Andrea Air is a new air purifier designed by Mathieu Lehanneur engineered to improve air quality by using the filtration of natural plants.

Microsoft’s first flagship store features print on-demand-video games.

This is an extract from the draft John Grant’s new book Co-opportunity, contracted for publication with John Wiley & Sons Limited, January 2010. This extract section 3 of the book – Information and Ethical Consumerism.

Back in July we came across the results of a study on consumer behavior as it related to “going green”. The research concluded that people are more motivated to make eco-friendly purchases based on perceptions about status – i.e. installing these solar panels are sure to make my neighbors envious – than they are by other factors, like cost-savings or more surprisingly perhaps, actually benefitting the environment.

Last month we wrote about the Reburbia competition that challenged architects and urban planners to appropriate the soon-to-be vacant ruins of suburban sprawl (aka big box stores and mini-mansions) for more efficient uses. The grand prize went to Calvin Chiu’s Frog’s Dream: McMansions Turned into Biofilter Water Treatment Plants. It’s a design that turns bloated mini-mansions into wetlands, providing an organic filtration system for a nearby city.
Chiu explains the project:
In response to the anticipated future, the Frog’s Dream project attempts to re-establish a sustainable relationship between city and suburbia. It proposes to transform the vacant McMansions, at the periphery of [...]

Image Credit: Getty Images, Eke Miedaner/Flickr
The modern swimming pool, despite its ability to refresh and relax, is usually a harsh, chlorine-filled experience that leaves one with red eyes and irritated skin. A healthier alternative can be found in companies that specialize in natural swimming pools (such as Total Habitat in the US and gartenArt in the UK). These companies assist in the creation of bodies of water that are chemical-free, using organic filtration systems which are friendly to the surrounding environment. Judging from the photos and case studies on the aforementioned sites, a natural swimming area has the potential to [...]

Tatil Design, a Brazilian design firm, has used laser etching to cut logos, messages and images into delicate dead leaves that can only be seen when held up to a light source. Called “Natural Medium“, these unusual promotional tools are a truly unique piece of marketing communications.
First introduced at the Cannes Advertising Festival in 2008, they made such an impression that the firm won a Bronze Award for the 2009 International Design Excellence Awards in Eco Design.

[via Inhabitat]
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Texas has moved a step closer to hosting what would be the largest wind farms in the US. Baryonyx, an start-up committed to innovative energy solutions (specializing primarily in wind power), has won three land lease bids from the State of Texas to construct data centers which would be powered by wind farms, and other forms of energy that operate with zero CO2 emissions. This would include two offshore farms, and one on land. The offshore sites would be more than 19,000 acres each.
When these farms are fully functional, Baryonyx would supply power to the Texas General Land Office, who [...]

A team of young German architects is envisioning a new method of construction that challenges our very notion of building materials. Many a design plan strives for an ‘organic’ or ‘natural’ appearance, one that seems to blend into and coexist with its environment, but Oliver Storz, Ferdinand Ludwig, and Hannes Schwertfeger, are constructing buildings from the environment itself, bending and grafting trees around and into each other to form sophisticated structures. The architects build their ‘arbo-architecture’ structures around metal support frames, which guide and constrict the growth of young trees into set forms. Once they mature, they are pruned so [...]

While it’s popular cousin the soybean may hog most of the spotlight, the multi-purposefulness of the coffee ground is nothing to scoff at. In addition to providing us with a refreshing beverage, and occasionally biofuel, a company in Taiwan has recently turned our caffeinated friend into a “super high-tech eco fabric.” The process, which was created by Singtex Industrial Co. and took three years to perfect, is boasted to produce two shirts from the amount of coffee grounds needed to make “one medium cup of coffee”. The fabric is also rumored to be “quick-drying, odor controlling,  and uv-protective.”
To give the [...]

At first glance, Jon Cohrs’ Urban Prospecting project looks like one of those late-night-tv pyramid schemes our well-intentioned aunt got tied up with in the early 90s. But with tongue firmly planted in cheek, Cohrs’ Black Gold Rush is actually drawing renewed attention to, and creating a way of engaging with, an oil spill twice the size of the Exxon Valdez disaster right in his Brooklyn backyard. The Greenpoint spill occurred nearly 15 years ago, and very little has been done in attempts to clean it, contain it or deal with it in any real way, in part because it [...]

The Wooster Collective were recently tapped to take part in a conversation at The White House about the role of the arts in our country. Following the discussion, they were given a fresh perspective on the work that they document on their website, seeing art “outside the walls” as symbolic of a necessary shift to remove the barriers in the ways our society currently operates. By redefining our government and institutions as truly public and “for the people”, everything from transportation to healthcare needs to change to meet our new expectations.
And in a more tangible sense, the art is still [...]

From the financial crisis to the environmental one, there is no doubt that the world is experiencing a period of drastic changes. While most of the countries are devising their policies based on green considerations, Brazil seems to be going in the opposite direction. The government has recently approved a 10-year plan for the Brazilian energy matrix that not only ignores renewable and clean energy sources where hydroelectric plants are not feasible, but also favors the increase of thermal plants based on coal and oil.
In a speech made in the south of Brazil shortly after the approval of the plan, [...]

Amidst the debate over the multi-billion dollar bottled water industry (is it really a debate anymore?), rises another complication in our consumer relationship to water: sure, you’re bringing your own Kleen Kanteen, but how much water was used to make that? Or the jeans you’re wearing, never mind the burger you had for lunch? The Wall-Street Journal recently reported “it takes roughly 20 gallons of water to make a pint of beer, as much as 132 gallons of water to make a 2-liter bottle of soda, and about 500 gallons, including water used to grow, dye and process the cotton, [...]

There was a portentous tone at this year’s Greener Gadgets Conference.  Right out of the gates, scientist/DIY guru/inventor and keynote speaker Saul Griffith minced few words about global warming.  He presented a dizzying array of graphs, charts and figures about our current energy consumption habits and the dire consequences that will almost certainly ensue if we continue at the rate we’re going.  One such figure showed how the average American would have to carry 23lbs. of oil to fuel his or her daily energy habit.  He stressed, in earnest, that we couldn’t persist in this way without inducing a global [...]