Native Trails uses 100% recycled copper to make handmade sinks for kitchen, bathroom and commercial use. Besides looking good, these sinks have the added benefit of being able to kill 99% of bacteria within two hours.

Good design solves problems and can sometimes even make a statement about changing human behavior. This refrigerator concept for Samsung by Netherlands’ GRO Design attempts to do just that.
It presents itself as a piece of furniture rather than an appliance to be hidden in the kitchen. Many people simply don’t have room for a traditional refrigerator and may center food consumption around the living room coffee table. GRO also designed the fridge to be as flexible as possible allowing both vertical and horizontal setups, suiting the potential buyer’s individual needs.
Fast Company has more on how it reflects change in the [...]

Yann Arthus-Bertrand, the French photographer behind film projects like “6 Billion Others,” recently released his latest project called Home that captures the beauty of our planet in a free film stressing the gravity of environmental issues.  Arthus-Bertrand pioneered modern aerial photography and this latest project showcases an incredible selection of inspiring images from his ambitious project.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this project is that it’s completely not-for-profit and copyright-free, enabling the movie to freely circulate around the web.  The high production values and original musical score were enabled by numerous sponsorships under the organization of the Good Planet Foundation.  In [...]

Curbly points us to an interesting dining room setup designed by Ilja Oelschlagel that seems to disappear into a wall. A table and benches fold out of a tiny wall unit and storage space is reveled behind a flat facade.
[Compact Kitchen via Curbly]

An artist couple from San Francisco has transformed a pink Ford Econoline 350 into a mobile studio apartment. Furnished almost entirely by free items from Craigslist, the scrappy mobile home has served as a base of operations as Crockett Bodelson and Sandra Wang traversed the west coast selling their artwork. Stuffed inside the truck are an upright piano, a stove, a table with chairs, a large workshop area, some mattresses and a bungee cord secured library. The biodiesel truck also runs off of solar power, and is an interesting example of using reclaimed materials to create something new.
[via SF Weekly]

This solar-powered trash compactor operates completely off the grid and stores up to five times the capacity of a normal trash can.  Energy independent devices can effectively improve previously energy-less designs.  Seen in Palm Springs, California.
[via future perfect]

Hario Glass’s Iuosen Pot is not your average water pitcher: equipped with a metal cage filled with iouseki stones and binchotan charcoal, the pot infuses typical H20 with a fresh, springwater taste and odor. The stones are what account for the distinctive, natural mineral flavor, while the charcoal absorbs solutes like chlorine and metals, while softening the water. And as Boingboing found, the special ‘iouseki’ stones have some sort of (unconfirmed) medicinal properties:
…Iouseki is famous as a medical stone and the two stones elute minerals, are porous and provided with strong adsorption force and ion exchange function and provided with [...]