Valentine Makhouleen — interactive art director » Sustainability

The Story of Cosmetics

Valentine — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 13:58:06 +0000

www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfq000AF1i8

Algae photosynthesis lamp

Valentine — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 12:19:30 +0000

Mike Thompson, the arts graduate from Design Academy in Eindhoven now introduces a seemingly unheard of algae powered lamp, which he names Latro Algae Lamp. He takes inspiration from the findings of a research conducted by Yansei and Stanford University scientists that concluded that algal cells can draw electrical current through photosynthesis. The lamp, basically, draws its energy from a glass chamber of algae.

Via Green Diary

12 events that will change everything

Valentine — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 17:56:34 +0000

View interactive feature

Give Earth a hand

Valentine — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 22:52:32 +0000

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ep9MFiWXR8M

Carl Sagan – Pale Blue Dot

Valentine — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 15:55:30 +0000

www.youtube.com/watch?v=wupToqz1e2g

One drop

Valentine — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 14:00:10 +0000

www.youtube.com/watch?v=6LdNj0kV9P4

http://www.onedrop.org

Peepoo bag

Valentine — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 18:31:50 +0000

Peepoo bag claims to have a sustainable solution to lack of access to safe drinking water and proper sanitation.

In the world today more than 2,6 billion of people has no access to basic sanitation. That means that 40 out of 100 person lacks even the most simple latrine to perform their needs. The lack of toilets affects both society and the individual through the contamination of fresh water and ground water. Human faeces contain viruses, bacteria, worms and parasites which kills and infects people with serious diseases. One child in the world dies every 15 seconds due to contaminated water.

http://www.peepoople.com

Jelly-like animals of the Arctic depths

Valentine — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 21:42:24 +0000

See the rest on BBC News

Homeless Teens to Create Skyscraper Garden Above New York City

Valentine — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 13:34:49 +0000

Whenever it seems like there’s a surplus of doom and gloom running through the headlines, you hear about a story like this: at-risk teenagers staying in Covenant House, a homeless shelter in New York City, have set about cultivating green roofs on skyscrapers around the city. Their goal is to create a citywide “skyscraper garden” across Manhattan.

The teens recently completed the first stage of the project, done in collaboration with Seeding the City–planting a green roof on the ninth story of a building in midtown Manhattan.

Read the rest on TreeHugger

Ontario buy-local grocers go independent

Valentine — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 16:07:27 +0000

This is great news. For a list of buy-local Toronto markets, visit MyMarket.

Dale Kropf calls it Independence Day: On July 3, his five grocery stores in southwestern Ontario ceased to be Sobeys franchises.

Corporate policies prevented him from buying local products, he says, so he joined forces with four other former Sobeys franchisees and formed the independent Hometown Grocers Co-Op.

“We feel that local food, local presence is huge in our market and we wanted to take advantage of that,” Kropf says.
Canadians are increasingly subscribing to the “buy local” and “100 mile diet” philosophies due to concerns over imported food, Kropf adds. “The pressure was always mounting — the more recalls, the more bad press from China or wherever the product was coming from. I know that in our case, our private label pickles are made in Indonesia. I couldn’t believe that.”

As a franchisee for a large grocery chain, Kropf says, corporate policies stipulating that he only buy federally inspected meat prevented him from stocking local products. Most federally inspected meat in Canada comes from large corporations such as Maple Leaf, Cargill and Tyson.