Refreshed.is

Thoughts on sustainability, design, travel, food and finding your passion, from the family at Holstee.

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Zero-Waste Pop-Up Diner

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Jamie Oliver has done it again. Despite careful planning, restaurants are often the biggest culprits when it comes to tossed food. However, on his admirable campaign to change the way we think about food, Oliver has just opened a pop-up restaurant in London that will employ a zero-waste policy.

“All produce at Jamie Oliver’s Diner will be eaten, composted, recycled or upcycled. Some menu items will even be made using discarded ingredients from other restaurants and shops, reports trade publication BigHospitality.”

The restaurant, which will feature classic diner fare such as burgers, shakes and pancakes will be simple but honest. “Enjoying food is about balance so we’ll be making sure it’s really clear whether you’re choosing something saintly or a bit of a treat,” said the chef.

For the full article via Earth911, go here. To read more about Oliver’s project with BigHospitality, go here.

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Sleek and Sustainable

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It’s summer time and vacation spots abound. Travel is at its peak and there are an array of options to choose from when considering places to visit. Would you like luxury or efficiency? With this list of the top 30 gorgeous eco-friendly hotels around the world, you no longer have to choose.

This megalist includes hotels offering “solar-powered electricity, structural elements made from natural materials, and downright beautiful scenery.” Traveling at its finest, and possibly, its most responsible. Eco-efficiency is emerging in all aspects of life and the travel industry is the latest to jump on the sustainability bandwagon.

Check out the full list of hotels here.

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They’ve Got Your Backside

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I’m always looking for products and accessories to enhance my riding experience without adding unnecessary parts athat can make cycling a hassle. One thing I have been searching for is a super simple fender that keeps my backside clean and is easily removable to keep it safe. Two products have come up in my search for an ultra-minimalist, cost effective solution.

First is a Kickstarter product known as the Musguard, a product of Jurij Lozic from Ljubljana, Slovenia. The Musguard is a removable and rollable bicycle fender. Jurij and the Musguard have surpassed their goal 4 times over, which is an awesome accomplishment and shows the cycling market’s interest in innovative solutions to common problems. The Musguard is awesome because it’s simple to install and remove for when that quick summer shower rolls through, and when not in use, it can be rolled up and attached right to the top tube. Head over to their Kickstarter and show your support.

Second is another similar product known lovingly as the Ass Saver, created by 5 designers from Gothenburg, Sweden. These polypropylene fenders are compact and extremely minimalist. The don’t include any unnecessary packaging and they do their best to minimize their environmental impact. 70% of their production is from recycled PP (polypropylene) and their goal is to eventually be 100% recycled. The coolest part about this fender is that it attaches right to the rails of your bike saddle and conveniently hides beneath the seat when not in use.

Both of these products keep your behind clean and give you that little bit of encouragement if you’re hesitant about riding in the rain. The key is to be prepared and it’s safe to say these products have definitely got you covered.

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Drink Your Vegetables

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With healthy eating at the top of trends and juicing running a close second, to fit in the recommended servings of fruits and veggies, many are turning to the green smoothie.

All-around awesome food blog Food52 shares a favorite recipe via Gena Hamshaw of Choosing Raw that leaves room for you to choose your favorite, seasonal produce:

1 cup fruit (bananas or berries are recommended)

1 cup leafy greens 

Liquid base (almond or coconut milk to keep it vegan)

Something for creaminess (avocados lend a hand to the plight for green!)

For more smoothie suggestions (including a Sweet Corn option!), go here.

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Reusable Items For Travel

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We all know that summer is the time for that epic vacation, a road trip with friends, family reunions and the time to check another location off of your travel bucket list. With so much packing and unpacking of the suitcase, it would be nice to find a way to streamline your belongings into items that can be reused trip after trip.

Earth911 to the rescue with a handy list of 10 Reusable Items Every Traveler Needs To Pack. From a fully foldable water bottle, reusable hand towels from our friends at People Towels and collapsible dishes from Guyot Designs (the flexibility of which is pictured above), packing for your next trip should be super simple and earth-friendly.

