Intolerable Beauty: Portraits Of American Mass Consumption By Chris Jordan

Cell phones #2, Atlanta 2005 44 x 90″

Crushed Cars #3, Tacoma 2004 44×60″

Recycling Yard #6, Seattle 2004 44×59″

Haunting and thought provoking comes to mind when viewing the photographic works by Chris Jordan, a Seattle-based photographer and environmental advocate.

Every day, 426,000 cell phones are discarded.

Photographer Chris Jordan heard statistics like that and wondered “what, exactly, does that mean? What does that number look like?”

His answer resulted in a unique photographic document that puts into perspective precisely how much is thrown away by otherwise responsible citizens.

I love his work. Check out Running the Numbers and Midway: Message from the Gyre

I have to admit, while house cleaning recently, I was tempted to throw away my Sonicare toothbrush. On the Phillips website, they claim you can recycle the battery and they listed Best Buy and Radio Shack as places to take them to. Well guess what? They fucking lied! I went to both places and my ass got denied. I was so frustrated, I just wanted to toss it. But I came home, read how to take out the damn battery myself and then took it to an e-Cycle drop off. Total pain but I felt good for making the effort.

Please take the time and effort to recycle your gadgets. Don’t toss them in the trash! The electronics don’t recycle themselves. You buy ‘em, you take them to e-Cycle heaven.

Source Lost In A Supermarket

This Should Be Good For The Landfills

Wired reports that CBS has embedded a video ad in Entertainment Weekly. The ad is called a “VIP (video-in-print) promotion” and it works similar to the audio greeting cards. Wired says it works better than Esquire’s e-ink cover did, but the one downside to the ad is that it is loud and there is no volume control.

Let me see.. a 2-5 minute promo and then a lifetime in a landfill. Makes total sense.

Source Wired

Posted by thuy

Samsung Reclaim Eco-phone

The Reclaim is created from 80 percent recyclable bio-plastic material, its packaging is compact and made from 70 percent recycled materials and printed with soy-based inks. Samsung offers only an electronic manual for the phone, available on the Sprint website, in an effort to save paper. It also includes a more efficient Energy Star phone charger.

Two dollars of each Reclaim purchase will benefit Nature Conservancy’s Adopt an Acre conservation program. Sprint also announced efforts to support other green initiatives. It has established environmental design standards and as a corporation it has pledged to reduce paper usage by 30 percent over the next five years.

With technology today, consumers upgrade their phones after 1-1.5 years. That’s a whole lotta electronic waste. Cell manufacturer’s need to take note. Until then, I’ll be patiently waiting, Blackberry.

Source Ecofriend

Posted by thuy

Recycled Camera Strap

Love these camera straps by Photojojo, made from salvaged seat belts of junked cars. They also made guitar straps out of reclaimed belts for Wilco and TV on the Radio.

Posted by thuy

What’s The 411? And Having Technical Difficulties

Hey kids, I always throw up a picture or vid with my posts but something’s broke- it’s either wordpress or my brain- so I’m currently trying to fix that shit. And by “fix that shit” I mean having a noontime cocktail while staring at the screen and wondering why it’s being like that.

Be back soon. For now, please use your imagination- the picture I was going to use was the one of Obama and his fine self walking out of the ocean in Hawaii, dripping wet and..damn, I’ll stop here.

Obama declares June National Oceans Month. The Daily Green

Paul McCartney and Yoko Ono urge for ‘Meat Free Mondays.’ Think you could do it? Winnipeg Sun

Tila Tequila writes anti-fur post on Global Grind and Russell loves her for it. See his post here.

Pasadena gets solar powered trash can-compactors. Must LA always be last? CBS2

Oooh Target stores get busted for dumping hazardous waste. Green Biz

Sitting on your ass collecting unemployment? Start training for ‘green’ jobs now. Just Google it damnit.

