Over the weekend, someone sent my husband a link to a video called “The Girl Who Silenced the World” from 1992 where a 12 year old girl named Severn Suzuki addresses the UN’s Earth Summit Meeting in Rio de Janeiro. Severn essentially gives the panel and every living adult a well-articulated lashing for leaving the planet in this state for her generation to contend with. Had the Internet been in full force then, this video would have flown around like wildfire. I’d like to help spread it around now. Everyone on this planet should watch it-it is more relevant now than ever.

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Cradle To Cradle For Everything?

Jason and I got to talking about Cradle to Cradle, as it’s an interesting topic, and well, they’re already doing everything else, why not take it a step further? Do I hear a protest? You don’t want someone’s underwear recycled into your t-shirt? But it’s for the cause, man… OK, jokes aside, and even if it wasn’t underwear being discussed, but some other form-fitting cotton garment, Jason did the research. Because he cares that much. The thing is, 100% cotton gets baggy and saggy. So it’s more likely to be thrown out soon. If it happens to be owned by someone who’s passionate enough to find a place to deliver their used cotton underwear, it can be recycled. Jason explained that less than 1% of all cotton is currently recycled, and Jeff pointed out that even pure cotton sometimes contains dyes and chemicals that make it impossible to recycle.

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The new green-themed Reclaim made by Samsung is more than your standard phone with slick green branding — though there’s a bit of that too.

What’s green (or blue), smaller than a deck of cards and will remind you to unplug the charger from the wall after charging? The Reclaim, the new green-themed smart phone made by Samsung for Sprint, is loaded with a bunch of green content, a handful eco-conscious accessories and an attention to sustainable packaging that make it more “green” than most other phones out there.

But you can’t just slap a case made from forty percent corn plastic, dip it in green paint and call it green, can you? The folks at Sprint sent me the new Reclaim so I could answer those questions myself.

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World class adventurer, National Geographic Emerging Explorer, and a descendant of the legendary Rothschild banking family, David de Rothschild, will attempt to do what no one has done before, sail half-way around the world from California to Australia on a catamaran made 90% of recycled plastic waste powered only by the wind and the sun.

However this is not the first journey to be made across the Pacific using plastic waste. Last year a raft made of 15,000 bottles called the Junk successfully made a similar journey from California to Hawaii in 87 days in order to promote awareness of the global plastic waste problem.

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British environmentalist David de Rothschild, author of Live Earth Global Warming Survival Handbook, met with the San Francisco Conservation Corps on Wednesday to talk about “Plastiki,” a 60-foot catamaran made from recycled plastic (except for the masts), which he’ll use to sail from San Francisco to Australia: an 11,000 mile voyage!

The boat is made up of about 16,000 plastic bottles and is an “effort to raise awareness of the recycling of plastic bottles, which he says are a symbol of global waste.” says Rothschild. Skin-like panels made from recycled PET, a woven plastic fabric, will cover the hulls and a watertight cabin, which sleeps four. Only about 10 percent of the Plastiki will be made from new materials.

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Talking with Corey Szopinski, Principal and Founder of Core Industries.

Your firm has worked on some pretty cool projects like Live Earth and Pepsi, 1% for the Planet and the Volkswagen Carbon Neutral Project. Tell us what your clients come to your company for and what makes Core Industries different from other interactive strategy, design and development firms.

We’re the next evolution of a boutique interactive marketing firm. We are one of the few very high end development shops that has a clear mission of focusing on the triple bottom line: people, planet and profit. Clients come to us because they know that we get invested in their projects, their company, and their people, because we care about what we’re doing… we not out to make a quick buck. In fact, our overall mission is to help foster the emerging green economy. Our way of doing that is by using graphic design, computer science and marketing strategy to help our clients be more “sustainable”. And for us sustainability has a dual meaning: it means being responsible for our environment, but it also means making sure the business is sustainable. In other words, we help our clients thrive, not just survive.

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The little g pants are the outer shell of the gDiaper system or the diaper cover that holds the flushable inserts.  The inserts are the disposable and absorbent inner liners that you toss (flush, throw away or compost). You reuse the gDiaper pants again and again. For about 40 years there have been only two basic choices in diapering. Cloth or disposable. gDiapers offers consumers a third option….a hybrid cloth diaper with a disposable element.

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Sierra Nevada Brewing Company and E-Fuel Corp have joined forces to create a high-grade, inexpensive ethanol fuel.

They plan to make fuel from discarded beer yeast using the Efuel 100 MicroFueler. The first-ever home ethanol systems will be housed at the brewery in Chico, California.

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Greening your purchasing involves thinking about your entire inbound supply chain and purchasing goods and services that are both affordable and also have the least possible environmental impact throughout the course of their lifecycles. Green purchasing does not always have to mean higher costs—although sometimes it will.

If you spend enough each year, lets’ say $500,000 or more, you could likely benefit from implementing formal green procurement policies and green spend management programs. But even if you are not ready to formalize your purchasing there are a few other basic guidelines for setting green procurement standards:

•    Buy Local. Although its not always easy, sourcing products and materials locally is good for the environment and can often save you a lot of money. According to NRDC, most produce in the United States is shipped an average of 1,500 miles before being sold; as a result, more than 80% of the cost of food goes to shippers and other middlemen.

•    Use recycled content products everywhere you can. It is easy to source recycled-content paper and products including consumables such as paper towels, napkins, toilet and facial tissue, trash can liners, and of course, light bulbs. Using reused and reclaimed materials is another option.

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Ecologic Designs’ story starts like this:  “There is always talk about a killer set of waves and dolphins playing in the surf, an epic afternoon rolling across warm red rocks on your bike, or a hike in fresh powder on a full moon snowshoe trek. There is also talk about a beach polluted by sludge or surfing next to trash, trails that all of a sudden become strip malls, or the snow trip sans snow because of global warming.” It’s this kind of understanding that guides Ecologic Design, through their two brands Green Guru Gear and Green Goddess, to craft products and fashions in Boulder, Colorado, that have a positive environmental and social impact, while raising ecological awareness.

Take Green Guru’s Blow Out series bi-fold wallet, for example.  The company uses reclaimed bike inner tubes to create a stylish and waterproof exterior. Every item in their Blow Out series is made from 98% reclaimed and recycled content by weight.  Each wallet features a six card and two bill compartments.  The ultimate in a locally-based enterprise, drawing from a readily available waste stream, Green Guru’s butyl rubber comes from Reclamation Stations within about eighteen miles from there they’re manufactured. Green Guru Pouches, Chalk Bags and Messenger Bags are also made from the upcycled inner tubes.

Since spring of 2007, Ecologic Designs has been an ecopreneurial trailblazer, creating viable and sustainable enterprises by harvesting the waste stream, often referred to as “upcycling”: the practice of recycling or repurposing items destined for the landfill and transforming them into something of further use and value. Upcycling was coined by William McDonough and Michael Braungart, authors of Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things.  The butyl rubber, also called vulcanized rubber, is not cost-effective and very difficult to recycle; therefore these inner tubes usually end up in local landfills where they won’t degrade for many years.  Unfortunately, tires and inner tubes account for over 50% of the rubber produced each year.

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It didn’t happen right away. Aldivar was searching for a way to give women an earth friendly way to generate income, and encouraged them to cultivate loofah, that grows easily there, to be dried out and made into cosmetic products. But they found that a certain portion weren’t up to export standards, and 30% of the quality material was being shaved off while making mats, slippers, insoles and the cosmetic tools.

So she wondered what use/value could be created from these. Material for house walls and roofs, she decided. After extensive trial and error, she and Padros devised the perfect combination of loofah, recycled plastic, and things like cotton netting and corn husks, all of which would otherwise be disposed of. At less than $3 a square meter, competitive with wood.

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I am completely in love with Liz Dickey’s art made from discarded bicycle parts! She launched 1.by.liz, making and selling her reCYCLED art, in Portland, Oregon just a few years ago. Each of her one-of-a-kind clocks and magnets are made from upcycled materials.

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It’s pretty powerful when an organization takes tons of wasted material, and upcycles it into sexy styles. Good One tells us their story, and how they re-design discarded  materials, before becoming a mess in a landfill. This is an example of Cradle to Cradle business design, yet to me it seems like an “Adoption to Cradle” approach because really, they are rescuing and giving the wasted fashion materials a new life. Watch their visual story on the Good One about page.

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So, let’s get some issues out of the way. No, McDonough and partner Michael Braungart did not originally conceive of the concept with which they’re most famously associated: as Hunter Lovins notes in the article, “Walter Stahel in Switzerland actually coined the phrase [cradle to cradle] 25 years ago, long before Bill started using it.” McDonough doesn’t live in a “green” house. He’s likely blown some deals with companies like Interface and Nike by demanding too much money, and making unreasonable intellectual property claims. Some of his projects haven’t lived up to the hoopla (if they’ve been finished at all). And, for all I know, he may well be an arrogant, self-serving jerk (I don’t know the man).

With all of that said, though, my primary reaction is “OK… but does any of this really matter?”

No doubt McDonough, like the rest of us, is a flawed human being, and perhaps many of us have been willing to grant him hero status prematurely (we’ve certainly sung his praises numerous times here at sustainablog). I think if we get caught up in the “battle of Bill,” though, we miss the more important issues here: the relevance and importance of cradle to cradle design, the legitimacy of certification processes for “green” products, and the relationship of these concepts to consumption in general.

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But, of course, I also know that book publishing takes a fairly heavy environmental toll: as our friends at EcoLibris have pointed out, “more than 30 million trees are cut down annually for virgin paper used for the production of books sold in the U.S. alone.” The WorldWatch Institute notes that the average American uses over 300 kilograms (or over 660 pounds) of paper annually. And Erika Engelhaupt, in Environmental Science & Technology, observes:

Reducing paper use does more than save trees. Pulp and paper mills are also a major source of pollution. They release into the air CO2, nitrogen oxides (NOx), sulfur oxides (SOx), carbon monoxide, and particulates, which contribute to global warming, smog, acid rain, and respiratory problems. In addition, bleaching paper with chlorine can produce dioxin, which is known to cause cancer. Paper mills also produce large amounts of solid waste and require a lot of water. The industry is trying to clean up, but anyone who’s driven past a paper mill has smelled the challenge.

Yep, that book addiction has quite the footprint. There are numerous approaches to dealing with this impact: “cradle to cradle” book design, Ecolibris-style offsets, used of recycled and non-toxic materials, and, of course, ebooks.

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The only difference is that mine is pre loaded with a wish. I’d tell you my wish, but then what if it doesn’t come true?

I adore Annatarian designs and it’s no secret that I’m a fan of these bracelets and I’ve given many to friends. They’re the perfect gift.

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“Lawrence Ohlman III, MBA candidate at University of Toledo, never imagined he would be repurposing part of his student loan, starting a unique sustainable products company and marketing the first FDA approved 100% natural tableware…” Ohlman says he took the housing portion of the loan, to finance the business, as he explains: ” I moved back in with my parents and started the EcoLogic Products company, that’s what MBA’s are supposed to do; I just advanced the timeline a little! “

Made primarily from bamboo fibers; the raw material is powdered and mixed with bio-based polymers at high temperature to form a collection of sustainable (biodegradable at the end of life) and durable dinnerware. It is clear to me this company truly follows a Cradle to Cradle product philosophy and here is why:

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The Eco Fashion World glossary is an exemplary resource! Take a look. The site is filled with inspiring green styles, expert advice and brilliant budding blogs.“Get the scoop on sustainable style, browse our unique and quickly expanding eco fashion guide and get inspired by the true visionaries in our magazine.” Shown here on the cover is a Lelia Hafzi gown design.

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Named the ‘Recycle Caps’ program, they’re collecting all hard, plastic bottle caps (from personal care products, household products, you name it), which are then being recyled into new caps, containers and bottles. Some of what they’ve already collected is being made into their limited retro edition Clove Shampoo that will be out in September with the bottle containing 96% post-consumer recycled content. The caps can be dropped off at any of their stores, beauty salons or participating schools.

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With this certain demand, our faithful suppliers are getting geared up and stocked up as well. So as you head down the aisle of your local grocery store or supercenter or what have you, you are sure to encounter lots of possible choices for what to spend your money on. And I can guarantee that most of them will be disposable. Plastic or paper plates, plastic cups, plastic utensils (including the beloved spork), paper napkins and tissues, plastic garbage and grocery bags, styrofoam or plastic coolers, etc., etc., etc. The list is endless…and this is only for party favors!

I do as much as I can to conserve resources and live sustainably. I remember at one family holiday smorgasbord, I believe it was Thanksgiving, I cunningly hid all of the plastic plates, cups, and utensils in a trunk in the closet in order to force my family to use the real, washable ones instead. No one was very happy with me, though I did convince one aunt to play along and stand up in my defense, but by using the normal stuff we reduced the amount of trash that day significantly compared to usual holidays. (And yes, for you cynics out there, I did indeed help out doing the dishes!)

Despite my ecological consciousness and consumer conscience, and despite my stratagems to thwart the forces of disposability, I cringe at the many disposable items that I still use in my own home. For example, disposable razors. These oh-so-convenient, many-to-a-pack, everything’s-a-dollar mainstays of male grooming seem rather benign at first glance (unless you nick yourself shaving, of course). Yet each one consists mostly of plastic, which is made from petroleum, and after a few shaves that plastic and the metal goes into the trash…and so on then to a landfill where it sits amidst all the other non-biodegradable garbage into perpetuity.

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