The best/worst of crazy, this week at EcoSalon.

Vivienne Westwood, oh-so-reserved lady of A-list fashion, is on a mission – and that mission is getting us to buy less clothes. Yep.

Fancy tucking to dinner underwater, or in pitch darkness? Check out our roundup of 10 of the strangest restaurants in the world (as if food isn’t complicated enough on its own).

It’s been another good year for sexism, as this bumper crop of dumb-as-a-stick comments about women demonstrates.

Google Street View is now taking in views of the Great Barrier Reef (while it still can).

Finally, the really crazy news this week is…we’re up for sale. And that means we need your help. Want us to remain your favorite voice of slightly-less-madness in a sea of madness? Spread the word!

The post The Friday 5: The World’s Gone Freaking Mad Edition 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.

Panorama views of the sea floor FTW!

This, believe it or not, is an image from Google Street View.

What happened here? Appallingly bad driving? In fact it’s the result of a partnership between Street View and the Catlin Seaview Survey  – you can see the current collection here.

What’s the point of this? It’s designed to do two things – promote Google Maps, which is under pressure from its rivals (although not the beleaguered Apple Maps on iOS 6), and to promote the health of 71% of our planet. This month the Catlin Seaview Survey kicked off with two expeditions to sites along the 2,300km-long Great Barrier Reef & Coral Sea, taking images with specially designed 360-degree-view cameras to be stitched together into gorgeous Street View panoramas.

But there’s a serious side to the fun. These images are also designed to act as a snapshot record of the state of these reefs, so scientists can track changes in reef health. Those changes shouldn’t be long in coming, if studies from Brazil and the Caribbean are any indicators. Last chance to see? We sincerely hope not.

Image: jurvetson

The post Google Street View Goes Diving – And Here’s Why We Should Care appeared first on EcoSalon.

Your online shopping is costing more than you think.

Every year, more and more companies are shifting their business-critical systems and data online, into what has been nicknamed “the cloud” – and we’re just beginning to understand the real-world cost of doing that.

In an ideal world, the internet would be underpinned with technology running at peak efficiency. As a year-long study conducted by the New York Times has discovered, the world is far from ideal. The data centers (or servers) worldwide that are almost always kept running 24 hours a day – in line with the 24-hour nature of online business – consume some 30 billion watts of electricity – that’s 30 nuclear power plants, just to keep servers ticking over. In the United States, they account for an estimated 2% of the national electricity output.

There’s no doubt that this figure is going to rise. What’s appalling is that it really should be dropping.

The study found that up to 90% of the electricity reaching these servers was being wasted, mainly due to servers running flat-out around the clock and converting so much energy into excess heat. Furthermore, these servers require backups, usually running on diesel, and the study uncovered multiple examples of clean air regulation violations. Worse still, some of these servers will be doing nothing useful with the power they’re receiving – one sample of 333 servers in 2010 found more than half of them in a “comatose” state, while three-quarters of them were using less than 10% of their computational power.

And how’s this for a depressing summary?

In a typical data center, those losses combined with low utilization can mean that the energy wasted is as much as 30 times the amount of electricity used to carry out the basic purpose of the data center.

James Glanz, New York Times

In a world of business-critical redundancy hardware and the need to meet instantly scaled-up demand, does the world need to put up with such chronic inefficiency? Not so. The National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (which of course you’d expect to be championing computer efficiency) managed a 96.4% level of server utilization in July of this year, according to its director of operations. It did it by queuing tasks and making sure the servers were packed out with work throughout the day, rather than compensating for less efficient processor use with more energy-guzzling hardware.

The good news is that this is happening in an industry obsessed with innovation. Google, Facebook and Intel are extremely vocal about their efforts to streamline their power usage, improve server-cooling technology and a host of other features (for example, super-efficient cloud-based structures that would manage data for clients more efficiently than they could themselves) that would make a dent in their energy costs. If data center owners find that investing in efficiency can leads to greater running profits, this situation could be rectified in record time – but as one commenter notes, electricity is cheap, and wasting it to ensure uninterrupted service might be more profitable in the short term. If that’s the case, getting companies to clean up their act will get tricky.

For some people, though, it’s not the data centers that are the root of the problem:

“That’s what’s driving that massive growth — the end-user expectation of anything, anytime, anywhere,” said David Cappuccio, a managing vice president and chief of research at Gartner, the technology research firm. “We’re what’s causing the problem.”

