Zara commits to go toxic-free!

Zara, the world’s largest clothing retailer, today announced a commitment to go toxic-free following nine days of intense public pressure. This win belongs to the fashion-lovers, activists, bloggers and denizens of social media. This is people power in action.

read more: greenpeace, 29.11.12.

i didn’t see any of this mannequin-protesting when i walked past the zara in SF on black friday, but yay at least the the rest of the world cares?

and check out this “detox fashion” anime video. it’s actually pretty good.
and the mannequin video. man, greenpeace is cool. and awesome. 

We want fashion without pollution in Copenhagen too! 

—greenpeace.

sign petition to get ZARA to detox its fashion and eliminate the use of hazardous chemicals.

good:

Urban Air: Los Angeles Artist Transforms Billboards Into Floating Gardens - Liz Dwyer

Imagine sitting in traffic during your daily commute and instead of seeing the clutter of countless billboard advertisements you see gardens floating in the sky. That’s the kind of green experience Los Angeles-based artist Stephen Glassman wants us to have as we travel through our urban landscape. His Urban Air project hopes to transform the steel and wood frames that hold billboard advertising into suspended bamboo gardens.

Glassman’s been creating large-scale bamboo installations across Los Angeles since the aftermath of the 1992 Los Angeles Riots. He came up with Urban Air because—like many of us who live in congested cities—he saw a need for more fresh, green space, and a greater connection to humanity. The idea won the 2011 London International Creativity Award and proved so inspiring that Summit Media, a billboard company based in Los Angeles actually offered to donate billboards along major streets and freeways.

As you can see in the video above, to create the garden billboards, Glassman and his team simply remove the commercial facade and modify the existing structure by installing planters, filling them with live bamboo, hooking up a water misting system and connecting them to a wifi network that monitors the environment. Then, says Glassman, “when people are stuck in traffic” on the 10 Freeway instead of seeing advertisements, they “look up and they see an open space of fresh air.”

The project’s hoping to raise $100,000 through Kickstarter to structurally retrofit the first prototype billboard, secure licenses, permits, and insurance, and pay for cranes to help install everything. They hope to spread the idea across the globe so they’re also producing “a system ‘kit’ that enables any standard billboard to be easily transformed to a green, linked, urban forest.” While it can be argued that that’s a hefty sum for just one billboard and a toolkit, seeing a beautiful garden suspended in air sure beats having to look at another advertisement, right?

“Without your permission, you are being polluted. Is that okay for you?”

Plastic Paradise: The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is an upcoming independent documentary film by docujournalist Angela Sun that focuses on the eco-issue of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch at the Midway Atoll. The film is currently in post-production but here’s a look at its heartbreaking trailer.

(Source: Laughing Squid)

The DDB China Group and China Environmental Protection Foundation recently installed a thought-provoking street campaign on 132 crosswalks in 15 Chinese cities that intended to draw attention to walkers’ positive uplift for the environment.

more: urbantimes, 19.09.12. 

latimes:

Brazil prisoners ride bikes toward prison reform: The alternative energy program lights a boardwalk and benefits inmates, while becoming the focal point of a movement to improve Brazil’s troubled prison system.

Must-read:

The bikes are hooked up to portable batteries, which light up the humble boardwalk along this small country town’s river each night. For every three days of doing stints on the bike, the men shave one day off their sentences. In its first months, the program has proved so popular that guards have reported a jump in good behavior, which moves candidates to the top of the waiting list.

Photo: Inmates gather in the area where bicycles are hooked up to generate electricity at the prison in Santa Rita do Sapucai, Brazil. Credit: Michael Robinson Chavez / latimes

climateadaptation:

The Keystone XL Pipeline route will separate thousands of miles of animal habitat, destroy fragile forests, put thousands of farms at risk, and threaten drinking water aquifers used by dozens of cities where millions of Americans work and live — all for Canadian oil that will primarily be sold on the international market.

Above: South of Fort McMurray, swaths of trees were removed to make way for an underground oil pipeline that carries product from the oil sands mines to processing facilities. Michael S. Williamson/The Washington Post

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