Today Inhabitat favorite Foster + Partners announced their bold move in the lighting realm with their eco-friendly and elegant FLO lamps. Debuting at the Salone del Mobile in Milan, the new reading lamps combine the latest dimmable LED technology with a clean and slender aluminum form balanced upon a circular steel base.

Read the rest of Foster + Partners Unveil Elegant LED FLO Lamp at Milan Furniture Fairhttp://www.inhabitat.com/wp-admin/ohttp://www.inhabitat.com/wp-admin/options-general.php?page=better_feedptions-general.php?page=better_feed

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Post tags: Design Supermarket, FLO, flo lamps, flo lights, Foster + Partners, italia Lumina, la Rinascente, LED lamps, Milan Design Week 2011, milan furniture fair 2011, Salone del mobile, starchitect industrial design

You are looking at the world’s first bamboo and rattan roadster, a biodegradable car called the Phoenix. The Phoenix was created by product designers Kenneth Cobonpue and Albrecht Birkner and was built in just 10 days of bamboo, rattan, steel, and nylon. At 153 inches long, it is a small and elegant solution to a big and ugly problem: the waste created by old cars that outlive their purpose. “This project attempts to unveil the future of green vehicles using woven skins from organic fibers mated to composite materials and powered by green technology,” says Mr. Cobonpue. So how does it work?

Read the rest of World’s First Biodegradable Car: Kenneth Cobonpue’s Phoenix Roadsterhttp://www.inhabitat.com/wp-admin/ohttp://www.inhabitat.com/wp-admin/options-general.php?page=better_feedptions-general.php?page=better_feed

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Post tags: bamboo car, biodegradable car, green automotive design, green transportation, Kenneth Cobonpue, phoenix, rattan car, sustainable transportation

The Lumileaf Solar LED Lamp is a beautiful lighting feature for any home. The lights shape has been inspired by nature, the solar panel and lighting area has an aesthetically pleasing leaf shape. The solar light can be used both indoors or outdoors to provide you with lamplight wherever you require it.

The Lumileaf Solar LED Lamp has been created by Sonelis to provide a lamp light that can be used both indoors and outdoors effectively. The light has been designed to have an appealing sleek look that has natural beauty from its leaf-like shape yet has the elegance and modernity from the use of  brushed aluminium. The LEDs of the lamp have been embedded directly into the solar panel, giving the lamp a very unique and space efficient look.

The Lumileaf Solar LED Lamp charges its built-in 1800mAh NiMH rechargeable battery from the leaf shaped solar panel. This panel must be positioned to face towards the sun during daylight hours to allow it to charge through to day so that it can provide you with illumination at night. The battery powers 6 bright energy efficient LEDs, plenty to provide adequate lighting for a variety of situations.

This solar lamp, due to its construction from brushed aluminium, can be used both indoors and outdoors. The lamp is water resistant, allowing it to cope with light rain, or the occasional splash of water. This can be very useful for those with children who could easily knock a drink over onto it, or splash it with a water pistol, though some care should still be taken as it would not cope well with total submersion.

The Lumileaf lamp is a useful solar powered lamp to have around as you can make use of it indoors as an eco-friendly desk lamp while being able to move it outdoors when you require outdoor table lighting for a BBQ or similar event. The lamps elegant design and ability to be used in a variety of ways makes it an attractive addition to any household.

Source: Sonelis

Want to buy this gadget? Check out the Lumileaf Solar LED Lamp By Sonelis article on EnviroGadget to see the lowest prices for this gadget.

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Unilever has topped rankings of the companies most committed to sustainability, in a poll carried out by consultants SustainAbility and researchers GlobeScan

The poll asked 559 qualified sustainability experts from business, government, non-profits and academia to name large companies that are “committed to sustainable development, seeing strategic advantage in pursuing policies and actions which go beyond the requirements of environmental and social legislation.”

Unilever was chosen by 15 percent of respondents, followed by General Electric (12 percent), flooring company Interface (12 percent), Walmart (11 percent) and U.K. retail chain Marks & Spencer (8 percent).

There was significant regional variation in the responses. In North America, Walmart led the pack with 21 percent, followed by General Electric at 18 percent. In Europe Unilever and Marks & Spencer were the top two. But in emerging markets, Brazilian cosmetics company Natura was top-ranked.