Image: Server room at CERN – torkildr

All quotes: James Glanz, New York Times

The post Vampire Servers: The Energy Cost Of Business As Usual appeared first on EcoSalon.

The power of transformation, this week at EcoSalon.

This week, we loved seeing how…

• Kale (described by Organic Authority as “the new beef” because of its rich nutritional value) can be turned into crunchy, tasty kale chips.
• Heather Ross can turn print design into an entirely new philosophy on DIY creativity.
• Solar panels don’t have to be ugly, clunky eyesores, as these 5 entirely natural-looking designs demonstrate.
• A brown paper bag could be transformed into a $290 “fashion statement.“
• The staple elements of your favorite dishes can be creatively swapped-out with some of the unlikeliest ingredients  lurking at the back of your pantry.

The post The Friday 5: From This Into That Edition appeared first on EcoSalon.

A new climate era is here.

If you wanted more proof of climate change (Really? More proof? Really?) then this picture should shut you up for good.

This month, the sea ice around the Arctic shrank to its lowest extent since records began, beating the previous record-breaking minimum (in 2007) by a truly worrying extent.

Every year the ice at the top of our world spreads and withdraws in a largely predictable way according to the seasons and influenced by all sorts of factors including sea currents, wind patterns and, of course, temperature. In 2007 the summertime extent of sea ice reached a new minimum of 4.17 million km². On the 26th of August this year the ice again shrank down to this level – and kept going. On the 16th of September the National Snow & Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado recorded arctic ice coverage at 3.41 million km² – the lowest since records began. (The yellow line denotes the extent of the average minimum over the last 30 years).

It’s difficult to grasp the scale of this but picture about a dozen United Kingdoms lined up side by side: that’s how much more sea ice has vanished beyond the average amount left at the end the summer over the past 30 years.

 – David Shukman, Science Editor, BBC News

So what’s going on here, since Antarctic sea ice levels are remaining relatively stable? Simple – it seems that arctic ice is proving a reliable gauge of the way our planet is warming up, while the Antarctic is proving slower to respond. And what will happen next? Nobody can say for sure, although it seems likely that atmospheric disruptions will follow, along the lines of the jet stream displacement that has been causing unusually poor weather across Northern Europe all summer and gave the UK its wettest June for over a century.  It also seems like that so-called “extreme weather” events become more commonplace.

Our northern ice-cap, a permanent feature for all of human history, could be well on the way to becoming a seasonal feature – and our world is visibly changing. Welcome to a new climate era.

Image: NASA/Goddard Scientific Visualization Studio, via New Scientist.

The post 30 Years of Lost Sea Ice in Arctic is Equivalent to a Dozen United Kingdoms appeared first on EcoSalon.

Walmart? It’s complicated.

As we noted yesterday, privately-owned solar panels are hot right now – and since they’re as cost-saving as they are trendy, you’d expect big business to be falling over itself to use them. You’d be right, too. A report from the Solar Energy Industries Association lists the top 20 companies by solar power capacity – and right at the top? Walmart.

Hmm.

Here’s an example of why lists never tell the full story. We’ve been keeping an eye on the mixed grocery bag that is Walmart for a number of years now – for example, wrinkling our brows over its patchy record on supporting and promoting women in business (Externally? Yup. Internally? Not so much). Grist, Treehugger and Mother Jones have all uncovered causes for deep, deep concern amidst the sustainability rhetoric. Walmart: it’s complicated.

The company’s success since 1960 is astonishing to behold, and it’s smart enough to know that being vocal about improving is the way to keep the critics under control. Topping a list of solar-powered companies won’t hurt their credibility by any means.  But does this list indicate they’re the greenest of them all? Alas, it’s not that simple. As Ariel Schwartz notes at Fast Co.EXIST, Walmart is at the top because it’s the largest retailer in the world, and consequently has more roof-space & more money to spend on cost-saving photovoltaic technology. A better way to spot the real top dog is to look at proportions. In terms of solar power units per store, IKEA wipes the shop floor with the competition with a whopping 79%.

Walmart currently generates just 2% of its power needs through renewable sources. Thanks to its size, that’s still a huge amount of power not coming from conventional supplies, and that’s a very good thing indeed. It’s also a showcase for the commercial viability of solar technology – even if Walmart were doing it just to save money. Whatever their motivations, they’re championing private solar power on a whopping scale, and we’ll certainly raise a glass to that.

