sustainability Archives

Lily Cole’s Veja Shoes Help Save the Rainforest, and your Ankles from a Lifetime of Boredom

English model, actress, and Sky Rainforest Rescue ambassador Lily Cole has recently collaborated with the French accessory brand Veja in an effort to combine sustainable fashion with Amazonia preservation in an unusual way.

SPARK Device turns your Jam Session into Clean Energy

Percussionist Sudha Kheterpal has teamed up with eco-designer Diana Simpson Hernandez to create SPARK – a musical instrument that successfully generates electricity just by playing it.

Piece by Piece, Elizabeth Brunner Stitches Ethics Back into Fashion

Filling up landfills, creating unfair wages for workers, and significantly contributing to greenhouse gas emissions, fashion isn’t exactly excluded from the consumer driven decline of the environment and humanity. But is the only alternative to shop at thrift stores or forever use hand-me-downs? Among the many designers emerging from the U.S.’s fast fashion disaster is Elizabeth Brunner, who has found a way to interrupt the wasteful cycle of clothing design.

Artist Barry Underwood Creates Landscape Auras to Reveal Human Impact on Nature

A thin but deafening azure pierces the forest; a chorus of coral rings dance on the water’s edge; a bed of tangerine rondure bloom in the dew of dawn—light artist Barry Underwood doesn’t simply toss neon lights into the woods and photograph them; he carefully folds the glimmer into the nooks of each unspoiled landscape, convincing them to reveal their mysterious undertones.

Scents and Sustainabilty: UC Davis Scientists Opt to Change Our Sensory Experience

UC Davis Scientists are making life a little sweeter by using cultured bacteria instead of nonrenewable oils to produce more eco-friendly fragrances.

Sustainability in Fast Fashion: H&M’s New Conscious Exclusive Collection

Leading fast-fashion retailer H&M is offering a more conscious collection with their new Collection of Sustainable Formalwear, which provides the best in sustainability and ultra-chic designs.

IAAC Students Design Bio-photovoltaic Cells that Extract Excess Energy from Soil

A team of research students at the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia in Spain has recently designed and installed a bio-photovolatic wall at their Valldaura campus to generate some buzz about collecting the natural and continuous untapped energy that constantly flows beneath our feet.

The Al Bahr Towers by Aedas, Wrapped in Solar-powered Mechanical Parasols

Challenged to design two skyscrapers that could energetically handle the infamous heat of Abu Dhabi while still letting in naturally light through its windows, Aedas Architects have devised a clever facade for the Al Bahr Towers that is both culturally relevant and energy efficient.

The Sustainable Style of Stella McCartney’s Pre-Fall 2014 Collection

Stella McCartney’s Pre-Fall 2014 collection demonstrates that ethical and sustainable fashion doesn’t have to resign to formless, potato-sack dresses. Using gentle organic fabrics and vegetable-oil-based faux-leather, McCartney designs form-fitting, draped and pleated styles with confident choppy patterns that resemble the quality and detail expected from similar big name designers.

The Elegant Quandary of Industrial Sprawl: Edward Burtynsky’s Aerial Photography

Using a helicopter and a digital Hasselblad camera, renowned Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky shows a side of global industrialization rarely seen by the public.

Emergency Shelters Made From Paper

Shigeru Ban is one of Japan’s most accomplished and innovative architects, known for his use of Western and Eastern influences, themes, forms and methods of building to design beautiful, ultra-modernist structures, and maybe more so now, his works using different materials for building, particularly paper.