Green Options

Oslo, Norway based FIN, is an organic global fashion line we’ve admired for some time now.

Shown here are various looks from FIN’s Fall 09 Eco Lux Collection. The eco materials they proudly use are:

• Organic Cotton
• Wild non-violent Silk
• Organic Baby Alpaca
• All Fair Trade Fabrics and Embellishments
• Produced with Love
• Carbon Neutral

The organic collection features exquisite tailoring details as well. 

Oceans cover close to 70 percent of the earth’s surface. They divide continents and peoples. They are dangerous, swallowing unwary explorers in their great depths. But the danger of the unknown ocean hasn’t stopped sailors in all ages from exploring the treasures that await across the vast blue expanse. With compass in hand and constellation above as guides, brave seamen would embark, never knowing if they would return alive.

Editor’s note: This post was originally published on Friday, May 1, at SolveClimate.

It is time for President Obama to mobilize us all to help build the new energy economy.

He has begun shaping the public policies we need. Now he needs to launch an Apollo project, interstate highway project, war effort and Marshall Plan all rolled into one.

For starters, he should call on us all to pick up our caulking guns and enlist in the war against energy waste – a national clean energy surge.

The potential for savings through efficiency improvements and conservation is enormous.

As Obama noted during the campaign, the United States is only the 22nd most energy-efficient major economy in the world right now. With very few exceptions, every vehicle, home, power plant, factory, community and state is hemorrhaging energy, energy dollars and greenhouse gas emissions.

Consider just a few examples:

These days it seems everybody has some sort of recycled/eco friendly paper offering. So what’s the big deal about a Swedish offering making it’s US debut on Earth Day this year?

White Lines factory reuses their carbon emissions in a closed loop, making for zero CO2 emissions, for one. Then they offset what they can’t reuse (transportation, etc) via planting trees in Africa, as coordinated by environmental consultancy U&W (interestingly pronounced “You & We” in Swedish) The wood used for the [...]

The pioneering new president of the Indian Ocean nation announces plans for his country - under grave threat from climate change - to go carbon-neutral in a decade. Written by Duncan Clark and shared with EcoWorldly as part of the Guardian Environment Network.

Malta is becoming the first smart grid island. Now comes an architectural plan to turn a whole Asian island into a zero-emissions eco-resort. Call it one massive brownfield reclamation project.

The Danish architecture firm Bjarke Ingels Group, or BIG, wants to turn Azerbaijan’s Zira Island into a resort and residential complex that would produce the same amount of energy it consumes. Some towns have looked to become carbon neutral and eco-cities are under construction. BIG’s idea seems to match any of those ambitions.

In the tiny Aspen sleeper community of El Jebel, Colorado, a man is on a mission. Jim Duke has always been known for his environmental streak — back in the 80s he spearheaded efforts to establish recycling and composting programs for Aspen and surrounding communities.

Now he’s spent $84,600 to install a large array of solar panels on his ranch capable of producing 15,000 kilowatt hours of electricity annually — and he’s giving away the power for free to charge any electric cars who’s owners show up on his doorstep.

Environmentally-friendly initiatives such as green jobs are at the center of his economic stimulus plan. So it’s no surprise that Obama’s inauguration will have the smallest “footprint” of any president in history.

Motorola has announced plans to launch the world’s first completely carbon neutral mobile phone, at CES 2009 in Las Vegas.

The shell of the W233 Renew is made entirely of recycled water bottles, and will be available via T-Mobile within the next three months. The struggling cell phone manufacturer has also teamed up with CarbonFund.org to offset the energy used in the manufacture, distribution and operation of each phone throughout its lifetime.

The UN Climate Conference in Poznan, Poland, starting today is raising hopes and fears across the green spectrum. As reported in the Christian Science Monitor.

A year-long push to devise a new global climate-change treaty – one that picks up where the Kyoto Protocol leaves off – gets under way Monday in Poland, with delegates from more than 190 nations set to resume grappling with the thorny issues of how much more to cut greenhouse-gas emissions and who will pay.

The talks, in their first round, are focused on reducing human influence on climate from occurring, according to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). More or less, this means keeping global warming to about 2 degrees Celsius above pre industrial levels by the end of the century. Expectations however are low for this meeting.

President-Elect Obama’s pledge to reduce greenhouse gases to pre 1990 levels in the next 12 years notwithstanding, this group has a lot of challenges ahead. This first round of talks is primarily to develop working groups to tackle the various issues surrounding climate change in both developed and developing countries. But, with the global economic crisis on everyone’s mind, it will be hard to keep the conversation on track and work toward lower carbon emissions.

And while they are working to devise ways to reduce carbon emissions, they’ll create quite a few. AFP reports:

Britain’s eco-towns have a number of ‘firsts’ to encourage their creation: