divine green: Sustainable Home, Beauty, & Lifestyle

Tract homes are turning eco-chic, at least in a small town outside of London. British architecture firm Rogers Stirk Harbour & Partners has designed a 145-unit housing development in England that could be a future model for efficient housing around the world. The two-story homes, which are between 700 and 1,400 square feet, feature a modern twist on the English chimney: the Ecohat.

Sounds like something a hippie would put on in winter, but the EcoHat is an aluminum structure (painted bright red) that contains powerful solar panels and an airflow system to optimize energy consumption inside the home. Sitting on the spine of the house like a chimney and angled toward the sun, the Ecohat filters fresh air coming into the building for natural air-conditioning and reuses hot air circulating through the stack to power a hot water system.

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By David Rittenhouse

TOKYO–One recent morning while I was hurrying into Shinjuku station here to catch the metro, I stopped at Starbucks for a small coffee and one of those really tasty sweet brown rice scones that they have in Japan.

When I finished my breakfast on-the-go I took my plastic tray with ceramic plate and paper cup to the return point/trash bin and had a sudden moment of conscientiousness. There were at least five different holes into which to separate and place the garbage–paper cups, plastic cups, tops, ice-liquids, other combustible and non-combustible items. (The Japanese government requires the recycling measures.)

This got me thinking. (more…)

Most sneakerheads don’t know it, but Nike’s newest $235 Michael Jordan shoe could flatter any environmentalist’s wardrobe. The shoe, named XX3 (after the sport star’s jersey number), which goes on sale nationally this month, is made with fewer toxins and produces less waste in the manufacturing process than most sneakers.

Nike’s not hyping that fact in advertising for the last–and most expensive–in its line of celebrated Jordan sneaks for fear that the message would be lost on its core buyers. But the shoe is made with a new technique that requires no chemical solvent to bond fabric to a carbon plate, a first for any basketball shoe, according to Jane Savage, chief sustainability officer at Nike.

“That shoe sends up the flare that you can have a profitable and sustainable shoe,” Savage said while speaking at CompostModern 2008, a recent design conference in San Francisco.

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SAN FRANCISCO–Ten years ago, a designer of a top-selling toothbrush might beam with pride over his or her creation. But seeing that indestructible saber of plastic washed up on a beach shore–battered but relatively unchanged–might cause the same designer some pause in today’s eco-conscious climate.

Valerie Casey would know. As head of global practice for design firm IDEO, whose clients include Johnson & Johnson and Sprint, Casey said at a recent design conference that she had a crisis of conscience about a year ago when she realized she wasn’t talking to her clients about sustainable design, for fear that they wouldn’t be amenable to ideas about eco alternatives.

So in the last year, she’s organized the Designer’s Accord, a nonprofit coalition of designers who pledge to share ideas and information about sustainable design practices with clients. The project launched in recent weeks.

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What are the names of the new eco luxury? Apart from U.S. carmaker Tesla Motors and fashion designer Linda Loudermilk, they’re largely brands from foreign companies.

The World Wildlife Fund UK, a nonprofit conservation group, uncovered in a recent report that the world’s top 10 makers of luxury brands–the likes of Bulgari, Tiffany, LVMH–have less-than-stellar records on environmental and sustainable business practices. (Story here.) But in the report, it also singled out seven companies that are proving that luxury can be affordable to the eco conscious.

At a recent design conference in San Francisco, Alex Steffen, founder of Worldchanging.org, talked about “guilt-free affluence,” or the idea that you could enjoy the good life (read: having nice things) without knowing that those things came at the expense of a kid in Vietnam. To achieve that guilt-free existence, he said, people must know more about the origin of the products they buy, i.e., how and where is it made? He called that the “back story,” which is something very few companies publicly disclose today.

These are a few companies that are making their back story part of the brand.

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Metropolitan cities are setting the example this year on decorating with eco-Christmas lights. San Francisco this weekend, followed by Paris on Monday, lit massive holiday trees with mini light-emitting diode bulbs, which burn brighter than typical bulbs and emit no heat. The LEDs consume about 90 percent less electricity than typical lights and can last as many as 20 holiday seasons.

Paris’s tree on the Champs-Elysees was donned with close to 1 million new LED bulbs, according to a story from the Associated Press. A joint project by General Electric and French gas company Gaz de France, the energy efficient lights are expected to cut the city’s electricity bill by 70 percent for the holiday tree over previous years.

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