The list, complete with links on where to buy, can be found here.

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Clean Vibes

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Music festivals are wonderful moments that bring together thousands for the soul purpose of enjoying music, dancing and simply celebrating life. If that’s the case, it’s high time to ask if they also need to leave a mountain of trash in their wake. The good news, I believe change is in the air. Festivals like Burning Man led the way by running what is probably the most responsible week long festival interms of clean up and being accountable for it’s surroundings.

Another trailblazer in this respect is the DC based Sweetlife festival. They not only had 3 bins (recyclables, biodegradables and trash) but even had a volunteer stationed at each spot helping to make sure folks new which bin to drop their respect waste. They took it a step further by giving out prizes to folks that would pick up any recyclable bottles accidentally dropped on the floor. I remember this resulted in many people proactively walking the ground picking up cans etc in between sets- and there’s more.

You may have even noticed that major festivals like bonaree and coachella offering similar incentive programs via the great folks at clean vibes, who’s goal is to bring this spirit to all festivals big and small.

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One Night in a Treehouse

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When AirBnB first launched, its primary mission was to help travelers find an affordable crash pad in a cool city center. Now, with 200,000 active listings, AirBnB has seen property owner hosts push it into the realm of luxury wish fulfillment. Proprietors rent out their private Scottish castles, pastel-colored VW vans, igloos, and now, tree houses.

The site hosts over 200 actively listed tree houses, from Southeast Asia to rural Italy to woodsy Vermont, which boast a conversion rate into renting that is higher than the average property.

With a recent controversy over the legality of AirBnB in NYC, it might not be a bad idea to continue exploring atypical rental properties. Resembling pictures from boards straight out of Pinterest, they should have no problem staying booked all year.

You can read more here.

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Skateistan: Empowering Youth

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Skateistan is an incredible organization that uses skateboarding as a means of empowerment for youth to create new opportunities and a catalyst for change. Skateboarding in this case is utilized for more than just the play aspect and is fully engaging for the youth that it reaches. Currently, Skateistan operates facilities for youth in Afghanistan and Cambodia and they offer much more than just skateboarding programs to engage youth of all ages and abilities.

“To grow a sustainable organization that is recognized locally & globally for changing the lives of hundreds of thousands of youth through skateboarding and quality programmes – creating leaders that change the world.”

Recently pro skater Javier Mendizabal and the Quicksilver by Vuerich B team traveled to Cambodia to meet the Skateistan team and their students. The Quicksilver team and Skateistan have collaborated with proceeds going to help the Skateistan team by creating a line of sunglasses made from recycled skateboard decks.

There’s a great article here about the trip and how skateboarding has the ability to span cultural barriers and unite various generations and inspire collaboration and change. The week long trip ended with an all ages skate jam along with art workshops and other various contests to celebrate the kid’s creativity and allowing them to show what they’ve learned.

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“What’s Wrong With Our Food System”

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Birke Baehr is not your typical teen. While kids his age often hit the drive-thrus or the local convenience stores, Birke is more cautious about the types of foods he choses to ingest, what the ingredients actually mean and how we can improve and implement a “more sane food system.”

“One thing that I wasn’t interested in was acting or talking about myself. The main thing was I really just wanted to keep spreading my message about food and farming.”

Beginning his journey for food that makes sense, Birke states, ”I came onto this knowledge just by being curious and asking questions” and in an effort to seek “the whole truth” about a rapidly failing system of both food ignorance and compliance. Because of his young age, Birke immediately began gathering attention first from his local community, then the world and finally through TED, who gave him the opportunity to speak on multiple occasions about his passion for real food and the fight against, as Birke defines them, “greedy food monopolies.” His calm acceptance of those who disagree with his ideas is posed both sincerely and graciously: ”Although we don’t agree, at least it has people thinking about the food system.”

