These designed cotton bags are way cooler than plastic. Plastic bags are undoubtedly bad for the environment, but sometimes it’s hard to get motivated to carry reusable bags with you for those spur-of-the-moment trips to the store. Serious and devoted…
Get one up on Rumpelstiltskin by turning plastic shopping sacks into uber-artsy bookmarks. I really hate giving cash gifts. Gift cards aren’t much higher on the “Hey, I burned lots of calories thinking of you” scale. Even when the card’s end…
Made from sawdust and plastic bags alone, these adhesive-free lamps take leftover materials and make them shine again. Plastic bags are an (unfortunately) abundant material that have been used in many ways by designers, but sawdust – though abundant as…
Colorful plastic bags are both the canvas and the paints in Aviva Sawicki’s artworks. Plastic bags are a ubiquitous and un-eco-friendly material that many sustainable and upcycling designers have tried to reuse. One designer has turned plastic bags into shoes,…
PET bottles hark back to their glass bottle predecessors using traditional glass blowing techniques. Plastic bottles have pretty nasty reputations for being bad for human health and the environment. Very few people are arguing that plastic bottles (and especially bottled…
At the end of her tour, Tafline gushes about her latest presentations at Al Ittihad school for boys in Abu Dhabi. My whirlwind tour through Dubai has come to an end. The Masdar City images posted from my first visit…
Dr. Abdul Aziz bin Ali Al Nuaimi, known as the Green Sheikh, at the Mina Al Salam hotel in Dubai. It isn’t often that I eat dates, drink coffee, and wax green with a Sheikh from Ajman. But yesterday I…
The plastic bag story isn’t over yet, but it’s definitely on the right track. United Arab Emirates’ residents are awash with excitement over the Ministry of Environment and Water’s moves to ban conventional plastic bags by 2013. And so they…
This story makes our hearts sing! Taking the threat of plastic bags seriously, Abu Dhabi is preparing for the 2013 total ban with a plastic-free weekend. Residents of the United Arab Emirates use 11.6 billion plastic bags every year. That’s…
The Environmental Protection Ministry’s New Campaign Urges Israelis “To Start Thinking Green.” It is certainly one of our pet peeves in Israel: Friday shoppers buying bag after plastic bag chock full of food. And on the market sidelines food waste…
