business

When Lighting Your Water on Fire Isn't a Magic Trick
Jessica Ernst lives in the village of Rosebud, Alberta, East of Calgary. EnCana, a big oil & gas company, is operating close to her house. The photo above speaks for itself. Read on for her story....

Tesla Electric Roadsters Finally Ship to Customers
As they say, if you never fail, you're probably not trying. It took a long time, and some even lost faith in the young company, but Tesla has now "broken the logjam", in the words of Ze'ev Drori, its president and CEO. Tesla electric Roadsters are now shipping. "Already 9 production Roadsters have arrived in California, another 3 arrive this weekend, and they will keep arriving at the rate of 4 per week" until December when production should ramp up to about 25 per week. There are currently 27 Roadsters in various stages of asse...

Transport Infrastructure Will Change
With the i-MIEV electric car being rolled out sooner than expected and electric vehicles like the G-Wiz and Vectrix becoming ever-more common sights on our streets, it’s a good time to start figuring out what the transport infrastructure of the future will look like. Dale Vince of Ecotricity fame, who is h...

Rocky Mountain Institute cofounder and Chief Scientist Amory Lovins has long argued that it's possible to protect the earth's climate at a profit.

By taking an integrated approach to climate protection, he explained Tuesday night during a talk in Aspen, CO, we can find cost-effective solutions that generate more solutions -- not more problems:...

Next Generation Prius to be Made in USA
Toyota has just announced on its blog that the next generation Prius hybrid (certain models of which might have solar panels) will be made in the US, becoming the second Toyota hybrid car made in the country after the Camry hybrid, which is made in Kentucky.

Blue Springs, Mississippi
"As part of a sweeping set of changes that reflect the state of the automobile business in the United States, Prius production will begin here in late 2010 at a brand...

Interface sells carpet to the tune of $1,100,000,000 each year. That is just one reason why the business world listens up when Ray Anderson speaks. Ray describes his ecological awakening as “a spear in the chest,” a wound he has used to both his company’s advantage, and the planet’s. Giving rebirth to 133 million pounds of carpet is just the beginning. Anderson and his design teams are hard at work studying nature’s delicate technologies—like the sticky feet of geckos—to make products better, cleaner, and more beautiful. Here, the founder of Interface share his insights on biomimicry, right-brain thinking, cradle-to-cradle design, and our innate “biophilia.” :...

Corporate Climate Action Pioneers
In recent years, a handful of large corporations have estimated and publicly documented the cumulative carbon "footprint" of their operations. Most firms, however, are waiting...nervously eying pioneering efforts...for the declaration of the corporate environmental "footprint" to become a community standard.

The usual starting point is to sum the Green House Gas equivalent (GHG-e) emissions of manufacturing sites under company control, including contract manufacturing. a.k.a. "outsourced manufacturing." A trickier aspect is to apportion the corporate footprint attributable to joint venture m...

When we wrote that Bike Mechanics are the New Doctors commenter Nate suggested that "bikes are remarkably simple machines to work on," who needs a mechanic?. In Madison, Wisconsin, you get your choice; James of BicycleDesign tells us of the Trek Stop- a vending machine where you can "stop by anytime to put air in your tires or buy basic small items like a tube, patch kit, water bottle, energy bar, chain lube, etc." According to Olive on Flickr, "contains items for doing minor repa...

Here is a small reminder that we really need to redesign everything about modern life, from the smallest, least noticed items on up. Who thinks about 8 - 10 billion polystyrene or polycarbonate hangers manufactured per year, of which only about 15% are recycled?

Green Heart Global, the parent company and designer of Ditto Hangers, that's who. Green Heart Global offers two options, both made from recyclable materials....

Japan's business news source, Nikkei (subscription only), has reported that Toyota is planning a Prius with solar panels manufactured by Kyocera Corp. Toyota has not confirmed the reports. If Toyota achieves the rumored timing, it will be the first major manufacturer to bring a car with integrated solar panels to the mass market.

Toyota has not unveiled any design plans for the solar panels: pictured above is an artist's conception of how the Solar Prius might look. The solar panels will power the air conditioning on the world's most popular hybrid car. The last major revamp of the Prius power system was an upgrade of the hybrid synergy drive i...

We know it sounds like putting a square watermelon in a round hole: but Wal-Mart claims it is the nation's largest buyer of locally grown produce. The scaling of centrally managed industrial agriculture in the USA will be transformed. More changes are coming. Wal-Mart Stores Inc. plans to buy and sell $400 million worth of produce grown by local farmers within its state stores this year, an effort the company says will only grow. One obvious upshot is diversification of the supply chain. Smaller contracts with more farmers & distributors. ...

Ray Anderson started his company, Interface, back in the 1970s to make carpet. Like any business man, he wanted to shake up the market and make a healthy profit, which he’s done, and Interface now has 17 manufacturing locations on four continents. But this is not business as usual. Not anymore. Since having a sustainability epiphany, as he calls it, Ray has starting steering Interface toward one hell of a goal: zero negative effects on the planetary ecosystem by the year 2020, a goal he admits no corporation has yet reached. TreeHugger has long found inspiration in Interface’s elegant design solutions—products li...

VW's 282 MPG Super Fuel Efficient Car
The 1-Liter car has been around in prototype form since 2002 and greens everywhere have been drooling at its 282 miles per gallon fuel economy (or 1 liter of gasoline per 100 kilometers, hence the name). VW has finally decided to make more and sell them, and a limited edition (estimated in the thousands) should start selling in 2010.