Posted by thuy

iRecycle – Earth 911.com iPhone App

iRecycle is an iPhone app that helps you find over 100,000 recycling and disposal locations in the U.S. for over 200 materials where you can drop-off your old cell phones, water bottles, cans, motor oil, and other recyclables. Use iRecycle to get directions and find out what else they accept.

Features:
- Find additional information for each location like hours of operation, other materials accepted (hey, maybe you can recycle all those plastic bags from under your kitchen sink), their Web site, etc.
- Call locations directly from search results
- Auto-complete saves time typing so you can spend more on finding a location convenient to you
- Check your search history to replay old search results

With information provided by local governments, industry insiders, organizations and everyday consumers, you can recycle hundreds of products from packing peanuts to computers. Find out where to go using your iPhone and the free iRecycle app.

This 3rd Party App is available at the Apple iTunes AppStore

Earth911.com

Posted by thuy

The Secret Life Of Cell Phones

Cell phone companies need to make it easier to recycle the cell phones they manufacture. Many consumers would like to do the right thing, if they only knew how.

Watch this video to learn about the life and death of cell phones.

Remember you can drop off electronics at your local Goodwill for free. They will e-cycle it responsibly or you can try to get some bucks for them from Gazelle.

source ecoscraps

posted by thuy

Louis Vuitton: Your Wish Is Their Command

Louis Vuitton is happy to create almost any custom piece, if you’ve got the cash. Last year Karl Lagerfield bought a custom LV trunk to hold his 20 iPods. And now a Chinese gentleman has commissioned something a little more grandiose, and just a little more strange.

The client “wanted to be able to watch television and offer coffee to his friends wherever he traveled in the world, including the remotest desert,” Louis Vuitton’s Patrick-Louis Vuitton recounts. “We agreed to put two solar panels linked to a battery for the flat-screen TV and DVD player, two-way radio, tuner and coffee machine.”

The one-of-a-kind trunk, which is covered in the label’s iconic Damier canvas, took a year to complete and costs tens of thousands of dollars.

One person who probably won’t line up for an exclusive LV trunk is the brand’s creative director, Marc Jacobs. He commented at the recent Met Costume Institute Gala that he doubts trunks will ever make a comeback.

“I don’t think there’s anything practical about traveling with a trunk,” he said. “Luxury travel is traveling with a toothbrush. That’s it, end of story. The people who really live luxurious lives don’t need to pack. They’ve got stuff wherever they go.”

I can’t knock anything with a solar cause but I’m totally laughing at the image of homeboy on a deserted island with this trunk. Seriously?

Source Earth First

Posted by thuy

Fairfax District Goodwill Grand Opening

I’m so excited about the Goodwill that just opened up down the street. I dropped in on the morning of the grand opening and the place was bumping. Balloons, music, families, hipsters and contests.

One thing I noticed was there weren’t any tags on the clothes. Boo-ya! That means not wasting millions of paper price tags as well as the plastic tags they use to connect the price tags to the clothes. They have signs that feature a flat price for the different styles of clothing. Brilliant.

I talked to the manager on my way out and he informed me that they do free e-waste recycling too. You just pull up to their back parking lot and drop it off.

Guess what I did last night? Started going through my stuff to donate and all my dead electronics to recycle. Clearing clutter feels so good.

Once again, I love my hood!

It’s on Beverly/Hayworth. One block west of Fairfax.

Posted by thuy

10 Ways To Change The World Through Social Media

Citizen journalism, open government, status updates, community building, information sharing, crowdsourcing, and the election of a President.

Editor’s note: This is first guest post from Max Gladwell.

Our children will inherit a world profoundly changed by the combination of technology and humanity that is social media. They’ll take for granted that their voices can be heard and that a social movement can be launched from their laptop. They’ll take for granted that they are connected and interconnected with hundreds of millions of people at any given moment. And they’ll take for granted that a black man is or was President of the United States.

What’s most profound is that these represent parts of a greater whole. They represent a shift in power from centralized institutions and organizations to the People they represent. It is the evolution of democracy by way of technology, and we are all better for it.