To read more about Birke’s hope for real food, go here. To view Birke’s original TEDTalk, given at age 11, “What’s Wrong With Our Food System,” go here. 

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Advancing the Plastic Bag Ban

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“Los Angeles is poised to become one of the country’s biggest cities to ditch plastic bags in shops,” said a recent article by Zak Stone in Fast Company. The current plan is to begin phasing out the plastics in large and bulk stores by January 1st, then advancing on to the smaller stores and companies by summer 2014.

Los Angeles is joining 76 other cities and counties throughout California that have already approved this advancement. Many environmentalists who support this motion are also looking forward to the economic positives this change will bring. Studies have shown that coastal towns of California spend around $420 million PER YEAR on cleaning up debris on beaches. With less bags in production, these costs are set to drop tremendously.

For the full article, including info on imposing fines on those who continue to use plastic, go here.

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Nisolo

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A couple of weeks ago, I joined a panel at Agora’s Impact Investment Conference. Alongside me was Patrick Woodyard, the founder of Nisolo, a company I have grown to admire a great deal over the past years.

Schooled as an economist first, Patrick mentioned how he saw first hand the pros and cons of social impact and the way it plays out in the developing world. The buy-1-give-1 model that has been practiced and led the path for so many social enterprises is a simple, beautiful story to tell, but rarely got to the root of the systemic poverty issues in the developing world.

Nisolo differentiates itself in the social impact world in two very important ways. Firstly, when you pick up a pair of Nisolo’s, they don’t give another pair to someone in Peru. Rather, it’s many people in Peru that get to continue to practice their craft at fair wages and, for the first time, get great access to developed world markets like the US. Secondly, and I would say equally important, this is a product that would easily fit in at any NYC designer boutique. They have made a clear and distinct effort to create a good impact without sacrificing quality or design. A difficult combination to which I can attest. Organizations like Nisolo help to push forward what it means to have social impact and are paving the way for a new generation of social enterprises.

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Underwater Hotels

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With advances in technology comes an increasing desire to push the limits of human travel and with it, how we vacation. While we may have to wait some time for hotels in the final frontier, other futuristic getaways are quickly becoming a reality.

Underwater hotels have been the talk of extreme vacationing for a few years now, with new visions of aquatic resorts surfacing each year.

From the Poseidon Undersea Resort in Fiji to the Discus Hotel in Dubai, these proposed hotels-of-the-future would allow travelers to sleep in the sea, and offer activities land-bound tourists could only imagine.

For more information, click here.

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Big Box Stores Go Organic?

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In this recent article from the Huffington Post, Target Corporation unveiled its plans to launch a “new organic and natural store brand as it works to rev up its grocery business.”

Noticing the growing desire for organic food products, Target and other big business chains are looking to get a piece of the bargain by offering organic options at their standard low prices.

“…the new brand, called Simply Balanced, will start with drinks and snacks like corn chips on Sunday. The line is an outgrowth of similar products within its existing Archer Farms store brand, which is positioned as a premium alternative to national name brands.”

Overall, Target plans to increase their organic options by 25% by the year 2017. HuffPo examines this move as a motivational push to other large brands to up their store brand offerings and standards as a way to “fend off competition” from other markets.

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It’s Time for Plan B

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Have you ever taken on a challenge so big it terrifies you, but so important you do it anyway?

Richard Branson, Founder of Virgin Group, has a history of taking big risks for the sake of doing things better. He’s taken on the music, telecom, and banking industries, all with the intent of improving quality and service.  He leaned deeply into climate change issues when he founded the non-profit, The Carbon War Room, in 2009.  This time he has assembled The B Team, a squad of powerful business leaders with a vision of changing business as usual in a serious way.  For too long, the private sector has been a major contributor to the growing inequality, record poverty rates, resource depletion, and environmental degradation we now face globally.  It’s time for businesses to place people and the planet on the priority list right next to profit.  That’s exactly what Arianna Huffington, President of The Huffington Post Media Group, and Paul Polman, CEO of Unilever, among others, have pledged to do.  By first looking critically inward at their own companies and industries, The B Team promises to take business to a whole new level of responsibility.

