The Greenest Tees Around: Teecycle Sells Hand Selected “Gently Used” T-shirts

T-shirts kick ass, green t-shirts kick even more ass. Teecycle.org is a cool new site that sells “gently used” one off t-shirts. It’s a super simple site set up on Blogger- each t-shirt gets a post with a photo, description, and link to buy it on PayPal. Most of the shirts run somewhere around ten bucks per with shipping- a great price about half the average cost of other cool tees online.
Here’s their schpiel-

Teecycle believes that your T-shirt says a lot about you, whether you know it or not.

When you buy off a rack in a department store, it says you have limited imagination, support giant corporate profits and have thousands of replicas. Who wants that?

When you own a Teecycle shirt, it says you have a unique one-of-a-kind item of clothing. It also says you care about the environment by keeping a perfectly usable item out of the landfill.

Each Teecycle shirt is hand-selected from rummage sales, thrift stores and, in a few cases, friend’s closets. Just not a rack in a nondescript department store.

Your purchase also supports the River Revitalization Foundation. $1 of each sale is donated to restore urban river trails and waterways in the Milwaukee area.

Head on over and pick up a new (old) shirt or three.

Link [www.Teecycle.org] via [T-Critic]

Greening Up War: A Round Table Discussion on Environmentally Friendly Killin’

The Onion nails it just right- if we’re going to torture, wage war, and ethnically cleanse, it should be in a environmentally friendly way.

H/T to the big guy Jordan for dropping this link on me.

Ali G In The Tree, Ali G In The Tree

OK, these are oldies but goodies- Ali G does Green.

Gather ‘Round the Festivus Pole, George Costanza’s Getting on the Green Team!

Holy crap! George Costanza is going green!

Ecorazzi told me about jason Alexander’s post over at Daily Green detailing how he and his family are trying to live a little more eco-aware.

Sorry, but I grew up on Seinfeld and the idea of George Costanza doing anything that makes the planet a better place makes me bust out laughing.

Serenity now!!!

Here’s a snip from Jason’s post, head over to Daily Green and read the whole thing.

This planet was never intended to support the number of human beings we currently have residing on it. As a result, natural lands and animal populations are disappearing — and rapidly. If we do not start to really understand this harsh reality and reverse it, our planet will not survive. At least not with a quality of life that anyone would wish for.

So our family talks about responsibility in family planning. We talk about replacing ourselves on this globe, rather than doubling or tripling our numbers. It is not an easy conversation. Life and families and babies are all joyous gifts. But if we do not begin to truly account for our numbers, we will surely create an ecological crisis that will only lead to anguish and despair.

We also talk about small acts of conservation in terms that make them impact in a more realized way. Leaving on lights unnecessarily isn’t just ‘wasteful’ or ‘costly.’ We talk about how the waste of that energy affects arctic refuges.

Link [Daily Green] via [Ecorazzi]

Happy April Fool’s Day From EarthFirst

I spent a lot of time thinking about how we wanted to roll out on April Fool’s Day. Images of headlines screaming about Al Gore being caught in a dirty motel with Bill O’Reilly and a 17 year old swirled around in my head as I went to sleep. I wanted to do something unique, something beyond the usual silly story about Exxon-Mobil going green. I wanted to do something that hasn’t been done.

So we’re going to celebrate a delayed April Fool’s Day. We will publish three posts sometime in the next year that are written in grand April Fool’s Day fashion. The first reader who picks up on it and calls us out on it in the comments will get a shiny badge, a parade*, and a cool $100.

If you know what you’re getting for Christmas it makes unwrapping your presents a lot less fun. Knowing you’re going to be pranked on a certain day of the year gives the same effect- much better to get hit on the side of the head with our prank hammer when you’re least expecting it. It’s our gift to you.

We’ll be doing roundups of all the April Fool’s action on the green blogosphere today. There will be some good ones and some goats, we’re looking forward to spending the day sorting through them all.

Oh, and I’d like to announce that EarthFirst (us) has acquired Earth First! (the radical eco-activists)for $4.3M in cash and stock. We’re going to merge our snarky green capitalism with their radical eco-activism and form EarthFirstEarth First!, leading provider of organic Kabbalah bracelets. Press release to follow.

Photo credit: Flickr user INTVGene

*- Winner will not actually get a parade. We were lying there.

Electric Feedback: Use Too Much Energy and This Light Switch May Shock You

Oh, how I wish this were true. From Gizmodo:

The Consumption Feedback Switch is a device that monitors your electricity usage. If it feels you’re within your light quota when you flip on the lights, you’ll see a small, harmless spark. But if you’ve been one of those dolphin-unsafe villains from Captain Planet, reading a few minutes too long at night, a gigantic stream of deadly electricity will mend your ways pending you not die.

