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Del Birmingham

How C&A created the world's first Cradle to Cradle T-shirt | GreenBiz - 0 views

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    In June, C&A, the international Dutch chain of retail clothing stores, launched a line of T-shirts certified to the Cradle to Cradle standard, meaning that they were designed and manufactured in a way that is benign to the environment and human health, and whose materials can be recirculated safely back into industrial materials or composted into the soil.
Adriana Trujillo

Foam-Dyeing Technology Poised to Transform Denim Manufacturing | Business Wire - 0 views

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    Representatives from across the apparel industry recently came together at the Fiber and Biopolymer Research Institute of Texas Tech University, where Wrangler, Lee, the Walmart Foundation and Indigo Mill Designs unveiled a disruptive new dyeing process for producing denim. In a radical departure from water-based dyeing, IndigoZERO™ uses a foam-based process to reduce water and energy use by more than 90 percent
Adriana Trujillo

Marriott International Unveils Global Sustainability and Social Impact Commitments to D... - 0 views

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    Marriott International launched Serve 360, a sustainability and social impact platform designed to "guide the company's commitment and deliver positive results" across four priority areas: communities, responsible operations, workplace readiness and access to opportunity, and human rights. As part of Serve 360, the company announced new 2025 sustainability and social impact commitments including targets to reduce water use by 15%, carbon by 30%, waste by 45%, food waste by 50%, and more.
Adriana Trujillo

Solar-powered Hotel at Oberlin is first in US to be heated and cooled with geothermal e... - 0 views

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    The Hotel at Oberlin in Ohio is one of five US hotels that have met the stringent sustainable criteria for LEED Platinum certification. The hotel relies on geothermal energy for heating and cooling and uses solar panels to produce electricity.
Adriana Trujillo

ByFusion turns all types of ocean plastic into eco-friendly construction blocks | Inhab... - 1 views

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    The problem of ocean waste, particularly the plastic variety, is a big one, and many creative people are working on ways to clean it up. Finding ways to repurpose the plastic debris collected from the ocean is one component of that, and the U.S.-based startup ByFusion has responded with technology that recycles ocean plastic into durable construction blocks. This way, the plastic waste can be repurposed permanently, rather than being used to create another disposable plastic item that might wind up right back in our precious waterways.
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    Technology that compresses plastic waste items turns them into blocks suitable for construction, providing a permanent way to remove discarded plastic from the environment. The RePlast system developed by New Zealand-based inventor Peter Lewis is said to be nearly 100% carbon neutral and doesn't require the plastic to be sorted or washed.
Adriana Trujillo

Target's Kelly Caruso Talks Going Big in Responsible Sourcing and Sustainable Design - 1 views

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    Target has set a goal to remove "all unwanted chemicals" from its own product line by 2020. The company expanded its list of high-priority ingredients but removed endocrine-disrupting chemicals from that registry.
Del Birmingham

Inside Interface's bold new mission to achieve 'Climate Take Back' | GreenBiz - 0 views

  • Interface reconstituted its Dream Team, “a collection of experts and friends who have joined with me to remake Interface into a leader of sustainability,” as Anderson wrote in the company’s 1997 sustainability report.The original team included Sierra Club executive director David Brower; Buckminster Fuller devotee Bill Browning, then with the Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI); community and social activist Bernadette Cozart; author and entrepreneur Hawken; Amory Lovins, RMI co-founder and chief scientist; L. Hunter Lovins, RMI’s other co-founder; architect and designer William McDonough; John Picard, a pioneering consultant in green building and sustainability; Jonathan Porritt, co-founder of Forum for the Future; Daniel Quinn, author of Ishmael; Karl-Henrik Robèrt, founder of The Natural Step, a sustainability framework; and Walter Stahel a resource efficiency expert. (Additional members would be added over the years, including Biomimicry author Janine Benyus.)
  • One example is Net-Works. Launched in 2012, it helps turn discarded fishing nets into the raw materials for nylon carpeting in some of the world’s most impoverished communities.
  • But Ray Anderson’s sustainability vision was always about more than just a “green manufacturing plant.” He wanted Interface to be a shining example, an ideal to which other companies could aspire, a test bed for new ideas that stood to upend how business is done — and, not incidentally, an opportunity to stand above the crowd in the world of commercial flooring.Climate Take Back is the noise the company wanted to make.
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  • The mission is that we will demonstrate that we can reverse the impact of climate change by bringing carbon home,” says COO Gould, who is expected to ascend to the company’s CEO role next year, with the current CEO, Hendrix, remaining chairman. “We want to be able to scale that to the point where it actually does reverse the amount of carbon in the atmosphere.”
  • There’s a small but growing movement to use carbon dioxide molecules to build things — plastics and other materials, for example — thereby bringing it “home” to earth as a beneficial ingredient, as opposed to a climate-warming gas in the atmosphere.Interface’s commitment to “bring carbon home and reverse climate change” is a prime example how the company intends to move from “doing less bad” to “doing more good” — in this case, by not merely reducing the company’s contribution to climate change, but actually working to solve the climate crisis.
  • tansfield believes Interface is in a similar position now. “We know now what the biggest issues of our generation — and frankly, our children's generation — are, and that's climate change, poverty and inequality on a planetary scale, on a species scale. We are bold and brave enough, as we did in '94, to stand up there and say, ‘If not us, who? And if not now, when?’”
  • The notion is something Benyus has been talking about, and working on, for a while: to build human development that functions like the ecosystem it replaces. That means providing such ecosystem services to its surroundings as water storage and purification, carbon sequestration, nitrogen cycling, temperature cooling and wildlife habitat. And do so at the same levels as were once provided before humans came along.
  • Specifically, Climate Take Back includes four key commitments:We will bring carbon home and reverse climate change.We will create supply chains that benefit all life.We will make factories that are like forests.We will transform dispersed materials into products and goodness.
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    "Climate Take Back," as the new mission has been named, is the successor to Mission Zero, the name given to a vision articulated in 1997 that, for most outside the company, seemed audacious at the time: "To be the first company that, by its deeds, shows the entire industrial world what sustainability is in all its dimensions: People, process, product, place and profits - by 2020 - and in doing so we will become restorative through the power of influence."
Adriana Trujillo

