Stylish and Sustainable Eco-friendly Boots
Recycling is important, but should be the final step in the let’s- o-green process. Simple, it seems, knows that. They make the soles of their shoes out of recycled inner tubes, they use recycled
carpet padding, 100 percent post consumer recycled paper, and recycled PET plastic (which is “a fancy-pants word for clear plastic that comes from soda and water bottles”). To make the body of the shoes, they use self-renewing materials like hemp, bamboo, cork, and the cotton they use is organic – a pretty important point considering that, grown conventionally, cotton is the most heavily sprayed crop in the world – with some of the most toxic chemicals around.
Many of their shoes are vegan, though they do use wool, silk, and “eco certified” leather and suede in some of their products. But everything is clearly marked, so it’s easy to know what you’re getting.
Simple also makes eco bags. Just about all of their products seem to avoid two all too common traps: green washing “green” fashion on one extreme, and genuinely organic styles that…well, look genuinely organic.
Play Golf and Feed the Fish with Ecobioball
Our seas and oceans are badly contaminated, especially with plastic waste, which affects animals and plants in the waters. Jeremy wrote in The Great Pacific Garbage Patch: Out of Sight, Out of Mind that “the floating expanse of waste and debris in the Pacific Ocean is now covering an area twice the size of the continental U.S. believed to hold almost 100m tons of flotsam, this vast “plastic soup” stretches 500 nautical miles off the Californian coast, past Hawaii and almost as far as Japan”.
Between 40 percent and 60 percent of the waste collected on beaches is plastic, according to the book Green Plastics by E.S. Stevens (Princeton University Press, 2002). The trash has often travelled for miles before being washed up on the shore somewhere. So what if you like to play golf on the beach, on a cruise ship or from your boat? Well, now you can do exactly that without littering, but feeding the fish instead.
The Ecobioball is a 100 percent biodegradable, non-toxic golf ball that you can use to play real golf on the water, full swing. The use of plastic golf balls is illegal near water due to the waste it leaves behind. That’s why the Spanish company has just launched an alternative golf ball, to be able to play golf on the sea without littering. Ecobioballs claims to be 100 percent safe for the flora and fauna of the sea, as it is fully biodegradable and non-toxic. Once the balls hit the water, they biodegrade in less than 48 hours, letting out the fish food they
contain inside. Let’s hope the fish enjoy their meals!
120 Million Crabs Take to the Streets on Island
Every year around January on Christmas Island, south of Indonesia, over 100 million audacious young crabs make their way from spawning grounds inland in a mass migration towards the sea clogging up the island’s roads on the way. As a result, rangers on island close lanes to cars to avoid having any crushed crustaceans. But despite the large numbers of crabs taking to the streets, there have been no instances of violence though random pinchings so often go unreported.The island, two-thirds of which is national park, is home to 14 different species of crab including the coconut crab, the largest invertebrate in the world.
In fact, the estimated 120 million red crabs don’t seem to bother the island’s 1,200 inhabitants too much. “It is difficult to see crabs in the houses,” one local resident told BBC Brasil. Still, rangers are doing their best to keep the little crabs on course as they make their way to the sea – even building plastic bridges to help them overcome difficult obstacles and putting up little fences to help guide them along.
The efforts shown in accommodating the yearly migration of over a 100 million crabs on Christmas Island by rangers and residents is commendable as is the ever-peaceful march of the crabs who have them so severely outnumbered.
Shared by TreeHugger, an online media outlet dedicated to driving sustainability mainstream
