The company’s designs by acclaimed Southwest sculptor Tom Joyce are a breath of fresh air—especially compared to the usual run of commodity solar outdoor lighting. With last week’s launch of Santa Fe-based Qnuru, we now know what’s possible in sustainable outdoor lighting.

It’s spring and eggs—chicken’s eggs—are everywhere. Many people have the fun of boiling, cooling, and dyeing eggs for Easter; you can apply decals or even colorful stickers to them. Then there’s the big hunt—for the real thing as well as for the chocolate kind.

A 73-year-old Californian, small and wiry, who is: an active surfer, skateboarder, and runner; who, without formal architectural training, installed a living sod roof on the first house he built back in the 1960s—four decades before living roofs became darling icons of the green movement.

When I picture a couch I think of rest & relaxation, though some people see the psychoanalyst’s divan. For this piece I will turn the tables and analyze the couch itself.

Once they’ve seen them, people crave recycled glass countertops. And it’s no wonder—they have everything going for them: stunning to look at, they capture the imagination, and they deliver the triple bottom line for people, planet, and profit.

Consumer electronics is the homely stepchild of industries, when it comes to the environment. Other manufacturing biggies crowd the limelight on today’s hot-button green issues — but CE deserves its place in the sun too.

Happy New Year! Break out the champagne and party hats! Welcome to the fresh, new face of Green by Design!

The bald eagles have returned to Tomales Bay, right down the road from my house. Their presence generates optimism among bird lovers in our small northern California town, and the surge of activity in the green movement is cause for celebration. Read: I can’t wait for January 20.

There’s a lot of green fog around—people claiming their products or actions are green, with the thinnest possible justification in terms of the real green movement. But what objects are truly green by design? What are their essential qualities?

New York City kids go to the Metropolitan Museum for fun, cultural uplifting, and enlightenment. My California grandson prefers to go shopping.

For a small town (pop. 800), Point Reyes Station, CA., has a lot going for it. It’s the home of the Cowgirl Creamery, makers of award-winning artisanal cheese. Straus Dairy is here too, the first organic dairy west of the Mississippi. We have not one, but two local newspapers—a Pulitzer Prize-winning rag and another that [...]

It wasn’t my intention, but this is turning into Bamboo Week at Green by Design.
First came the PlybooPure story; then fun facts about bamboo. I keep running into more fascinating uses for this genius of a grass. This time it’s bamboo paper and letterpress printing—with a deeply ecological twist.

Bamboo. Can’t go a day without somebody telling us he’s walking on it, sleeping on it, cooking with it, knitting with it, writing letters on it, or wearing it.

Unless you’ve been living in a dirt-floored cave for a decade, you already know that bamboo is a great, green alternative to hardwood flooring. Classified as a grass, bamboo can grow as much as 12 inches a day, and after being cut, will renew itself in as short a time as three to five years—much [...]

I loved Hubert’s post yesterday. So much waste to avoid! And then I read the following newsflash from the NRDC (Natural Resources Defense Council, 11/17/2008): Video Games are Energy Drains

My friends and family members know that I work in the solar business, and they often send me links leading to neat solar products, like the solar tree designed by Vivienne Muller that I blogged about recently. It recharges your gadgets, beautifully.

I did something the other day that I hadn’t done in a long time: I mowed my lawn. As a denizen of the city for the past 19 years, I had little need for more than rudimentary pruning and weed pulling. However, a recent move to suburban Menlo Park, CA, thrust me into a position [...]

Some folks see the world in terms of ‘guy things’ and ‘chick things’. You know—men like rugged, practical stuff, and women prefer sensitive, impractical stuff.

In an earlier post on lighting, LEDs—You’ve Come A Long Way, Baby, Sam Leppanen outlined the many advantages of brightening up with LEDs. This post zooms in on lighting’s total cost of ownership, so you can directly compare the tab for LED bulbs with those for Compact Fluorescents (CFLs) and incandescent bulbs.

It’s inevitable. Every industry goes through it.
When you look at this solar sun hat, you know exactly what I’m talking about—solar is in the Ugly Duckling phase. My apologies to the person who designed it, but this hat just can’t represent the apex of solar technology and clothing design.