For most of us, social media has changed our lives in some meaningful way. Collectively it is changing the world for good. Given the pace of innovation and adoption, change has become a constant. Every so often we find the need to stop and reflect on its most recent and noteworthy developments, hence the following list.

Please note this is not a top-10 list, nor are these listed in any particular order. It’s also incomplete. So we ask that you add to this conversation in the comments. If you’d like to Retweet this post or take the conversation to Twitter or FriendFeed, please use the hashtag #10Ways.

1. Take Social Actions: The nonprofit organization Social Actions aggregates “opportunities to make a difference from over 50 online platforms” through its unique API. It recently held the Change the Web Challenge contest in order to inspire the most innovative applications for that API. The Social Actions Interactive Map won the $5,000 first prize. The result is a virtual tour of the world through the lens of social action. “People are volunteering, donating, signing petitions, making loans and doing other social actions as we speak — all over the world. To capture the context of the where, this project uses sophisticated techniques to extract location information from full text paragraphs.” You can also join the Social Actions Community, which is powered by Ning…which now boasts more than one million individual social networks.

2. Twitter with a Purpose: This list could be exclusive to Twitter. The micro-blogging sensation was featured on our first two lists (a three-tweet), and it’s certain to be a fixture. From Tweetsgiving, the virtual Thanksgiving feast, to the Twestival, which organized 202 off-line events around the world to benefit charity: water, it’s become the de facto tool for organizing and taking action. Tweet Congress won the SXSW activism award, and celebrity Tweeps Ashton Kutcher and Kevin Rose Tweeted their two million followers about ending malaria. Max Gladwell recently initiated the #EcoMonday follow meme as a way to connect and organize the Green Twittersphere.

3. Visit White House 2.0: Inside of its first 100 days, the Obama administration has managed to set the historic benchmark for government transparency and accountability. The President’s virtual town hall meeting used WhiteHouse.gov to crowdsource questions from his 300 million constituents, complete with voting to determine the ones he’d have to answer. All told, 97,937 people submitted 103,978 questions and cast 1,782,650 votes. The White House continues to raise the bar with its official Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter channels. In so doing President Obama is not just setting the standard for state and local government in the U.S. He’s establishing the world standard. The Obama administration is spreading democracy not by force but through example. Because you don’t have to be an American citizen to be a friend or follower of White House 2.0.

4. Claim your Zumbox: What happens when all mail can be sent and delivered online to any street address in a paperless form? That’s the big question for Zumbox, which has created an online mail system with a digital mailbox for every U.S. street address. And while the answer to that question remains to be seen, it promises to be as liberating as it is disruptive. A key quality for Zumbox is that it’s closed system much like that of Facebook, only instead of true identity it’s true address. This will enable people to better connect with their communities including their neighbors, local businesses, and the mayor’s office. The primary agent of change, though, might not be that this uses street addresses but that it enables direct and potentially viral feedback, which is a virtue that e-mail and the USPS do not offer. The first methods are to request exclusive paperless delivery and to block a sender, but others are certain to evolve such as real-time commenting and ways to share mail with friends, family, and colleagues. Welcome to Mail 2.0. (Disclosure: Zumbox is a client of Rob Reed, the founder of Max Gladwell.)

5. Host a Social Media Event: This is the year of the social media event. No meaningful gathering of people is complete without an interactive online audience, especially when it’s so easy and cost effective to pull off. Essential tools include a broadband connection, laptop, video camera, projector, and screen. Add people and a purpose, such as entrepreneurship. Promote it through social media channels, and you have a social media event. A recent example in the green world is the Evolution of Green, which was hosted by Creative Citizen, a green wiki community. It celebrated the launch of a new Web property, EcoMatters, while also establishing a new Twitter tag. By posing the question, “How can we go from green hype to green habit?” and including the #GreenQ hashtag, it sparked a conversation between attendees and the Twittersphere in real time. Thus was born a new mechanism for getting answers to green questions via Twitter.