The survey also found that a majority of sustainability experts believe that social entrepreneurs are the only leaders effectively advancing the sustainability agenda. Asked to rank the performance of various types of leaders in pushing this agenda in the past year, 57 percent said social entrepreneurs did an excellent job, compared to 49 percent for non-profit leaders, 40 percent for scientists, 24 percent for corporate leaders, 23 percent for leaders of multi-lateral organizations, and only six percent for government leaders.

The percent ranking corporate efforts as “excellent” did however rise, from 20 percent in 2010 and 21 percent in 2009.

Asked the reasoning behind their choosing one organization or another as leaders in sustainable development, 37 percent chose “commitment to sustainability values”, followed by 21 percent for “sustainable products/services/supply chain” and 14 percent for “integration into core business model”.

The research found that many of the corporate sustainability leaders, including GE, Marks & Spencer, Natura and Walmart, had built their reputations incrementally, posting gains over most of the last six years. But Unilever catapulted into the lead this year, exemplifying what the researchers called a “what have you done for me lately” mentality.

Last November the company launched its Sustainability Living Plan, setting more than 50 social, economic and environmental targets, with ambitions to cut the environmental footprint of its products in half, sustainably source 100 percent of its agricultural raw materials, and help 1 billion people improve their health and well-being.

Last week Unilever Canada will become the single largest commercial purchaser of renewable power in that country, through a 59,000 MWh a year contract.

BP, on the other hand, was chosen by between 20 and 30 percent on respondents in 2004, 2005 and 2006. But its popularity plummeted in 2007 and continued sinking after that. This year – the first rankings since the Gulf of Mexico oil spill – BP received 0 percent.

Three out of five employers (60 percent) are measuring their cost savings from environmental programs, up from 39 percent last year, according to a survey by Buck Consultants, a subsidiary of Xerox.

“The Greening of the American Workplace 2010” found that savings are widespread at American companies, with 78 percent of respondents reporting electricity cost savings, two-thirds indicating heating/cooling and paper savings, and 60 percent cutting costs on water.

Overall, 69 percent of respondents have green programs in place, up from 53 percent last year. Nearly six in ten respondents indicated that the economic downturn had no impact on their green workplace initiatives while 19 percent expanded such programs during the recession.

Cost savings were cited as the leading motivator for environmental programs at 78 percent, followed by the creation of community goodwill (58 percent) and employee engagement/morale (56 percent).

Among the organizations that have a formal green program, the most common practices are:

• Recycling and paper reduction (97 percent)
• Web and/or teleconferencing (95 percent)
• Healthy living and wellness (85 percent)
• Internal green communication programs (81 percent)
• Light sensors (75 percent)

The survey also found that the proportion of respondents tracking stakeholder feedback on environmental and social responsibility programs has doubled from one year ago, to 62 percent.

Leadership is a critical factor for the success of green workforce initiatives, Buck said – 88 percent of companies with such programs include the CEO in development and communications, while 91 percent have appointed a dedicated leader for their green efforts.

Among employers that provide incentives to encourage green behaviors, 43 percent provide special employee recognition, 19 percent give prizes, and 14 percent provide a monetary reward.

Buck surveyed over 100 organizations, representing a wide range of industries including financial services, manufacturing, health care, and non-profits.

Lifecycle analysis, or LCA, is all the rage. Academics and consultants tout the amazing insights that an LCA can provide companies. Labeling organizations solicit companies to run LCAs to produce carbon or other environmental footprint numbers. And it’s true – mostly – that LCAs can provide incredible and sometimes truly revolutionary insights into a company’s impacts that highlight waste and illogical supply chain steps.

There are two very real problems about LCA that everyone needs to know about (but which, in my opinion, shouldn’t actually prevent anyone from running an LCA). The more you know, the more you know – right? So it makes sense to know as much as you can about your product’s lifecycle. However, you also need to know about LCA and the best way to make it work for you.

Problem #1: Who’s running your LCA and how are they doing it?

The title of this piece references a magical, mysterious “black-box,” because many LCAs today are shrouded in secrecy. And the secrecy is being defended as “intellectual property” or “proprietary data” or “just too complicated” and “we’re the experts.”

