Congrats Jill! (Inhabitat founder Jill Fehrenbacher launched a new site, Ecouterre) Focused on, well, eco-fashion of course. Good luck!

I have written extensively about green companies – not just because being it’s the current hot trend, but because I feel it is what we must move towards in order to be sustainable. Today, a revolutionary clothing company launches. Formed by industry veterans with experience from Nike, adidas, and Royal Robbins, Looptworks takes the word green and flips it on its head. The company is attempting to produce 100% of it’s line from excess materials and components. In other words, it will create clothing from no new materials, instead re-using excess from factory floors that currently gets dumped into landfills. A typical textile factory produces 60,000 pounds of waste a week so source materials will not be a problem for the Portland, Oregon company but consistency in the supplies may be. As expected the collections are limited and, I expect them to be constantly evolving as Looptworks finds new materials to work with. The initial collection consists of 20 apparel pieces for both men and women and items range from jackets to skirts and graphic tees. The company is targeting an active lifestyle that brings together boards ports and outdoor activities, mixed with an urban aesthetic. I am personally very excited to see this business model catch on.

Green is the new black and this year companies are definitely heeding the call as more and more of them are adding eco-friendly elements into their product lines. Few though, can compare to El Naturalista, a Spanish footwear company that is built from the ground up as an earth-centric corporate citizen. El Naturalista has some key philosophies by which they operate: focusing on using natural and recycled ingredients and avoiding polluting and toxic substances in the manufacturing of their shoes and packaging. The Fall line is already making its way to retailers worldwide. Women should take a look at the Yggdrasil collection for subdued styling but with details that warrant a double take. For men, I am particularly fond of the Recyclus line which uses recycled rubber in the soles, cork midsoles, hand-sewn uppers and 100% recycled packaging. With a clear focus on nature and a design team that works hard to show that you don’t have to choose between style and sustainability, El Naturalista has this down pat. Look for their FW09 collection in stores now.

Get stickers, green businesses: the idea behind sustainability and consumer-focused company Viv is a simple and free one that could also be the best way to make your credit card look better (short of getting a black AMEX). After customers place a small sticker on the front of their debit or credit cards and show it at the time of purchase, participating retailers pledge to make energy efficiency and other green improvements to their businesses if enough stickers come through their doors and patronize. Grocery stores, bars, “eco-gourmet restaurants,” and liquor and convenience stores are all taking part, and their progress on their commitments to make their businesses more eco-friendly can be tracked by the community. San Francisco-based founder Arul Velan started the company after Stanford Business School and a stint at Facebook with the help of Dinesh Thirupuvanam, and the pair and their team have been seen recently at street fests and athletic events distributing their green stickers. A little good, a lil' green.

The old street lamps in your neighborhood may still do their job of illuminating those darkened city streets with a flicker and a buzz here and there, but as time has gone on they’ve also managed to remain quite the drain on the electrical grid. The thoughtful folks at Urban Green Energy ask the question, “Why continue all of that energy consumption, when you could just as easily achieve the same effect off the grid?” Their Hybrid Wind/Solar Street lamp seems like an absolutely perfect environmentally friendly alternative to those old flickering lampposts littering city sidewalks. Instead of sucking at the teat of the local power source, these divinely designed sources of street illumination use nature’s own goodness in the form of the sun’s rays and the whispering wind to make sure you feel safe as you traipse from corner to corner and block to block once the center of the universe has set.

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Our friends at Pangea Organics hit us with a couple of Radiance Gift Sets to giveaway this week– just in time to get your skin in perfect shape for the spring and summer sun by the pool. This awesome box set includes a facial cleanser made from Egyptian calendula and blood orange (can I eat that?), a facial scrub from Egyptian geranium with adzuki bean and cranberry (also, can I eat that too), facial mask (Japanese matcha tea with Acai and goji berry), lip balm (Italian red Mandarin with rose) and an eye cream (Turkish rose and white tea).   It all sounds so delicious it’s hard to believe it’s skin care. 

The 1st and 25th persons to comment today will be crowned the winners. Also, you can follow Pangea on Twitter to follow along and win more great stuff.

Let’s go ahead and just say it: wallpaper and tiles are long dead. New ecological paint job—well, baby, you can get a little more creative than that. The way to go, if you want to really make a statement for guests and live in something conducive to green all the way, is investing in an Ekobe wall. Composed of 100% natural materials, the tiles by the Brazilian company are veggie matter. We’re not talking about banana peels or apple cores; this stuff gets more tropical and exotic, like the insides and outsides of coconut shells. The Membira line goes so far as to mix in rice peel (you can peel rice?). The surfaces are often presented as mosaics that have their own particular discoloration or irregularities in texture—all aspects that reflect their truly natural origins. Consumers can apply Ekoba products to pretty much any internal surface but are advised against making major pathways with the square pieces because it seems they’ll disintegrate with all that wear and tear. As you can see from the photo, surfaces made with Ekobe tiles lend themselves to stunning interiors and stand apart from anything else out there. I’d jump at a chance to attend a meeting in that room. The tiles are available at Nemo Tile in NYC.

