This is the beautiful t-shirt in organic cotton that Miguel Adrover of Hessnatur designed for the Grameen Foundation, a $20 value.

Miguel Adrover is well-known in fashion circles for his fantastic and timeless creations, and he is now the designer behind German brand hessnatur. We’re going to be giving one women’s (medium) designer t-shirt away to a random winner (enter to win by commenting below).

hessnatur, the leading global pioneer in organic apparel have joined forces with Dr. Muhammad Yunus, founder of the Grameen Foundation and 2006 Nobel Peace Prize recipient, to launch a limited edition tee shirt designed by hessnatur Creative Director, Miguel Adrover.

The tee shirt, which will be priced at $20, will be made by Grameen Knitwear in Bangladesh. With every tee produced, hessnatur guarantees a 40% bonus over fair purchase price and donates 25% from the sale of each shirt to the rural education project of the Grameen Foundation. 

The partners, who share a belief that the combination of microcredit and education can be an effective tool in fighting poverty, have merged Dr. Muhammad Yunus’ revolutionary microfinance program with the expertise in organic farming practices of hessnatur to help improve both the living and health conditions of workers in one of the poorest regions in the world.

In Dr. Yunus’ words, “poverty is the absence of all human rights.  The frustrations, hostility and anger generated by abject poverty cannot sustain peace in any society.  For building stable peace we must find ways to provide opportunities for people to lead decent lives.”

Empowering people to make change is fundamental to both hessnatur and Grameen, and the graphic symbol and statement, “The world in your hand,” was created by Adrover to highlight how the importance of a simple decision, such as purchasing an organic tee shirt, can sanction communities to protect nature and preserve the future of the planet.

Adrover explains  “my designs have always been rooted in my observations of the world around me and I believe that fashion must reflect the harmony between humanity and nature.  It may not seem that a tee shirt would mean so much to a fashion designer.  But, since I believe that the world is in our hands – that we must take responsibility for all that we do – this is more than just another tee.”

Good luck! Contest closes at midnight, EST May 29th. Be sure to comment below to enter to win!

You can also buy the shirt (there’s a men’s version too) on the hessnatur site.

Thanks to everyone who entered our Delight.com giveaway for the chance to win a set of Nellie’s PVC-free Dryer Balls!

Delight.com is generously offering prizes to THREE lucky Eco-Chick.com readers, and after randomly choosing three names from a hat, we’ve got our winners. Congratulations to Lisa, Amber and Sarah! I will email each of you ladies to get your contact information.

Nellie’s PVC-free dryer balls are a non-toxic and environmentally-friendly way to reduce laundry drying time and soften your laundry naturally without the use of chemicals or disposable dryer sheets. Nellie’s Dryerballs tumble around in the dryer along with your clothes, lifting and separating fabrics so that air can flow more efficiently, reducing drying time up to 25%. That saves money and energy. Plus, they now come with optional all-natural lavender fragrance sticks to give your clean laundry a fresh, natural scent!

Get more info on Nellie’s PVC-free Dryer Balls at Delight.com and check out the rest of the fabulous eco-friendly offerings while you’re there. Happy shopping!

It’s Spring, so I’ve been perusing dresses, looking to add to my beloved collection of interesting and ecofriendly frocks. Here are three that are all made from vintage fabrics that are perfect RIGHT NOW.

The Maria dress from Minna has that ‘wearable sculpture’ look, with a slightly exaggerated tulip skirt and an English-rose print that is so hot right now (but is an original vintage fabric, natch). I’m going to keep my eye on Minna, a UK-based designer; poking around her collection for sale on Fashion Conscience and then her own site, I became a wee bit obsessed with owning an ethereal piece.

This buttercup yellow gaillard dress reminds me of the pony I learned to horseback ride on. She was an adorable, gentle palomino, and the yellow with cream dots and the sweet collar and cap sleeves (and a drop waist, I’ve not seen one of those in ages!) make me want to take a wander through the woods looking for spring flowers like Trillium and Lady’s Slipper. A combination of vintage lace and remnant cotton from Makool.

Doucette Douvall’s hat-tip to the era of Mad Men, the Edith dress is a plaid and pretty print combo that would be flattering for the curvy or the not-so. I’m loving the Michelle Obama-like sleeveless but still modest top. Vintage materials repurposed.

Starre Vartan in front of a Green Wall at the Vertical Gardens exhibit at Exit Art

The Vertical Gardens exhibit at New York City’s Exit Art was a glimpse into the future– not one that’s made up of sleek silver flying machines or barren cityscapes, but instead a vision wherein buildings and urban structures are integrated into the local ecosystem.

This is the kind of future I can see myself, my friends and their children living, growing, and thriving in; where one doesn’t have to choose between the city and the country; where you can bring the farm and the garden right into the city center.

