does it take to lead a good, green lifestyle? With more and more ‘green’ products hitting the market, the conscientious consumer now faces a veritable morass of choices; small important everyday choices that can make a big difference in the long run. This fall, Inhabitat launches a special 8-part series will explore various aspects of the “green lifestyle” – what it means, what to look for, and where to look for more in-depth expert insight. We’ll start close to home with something as seemingly mundane as house cleaning.
Brooklyn-based husband and wife designers Oeuf create beautiful, eco-friendly kids furniture that is so chic, you will want to keep it in your house long after your kids have grown up. (At least you can use this logic for the dresser shown above, if not the crib). …
Throughout time, cathedrals have signified some of the human race’s most awe-inspiring architectural endeavors. Continuing this trend, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill recently completed construction on their incredible Cathedral of Christ the Light in Oakland. If you have been searching for religious -or architectural- inspiration, check out their awe-inspiring cathedral. The stunning structure makes beautiful use of glass, fly ash concrete, and fsc-certified wood, but we were most impressed by its incredible use of natural light. SOM is well known for its work on many other large projects such as offices, airports, islands, museums, and skyscrapers.
We are excited to announce that one of our favorite contemporary furniture design teams, Molo, just launched a brand new fold-up paper lantern called ‘Urchin’. Molo’s Urchin Softlights are a series of gorgeous expandable lamps composed of flexible-yet-durable honeycomb craft paper. Urchin embodies Molo’s versatile design philosophy and is as adaptable as their paper walls or stacking blocks, allowing the user to lift or push the softlight into any desired position. Watch designer Stefanie Forsythe styling her Urchin softlights in a flash intro here.
RCA Concept car by Joonas Vartola
What intelligent new systems will the cars of tomorrow feature? Recently we were asked by Best of the Green Web to compose our thoughts about the future of personal transportation into a three part series. Whereas in past weeks we’ve focused upon the drive towards creating more efficient vehicles from eco-friendly materials, this week we focus on the more intricate technologies required to achieve the goal of sustainable transportation. After all, increasing fuel efficiency is a worthy goal, but let’s face it – if we really want to change our relationship with our cars, we need them to be smart. Check out Best of the Green Web for the full article!
Recently General Motors revealed its hope for the future of transportation: a production model of the Chevrolet Volt. The plug-in electric powerhouse will feature a revolutionary propulsion system that will allow it to travel 40 miles without using a single drop of gas – that’s far enough to render 75% of American’s daily commutes emission-free!
Graffiti meets environmental and social activism in Peter Gibson (a.k.a. Roadsworth)’s literal take on street art. Frustrated with the lack of safety provided for cyclists in today’s cities, the artist began (illegally) spray painting extra bike lanes onto the streets of Montreal in 2001. It wasn’t long before he began to branch out and address other civic and environmental issues through his cutting brand of creative imagery. Intended to address many of the confining conditions of living in an urban environment, Peter Gibson’s work treats these topics with a sort of wry humor that doesn’t dull their urgent message.
Here at Inhabitat we love the practicality and ease of mobility that folding bikes offer, so we were ecstatic to hear that folding bike company STRiDA just released its fastest, most advanced cycle to date! We were huge fans of the company’s brilliantly engineered 5.0 Bikes, and it looks like STRiDA has outdone itself again with its sleek new MAS Special Signature. The retooled ride features a Swiss engineered drive system and a rustproof aluminum frame that folds in just 5 seconds flat.
For all you amateur and professional photographers out there, Lowepro now has a series of camera bags made from 95% recycled materials. The durable fabric is made from 100% recycled Cyclepet®, while the hardware is made from reground plastic, which is recycled from industrial trimmings salvaged from factory floors. The Terraclime bags are available in 4 different sizes and can accommodate small cameras, GPS units, all the way up to a DLSR with an extra lens. You can choose from 3 hip colors as well – black, plum and grass.
Chilean architect Guillermo Hevia designed this stunning glass bottle plant in Chile with an exception set of sustainable building strategies including bioclimatic technology, passive ventilation, and clean energy sources. Composed of steel, glass and concrete, the Cristalchile factory is ideally placed to utilize wind and sun for climate control and energy in the breezy region of Llay-Llay, which translates to “wind” in Mapuche.
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