And while some of that may be true, how can LCA become common practice if the only way to do it is to hand over your private information to a magician, pay him (or her) a vast sum of money, and sit back and wait for him to reappear with spreadsheets and spreadsheets of data in teeny tiny fonts that only he understands? And when you pay him another vast sum of money, he’ll give you his interpretations and recommendations about what he sees in all those numbers and you’ll have to take his word concerning the data. And then, hopefully, you go away with a feeling of satisfaction that now you have run an LCA and have some insight too. (Of course, you’ve also got all those spreadsheets that you don’t really know what to do with but that you suspect could possibly have additional insights somewhere in them but unfortunately you’ve run out of your budget and can’t afford to pay another vast sum of money to get another reading!)

Problem #2 – The data itself.

Building on Problem #1 is the common assumption that the data used in an LCA is precise and must be down to a bunch of decimal places and must be absolutely defendable in every instance. For the vast majority of LCAs, that may be the line you hear; but that’s not actually what’s going on behind the scenes. Imagine a wheat field on a hill. If you’re measuring the water footprint of wheat, should you measure the water use at the top of the hill or at the bottom of the hill? What about in the shade of that tree? Or, what about in the last dry year? Or during the 100-year flood year? What about calculating productivity (tons per hectare)? Which is the key variable? This depends on the soil type, texture and moisture level. The reality is that productivity varies from plot-to-plot. Despite the scientific community’s efforts to relate LCA results and productivity, unfortunately there is no real correlation.

There are so many problems and angles that it would actually be scientifically more reasonable to take an average of water consumption of this type of wheat, in this type of climate, in perhaps the past 10, 20 or 30 years. Even though it may seem a little scary and difficult to defend, the average water consumption would actually provide more accuracy than the actual measurement of water usage in that field today.  And if we expand that example to carbon, do you really need to know the exact carbon emissions of a truck in Argentina versus the same type of truck used in Spain? Wouldn’t it be more cost and time effective to use average measurements from readily available data?

The key to a defendable and useful LCA is transparency. Transparency of methodology, transparency of data sources, and transparency of assumptions. Without transparency, the results mean very little. Recently I went through a bunch of retailers’ websites and pulled their published carbon footprints – from Japan, to France, to the UK, and beyond. There’s actually quite a lot out there and definitely a lot of investment behind these numbers, but there is absolutely no transparency about how these numbers were calculated and what they actually mean. Unfortunately, despite the hype and PR, the numbers end up being fairly useless and undermine real measurement models that can inspire real, sustainable change in a world that really needs it.

So, do yourself a favor. Recognize that LCA is going to become a common business practice in the not too distant future. And demand transparency and full disclosure from your magicians and their assistants.

Sara Pax is the president of Bluehorse Associates, a developer of sustainability metrics specialized in the food and beverages industry with its smart product-level lifecycle assessment solution, Carbonostics (cost + carbon + nutrition). www.carbonostics.com

Safeway has surged into first place in Greenpeace’s rankings of major seafood retailers, surpassing last year’s winner Target.

Target and Wegmans now tie for second place on the Supermarket Seafood Sustainability Scorecard (pdf), pushing Whole Foods from third to fourth.

The top 15 supermarkets in the rankings all get passing grades from Greenpeace (shown in orange on the chart), but Giant Eagle, Publix, Supervalu, Winn-Dixie and Meijer all get failing grades (shown in red). None of the five responded to Greenpeace’s request for information.

These results stand in stark contrast to the scorecard from three years ago, when all 20 retailers assessed got failing grades.

“The fact that we have now seen such a wide variety of retailers lead the pack – from organic specialty retailers and high end stores to big-box retailers to one of the biggest national chains in the country – just emphasizes that sustainability is not a niche luxury trend, but an important response to customer demand and responsible retailing,” Greenpeace senior markets campaigner Casson Trenor said.

It notes that more and more retailers are refusing to stock orange roughy, which Greenpeace says is one of the most vulnerable fish stocks on the planet. Safeway and Wegman’s have both publicly supported a no-take marine reserve in Antarctica’s Ross Sea, “the last pristine ocean on earth”, Greenpeace said.

But Greenpeace notes that none of the supermarkets achieved a “green” score.

“We are cheered by the great progress, but until retailers acknowledge their role in destroying our oceans and in propagating environmentally damaging aquaculture, consumers will struggle to find a truly responsible seafood merchant,” the organization says.

