The Sears Tower (soon to officially be the Willis Tower, but will probably never be called that) is going to be getting a retrofit to add wind turbines and reduce energy use overall – nice!

Click here for full article.

Technorati Tags: wind power, sears tower, electricity, green, environmental, urban

We’re really happy that we’re now able to sell Sigg water bottles with our own designs on them! Click the “I Dig the Green Scene” image at the left to see our initial offering of Sigg water bottles with ‘green’ themed designs on them. And in case you don’t know, Sigg water bottles are made in Switzerland, and are made of ALUMINUM, and are totally washable and reusable. In fact, they’re made out of one piece of aluminum, so they can hold up practically forever – no need for disposable water bottles anymore – just refill your Sigg!

And since I’m promoting Sigg water bottles, I might as well share the selection of custom designed Sigg bottles I have in my Art of FoxVox art shop too! I specialize in original Celtic art, although I also have Sigg bottles with original astrology designs, chinese characters, viking runes, etcetera, and many of my designs are looking mighty nice plastered on these bottles! If you’d like to see a LOT of cool Sigg water bottles (great as gifts for green friends and family, even if they don’t KNOW they’re being green – heh) from my art shop, click the “Celtic Bare Branches” black and white Sigg bottle design to the left! Lots to choose from, a bottle for everyone you know!

Technorati Tags: sigg, water bottle, sustainable, reusable, recyclable, aluminum, refillable, plastic water bottle

My friend, Jean, has just started up an excellent shopping site (with a really cool name) – OrganicGoGo! Not only is she featuring all kinds of certified organic t-shirts with cool green designs, but the designs are all made by independent designers/artists too! And now I see she’s got aluminum SIGG water bottles in there too – excellent! So click here and check out Organigogo’s t-shirts – and organic kids/infant apparel too!

We’ve been doing some spring cleaning around here and have been collecting a bunch of stuff that’s still quite usable and in good shape but we just don’t want anymore, and posting it to our local FreeCycle list. So far, everything we’ve posted has been snatched up – like boxes of books we’ll never read again or don’t want to keep for other reasons (we still have a ton of books of course, but you can pry those out of our cold, dead hands – LOL), a box of mixed videos, an old desk lamp, etc. I love the idea that other people can get good use out of these things, and we just want them cleared out, so it’s so win-win. So if you haven’t already check out FreeCycle and search their site to find a list in your area to help stuff get to those who can use it, including yourself, since you can also post on lists if you’re in need of something specific too.

We’re happy to announce our new line of ORGANIC T-SHIRTS in our shop, from American Apparel and Econscious – men’s and women’s regular t-shirts and fitted tees, as well as kid, toddler, and infant tees, and infant bodysuit (onesie) as well. They’re made from organically grown cotton, and are super soft and comfortable!

And just in time for Earth Day, here are a few great designs that will look smashing on those oh so soft organic tees:

Just click on a design or click here to check out the entire shop – you can get any design there on organics, making it much, much easier to be as green as you want to be. ;)

Technorati Tags: organic, t-shirt, tshirt, earth day, cotton, environment, locavore, alternative energy, wind power, solar power, treehugger

“Peru’s Ministry of Agriculture has decided to single handedly attempt to mitigate the effects of climate change using a nation-wide tree planting project. The campaign began on 13th December, and aims to have 40 million trees planted by 20th February. Forty million trees in three months. That’s the same as 512,820 trees per day. Which is a lot of tree planting.” Click Here For Full Article.

The Associated Press reports that Toyota is secretly working on a solar powered car. (Well, it’s not a secret anymore now is it?) I am impressed though, not just by Toyota’s attempt to create such a revolutionary product, but also that they have already embraced solar energy by adding solar panels to the roofs of their Tsutsumi plant in central Japan.

