Category: Go Green
Thursday, December 24, 2009
Photo courtesy of Bamboo Bike Studio
Strong. Light. Flexible. Renewable. Bamboo is a great choice for bike frames and at the Bamboo Bike Studio in Brooklyn, NY cyclists can build their own custom bamboo bike. In addition to bike-building workshops, the studio advances sustainable entrepreneurship and self-propelled transportation worldwide by working with partner organizations to establish scalable bamboo bike factories in countries such as Ghana, Kenya, and Ecuador.
Bamboo is an ideal material for light-industrial business in developing countries due to its build-ability (working steel and aluminum requires the skills of a master welder, and shaping carbon is a highly technical process); performance (bamboo is hollow and lightweight, yet strong enough to take the rigours of cycling); and sustainability (it grows quickly in a variety of climates and requires no refineries, smelting, or long-distance shipping).
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Wednesday, December 16, 2009
Director Kevin McMahon’s 2009 National Film Board documentary, Waterlife: The Story of the Last Great Supply of Fresh Drinking Water on Earth, is accompanied by a fantastic interactive website. Creatively communicating a host of inter-related topics, including dredging, chemicals, invasive species, power, fishing, history, wildlife, responsibility, action, and change, this site is a captivating way to learn more about what’s happening to the Great Lakes - and how it affects us all.
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Tuesday, May 26, 2009
Posted by: Shannon | Category:
Go Green |
(Mature Sisal Plant)
Since my bagasse post last month, I’ve been curious about tree-free paper - and why it’s not more readily available. Relying on trees for paper is a relatively recent development - the first machine and process for pulping wood was invented in the mid 19th century. Prior to this, pulped rags (cotton and linen) and other materials had been used for nearly 2000 years (5,000 years ago Egyptians began to use papyrus but it’s technically not a true paper because it’s layered as a mat rather than made from pulped cellulose).
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Thursday, April 23, 2009
Posted by: Shannon | Category:
Go Green |
In a post last week, I mentioned O’BON, a San Francisco company offering stationery made from bagassse. I’d never heard of bagasse, so I did a little online sleuthing to find out more about this fibre, a bi-product of sugarcane processing. Lo and behold, this once ‘worthless’ residue is turning out to be quite a versatile, earth-friendly, renewable resource.
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Monday, April 20, 2009
Dutch design studio SPRANQ Creative Communications designed this font specifically to use 20% less ink due to omitting parts of the characters’ internals - think swiss cheese meets Verdana. The creators acknowledge ecofont isn’t very attactive, especially in a large size, but feel it’s suitable for internal corporate or personal purposes.
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Friday, April 17, 2009
On the eve of Earth Day, TreeHugger, a leading media outlet dedicated to driving sustainability mainstream, has profiled ten of the best green designs that will be launching at the world’s biggest contemporary furniture fair in Milan April 22-27. Salon Internazionale del Mobile, now in its 48th year, features green designs ranging from recycled eggshell stationary to polished biodegradable dinnerware to paper furniture by architect Shigaru Ban.
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Friday, March 13, 2009
Would be required to haul the amount of paper-based material Fleming diverted from the landfill in 2008! Our recycling company, Urban Impact, recently provided us with a certificate stating we recycled 99 cubic yards (75 cubic metres) of mixed paper last year. Other green news of 2008 included installing a timer on our coffee machine so we’re not wasting energy during off hours. Little steps, yes. But together they really add up.
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