Meet Maya Penn, a teen who plans to save the planet one idea at a time.

When I was 14 I spent most of my time talking on the phone, fantasizing about my crushes, and doing my homework. I had no plans to save the planet and quite honestly knew little about my impact on it. But Maya Penn, a 14-year-old fashion entrepreneur and environmentalist, doesn’t just put my teenage accomplishments to shame, she’s also quite impressive compared to most adults I know.

“Ideas make the world go round,” she said in her recent TED talk.

At age 11, she founded Maya’s Ideas For the Planet, a non-profit where she designs T-shirts to save the bees and has sent eco-friendly pads to girls in developing countries. Her parents taught her at a young age how to be a steward of the environment along with the importance of giving back. She’s taken these two lessons to heart and her ideas reflect it. She plans to save the planet through her works.

She’s an artist at heart but also a coder. Her father taught how to take apart a computer and put it back together again. Since then, she’s built her own website in HTML and learned how to code. Maya is also a cartoonist and we’re not talking doodling during class. In fact, she designed and animated her own cartoon. There seems no end to what Maya can accomplish.

Maya feels she’s part of a “new wave of entrepreneurs” that seek to have a successful businesses and sustain the planet. She says it’s the heart that sparks movements, not the head, and we have to appeal to the heart to create change. Her optimism is infectious. Especially when you consider how environmentalists can be so gloomy sometimes.

This teen isn’t just impressive in her own right, she’s a reminder of the true potential of the human spirit. In case you’ve forgotten what you can accomplish as a human being, she’s here to remind you. Whatever your talents, use your time to put them to work. Don’t just go through the motions; find your purpose and follow it. Who knows what Maya will end up doing as an adult, but I’m sure it will be impressive. And she hasn’t wasted any time getting to work.

Related on EcoSalon

20 Unforgettable Works of Environmental Art

51 Fashion Tips Every Women Should Know

On the Frontlines of Global Climate Change and Women’s Rights

Image: Jason Hargrove

The post How to Save the Planet: A 14-Year Old Fashion Designer and Entrepreneur Knows the Secret appeared first on EcoSalon.

Walking becomes a form of art.

Let’s say you’re the first environmental protection non-profit operating in a country with the largest market for cars in the whole world. Let’s say your country’s air pollution problems are getting out of control. Let’s say you want to hammer home the pollution-busting value of walking.

Let’s say you have gallons of  non-toxic, washable, quick-drying green paint.

If you’re Jody Xiong, working with China’s Environmental Protection Foundation, you do this: paint a leafless tree onto a 7-meter wide, 12-meter long white canvas, and lay it over a pedestrian crossing on a busy city street. Next, lay paint-soaked sponges on either sidewalk, so every time a pedestrian crossed the street, they left a trail of green footprints across the canvas…

…making the tree bloom with color.

The symbolism is clear – the more you walk, the greener everything gets – and from its initial pilot on 7 main streets of Shanghai, that message was carried to 132 roads in 15 cities across China, with an estimated 3.92 million participants. A follow-up survey pointed to a sharp rise in eco-awareness in the targeted areas (and to underline the message further, one of the green-trodden canvases is now hanging in the Shanghai’s Zheng Da Museum of Modern Art).

Sometimes a lot of tiny steps can add up to one great big one.

Images: Bored Panda & DDB China

The post Chinese Environmentalists Fight Cars With Green Footprints appeared first on EcoSalon.

Imagine driving along the road and seeing puffs of green or red smoke coming out of the car in front of you. If the new conceptual device created by artist Karolina Sobecka were to enter production, it could happen.

Sobecka is in the process of developing the puff, a cartoon cloud-shape car accessory that will attach to a car’s frame near the exhaust pipe and illuminate the amount of carbon emissions a car is discharging through three colors – white, green, and red. White would indicate the low levels, green moderate levels and fire engine red high levels of carbon emissions. (Hold your homeland security alert jokes, please.)

A companion iPhone app will also be available, designed to provide real time visualization of the emissions as well as driving data.

Alas, according to Sobecka, the puff is not heading for the market place. Instead, she has created it to generate discussion and dialogue about car usage. Her site, the Amateur Human, will eventually offer a Do It Yourself game plan, that will allow anyone to build on this concept and further personalize their approach to eco-consciousness.

To learn more about the puff, check out this interview with Sobecka at CleanTechnica.

The post The Color of My Car-bon appeared first on EcoSalon.