Group items tagged

British inventors have designed a washing machine that takes eco-friendliness to a new level: it uses just a single cup of water to wash a load of clothes. Instead of water the Xeros machine uses thousands of special plastic chips (about 44 pounds' worth) in each wash, and when that single cup of water is heated, these chips absorb the dirt-including tricky stuff like coffee and lipstick. The chips are removed when the wash ends, and can be reused up to 100 times. Though it's still in prototyping, the inventors are intending to commercialize their machine, and it may even hit the shops next year for a price similar to conventional machines.

What aims to be the greenest building in Europe has just been un-earthed and is expected to be complete at the end of next year. And using the snafus of the greenest building of 20 years ago, they may well have all the bases covered regarding efficiency and environmentalism.

Builders and developers who install solar hot water on new homes are now eligible to receive a $1,000 discount. The discount is currently available for installations carried out before March 31, 2009. Eligible new buildings include single-family residences or small multi-unit residences without a common entrance and comprising less than 600 square meters of building area - or three or fewer stories of building height. These new incentives are available through registered SolarBC contractors, who will provide you with technical advice, professional installation services and will help you apply for your $1000 discount

An MIT class has estimated the carbon emissions of Americans in a wide variety of lifestyles -- from the homeless to multimillionaires, from Buddhist monks to soccer moms --

I used to be a strict modernist; my role at TreeHugger was to demonstrate that green design could be wonderful and cool and I filled the site with all kinds of modern houses with some claim, often weak, for being green. Those houses became less common on the site in recent times, as I worried more about house size, the appropriateness of single family dwellings on big suburban lots, and trying to reconcile my love of clean, modern design with my concern about the use of fossil fuels or building materials that cannot be maintained in a world made by hand.