Vertical Gardens are not only beautiful green spaces among the concrete jungle of the urban landscape, they are practical too: these gardens can grow food for the surrounding communities, giving access to green space AND fresh food (what could be more local than the vertical garden farm on your own block?)

These vertical farms are designed to help ease the environmental impact of what the U.N. estimates the world’s population will reach roughly nine billion people, and the vast majority will live in cities in the next 50 years. According to Mother Nature Network’s article on the subject:

..both animal and plant life could thrive indoors. Fish such as tilapia, trout, and striped bass would live in the pond on the ground floor, while fruits and vegetables would be grown hydroponically, without the use of soil, on upper floors. Wastewater from the fish tanks would be transported to the basement where, along with drain water from showers and sinks, it would be treated and then used to fill the fishponds and hydroponic tanks.

Water containing human wastes and other organic material would pass through a methane reactor to create energy to power the building. With no need for pesticides or food transportation, and the ability to produce multiple crops in a season (six corn harvests, for example, instead of one), the vertical farm sounds like an eco-cornucopia.

Below see some of the innovative ways that Vertical Gardens, Vertical Farms and other forms of urban gardens have the design world creating green spaces sprung from concrete.

The High Line, a former elevated train track that runs along Manhattan’s West Side, is being rehabbed into a park with great views of the Hudson River. When complete, it will be a multimodal ribbon of green running alongside the river, echoing the natural curves of the water.

The Shake Shack in Manhattan has a green roof, which blends in well with its location in Madison Square Park.

EVO Design created these planters which provide both light and space for plants, in one unit. Eventually the creators hope to make it a solar-powered unit.
“New design is about the Interaction between architecture, landscape architecture, farmers and construction workers. It should all be more collaborative, because the old system of separation and specialization isn’t working. All this technology we need is here, we just need to get it into use,” saysMica Gross (pictured).

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Editor’s note: This is first guest post from Max Gladwell.

Our children will inherit a world profoundly changed by the combination of technology and humanity that is social media. They’ll take for granted that their voices can be heard and that a social movement can be launched from their laptop. They’ll take for granted that they are connected and interconnected with hundreds of millions of people at any given moment. And they’ll take for granted that a black man is or was President of the United States.

What’s most profound is that these represent parts of a greater whole. They represent a shift in power from centralized institutions and organizations to the People they represent. It is the evolution of democracy by way of technology, and we are all better for it.

For most of us, social media has changed our lives in some meaningful way. Collectively it is changing the world for good. Given the pace of innovation and adoption, change has become a constant. Every so often we find the need to stop and reflect on its most recent and noteworthy developments, hence the following list.

Please note this is not a top-10 list, nor are these listed in any particular order. It’s also incomplete. So we ask that you add to this conversation in the comments. If you’d like to Retweet this post or take the conversation to Twitter or FriendFeed, please use the hashtag #10Ways.

1. Take Social Actions: The nonprofit organization Social Actions aggregates “opportunities to make a difference from over 50 online platforms” through its unique API. It recently held the Change the Web Challenge contest in order to inspire the most innovative applications for that API. The Social Actions Interactive Map won the $5,000 first prize. The result is a virtual tour of the world through the lens of social action. “People are volunteering, donating, signing petitions, making loans and doing other social actions as we speak — all over the world. To capture the context of the where, this project uses sophisticated techniques to extract location information from full text paragraphs.” You can also join the Social Actions Community, which is powered by Ning…which now boasts more than one million individual social networks.

2. Twitter with a Purpose: This list could be exclusive to Twitter. The micro-blogging sensation was featured on our first two lists (a three-tweet), and it’s certain to be a fixture. From Tweetsgiving, the virtual Thanksgiving feast, to the Twestival, which organized 202 off-line events around the world to benefit charity: water, it’s become the de facto tool for organizing and taking action. Tweet Congress won the SXSW activism award, and celebrity Tweeps Ashton Kutcher and Kevin Rose Tweeted their two million followers about ending malaria. Max Gladwell recently initiated the #EcoMonday follow meme as a way to connect and organize the Green Twittersphere.

3. Visit the White House 2.0: Inside of its first 100 days, the Obama administration has managed to set the historic benchmark for government transparency and accountability. The President’s virtual town hall meeting used WhiteHouse.gov to crowdsource questions from his 300 million constituents, complete with voting to determine the ones he’d have to answer. All told, 97,937 people submitted 103,978 questions and cast 1,782,650 votes. The White House continues to raise the bar with its official Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter channels. In so doing President Obama is not just setting the standard for state and local government in the U.S. He’s establishing the world standard. The Obama administration is spreading democracy not by force but through example. Because you don’t have to be an American citizen to be a friend or follower of White House 2.0.

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Artist and art student Sara Watson hand-painted this car to blend into it’s local environment. Says Sara, “I was experimenting with the whole concept of illusion but needed something a bit more physical to make a real impact.” Awesome!