1-Liter Car Technical Specs
The One-Liter car (or 1-Litre, over in Europe) weights only 660 pounds. The body is made from carbon composites and it is shaped to be extremely slippery, giving it a coefficient of drag of only 0.16 ("the average car comes in around 0....

Econ 101: Subsidies
One of the many problems with subsidies is that they are almost impossible to repeal. That's because they usually give big benefits to a small group of people at a relatively small cost to a huge number of people. For example, corn-ethanol subsidies are going to be very hard to phase out because they might mean hundreds of thousands of dollars to farmers, while their cost is spread over the rest of the population and almost invisible. Farmers are a lot more motivated to lobby politicians than the average taxpayer, even if they only represent 1% of the p...

Automakers Can't Keep Up with Small Car Demand
Sales of the Toyota Prius hybrid car are down 26% in June, but that's not because there is less demand for it, rather the opposite. Toyota just can't make them fast enough and waiting lists are getting longer, with about a six month average. And that might just be the start: "In a J.D. Power survey, 72 percent of U.S. consumers said they were interested in buying a hybrid."

Honda Becomes #3 in US Thanks to Small Cars
Honda swam upstream and, unlike other automakers, actually sold more cars,...

Tesla Electric Car Factory in the Bay Area
This story is still breaking, but here's what we know so far: The Tesla Motors electric car factory that was supposed to be built in New Mexico will instead be built in California, in the Bay Area, thanks to help from governor Schwarzenegger (a $9 million incentive package is mentioned by TechCrunch).

Whitestar Electric Sedan now "Model S"
From the start, we knew that Tesla's plan was to start at the top of the market with the Electric Roadster, and then progressively move down. The second step is an a...

This is a business idea we shouldn't need; every office building should have decent bike storage and a place to change and shower, it should be in the building codes like washrooms. Unfortunately they don't; that is where urban bike stations come in. The coolest one is Bike Central in Auckland, New Zealand; they offer safe storage, showers, coffee and a bite to eat, wifi and will do your dry cleaning and laundry while you are at work. It is more like a health club than a bike shop, but then if you are biking to work that's what you want.

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59.3% -- Albert Betz calculated in the early 20th century that the maximum theoretical efficiency of a wind turbine is 59.3%.

50% -- Currently, modern wind turbines are efficient at about 50%, a very impressive number.

15% -- According to GE, when it entered the wind turbine market in 2002, the average wind turbine was out of commission about 15% of the time.

3% -- Nowadays, wind turbines are down only about 3% of the time. That helps drive the cost of wind power down and get the most out of each turbine. Uptimes can probably be improved even further.

8 -- Electricity produced by a m...

There is no question that the world of today is a much different place from just a few years ago. And one of the most exciting policy developments we’ve seen over the past few years is the progress we’ve made on global climate change.

And Business Roundtable strongly believes we should keep moving forward.

I am proud to say that Business Roundtable – an association of chief executive officers of 160 of the largest companies in the world, representing every sector of the economy – has been out in front on this issue. Our CEOs worked hard to come to agreement on the need to address

As small, socially responsible businesses gain attention, some large corporations start to take notice, and in some cases take over (See, for example, Ben & Jerry’s, Tom’s of Maine and Burt’s Bees.)

The UK-based Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) is a body that regulates truthfulness in advertising. We’ve already seen the authority step in to a number of disputes regarding sustainability claims – including banning a deceptive Lexus ad; a greenwashing campaign for conventional cotton, and claims from Ryanair that aviation accounted for only 2% of global greenhouse emissions. But it’s not just corporations that the ASA has on their toes – it also ...

In another effort to jump-start investments in clean technologies and save the world, representatives from business, government and academia came together in Brussels on 29 April for a “CleanTech” forum.

These “corporate executives responsible for sustainability initiatives, entrepreneurs, early stage and established cleantech companies, utility and industry executives involved with emerging technology ventures and strategic alliances, professional service providers focused in the areas of legal, financial accounting and management, and governments/economic development councils, policy makers, scientists and researchers,” says the

Lambert, Getty Images

We had a faint hope that the rise in food prices might lead people to buy more carefully, perhaps cook more from scratch instead of buying prepared food, or even cut back on meat and eat more vegetables. No such luck; according to the IHT, Americans are just buying more crap, because the cheap calories come from the most processed, corn-based foods. My favourite quote:

"In Ohio, Holly Levitsky is replacing the Lucky Charms cereal in her kitchen with Millville Marshmallows and Stars, a less expensive store brand." Pizza sales at Domino's are down, while Wal-Mart says that sales of peanut butter ...

The US Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act (FIFRA), and current enabling rules have been in place since the 1970's. From the customer viewpoint, there's no excuse for a nationally prominent firm formulating gardening products without proper safety testing and registration. EPA is ordering Scotts Miracle-Gro Co., located in Marysville, Ohio, to stop selling and distributing two pesticide products that have not been registered with the EPA. The pesticides are "Garden Weed Preventer + Plant Food" and "SLS Fertilizer With .28 Halts" and are commonly used on lawn...

While record oil prices are responsible for a small car comeback and solid growth in hybrid car sales in the USA despite a sector-wide slowdown, China seems to be falling in love with big cars.

"If you look at the fastest-growing market segments in China, there are two — SUVs and luxury cars," said Joseph Y.H. Liu, GM China's vice- president for sales and marketing. That's why GM put its ginormous Escalade front and center of its display at the Beijing Auto Show. Dongfeng and Auto Works, Chinese auto...