Largest NetZero plus commercial retrofit in the US opens in Los Angeles | Inhabitat - G... - 0 views

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    The Net Zero Plus Electric Training Institute has opened in Los Angeles. The facility, considered the largest retrofit net-zero project in the US, will serve as a training facility and should produce more energy than it uses.
Adriana Trujillo

Bringing Back the Night: The Fight Against Light Pollution by Paul Bogard: Yale Environ... - 0 views

  • France
  • within an hour of workers leaving
  • cannot be turned on before sunset
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  • two years
  • designed to eventually cut carbon dioxide emissions by 250,000 tons per year, save the equivalent of the annual energy consumption of 750,000 households, and slash the country’s overall energy bill by 200 million Euros ($266 million).
  • “reduce the print of artificial lighting on the nocturnal environment
  • lighting in many parts of the world is endangering our health and the health of the ecosystems on which we The good news is that light pollution is readily within our grasp to control.rely
  • ecological light pollution, warning that disrupting these natural patterns of light and dark, and thus the structures and functions of ecosystems, is having profound impacts
  • China, India, Brazil, and numerous other countries are becoming increasingly affluent and urbanized
  • glowing white
  • Connecticut and California — have enacted regulations to reduce light pollution, but most nations and cities still do little to dial down the excessive use of light
  • LEDs, or light-emitting diodes, can improve our ability to reduce and better regulate lighting
  • “blue-rich
  • disruptive to circadian rhythms.
  • reducing
  • or Loss of Night
  • 30 percent of vertebrates and more than 60 percent of invertebrates are nocturnal
  • bright lights
  • All are potentially impacted by our burgeoning use of artificial light
  • We have levels of light hundreds and thousands of time higher than the natural level during the night
  • computer-generated maps that dramatically depict the extent of light pollution across the globe
  • Every flip of a light switch contributes to altering ancient patterns of mating, migration, feeding, and pollination, with no time for species to adapt
  • 2012 study of leatherback turtles
  • “artificial lighting of the nesting beaches is the biggest threat to survival of hatchlings and a major factor in declining leatherback turtle populations.”
  • eflected light of the stars and moon from the beach to the ocean
  • follow the light of hotels and streetlights
  • drawn off-course by artificial light
  • between 100 million and 1 billion, we don’t really know — killed each year by collision with human-made structures
  • our outdoor lights are irresistible flames, killing countless moths and other insects, with ripple effects throughout the food chain
  • natural pest control
  • for bats
  • artificial light disrupts patterns of travel and feeding since many bat species avoid illuminated areas.
  • that street lighting influences the migratory pattern of Atlantic salmon,
  • studies on light pollution, ranging from research into the socio-political challenges of cutting light pollution in the Berlin metropolitan area to the effects of light pollution on nocturnal mammals
  • composition of entire communities of insects and other invertebrates.
  • humans
  • nocturnal light disrupts our sleep, confuses our circadian rhythms
  • hormone melatonin
  • most disruptive to our body’s
  • blue wavelength light tells our brain that night is over,
  • consequences of excessive exposure to light at night include an increased risk for obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease
  • American Medical Association
  • “risks and benefits of occupational and environmental exposure to light-at-night
  • “new lighting technologies at home and at work that minimize circadian disruption
  • are concerned about the impact of some new lighting
  • make LEDs a
  • these lights may actually make things significantly worse
  • often brighter than the old lights they are replacing
  • LEDs could “exacerbate known and possible unknown effects of light pollution on human health (and the) environment” by more than five times.
  • preventing areas
  • recommends limits for the amount of light in five different zones of lighting intensity
  • banning unshielded lighting in all zones.
  • researchers have identified numerous practical steps to reduce light pollution:
  • spectral composition of lighting (
  • limiting the duration of lighting
  • altering the intensity
  • the Model Lighting Ordinance
  • simple act of shielding our lights — installing or retrofitting lamp fixtures that direct light downward to its intended target — represents our best chance to control light pollution
  • lines of shielded lighting fixtures
  • light equals safety, and darkness danger
  • with little compelling evidence to support common assumptions.
  • The objection
  • For example, ever-brighter lights can actually diminish security by casting glare that impedes our vision and creates shadows where criminals can hide.
  • light effectively than abundantly
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    As evidence mounts that excessive use of light is harming wildlife and adversely affecting human health, new initiatives in France and elsewhere are seeking to turn down the lights that flood an ever-growing part of the planet
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    mounts that excessive use of light is harming wildlife and adversely affecting human health, new initiatives in France and elsewhere are seeking to turn down the lights that flood an ever-growing part of the planet.
Adriana Trujillo

