Washing the car may make your ride nice and shiny, but all that water runoff might make you feel dirty.

When you wash your vehicle on a paved surface such as a driveway or parking lot, all that…

As global warming is at the top of the agenda, world leaders are asked to act immediately, from forced recycling to carbon offsetting and celebrities launching a 10-year campaign to make environmentally friendly living fashionable. Are these efforts really improving the environment? What is eco-friendly living? When we live in a period where the worst climate disaster is about to happen, how can we live the ultimate green lifestyle? Extreme Green Guerilla, Michiko Nitta’s graduation project at RCA, Design Interactions, brings the current green lifestyle to the extreme. Her “manifesto” looks at three important areas of our daily life: communication, food and death. The extreme guerilla adapts from a network of amateur self-sustaining people who have shortened their lifespan to sustain the ultimate green lifestyle. Whilst going to extreme lengths to protect the environment, they try to enjoy a decadent quality of life by utilizing urban waste and biosystem. This consists of embracing emerging technology to develop the ultimate green solution. They try to avoid being tied to big corporations and using electronic devices to send emails and SMS. E.G.G. are also against conventional posting service, as it leaves a great CO2 footprint. Instead, they resort to A.M.S., the “Animal… (more)

(Posted by Regine Debatty in Sustainable Design at 11:44 AM)

This is the final installment of my summary of our Green Design Dialogue discussion on May 25. I introduced the participating designers in my first post, and continued summarizing our discussion on…

Editor's note: This week, Ecotality's Bill Hobbs points to an interesting new development: Algeria, a member of OPEC, has plans for exporting solar power. This post was originally published…

Devils Lake installation: image courtesy of Green Museum

There is a little family of asexual plants commonly known as duckweed, and otherwise known in the botanical world as lemnaceae. These…

Starbucks announced yesterday that it has reached a licensing agreement with the Ethiopian government regarding the marketing use of Ethiopia's well-known coffee producing regions, most notably…

Editor's note: We're please to welcome Colleen Patrick-Goudreau to the Green Options writing team! Colleen has taught vegan cooking classes in Oakland, California, for seven years, and is a…

Following in step with Boeing's prophecy for future aviation biofuels, the Department of Defense (DOD) has awarded a $1.1 million contract to Shell Oil to produce synfuel for the U.S. Air Force…

Last week I covered the SmartPower and YouTube Clean Energy Ad Challenge. SmartPower is a nonprofit marketing agency that promotes renewable energy, and their challenge to the YouTube community was…

Given the rate of growth in Dubai, we’re seeing an endless stream of media reports about building plans and strategies there. At Worldchanging, we’ve also had a relatively consistent trickle of news about Dubai and the UAE in general, but the green and sustainable projects we talk about here represent only a tiny fraction of the total activity there, most of which races ahead on unsustainable ground. Little by little, though, an assortment of models are emerging, from office parks to housing developments to skyscrapers. It may not be long before the UAE has a full package of potential sustainable designs for future architects to learn and work from. One new arrival on the scene comes from a German architect, Eckhard Gerber, who currently holds CAD drawings for the tallest zero-emissions, zero-energy skyscraper in the world. As Der Spiegel reports, the Burj al-Taqa (“Energy Tower”), is “a giant 68-story building projected to rise to a lofty height of 322 meters (1,056 feet), which would make it number 22 on the list of the world’s tallest buildings.” Together with engineering company, DS-Plan, Eckhard designed a cylindrical building in order to expose the least possible area of the façade to sunlight, and… (more)

(Posted by Sarah Rich in Green Building at 3:04 PM)