Reusable bags. I want to use (and reuse) my reusable bags, but I always forget them at home. I love how many of them I see around lately though. I don’t carry a purse so carrying it around is a little tricky, but maybe I just need to get over that and carry it with pride. Flip and Tumble is a new (and I know, another) maker of Reusable Bags– and these ones look really awesome. Unlike Baggu (which we still love), the Flip and Tumble bags have a small little compartment to pack the bag back into sewn/built inside the bag, so you’ll never lose the little carrier. The bags are available in nearly a dozen colors and cost $9 if you buy 1-2, $8 if you buy 3-6 and $7 a pop if you buy more than 7. I say, Buy 7 and gift to your friends or family and help rid the world of plastic bags.

San Francisco’s Rickshaw Bagworks (whose zero waste messenger bag was previously featured) is now creating customizable folios for Moleskine journals. The $50 folios include space for four pens and business cards and have a protected pocket perfect for receipts or maps. Each is made to order in the City by the Bay, and, should you feel stuck trying to pick a color combination, there’s a Flickr gallery chock full of customized fabrics to delight even the most hardcore Moleskinerie fan. Sustainable, awesome.

The minds behind New Soap, Old Bottle are marketing multifuncionality in the form of new liquid soap sold in reused plastic and glass bottles. After being sanitized, the former Coke and Heineken bottles are filled with home or car cleaner, topped with child safe caps, and sold at $4 a pop. “Big companies aren’t going to do this on their own. So we’ll do it for them,” said Scott Amron, designer, electrical engineer and founding principal of New York’s Amron Exprimental. “We buy brand name liquid soap by the barrel and package it in old bottles here in America.” Recessionistas and green thumbs rejoice– we love this work.

Can anyone guess the bottles above? First one is pretty easy…

Ross Lovegrove never ceases to amaze us with his serious industrial design talent. We assume that it’s his knack for combining that which is visually stunning with an absurd amount of practicality that drew the folks at Biomega into his collaborative arms for what amounts to a stunning addition to their ever growing line of “furniture for locomotion,” or what in layman’s terms could be called a pretty sweet bike. The Biomega Bamboo utilizes a natural material that when properly prepared, is stronger than steel. The result is an eye-catching fusion of nature and innovation on two wheels. To catch a sneak peek at this cycling sight to behold, head over to Milan’s Design Library at Via Savona between the 22nd to 27th of April, where it will be on display from 10am to 10pm. Congrats JMS!

Walk Score assesses the “walkability” of a prospective area by locating nearby stores, restaurants, schools, parks, etc. The application measures the ease with which you could navigate a neighborhood on foot, not necessarily the safety of doing so. Walk Score peppers Google Maps with local conveniences, making it a very popular widget for real estate websites. In the current economy, knowing the nearest watering hole to your new condo is important info indeed. San Francisco ranked in the #1 spot for city with the most walkable neighborhoods, followed closely by New York. Despite the old Missing Person’s song, Los Angeles came in at a decent 9 out of 40. I guess people just choose not to walk in L.A.

Today's Equinox Event at San Francisco's 111 Minna will be the most recent SF Beta event and program from Virgance, the for-profit activism campaign management company whose primary tool for encouraging change is online networking. They're the brains behind 1 Block Off the Grid, a community effort to make solar power available in bulk to neighborhoods, and consumer network Carrotmob, which invites people to reward companies that make socially responsible purchasing decisions. Promoted as “the biggest beta ever,” today's Equinox Event is co-sponsored by cloud hosting company GoGrid and GOOD Magazine, and promises cocktails with entrepreneurs and activists to celebrate Virgance's upcoming first anniversary.

Keen, a company that started with the question, “can a sandal protect the toes?”, has gone on to expanding their product line well beyond just active sandals. Admittedly, I have not checked out their site since I was shopping for my trip to Kauai a few years ago, but a few weeks ago I pointed Firefox their way and was impressed with what I saw. Their Harvest Collection of bags is particularly noteworthy.

One model, the Cornell, is a unisex messenger bag made of 100% reclaimed rice paper. For those of you who have ever bought large sacks of rice from an Asian market, you know exactly what that is. The design and graphics on each bag are completely unique, the bottom is made of 100% recycled rubber (from tires), and there is a lushly padded 17.4″ notebook sleeve built in. I will not say it’s perfect, however. The front zipper on mine gets stuck, and repeated pulls are slowly ripping the pouch from the bag. My only other complaint is a small one – occasionally the strap folds up onto itself within the metal loops. Other than these small quibbles, the Cornell gets my vote if you are looking for a comfortable, unique, and green bag.

Who ever thought something rolling on 30-inch bicycle wheels could look so good? Mercedes Benz has unveiled its F-Cell Roadster (the F stands for fuel, and yes, it’s a hybrid), an unconventionally attractive ride incorporating every era of the seasoned carmaker’s pioneering design style. The F-Cell embodies the company’s innovative technology with the simplicity of the first epoch of automobiles. While it may top out at 25 km per hour, it’s the progressive concept of this prototype that counts.

Via Clusterflock