A green fashion show with clothes made out of eco-friends things called the 'GreenShows' kick started with the Brit-designer Gary Harvey. He put on display 22 stunning gowns from recycled material, focusing on vintage garments like Levi's 501s, '70s floral print maxi dresses, logo tees, and the pages of the Financial Times. Most of the dresses features were composed of several individual garments like laundry bags, souvenir scarves from around the world, baseball jackets, trench coats, army jackets, t-shirts with slogans, etc.

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When you know that electricity is a rare and cherished commodity, every effort for alternative sources is welcome, especially in developing nations. And so MIT has come out with a refrigerator that can run on solar power. This system designed by Promethean Power Systems can be used as a commercial cold-storage especially where there are a lot of power failures. This will help store perishable food items especially if the time-to-market is considerably long. It will also create a cost-effective solution in the cold-chain food distribution system. The environmental benefits are an added plus.

[Zikkir]

I prefer smart casuals to a rugged and tattered look. So I prefer washing my jeans once a week, but that in turn means that they have a life shorter than what I would like. So a Brazilian fashion label called TriStar has come up with an innovative idea to help me save my blue jeans in a green way or at least retain a bit of their original color. And if you decide to heed their advice your jeans will go inside cold storage, that too quite literally! The recent denim collection from the label comes with direction to freeze-clean your jeans! The label CEO quotes ' After use, just put them inside a plastic or cloth bag and leave them in the freezer for 24 hours to kill the bacteria'.

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What happens when a company is growing but cannot keep up with the power bills? It decides to go green! But I don’t think that's what happened with Facebook. Their new Oregon data center will now be powered by a coal plant in Idaho to reduce costs. According to a report from the Energy Information Administration, the last 5 years the data center's power consumption has grown to 1.4 percent of the total energy use in the country! But in a bid to reduce their overall carbon foot print, the Pineville-based data center would be equipped with an outside-air intake system to cool the massive data servers, thus creating a health mix of renewable energy based power-grid!

[Treehugger]

If you struggle with frequent load shedding or are just plain environment friendly and want to restrict the use of electricity in your daily chores, why not move to an energy efficient vacuum cleaner instead? Miele Hybrid is said to be the first vacuum cleaner that can work with lithium-ion batteries, for a chord-free cleaning experience. You can charge the lightweight and powerful lithium-ion batteries automatically by using the power chord. These batteries are clean and can last for 10 years. It also guarantees enough power to the 1,800 watt motor, so that you can clean with the same efficiency. They require 3-hours to charge. Once charged, the batteries can be used for a non-stop 20 minutes without power assistance.

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Now it’s the turn of South Korea to turn eco-friendly yet again! And with the assistance of Samoo Architecture, a part of the upcoming National Ecological Institute(NEI) of South Korea site, a sprawling area consisting of 33,090 sq m will be provided with the most favorable conditions for a housing a relatively huge ecosystem. The Eden Project of the South or the Ecorium Project, will spot several interlinking domes appearing as wedge-shaped greenhouses. The technology will be backed mainly with the use of solar energy without any shades, but only a simulation of it by special arrangement.

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Pollution has reached astronomical heights, and there seems to be little you can do to control the impurities in the air that you breathe. But there are some nice people who are coming up with ways and means to make the earth a better place, quite literally. Although you cannot control pollution to a very large extent, you can ensure that your CO2 intake is reduced considerably. Kristin O’Friel, student at NYU has designed a neat new corset called as the CO2RSET. This particular corset loosens and tightens up by itself depending on the levels of CO2 in the air.

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Okinawa is all set to make its mark in the green world, thanks to Toshiba. The company will supply the much awaited gen-next electric power system for a power company in Okinawa Prefecture, Japan. The power system will have storage batteries which will supply electricity generated by sources like solar panels. The testing is said to begin in 2010 at Miyakojima, Okinawa Prefecture, Japan. The testing will be carried out by adding photovoltaic systems (3MW, 1MW) and storage batteries (4MW, 200kW) to existing facilities including two thermal power plants (21,500kW, 40,000kW), a gas turbine plant (15,000kW) and five wind plants (900kW x 4, 600kW x 1).

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Sustainability has been the most used word for the last few decades now. To make a sustainable environment involves nourishment of the nature apart from the basic supply of necessities and support. And so Danish architects Cobe, in collaboration with Sleth modernism, Polyform and Rambøll are in the process of the facilitating the largest urban Scandinavian transformation on Copenhagen's northern harbor, called as the Nordholmene. This project is said to be fully complete by the next 40 to 50 years and will be equipped to house and employ up to 40,000 people.

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When you have children around the house, you need to be extra careful with electrical wires, gadgets and fire. Well with the help of designer Karim Rashid, you can ensure that your child enjoys a drink of warm milk without worrying too much and also making sure that your child's carbon foot print is cut down a bit too. The Iamo Go baby bottle is a concept where a phallic-shaped bottle can heat milk to body temperature without the use of any power chords. The technology it uses "a disposable capsule containing water and salt" instead of electricity to generate heat to warm up its liquid contents.

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Over consumption of energy leads to disastrous results, and that is not only true for the planet! With most people opting for the most clichéd New Year resolution of slimming down, this year you can add a little green twist. Tanita solar technology has come out with the new Tanita HS-302 Solar Digital Scale which combines Japanese electronics with its second generation solar technology to give you a unique weighing scale that uses direct sunlight or indoor lighting for power, so that the power does not get over, no matter how heavy an object you are weighing on the scale.

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Wooden floors are high on maintenance and need to be replaced occasionally. If you are looking for more viable options, then let Boston-based Company EcoModern Design show you how to make the flooring of your house both classy and sustainable at the same time. Their new product EcoLux flooring comes in gold, silver, copper-leafed, imitation gold leaf, Forest Stewardship Council-certified hardwood, bamboo, or engineered maple. This flooring is made with metal gilding using a 2,000-year-old technique which was originally used to restore paintings.

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Bicycles help you maintain your fitness apart from being a far more viable and desirable mode of travel ecologically. Keeping in view the steep rise in the number cargo bikes in Copenhagen every year (it is estimated that six percent of the household of the metropolis is the proud owner of at least one cargo bike bring the average to a staggering 15,000 bikes in the city alone), goodmorning technology has come up with a unique car-shaped parking option for these bikes called CarGo. This "car" helps to store up to four bikes in a space required by one car. Each shell is created with fiberglass and has four separate cabins to park the bikes inside with ease. The casing has five solar powered lights: four as headlights that come on after dark and an additional one inside that is automatically turned on when any of the doors are opened.

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If you enjoy fishing as a hobby, then you would have encountered green and smelly algae growing around fresh water steams. If you thought they were really good for nothing, then there are scientists working rather hard to prove you wrong! Imagine powering a "slim" phone of the future with them! Batteries which seem to be a feasible alternative to electricity crisis are usually bulking and made of metal, which adds to harmful wastes if not disposed and recycled cautiously. And so efforts are being made to come up with flexible, lightweight, inexpensive, environmentally friendly alternatives that too made of nonmetallic components. One favorable material for such batteries seems to by conducting polymers, but they seem to deteriorate in use rather rapidly. Scientifically called as "Cladophora" these algae hold the key ingredient for these batteries: cellulose, and that too almost one hundred times the amount usually found in paper.

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When a company decides to make every child computer literate with a unique scheme like OLPC (One Laptop per Child), they seem to have their hearts at the right place. Pixel Qi is back in action and this time they are developing an HDTV that will run on batteries powered by the sun! The sub-10 watt HDTV has been created keeping in mind places where electricity supply is either unstable or scarce.

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