Three Australian mates have teamed up to create an environmentally friendly alternative to the wire hanger. Seeing the gap in the market for a hanger that doesn’t take a hundred years to break down, the guys over at Green Hanger took it upon themselves to design and distribute a 100 percent recyclable cardboard hanger. Not only can these be used in the household and in shops, but also at your local dry cleaners. At present, you can get this simple yet clever design at select Australian retailers with the overseas market soon to be opened up.

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This year’s SEMA show in Las Vegas was home to several electric vehicles, yet the eVaro seems to have garnered the most attention, boasting zero carbon emissions for 90 per cent of the time spent on the road and an impressive mpg of 275.

The three-wheeled plug-in hybrid (which boasts better turning performance than traditional vehicles) can go from 0 – 60 in five seconds and can cruise for 90 miles on battery power alone (it takes the eVaro three hours to fully charge). No word on whether the vehicle will ever see commercial production, but the Auto X Prize (US$10 million) is certainly a boost.

Pratt Manhattan Gallery, in a show guest curated by Francesca Granata (Parsons School for Design Lecturer) and Sarah Scaturro (adjunct instructor for Fashion Institute of Technology), takes a look at American eco-fashion visionaries — such as Alabama Chanin [above], Uluru, Loomstate, and others.

The goal of the showing, which begins on November 20, is to further push the use of fair labor and sustainable practices within the fashion industry. The main point of view revolves around ‘Reduce, Revalue, Rethink,’ all which culminate in a minimalist and sentimental garment that consumers are more apt to buy and wear long term.

Philadelphia’s 58-floor Comcast building has been awarded the Gold Certification for LEED-CS (core and shell). The obelisk-formed building, which sits right above the Suburban railway station, boasts high performance glass and sunscreens, which helps keep out 60 per cent of the sun’s heat and contains 70 per cent of the site’s available light. The building also boasts high-efficiency water utilities, allowing for 40 per cent less of water consumption than a traditional office building. The building, Gold certified LEED by the architect Robert A.M. Stern, is one of the first, but certainly not the last, skyscraper to get certified.

Gizmodo ran this story recently that they suggest is proof that birds are secretly composers: ‘A normal person sees these birds perched on electrical wires and worries about getting crapped on. Jarbas Agnelli looks at them and sees musical notes. Maybe he’s smarter than the rest of us because the melody is utterly oh-so-sweet-that-I-could-doze-off-right-now’.

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Swedish tea company Johan & Nyström’s fourteen luxury teas — Teasy T Exclusive — are packaged in eco-friendly bamboo tubes designed by Seforma.

The Miss Rockaway Armada is a group of about thirty artists, musicians and performers who hail from across the United States. In the summers of 2006 and 2007, the group floated down the Mississippi River from Minneapolis to New Orleans on a flotilla of handmade rafts. Crafted mainly from junk and recycled materials, the rafts ran on wind and solar power, were fuelled by bio-diesel, and their crew subsisted on rainwater and dumpstered meals for the entire journey. 

Stopping off at numerous ports along the way, the Armada performed vaudeville shows, played gigs and organised art workshops in towns along the river, hoping to inspire their inhabitants and encourage cultural change. Though the rafts have since been abandoned, the Armada collective continues to put on shows both across America and in Europe. Best known for their involvement in musical outfits such as The Amateurs and The Toyshop Collective, the group is currently working on other ‘big, insane projects’, the details of which are so far unknown.

Where were these things when I was a kid? Sure beats the rusty swingset my grandfather had embedded into his concrete yard. Ouch! Soft skin and hard surfaces do not go together well! This chemical free Playset is made from Northern White Cedar and is environmentally friendly in every way imaginable, right down to the ten percent of CedarWorks profits that are given to organizations which support kids and the environment.

Eve and Eryn, two amazing Free Spirit Sphere tree houses, are located in Vancouver, Canada, high up in the canopy of the West Coast rainforest. They are, as their creators describe, ’suspended like pendants from a web of rope’ from the trees. This is a unique way of creating unobtrusive means of living amongst nature. Insulated and set up for one or two people to stay in, these spheres allow people to experience the ‘energy shift’ that occurs ‘once one breaks contact with the ground’.