The App That Will Make Sustainable Energy Cool - 0 views

  • The app is designed to inspire, empower and motivate a generation of global citizens to take positive action around the world
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    When you ask kids about their favorite things, sustainable energy probably doesn't top the list. But a new movement and mobile platform called mPowering Action might change that.
Adriana Trujillo

New Disney Facility in Santa Clarita Faces Hurdles - The Hollywood Reporter - 0 views

  • removal of 158 oak trees
  • Planning and the Environment
  • We’re considering our options.”
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  • The Ranch, which will take up 58 acres of Golden Oak Ranch
  • an 890-acre piece of land owned by Disney that already hosts about 300 days of production each year.
  • six soundstage buildings
  • 2,854 people and contribute $533 million in annual economic activity throughout Los Angeles County.
  • Full build-out, though, could take years, even after the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors approved the project during a vote Tuesday. Still ahead are meetings with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Los Angeles Regional Water Quality Control Board
  • SCOPE and other environmental groups have been addressed
  • plant 1,600 new oak trees in the area, and argues that 637 acres of Golden Oak Ranch will remain a natural backdrop area. Disney also touted several “green design features” for reducing energy consumption, traffic and storm-water runoff.
  • Plambeck, though, isn't satisfied,
  • "to a voluntary project condition that places a conservation easement over the remaining undeveloped portions of the Golden Oak Ranch as a condition precedent to any permit issuance."
  • not develop 637 acres,
  • but if that's the case, why won't they put it into a conservation easement to assure everybody of their intentions?"
  • The Sierra Club, for example, has taken a neutral position on the
  • SCOPE
  • Santa Clarita Organization
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    A local environmental group slams the plan for the just-approved 58-acre facility, which will eventually employ 2,800 people but faces months of hearings before breaking ground
Adriana Trujillo

Hilton Foundation headquarters yields more than energy savings | GreenBiz.com - 0 views

  • Conservative estimates of the savings associated with retention project more than $5,000 per year in savings for the foundation.
  • n designing a new permanent home, the foundation's primary goals were environmental stewardship and crafting a simple, peaceful, healthy, productive and energy-efficient working environment that would last for at least 100 years.
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    Conservative estimates of the savings associated with retention project more than $5,000 per year in savings for the foundation.
Del Birmingham

Hyatt Sets 2020 Environmental Goals · Environmental Management & Sustainabili... - 0 views

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    Hyatt Hotels has committed to reducing water use per guest night by 25 percent by 2020 - one of the hotel chain's new environmental goals announced yesterday
Del Birmingham

Eileen Fisher wants those clothes back when you're done - The Washington Post - 0 views

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    It's back-to-school time, which means the advertisements are everywhere: Buy! Buy! Buy! Pencils and gadgets. Backpacks and sneakers. And, yes, heaps and piles of brand-new clothes. But this year, those ads are running up against another powerful message, resounding from such big brands as Eileen Fisher and Patagonia, along with a growing cadre of smaller thrift and resale shops: Let's make do, reuse, recycle.
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