Image: Roof of Las Vegas Walmart (Walmart Stores).

The post Walmart Collects More Solar Power Than Anyone Else – Why? appeared first on EcoSalon.

Alternative energy never looked so natural.

Solar energy is clearly part of the solution to the problem of dwindling fossil-fuel reserves. It’s increasingly cheap, it’s the target of huge quantities of investment and entrepreneurship, thanks to innovations like CSP (Concentrating Solar Power). But if you flinch at the idea of a world dominated by flat panels and vaguely sinister solar receiver towers, take heart: many designers are looking at the natural world for inspiration. Here are 5 gorgeous examples of that ethos at work.

1. Light Bird: inspired by birds fanning their wings to catch the sun’s warmth, the Light Bird opens its panels during the day and clams shut when the sun goes down to light the way, LED style. Currently a prototype; we hope it takes flight.

2. Solar Tree. No need to wonder what inspired this design. It’s already installed at St. John’s Square, London, and it features a computer intelligence that can judge exactly how much light to emit after dark based on its battery levels and surrounding light levels.

3. Spherical Collector. The eye is an extremely efficient collector of light – and this ball lens design follows its example by focusing light on a collector with a 35% efficiency improvement over traditional photovoltaic designs.

4. Corona Solar Light. There are two ways you can go with solar energy collection: a small number of huge panels or a huge number of small ones. The Corona is designed to cover your garden like an invasion of funghi, and since it requires no batteries or wires, it can go anywhere.

5. Solar Ivy. But as a demonstration of the “small & more” philosophy at work, it’s hard to beat Solar Ivy – an array of tiny panels designed to look like they’re crawling up the side of your house!

Images: Solar Ivy; Apartment Therapy; designboom (1) (2); Yanko Design.

The post 5 Futuristic Solar Panels Inspired By Nature appeared first on EcoSalon.

CDs get a second life -which might also be their last chance at it.

Long live the DVD and the Blu-Ray. The Compact Disc, once the bleeding edge of digital storage technology, has made its final swan dive – and even the music industry, its last bastion of safety, is making worried noises about its future. Cue hundreds of millions of pieces of shiny plastic fanning about over the world’s landfills. (Sad face).

So let’s wave a flag for Sean Avery and his CD animals.

He’s an Australian illustrator, graphic designer and sculptor of wonderful things. In his own words: “My sculpture work is all about repurposing the discarded to make something beautiful.”

All his sculptures are unique, eerily organic…and involve hundreds of tiny shards of shattered CDs. (Unsurprisingly, they take so long to finish that he doesn’t make very many of them – so they’re all highly sought-after).

For more examples of his quirky talent, check out his deviantArt page and his recently released children’s book, All Monkeys Love Bananas.

All images: Sean Avery.

The post Making Broken CDs Adorable: The Animal Art of Sean Avery appeared first on EcoSalon.

Who said what, this week at EcoSalon.

“According to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, there are 129,817 federally licensed firearms dealers in the United States. That’s more than three times the amount of grocery stores in the U.S. (36,569), meaning that simply factoring in the numbers, it’s easier to get a hold of a handgun than a bag of spinach.”

“100: Number of orgasms experienced per day by a New Jersey woman, who suffers from Persistent Genital Arousal Syndrome. The rare condition is apparently completely unrelated to one’s sex drive.”

“For a company that purports to support local farmers and small businesses, FreshDirect doesn’t seem to have much regard for the community in its own backyard.”

“Fear of what people will think of you. Fear of failing miserably and publicly. Fear of not being able to pull it off. I was petrified myself in 2008. I got a $200,000/year job offer two weeks before I was scheduled to move to Madrid, after I had quit my GE job and my family thought I was an IDIOT when I said no. I mean, they were really just disgusted with me. I said at the time, “I’ve been working in this field for eight years now. I made a lot of money. I saved. When do I earn permission to do what I want with my life? When does it end?”

“As we documented the day with black and white images, it looked so romantic and felt like a moment from a Willa Cather novel. But the reality behind the black and white is a sordid, ugly history. I can’t pretend that I didn’t think about those that did this work because they had no choice. But I live TODAY and I WANT to grow organic cotton in the state of Alabama TODAY.”

The post The Friday 5: Say What? (Again) Edition appeared first on EcoSalon.