Staying in either Eve or Eryn is an ephemeral experience, with each sphere staying in the trees for only a matter of days. At the end of a stay, the whole thing, including stairs and suspension bridges for access, it is removed, ‘without a trace’. Free Spirit Spheres also sells tree houses made from either wood or fibreglass allowing people, if they wish, to take the experience home to their own backyard.

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Working around the theme, Small is Beautiful, this eco-friendly mobile home design by Slovakia-based Nice Architects is totally self-sufficient in regards to energy, water and waste, and at 270 sq feet, is big enough to provide comfortable living space for two people. Very nice indeed.

These is very clever design by the partnership of Bo-Young Jung and Emmanuel Wolfs, who work collaboratively under the name, Draw Me a Sheep. Inspired by the ongoing debate over how we use our natural resources, they have created a series of chairs made exclusively from great chunks of wood. Wonder how comfy it would be, though?

Working exclusively with PET bottles, Malaysian designers Lisa Foo and Su Sim have produced these creative-looking lamps, which will work inside your home or in more remote locations such as outdoor parks and plazas.

Paris-based design firm Off Architecture, in collaboration with Duncan Lewis Scape Architecture and Jeans Gincinto, is granting a gift for current and future students of the Lycee Jean Moulin in Revin, France. The Lycee, which will be completed sometime in 2012, is being constructed to sustainable standards, including being built with the flow of the hillside where it resides. The school’s blueprint is a single-floor construction with terraced floors moving up the hill. The roofs of each building is made to resembling the rolling landscape and is flooded with vegetation so that by air, the school nearly disappears. In what promises to be the first of many sustainable lycees in France, the bar is set extremely high.

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A styrofoam beer cooler, a cheap camera, a little helium, and $150, goes a long way — a whopping eighteen miles into the stratosphere. Two MIT students have proven that DIY is a much more cost efficient way of taking pictures of the curvature of Earth than any of NASA’s costly programs.

With cool packaging designed by Bulldog, Foxglo lightbulbs were launched to complement the shift in Europe towards basic green ideas, more ’specifically, a shift from use of incandescent light bulbs to more energy efficient, compact florescent lighting’. [photo via the Dieline]

Work hard, I always believed, and someday I’d fulfill my very American dream of owning my own home. Alas, hefty student loans and other insane expenses tore asunder my dream of ever owning property. Until now. Twelve years ago, Dan Phillips started Phoenix Commotion, a construction company that builds low-income housing out of found and salvaged materials. Each home is one-of-a-kind, with floors built out of wine corks, and picture frame corners constructed into ceilings. The fire beneath my dream of home ownership has been newly stoked.

Many fashion-forward but environmentally conscious women have had to forgo the comfort and simplicity of the jellies because of the negative impact the manufacturing has on the planet. But now, with the introduction of the very rare and very comfortable clear jellies from Melissa, a shoe darling of the eco world, we can show off our style and ethics in a shoe that lets us marry comfort and style.

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When we feel bad about buying Made in China, we buy it anyway. When the kids at Peppermint Mag feel the guilt, they buy American Apparel. These cats have shown that it’s easy to be cute and stylish while being environmentally conscious. Enviro-friendly is no longer the domain of long-haired hippies and tie-dyed shirts. Welcome to the era of reuse, recycle and the revision of our tomorrow, one little pom pom hat at a time.

Swedish trio Claesson Koivisto Rune have come up with a biodegradable environmentaly friendly chair. The brilliance shines through DuraPulp, a paper based material that is fully recyclable. Reinforced with PLA, plastic made from maize starch or cane sugar which binds with the paper fibers at 167 degrees Celsius, the result is a material that has the properties of plastic and the qualities of paper: water resistant, lightweight, yet surprisingly solid.

In Brandon Jan Blommaert’s latest exhibition, he takes inspiration from Godzilla and creates large sculptures of robots and monsters from trash that he has salvaged himself and then photoshops a fantasy background behind them. It was all created as a series of public artworks for a Canadian town in Alberta. The main message? We will most likely have to live with the trash we created.