Alright, we’re actually not sure that you feel a shock at all since the word “spark” may have been the choice of a liberal Google translation denoting “small glow.”

Damn, I would LOVE to do a product review on a light switch that actually gave you a shock if you were using too much energy. Eco-evil. I with there was an Etsy Alchemy for green tech products.

Link [Consumption Feedback Switch] via [Gizmodo] via [dvice]

Vanity Fair’s Greenwashed Cover: There’s Nothing Green About Madonna

Why the fizuck is Madonna on the cover of the latest green Vanity Fair issue? She’s a wrinkly ol’ piece of plastic ass with a bigger environmental footprint than many small African nations. Blech.

Link [Ecorazzi]

Carrotmob: Harnessing People’s Dollars To Drive Businesses Green

The Carrotmob is one of the coolest green ideas I’ve heard in a long time. Founder Brent Schulkin has pulled together an amazing concept- organized groups of people channeling their spending power on one specific day to give incentive to companies to green up their operations. The first campaign they are doing is a buyout of K&D Market, a liquor store in San Francisco. All the Carrotmobbers will be showing up on Saturday, March 29th to spend a lot of money on booze. The store won a bidding war by pledging to kick 22% of the revenue generated by the Carrotmob towards greening up their operation, specifically energy saving measures recommended by SF Energy Watch.

If you’re in the Bay Area this weekend you can take part by swinging over to K&D Market to buy a bottle or three. Bring cash.

We’ll be watching Brent and his Carrotmob; it’s a great concept that could take off everywhere. Definitely Pure Awesome.

Link [Carrotmob] via [Boing Boing]

Watch Your Favorite Green Eps of South Park Online- Trey and Matt Set SP Free

I am an unabashed hardcore fan of the show South Park. I’ve seen every episode thanks to the magic of file sharing and YouTube and was happy to hear last year that Matt and Trey were planning on setting the show free on the net. They’ve always encouraged their fans to share episodes online and worked out a deal with Comedy Central to stream them all on SouthParkStudios.com. The site went live last week.

South Park has always ridden the edge when it comes to political and social issues and they haven’t shied away from writing about the environment. Here are a few that touch on green and eco issues. Enjoy!

Rainforest Schmainforest- The kids take a school field trip to the rain forest and discover that it actually kind of sucks.

Fun with Veal- The South Park boys bring out their inner animal rights activist and battle to save a bunch of baby cows from being killed for veal.

Die Hippie, Die- South Park is taken over by hippies who converge on the town for a massive hippie rock show. Sure, it’s not really all that environmental but it’s about hippies and we all know hippies love the earth.

Two Days Before the Day After Tomorrow- A giant beaver dam breaks and the town figures out that Global Warming is to blame. Naturally, they panic to hilarious effect.

Smug Alert- The Brovlovski Family gets a hybrid car and become smug jerks about it. They move to San Francisco and are saved by Cartment from a giant Smug storm that takes out the city.

ManbearPig- This is my favorite one. Al Gore comes to town to warn the citizens about the dangers of Manbearpig- half man, half bear, half pig.

Link [South Park Studios]

Video Shows Growth of Wal-Mart Matches Outbreak of Infectious Disease

This is awesome- Kiwi Tobes has a downright creepy video showing the growth of Wal-Mart since its founding. I’d be willing to lay a tenner down on the table betting that the growth of Wal-Mart is similar to the outbreak pattern of an infectious disease released from Bentonville- think Stephen Kings The Stand here.

It’s pretty damn clever how the video was put together. Here’s what Kiki Tobes says:

Freebase has a topic for every zip code, along with it’s longitude and latitude. Here’s one example. One query pulls out all the ZIP codes along with their longitudes and latitudes. You can turn longitudes and latitudes into graphical coordinates with some simple transformations (which will vary based on the region you’re plotting and how big your image is) — here are the ones I used:

x=(longitude+127)*16
y=(50-latitude)*20

If you plot all the ZIP codes using a library like PIL, you get a nice map with dots that roughly match population density, which has the advantage of looking a little bit like a night-time satellite photo of the United States.

Freebase also contains a list of Wal-mart locations, along with their addresses and the year that they opened. Here’s an example. One query pulls all of these out of Freebase.

To create the animation, I generated 30 images for each year starting with 1962. I spread all the Wal-marts that opened that year over the 30 frames. To show the appearance of a Wal-mart, all I had to do was plot a large white dot over the small yellow dot for the appropriate ZIP code. I turned the 1380 images into an animation using MEncoder.

Here’s a version I found on YouTube, but I like the one on Kiki Tobes much better. There’s something about seeing it spread out into the black and slowly trace the outline of the country, as if the ocean is the only thing holding its hungry growth back. Click over and watch the Kiki Tobes version, it’s worth the minute it’ll cost you.

Link [Kiwi Tobes] via [Boing Boing]

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