This is the sort of research I would love to see American car companies doing. The 30,000.00 Chevy Volt might be a step in the right direction, but it’s too expensive for the average buyer to invest in right now. It’s also disheartening to see that the Big 3 are still spending millions of dollars in court to oppose the stricter state induced emissions standards. This is hardly the attitude of an industry that has seen the light and is embracing a leaner, greener way of doing business. As much as I feel for all the workers who will lose their jobs if any one of the big American car companies go under, I find it hard to sympathize with their actual plight.

We recently rescued two button quail (pictured below, aren’t they cute? sort of like mini-chickens in some ways) and two turtle doves (I know, I know – heh) from a, shall we say, disagreeable living situation. And in doing our research, we discovered that the button quail produce a LOT of eggs (which they have) and need a lot of calcium, and they love to eat egg shells for that calcium.

Now, we’re not eating/using the quail eggs ourselves yet, and we thought it would be weird to feed them back their own eggs shells, but we ARE cleaning up all of our regular chicken egg shells, breaking them into small bits and then giving THOSE to the quail. They always just JUMP on them and eat them immediately, so yay for that!

Although it’s not too much of a challenge to find other ways to recycle or compost egg shells, I thought this way was rather unusual so I thought I’d share.

We’ve decided to start our own shop with our own green-themed designs and slogans and what not. Each design comes on a variety of t-shirt styles, including organic cotton! Why do we offer t-shirts that AREN’T organic cotton as well as the organic cotton? Because the organic cotton t-shirt, at the moment, does not come in all of the sizes that we’d like to offer, or varied style. In the future, we’d like to add more organic styles, but I think this is a good start. (It should be easy being green, right? LOL)

In the next few weeks we’ll be posting features of some of our designs and products. To start, in honor of President-Elect Obama, we’d like to show off our “WELCOME TO WORLD2.0″ design! A play on the new Web2.0 idea (a new phase of clean and functional website design), our hope is that the election of our new president will be the start of a newer, greener world for everyone! Bumper stickers, and things like buttons, and magnets are also available. Click here to see our entire selection of World2.0 products!

And click here to shop the entire store too. Thanks for checking us out!

Ever since Washington Mutual started to tank a little while ago, we started learning a LOT more about banks and banking, just by researching things online. We’d been using WaMu for a long time at this point. And I had never really looked into the difference between a national commercial bank, a community bank, and a credit union. And I’m still wondering what took me so long to look into it. Probably because we never had that much money to really worry about where it was being kept, as well as laziness, and convenience.

I discovered that many credit unions (non-profit, customer-owned) and community banks (not all but many, perhaps most) have NOT been involved in the sub-prime disaster and have more stability due to conservative lending practices. They also have a tendency to reinvest their money in the local community more. Each bank is different, but I want to encourage you to do your own research and discover the differences for yourself.

When we then realized that we needed to set up new accounts somewhere else besides WaMu (not fond of JP Morgan Chase who bought WaMu’s banking part, just another huge commercial bank), we decided on a local community credit union. They are offering us free checking, and allowed us to put a minimum into a savings account to start it up, with a better interest rate too. They are NOT FDIC insured, but credit unions are usually insured by a few different respectable independent organizations (ASI-American Share Insurance, NCUA-National Credit Union Association, and more), and often per account (instead of just per customer).

Another point I wanted to bring up about commercial banking is the idea of the money-market account, which takes your money and invests it FOR you – often you have no way of knowing what enterprises your money is going to support. I don’t know if there’s anything like a ‘green’ money market or the like but when I get to that point, I’ll be doing more research in that area too.

So, while I don’t have a lot of expertise in this area, I’m starting to learn, and wanted to post about it and encourage any readers to find out as much as they can about who’s taking care your money and what it’s supporting, etc. Seems like a good time to start if you haven’t already!

p.s. – And just a little editorial about the $700+ billion bailout plan… if it hadn’t passed, I wonder what would have happened? When a kid gets ‘bailed out’ of trouble, do they learn from their mistakes? And while I didn’t expect it to happen, I wonder why homeowners having trouble paying their mortgages don’t get bailed out FIRST, which would then trickle back to the big corporations, yes? *sigh* Anyway – I think I’ll stop this rambling post here for the moment.