Catamaran made from 12,000 recycled plastic bottles crosses the pacific to raise awareness of our tendency to waste plastic like there’s no tomorrow …good idea? Here’s a cool video.

Street artist BLU gives his take on global warming in Berlin.

via JUST

Check out Masanobu Fukuoka and his radical disciples farm the natural way. Then read his book.

Part One

Part Two

Come have breakfast with me at SDSU.

Beekeeping, Permaculture, the Farm Bill, NAFTA, you name it. The Ecological Intelligentsia is going to be dropping knowledge this weekend.

Volunteer if you have the motivation to do so. Otherwise, just come!

With just about the worst tag line ever, you have to applaud the Betacup contest for choosing a tangible, real-life problem to address. Betacup is awarding 20,000 USD to the best concept that redesigns the way we consume disposable paper coffee cups. While many would argue that drinking coffee sustainably means not importing it from far away places, Betacup is challenging people to submit ideas that offer a convenient coffee-on-the go solution to the 200+million North American coffee consumers who chew through 58 billion cups per year. Whether or not we’ll be able to drink coffee sustainably, these guys have the right idea and I’m curious to see what solutions come of it. Check it out at www.thebetacup.com

The collapse of the auto industry has caused people to re-design life in Detroit. Mark Dowie‘s immodest proposal:

Detroit, the country’s most depressed metropolis, has zero produce-carrying grocery chains. It also has open land, fertile soil, ample water, and the ingredients to reinvent itself from Motor City to urban farm.

Read the entire article here.

The Western lifestyle is characterized by aggressive and expanding rates of consumption. We already knew that. What many don’t know is that much of what we consume comes from places far away. In these places, people and their environments have been, and continue to be, destroyed so that items like Bananas (Ecuador), Coffee (Peru), Sugar (Brazil), Cotton (India), and Cocoa (Ghana) can be shipped to “wealthy” countries for consumption year-round.

The Fairtrade Foundation, a London based non-profit that licenses FAIRTRADE products in the UK, has designed a clever campaign to challenge people’s consumption habits. Buying FAIRTRADE products for two weeks sounds like a step in the right direction. Now if only we could design a way to float the containers here using only the ocean currents. I’ve never heard of FAIRTRADE oil, have you? Better reason yet to support local commerce.

via holidaymatinee.com

The “News” has been drenching us with coverage of the Earthquake in Haiti. Before the earthquake, there was little reporting on the dismantling of Haiti’s economy. However, CNN deserves accolades for highlighting SOIL, a non-profit organization who’s goal is to broaden the community of people concerned about development and social justice in Haiti by installing composting toilets.

Right now, donating money is popular. The founders of SOIL were motivated to make a difference long before it was as easy as sending a text message to Wyclef.

Read their first-person account here as they react to the disaster. SOIL has decided to devote 100% of all donations that come in the next month to disaster relief. Donate here

Today’s vintage market perfectly juxtaposes old clothing with modern commercialism.  That vintage sweater from Screaming Mimi‘s or Nasty Gal wasn’t always cleaned and styled and packaged up so nicely for you.  It didn’t carry a $100 price tag either.  No; after its first life in the 80s or 90s, it was pulled, crumpled and damp, from a bail of clothing in a rag house, worth only pennies.

A rag house is a used clothing retailer: unsold thrift stock is compacted into bails and shipped into their warehouse.  They can receive bails of apparel, shoes, belts, bags, fabric remnants, etc.

The warehouse of EMR, or Environmental Material Recovery, in Los Angeles

Bails of clothing

Rag houses like EMR sort out the valuable pieces to sell wholesale to vintage dealers, and the rest is shipped overseas.  EMR sells their discards by the pound to impoverished parts of the Philippines.

The Rose Bowl in Pasadena holds its world famous flea market on the second Sunday of every month.  Though general admission begins at 9 am, a “special preview VIP admission” is offered beginning at 5 am for $20 per person.  At 5 am in the valley it’s pitch black and freezing cold.  With over 2,500 vendors, who would want to shop then?  The next and final tier of buyers would, looking for merchandise to sell at retail price points.  The vast majority are Japanese buyers, equipped with flashlights and rolling carts.  They buy in bulk and ship product back to Japan’s booming vintage market.  The majority of commerce at the Rose Bowl takes place before the sun is even up; the celebrity sightings and super chic L.A. kids are a mere addendum.

Last Sunday, a group of us from TMY headed up to the Rose Bowl to see what we could find.  I have been there many times and in different incarnations. I’ve been a vintage-obsessed high schooler, I’ve sold there for EMR, I’ve bought for a retail store I used to work at.  This time I was myself: wary, educated, but still wanting a certain 1970s sweater.

Sources: 1, 2

For $8-10 bucks you can refill your ink cartridges at Costco. At OfficeMax, my ink cartridges cost $15 & $35 (BW and Color).If you want to be more environmentally friendly and are ‘anti-buying-shit’ this is a neato option for you.

Drop off your ink cartridge (HP, Lexmark, DELL) and it takes about an hour, if they’re busy. You can also drop it off, just like you would a roll of film, and pick it up another day. In the meantime, you can browse around the store and enjoy a ’samplefull lunch’

via:(whygeneration.me)