Product Ecology

Green Your Appliances Your Appliances! Washers and Dryers

At Inhabitat: We’ve enjoyed covering the surging interest in eco-fashion at Inhabitat – particularly new designers experimenting with bio-based materials and organic sources, produced with green and socially conscious methods. But the next time you covet the latest NaturevsFuture corn-based dress or Linda Loudermilk bamboo and silk trousers, consider this: the majority of a garment’s ecological impact occurs during the washing phase. So with

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Green Your Appliances! Refrigerators

Inhabitat: experimenting with conversational media in this series for Bosch. This summer with our new special series we’ll be investigating four different home appliances to learn about efficient energy use, green design, and eco-friendly choices. First stop on our green appliances tour: the refrigerator.   Read more: GREEN YOUR APPLIANCES! Refrigerators | Inhabitat – Sustainable Design Innovation,

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The New Greener Apple iMAC

At Inhabitat: Apple just launched their newest line of desktop iMacs – slim, graceful, and made from glass and aluminum. “Aluminum is durable and lightweight; recyclers love it,” said Steve Jobs. “Glass is elegant, very scratch resistant and very recyclable.” These are likely the first Apple products designed with ecology and environmental issues in mind, and while the

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A Debate over ‘Greenwashing’

My debate on Greenwashing the Swiffer picked up on BusinessWeek.com Design and Innovation: Gianfranco’s Zaccai’s column praising the Swiffer as ecofriendly sparked outrage in the blogosphere. Here, he answers questions from one skeptic on “profitable sustainability” “Our voracious and seemingly endless appetite for more, better, bigger, and easier is leaving our planet overrun, and creating

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Swiffer Sustainability: The Swiffer Designer Speaks Up

Posted at Inhabitat: Our story “Greenwash Your Floors with the Swiffer” launched an interesting debate on our site about greenwashing and eco design . A commenter named Kim called on us to move beyond criticism and contact the designers directly… If we can educate the product producers about holistic sustainable design systems and principles and give them better solutions,

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A Greener Apple: Steve Jobs Steps Up

In a reversal of Apple’s long-held lipped and secretive stance, yesterday Steve Jobs announced the company’s environmental policies. Responding to the Greenpeace campaign for a greener Apple, Jobs acknowledged a failure to communicate that – actually – Apple is doing quite well on the environmental front. It turns out that Apple had phased out CRTs mid-2006, met RoHS restrictions

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Walmart Launches Sustainable Design Competition

Walmart knows its own power. Following the release of a packaging sustainability scorecard last year, Walmart has followed up with a call to the consumer electronics industry – go green and prove it. In partnership with The Green Electronics Council’s EPEAT program (which we’ve mentioned before), Walmart will co-develop a standards scorecard that will evaluate products for energy efficiency, durability,

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