Gil Friend’s Blog

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/toc/05_27/B3941magazine.htm

PS: Ottman's summary of NIKE's Considered Boot: Nike designers chose to do 'more with less'. A typical Nike light hiking shoe contains 30 different materials - the Nike Considered Boot contains 14. By weaving parts of the upper on the Boot, designers used only the...

Jackie Ottman suggests: Before you head out for the July 4th weekend, pick up a copy of BusinessWeek. INNOVATIVE PRODUCT DESIGN is on the COVER. What's not evident from the story is that environmental criteria were included for the first time in selecting the IDEA...

[WorldChanging]: Alan AtKisson offers a terrific summary of recent developments in ecological economics, and the challenge of figuring out how well we're doing at creating and maintaining real wealth, despite our woefully limited economic tools -- and introduces some...

[New Scientist]: Global warming looks set to be much worse than previously forecast, according to new research. Ironically, the crucial evidence is how little warming there has been so far. It turns out, according to these researchers that reducing pollution reduces...

I've been enjoying the growing phenomenon of city's declaring thet they either are or will be 'the greenest city in the country.' Ain't competition wonderful! At last count, I'd clocked at least a half dozen in the US along, including Berkeley, Chicago, New York,...

Greg Palast takes a club to Tom Friedman's A Race to The Top: The computer wizards of Bangalore (in Karnataka state) and Kerala are the products of fully funded state education systems where, unlike the USA, no child is left behind. A huge apparatus of state-owned or...

Blogging today from the Cradle to Cradle Design and Intelligent Materials Pooling course with Michael Braungart at SRI International -- if I can get my offline blogging features working. Hmm. I couldn't. 10 pages of notes. It may take a while to extract the gems for...

[Roland Piquepaille]: Making diesel-like liquid from carbohydrates found in plants has been done before by fermenting glucose into ethanol added to gasoline. But this process was inefficient and expensive because the ethanol needed to be separated from water at the...