It takes courage to go after what you believe in when it means disrupting the status quo.  Members of The B Team are putting their names and companies on the line to redefine “normal,” even if it means backlash from their peers.

Read more about how they are doing it here and then make your own plan to take that big leap you’ve been thinking about.

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The Future of Sustainable Commerce

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This post was originally featured in the Digital Culture newsletter.

In the last half decade, we’ve seen the concept of sustainable commerce go from being pushed forward by select progressive, young companies to now being reverse-engineered into some of the largest corporations on the planet. As the notion of sustainability grows more mainstream, it will join the ranks of a truly sought after competitive advantage that aims to impact both customer acquisition and cost reduction.

The theme for this year’s sustainable brands conference, “Moving from revolution to renaissance,” captures this new landscape succinctly. What started as a long push from a concentrated group of trail blazers a half decade ago is now opening up to many more who are eager to participate in the movement. Similar to the original renaissance, newfound access to information is helping to bring these ideals to new levels: through increased access to information comes transparency. The future of commerce will be driven by educated consumers asking questions they never even knew were important to them only a year ago. It will be increasingly difficult for organizations large and small to keep unethical practices out of the public eye; so they will be, for the first time, highly incentivized to ‘do well by doing good’ from the get go, rather than dealing with a potential backlash down the road. Having a million followers on Twitter is great because you have that many fans ready to talk up all the good within your company or organization. But it probably also means you have twice as many watchdogs ready to pick up digital megaphones. This fluidity of information and eagerness to “share” has been a boon for Holstee. It enabled us to get on the the map when our Manifesto picked up a little viral following: being shared millions of times around the world and across the web, translated by our growing community in over 14 languages and eventually dubbed as the new “Just Do It“ by the Washington Post. This became a great intro for millions to learn about Holstee and our hope to encourage mindful living through design. Without the aid of so many people sharing and having access to personal platforms, Holstee would probably be in a much different place today.

As sustainability matures I think we’ll also find our view of it going beyond the simplicity of a buy-one-give-one message that enabled some of the most notable early sustainable brands. True sustainability is much more complex and requires a holistic approach and mindset to get where it needs to be. Though it’s true that complexity is not the most effective marketing message, still marketers should take heed. The public is more knowledgeable than ever and eager to speak up: to both expose those making decisions of short term profit over progress and to reward genuine brands, those who aim to push the world forward, by giving their online nod of approval.

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Flight controlled by Human Thought

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Researchers at the University of Minnesota’s Institute for Engineering in Medicine have harnessed the power of thought to guide a remote-control helicopter through an obstacle course. The demonstration joins a growing number of attempts to translate the electrical patterns of thoughts into motions in the virtual and real world.

“The ultimate application really is to benefit disabled patients who cannot move or patients that suffer with movement disorders,” Prof He said.

Applications range from assisting those with neurodegenerative disorders to novel modes of video game play.

Read more here.

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When Organic Matters

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Eating healthy as a whole is generally perceived to be an expensive lifestyle. The assumption is that whole ingredients and fresh produce cost more than the average family can afford. My argument here would be this: not everything you get from a grocery store has to be organic and eating healthy isn’t as expensive as you think: the average cost for a family of four to eat McDonald’s is around $25 – and the nutritional payout? Zero. And when it comes to treating your body right, putting a price tag on your health is hard to do.

This post from Honest Cooking covers 10 Ways to Eat Organic on a Budget and offers tips and tricks for both beginners and seasoned shoppers alike. While the list of what organic produce to buy tends to flex over time, some hard and fast rules for organic shopping include: meat, dairy and any packaged products that contain soy or corn. Some of these other tips include planning your meals, cooking from scratch as often as possible, eating seasonal (when items will be the lowest in price) and shopping for alternative cuts of meat.

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