6. Travel the World: More than anyone else, Tim O’Reilly knows the potential for social media to change the world. In his opening keynote at this year’s Web 2.0 Expo, he called for a new ethic in which we do more with less and create more value than we capture. This provided the context for SalaamGarage founder Amanda Koster, whose presentation followed O’Reilly’s. The idea is that social media has enabled each of us to have an audience. Whether through Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, or a personal blog, each of us can have influence and reach. What’s more, it can be used for good. SalaamGarage coordinates trips for citizen journalists (that means you) to places like India and Vietnam in conjunction with non-government organizations like Seattle-based Peace Trees. The destination is the story, as these humanitarian journalists report on the people they meet and discoveries they make. Their words, images, and video are posted to the social web to gain exposure and because these stories just need to be told.

7. Build It on Drupal: You may not have noticed, but the open-source Drupal content management system (CMS) has quickly become the dominant player on the social web. While we still prefer WordPress as a strict blogging application, Drupal has emerged as the go-to platform for building scalable, community-driven Web sites. It powers Recovery.gov, a key part of President Obama’s commitment to transparency and accountability. PopRule uses it as a social news platform for politics. And Drupal will soon become the platform for Causecast, a site where “media, philanthropy, social networking, entertainment and education converge to serve a greater purpose.” This is especially significant because Causecast CEO Ryan Scott is transitioning the site off of Ruby on Rails because Drupal has proved more efficient, user friendly, and cost effective. (Disclosure: Max Gladwell founder Rob Reed is co-founder of PopRule.)

8. Green Your iPhone: Looking for an organic diner within biking distance that has a three-star green rating? There’s a app for that. It’s called 3rd Whale, and you can download it for free. (Except that the star rating is actually a whale rating.) Complete with Facebook Connect, this iPhone app locates green products and businesses in 30 major North American cities. It uses the iPhone’s dial function to select a category (food), sub-category (restaurants), and distance (walking, biking, or driving). In Santa Monica, this might give you Swingers diner for its selection of veggie and vegan fare. You could then get directions from your current location using the iPhone’s built-in Google map, rate your experience on the three-whale scale, and write up a quick review. 3rd Whale recently released a new feature that integrates green-living tips, which can show how much energy or waste you’ll save by taking a given action.

9. Unite the World Through Video: Matt’s dancing around the world video inspired many to tears. Today, more than 20 million people have viewed his YouTube masterpiece, where he performs a kooky dance with the citizens of planet earth. The most recent example of this approach is Playing for Change, which connects the world through song. The project started in Santa Monica with a street performance of the classic Stand By Me and expanded to New Orleans, New Mexico, France, Brazil, Italy, Venezuela, South Africa, Spain, and The Netherlands. The project was superbly executed via social media, complete with a YouTube channel, MySpace, Facebook, and Blog. It’s received tremendous mainstream media exposure and also benefits a foundation of the same name.

10. Rate a Company: The conversation about corporate social responsibility (CSR) takes place across the social web on blogs, Twitter, and YouTube, but a central hub for this information and opinion is still to be determined. SocialYell seeks to address this by building an online community around the CSR conversation, where users can submit reviews of companies together with nonprofit organizations and even public figures like Michelle Obama. The major topics are the Environment, Health, Social Equity, Consumer Advocacy, and Charity. The reviews are voted and commented on by the community in a Reddit-like fashion with both up (Yell) and down (shhh) voting. The site is relatively new and still gaining traction, but there’s no question that a resource like this is needed to shine a bright light on CSR and and other related issues.

11. Publish a collective, simultaneous blog post on a universal topic: As Nigel Tufnel might say, this list goes to eleven. Let the #10Ways conversation begin…

Final note: This is Max Gladwell’s third list of “10 Ways to Change the World Through Social Media.” The first was posted a year ago today on Sustainablog.org, and the sequel followed five months later. If a single headline can capture the Max Gladwell raison d’etre, this is it.

Posted by Max Gladwell