divine green: Sustainable Home, Beauty, & Lifestyle

Lake Mead, the U.S.’s largest manmade lake on the Nevada-Arizona border, has a 50 percent chance of going dry by 2021 if local population demands and global warming trends continue unchecked, according to a study last week from scientists at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego. That’s especially alarming news considering that Lake Mead, a body of water created by the Hoover Dam and the Colorado River, provides about 90 percent of the drinking water to Las Vegas, as well as a portion to southwest cities like Los Angeles and agricultural groups.

The forecast particularly highlights the precarious situation of a major city residing in the desert. Golf courses, unnatural residential lawns and ornate water fountains around Las Vegas are among massive drains on the water supply.

One of the ways Las Vegas authorities are trying to address issues of sustainability and educate the public on conservation is through a recent project called the Springs Preserve Sustainability Center, which opened last May. (more…)

Homeowners and future homebuyers are among those in the best position to make a difference to global warming. That’s because buildings–their energy production in heating and cooling–are the single largest contributor to global warming, producing an estimated 48 percent of the world’s heat-trapping gases, followed by the transportation industry at roughly 30 percent.

That’s why it might make sense to bone up on the tips and tricks offered in the new book, “Green Building for Dummies.”

Admittedly I’m not a fan of “…For Dummies” guides, because on principle it’s not dumb to delve into a subject and learn as much as you can. This book’s author, Eric Corey Freed, a San Francisco-based architect of sustainable living spaces, is highly respected in his field and definitely smart.

Corey Freed says that homeowners can get the most bang for their buck in their home’s energy efficiency by improving its insulation. 

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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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Gucci, Tiffany, Swatch, Bulgari. These luxury brands aren’t what you’d call divine green.In fact, their environmental stewardship scored them Ds and Fs on the World Wildlife Fund UK’s first study on the social and environmental performance of the world’s top 10 makers of high-end goods. (Report here. Beware, it loads slowly.) The top of the list, French cosmetics maker L’Oreal, scored a so-so C+ and was joined by French brethren Hermes and LVMH in the average set.The conservation group scored luxury makers by analyzing the companies’ self-reported data to environmental agencies and investors. It also looked at their overall media reputation for good governance, and social and environmental responsibility (or ESG). It examined practices related to “mining and farming, design, manufacturing, marketing, retail, use, re-use and eventual fate” of products, according to the report, called Deeper Luxury. It then gave each company a score (from 1 to 100) to designate a rank and grade. (more…)

For every liter of Fiji, Evian or Dasani bottled water that you buy, it takes another three to four liters of water to make the plastic container it sits in.

That unsettling research is from Peter Gleick, co-founder of the Pacific Institute, one of the nation’s top water-conservation assessment centers. National Public Radio’s Terry Gross interviewed Gleick on Tuesday for the show Fresh Air. (Interview here.)

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Consumer electronics are the fastest growing hog of electricity in U.S. homes. That’s according to Noah Horowitz, senior scientist at the National Resources Defense Council, who said at a recent event that all those plasma TVs and Playstations now suck up as much as 15 percent of the household energy bill.

For example, Horowitz said, a 50 inch plasma TV uses 500 kilowatts of energy annually (if “on” an average of two to three hours daily), or about 4 percent of the household electricity bill. That’s the equivalent of adding another refrigerator to the house, he said.

Horowitz blamed the problem on designers of consumer electronics, who aren’t thinking about energy efficiency at the outset. Consider the DVR. Many of the digital recording devices don’t include an on/off switch.

“It’s on 24 hours at full power even if you’re not using it,” Horowitz said. “With the uptake of DVRs in homes, you could eliminate the need for new power plants if the box was designed better.”

One solution is to unplug (more…)

If there’s any good reason to rethink your carbon footprint, it’s the worrisome findings from a six-year study on global climate change from Nobel Prize-winning experts. The authority–the U.N Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a group of 2,000 scientists from 140 countries–released the culmination of its research on the effects of global warming last weekend. Here are some of the findings, but you can read the full report here.

Global greenhouse gases have risen by 70 percent since 1970, largely because of carbon dioxide emissions from factories, power plants and cars. The growth of atmospheric gases is responsible for global warming, or the rise of planetary temperatures by 1.3 degrees over the last century, according to the report. In fact, 11 of the last 12 years have been the warmest on record over the last century.

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