 |
What chemicals are in your baby shampoo? Was sweatshop labor used to make your t-shirt? What products are the best, and what products should you avoid?
Increasingly, you want to know about the impacts of the products you buy. On your health. On the environment. On society. But unless you’ve got a Ph.D, it is almost impossible to find out the impacts of the products you buy. Until now…
|
|
 |
Almost all consumer electronics (mobile phones, computers, monitors, printers, etc.) contain toxic materials such as lead, mercury, arsenic and a broad variety of other materials that pose a threat to the environment and health. The challenge is to extend device usage to end-of-life, safely mine existing eWaste for materials, and design new devices with planned reclamation using reclaimed materials where possible.
|
|
 |
One in four of the trucks traveling the world's roads is empty – a waste of money and a blot on the environment. In the highly fragmented truckload transportation industry, a huge amount of trips involves empty trucks. However, reducing the amount of truck repositioning is difficult because the need for a carrier to reposition its vehicles depends on the interactions between the shippers the carrier is serving.
|
|
 |
It's all about creating a unique story and product that can be shared with friends. Support environmental causes, help combat poverty, save the world and consume in a sustainable and conscious way. Consumers' desire to find out about the origins of a product to become a given. Questions no one ever asked a few years ago becomes integral part of the purchasing process. How was the product made? By whom? What effects on the environment will it have after purchasing?
|
|
 |
In a society obsessed with instant gratification, novelty, and conspicuous consumption, it’s easy to dismiss fashion design as frivolous. Skirt lengths and platform heights appear inconsequential when juxtaposed with real-world concerns like climate change, economic strife, water shortages, and hunger and malnutrition. But if you consider the fact that clothing is something in which we envelope our bodies every single day — and which uses a ton of natural resources to produce — to ignore the apparel industry’s environmental and social impact would be negligent, not to mention foolhardy.
|
|
 |
Heating hot water can be 40% of your energy use. Your A/C unit makes excess heat in the process of cooling your home. Why use energy twice, if you can reuse it? Now there's an environmentally friendly way to generate hot water by capturing the wasted heat from a central air conditioning or refrigeration system.
|
|
 |
Conceptually, swimming pools are pretty simple -- they're just big basins of water, but there is a lot of technology and chemicals at work in your average pool -- much more than you might expect. They use a combination of filtration and chemical treatment to continually clean a large volume of water. Some of this stuff might be harmful to you and the environment.
|
|
 |
Plastics are a valuable natural resource. They are derived from fossil fuels and are created at substantial energetic and environmental cost. And yet we have come to treat plastic as the ultimate throw-away consumer commodity - using them in an all-pervasive multitude of short-term applications.
|
|
 |
Home food production can be strenuous work, often taking hours of labor to set up and maintain. This aspect of home horticulture was one of the main complaints of large unit families who have little or no spare time throughout their day. What was needed was a simple, fun solution which could encourage families and individuals to grow there own food saving them money and of course the environment.
|
|
 |
Finding clean drinking water is increasingly difficult and communities are already engaged in nasty legal battles over water rights. California has estimated it may run out of clean drinking water within 20 years. Plus, a new awareness of the bacteria and parasites that currently contaminate our drinking water and the environmental cost of bottled water are also fueling intense debate.
|
|