Via: Sunfiltered blog at the Sundance Channel, and thanks to Jeffrey Davis at The Fun Times Guide to Living Green for the tip!

This article originally appeared on EarthFirst.com.

Money isn’t everything – or is it? To most corporations, making a profit is goal number one – but some of those companies take it way too far, sacrificing the health of the planet and its inhabitants for a bigger bank balance. Far too many corporations turn a blind eye to the consequences of their destructive, exploitative practices. The worst of them are committing atrocities that go beyond the realm of objectionable into criminal, dumping toxic chemicals without regard to public health and employing child labor.

What makes these seven companies extra evil is the fact that they’ve committed crimes that are BOTH environmentally and socially irresponsible.

Nestle

Image via Blood in Your Coffee

More than 40% of the world’s chocolate comes from Côte d’Ivoire (the Ivory Coast) in Africa, where tens of thousands of children are estimated to be working in dangerous conditions on cocoa farms. Nestle uses cocoa harvested by slave labor, and only when Senator Thomas Harkin (D-Iowa) led an investigation and introduced legislation that would require chocolate sold in the US to be labeled “slave-free” did the company act. Nestle promised that by July 2005 they would find a way to certify chocolate as not having been produced by any underage, indentured, trafficked or coerced labor, but since then, they have achieved very little.

Nestle’s bottled water business is also a major cause for concern. Nestle controls one-third of the US market and sells 70 different brand names of bottled water including Arrowhead, Deer Park, Perrier and Poland Spring. The company buys up pristine springs in some of the most beautiful natural spaces in America and builds huge factories on the sites, releasing pollution into the air and drawing enormous amounts of water out of the springs.

And, while the company claims an environmentally friendly ethic, saying it would never harm an aquifer, that’s exactly what they have done in places like Mecosta County, Michigan, damaging the watershed with excessive withdrawals, reaping huge profits and leaving the locals to deal with the consequences.

Pfizer

Image via Daylife

Air and water pollution, disregard for safety standards and experimentation on Nigerian children: these are just a few of the environmental and human rights offenses perpetrated by the world’s largest pharmaceutical company. It’s hard to imagine how Pfizer officials can bear to look at themselves in the mirror every day after what they’ve done.

Pfizer is guilty of some of the most despicable price gouging in corporate history: it keeps its HIV/AIDS-related drugs out of the hands of the world’s poor, who need them the most. Pfizer has aggressively fought efforts to make these drugs more affordable, refusing to grant generic licenses for HIV/AIDS drugs to Brazil, South Africa and other countries in need of them.

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Starre Vartan at Project Earth Day Fashion Show

2009 is the third anniversary of the Project Earth Day Fashion Show; I’ve been lucky enough to attend all three and it’s one of those events I really look forward to every year. It’s really a showcase of the most innovative talent (both student and designer) in ecofashion for that year.

Some of the most creative work in fashion design right now is going on in the world of ecofashion, which includes but is not limited to sustainable textiles, upcycling, animal-friendly fabrics and nontoxic dyes. The designers included in Project Earth Day (and others, too) are constantly pushing the boundaries; finding original materials (hemp silk was everywhere this year, there is less bamboo); uncovering new and traditional dye sources (cochineal beetles and Indigo) and making reuse truly beautiful. They are setting the standard for the next incarnation of American fashion which will become more planet- and people-friendly every year because of the forward-thinking work of these designers.

This year the designer’s show (which followed the student show ) featured Bahar Shapar, Lara Miller, Sublet, Melissa Kirgan, Mika Organic, Bodkin, Covet, Fearless Dreamer by Meiling Chen, Larsen Gray, Xing-Zhen Chung-Hilyard (AKA: XZ), Loyale, Mociun, Mottainai, and also shoes by Cri de Coeur, Charmone, OlsenHaus, and Neuaura. Jewlery by Alkemie.

The theme of the show was “Through the Looking Glass” and makeup and hair (adorned with huge bows) reflected the Alice in Wonderland on a Lovely LSD Trip background and accompanying hanging bug sculptures. Held at the Openhouse Gallery, the event was superpacked and everyone was excited to be there.

Bahar Shapar and Molly Garretson organized the event.

Designers Meiling Chen, Melissa Kirgan and Xing-Zhen Chung-Hilyard from the EKO-lab

Melissa Kirgan’s sustainably-dyed dress (I talked to Melissa about this dress at fashion week, check the vid here)

Back detail of Kirgan’s deep waters gown. For a close-up, see Inhabitat’s shot here

Yellow Cutout Kaftan (100% hemp; low-impact ink) by Xing-Zhen Chung Hilyard

Loyale’s Alviso jumpsuit

Cynthia bloomers and print Alma tank by Lara Miller

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