Organic Beauty Products Launched in the UK

While the UK has seen a fair number of organic beauty products hit the shelves, none of them have had the fair-trade seal of approval on them until now.  The Fairtrade Foundation has recently given five different companies their seal of approval.  They include Boots, Essential Care, Lush, Bubble & Balm, and Neal’s Yard.  The 57 different products that have been licensed by the foundation contain at least one fair-trade certified ingredient.

So what does that have to do with green news?  Well, the fact is that these natural ingredients are often grown and sold by farmers in third world countries.  The Fairtrade Foundation guarantees that these farmers get a fair price for their ingredients.  This means that farmers are encouraged to grow these natural ingredients, which include things like sugar, brazil nut oil, and Shea butter.  In addition to getting fair prices for their products, companies also invest a bit in the community, giving money to local schools and other groups.

While going green does mean supporting companies and products that help the environment, buying products endorsed by the Fairtrade Foundation also helps the world.  By helping those who grow the natural ingredients found in the beauty products sold by these companies, we’re helping promote farming and organic products.  Many of the farmers who grow these products do so using green technology or, at the very least, avoid damaging insecticides and other harmful things.

The Muvbox Portable Fast Food Restaurant

Recycling shipping containers seems to be on everyone’s minds these days.  In addition to building offices and other builds with them, one man in Montreal decided to use one to create his restaurant.  The interesting part?  It’s mobile.

The Muvbox was created by Daniel Noiseux, owner of the Montreal Pizzaiolle chain of restaurants.  He took a 20-foot shipping container and went about retrofitting it with everything a modern restaurant kitchen would need.  He added seating for up to 28 people, attached solar panels to the top for energy, and then added in the neatest concept of all: he made the entire thing capable of folding down and in.  With just a push of a button, Noiseux’s restaurant folds up into the 20-foot container, making it incredibly portable!

It doesn’t take long to be ready to serve hot, fresh food, either.  All Noiseux has to do is move the container to the desired location and hit a button.  In under two minutes, the entire restaurant has opened up, and within 15 minutes, a small staff of only three or four can have everything ready to go.  The solar panels on the roof provide around 40 percent of all the energy necessary, which is another great feature.

While it’s the only one so far, Noiseux would love to see his space-saving, portable restaurant concept be used by many others in the food business.  He also thinks the idea can be applied to other types of businesses.  The shipping containers can be customized to fit just about anything, and with solar power, there may not even be a need to seek more traditional power sources.

Shipping Container Box Offices Save Resources

No, these aren’t offices made out of small shipping boxes or other cardboard boxes.  Instead, they’re created from the huge shipping containers that are used on ships, trains, and other vehicles.  These giant metal containers are often discarded after being used multiple times or after the company that uses them goes out of business.  However, people have found a use for them—they build offices from them.

One of the most recent shipping container box offices is being built in Providence, Rhode Island.  This office space is being created entirely out of used shipping containers.  These tiny cubes, which are more or less small buildings by themselves, are being combined into an office space that will use about 25 percent less energy than a standard building will.  Part of this is because the building is going to be very well insulated and will have a very energy efficient heating and air system.  It will also use no fossil fuel to power its heating and air.  The building will also use lighting that features response sensors.  These sensors will measure how much light is coming in naturally and adjust artificial light as necessary.

The entire building will use 32 different shipping containers that have been reclaimed from US ports.  The building will be three stories high and will be home to twelve new offices.  In addition to saving money, the building will also reduce water run-off by over 65 percent by using rain gardens.  These gardens will help storm water get back into the earth and provide nutrients to plants rather than simply be wasted.

While construction is underway (using completely green techniques), the final shipping container box office won’t be completed until March of 2010.

Eco-Friendly Personalized Coffee Mugs – ECOMUG

EcoMug is based out of California. They personalize ceramic 15 oz mugs and 20 oz EcoBottle's using organic water-soluble inks. Water bottles are clean-tasting and made from a ZERO BPA, non-leaching polypropylene, known as pp#5. These products are reusable, and 100% recyclable.

The Pacific Garbage Patch, is a garbage stew twice the size of Texas floating off the coast of California

HP Makes Laptop Packaging Greener

While HP may not like talking about how they have one of the most ecologically friendly packaging ever, but they certain did a great job at coming up with an amazing way of saving on packing materials.  Why don’t they want to advertise this?  Well, according to the lead designer of their Innovation Program Office, the department that has come up with a number of green solutions for the computer manufacturer, being green just isn’t part of their brand!

Back up just a bit.  HP itself is certainly interested in being green, but when it comes to this particular laptop packaging, green isn’t hip.  The packaging in question is for their Voodoo brand of laptops.  It is mainly aimed at gamers, a group that is not known for going out of their way to be green (you know how many pizza boxes they go through each month that don’t get recycled?).

So what is this amazing packaging that HP doesn’t really want to talk about?  Well, it is basically a very nice box that features a small embossed logo on it.  There’s no other printing on the box, saving on ink.  As a bonus, because there’s nothing else printed on this box, it can easily be reused for a number of things.  Inside the box are two simple trays that hold everything that comes with the laptop.  These trays can easily be used for sorting papers and other tasks.

Gone is that plastic sheet that normally has to be peeled off the screen.  Instead, the laptop is covered with a microfiber sleeve that can be reused over and over to protect the computer and clean it.  While this sleeve isn’t biodegradable, it’s not garbage like the plastic was.  Just about every aspect of the packaging, then, can be reused in some way.  That’s a huge advancement over other computer boxes.

Purchasing Carbon Offsets With Brighter Planet.com

If you are interested in different ways to reduce your carbon footprint you can make a difference by using the Brighter Planet website. There you can sign up to use the credit card offered by their partner, Bank of America (and choose paperless billing). Everytime you use this card you will be effectively offsetting your carbon footprint, because the points earned from your purchases are “invested on your behalf to help build renewable energy products”. Brighter Planet also offers you the ability to directly purchase carbon offsets called "Planet Shares", where you pay a fixed amount to offset a specific amount of CO2 emissions. As an example they charge $48 for a 4 ton carbon offset. Read more