Newspaper reports last May said that Publix was launching a new seafood grading system that will rank environmental attributes of more than 300 seafood items. The retailer said it was working with three environmental groups — the Ocean Trust, Ocean Conservancy and the Sustainable Fisheries Partnership — to develop its sustainability standards.

But the Greenpeace report said that Publix has yet to implement a sustainable seafood policy, and said that the non-profit could not locate any information on the seafood grading system in Publix annual reports or other publicly available information.

This week Kroger announced that it will remove shark, marlin and bluefin tuna from its cases, and will aim to use certified sources for its top 20 wild-caught seafood items by 2015, after reaching an agreement with the World Wildlife Fund (WWF).

Greenpeace said the discontinuation of shark, marlin and bluefin is a powerful first step. The organization said it does not endorse Kroger’s chosen certification body, the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC), but acknowledged that the move is evidence of progress in Kroger’s ethical sourcing.

Here is a very special sneak-peek at what the students of Domus Academy have been up to. Electrolux commissioned the product design students to come up with ideas that support a better kitchen environment using existing technologies. Re-Source perceives appliances to be the best kitchen mate! Here’s a look at 9 exciting projects, some of which we will be looking at in-depth at a later stage.

On a side-note the Electrolux Design Lab registrations close on 1st May 2011 23:59 CET.

1) Aeolus by Chi Rong Hsu

Aeolus is a smart extractor fan that whiffs out kitchen odors in a jiffy. It also adds space by accommodating utensils and glasses to be hung from its frame.

2) Breathe by Beyza Dogan

Breathe is a living kitchen appliance that literally ‘breathes in’ air pollutants through ionization.

3) Celcius by Marcela Vanesa Céspedes

Celcius is a kitchen waste disposal and recycling appliance, which uses enzymes to break down organic waste. Thus creating energy to heat your home.

4) Chefiamo by Jervis Chua

‘Chefiamo’ is a virtual cookbook that allows preserving traditional styles of cooking and inspires you with its recipes being projected to screen.

5) CLEAiR by Ariadna Tellez Rossell

CLEAiR is an air purifier that keeps you updated about the air quality at home.

6) Fulcrum by Surbhi Singhal

Fulcrum is a multifunctional modular kitchen that fits in a lot more than you think or expect.

7) KEWA (Kinetic Efficient Water Appliance) by Pietro Russomanno

KEWA uses air pressure for cleaning dishes. It directs water through kinetic jets to create a ‘water-blade’ That cleans pretty efficiently.

8 ) Wine by Jung Kun Choi

‘Wine’ is a wall mounted wine showcase that allows you to display and keep your wines at optimal temperatures.

9) Jumble by Zahira Ivelisse Crespo

Jumble is a flexible set of induction cooking plates that facilitate easy transfer of cooking vessels to different temperate zones.

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The concept of going hubless with wheels is not something that is unheard of. This concept has been in existence for more than a decade, yet it has not received widespread popularity for several factors. Yet, the Lunartic Belt-driven Hubless bicycles are expected to overcome the difficulties of the earlier hubless models. The new bike uses some of the latest technologies and has been made compact for ease of users. Not only that but also the trendy look of the bicycle makes it rightly suited for any style-conscious youth.

The Lunartic bike, which is making news recently and is considered to be the bicycle of the future, has been designed by Luke Douglasland of Loughborough Design School. The belt-driving feature of the bike is not the only striking feature it has. Hubless rear wheels devoid of any spokes also deserve mention. As per the reports, Luke Douglasland aimed to create a compact bicycle design which will not only provide high performance but also will ensure the comfort of the user. The large wheels of the bicycle suited the purpose rightly. With small front wheels and large back wheels, this bicycle offers more stability as well as better maneuvering facility than any of its kind.

Several expectations and anticipations are circulating the new hubless bike. If things get materialized as expected, this will surely bring a revolution in the concept of bicycling. The differently sized hubless wheels of the bike and its chain less functionality have already started garnering popularity among the critics as well as common men. Yet, the master mind behind the bicycle, Luke Douglasland, who has designed this bicycle as his project paper for final year admitted that more works are required on it to make it completely functional. Therefore, it may take a few more months or even a year to make this innovative bicycle sellable.

The bicycle even though offers several changes than the traditional models, it uses the same geometry of the conventional models. Thus, sitting posture or riding the bicycle for hours may not be tough.

Via: Technabob