A new report compares the environmental impact of shipping things in different packaging styles. Turns out that overall weight and volume are generally more important considerations than material choice. The overall winner seems to be lightweight bag, if it’ll hold your stuff. We’ve been trying to figure out how to ship our WideLoaders for years. [...]
Category Archive for ‘Enviro’ 
Do Rising Gas Prices Increase Cycling?
People have lately been fond of saying that rising gas prices will be good for Xtracycle business. We did in fact have a woman call last year to say she was on a Peak Oil site and it recommended buying a bike so she was buying a bike. Peak Oil and rising gas prices aren’t [...]
The Whole Shebang
As stoked as I was to do the Grist Interview, I was a little bummed to be heavily edited. Not because my responses didn’t need any choppin’, but because they cut out pretty much all of my philosophy on career choice, hate, blame, fear, and optimism, which I thought was the meat of my interview. [...]
Is Local the New Organic?
Interesting piece about the growing murmur around OG vs. Homegrown. Organically grown die-hards have been starting to wonder if certified kiwis straight off the plane from New Zealand are really all that good for the planet.
Interview in Grist
Grist Magazine calls its news “gloom and doom with a sense of humor,” and I’ve long thought of them as the hippest enviro site on the planet. Funny punny is often the mode. So I was stoked when they asked me to be their featured “Interactivist” for the week, which amounts to doing an interview [...]
Greenfest this Weekend
The band will be getting the hell out of L.A., fleeing towards home this Friday. But first we’ll stop in San Francisco for the Green Festival, rendesvousing with Ross, Laughter, and possibly even the Fossil Fool AND the Granola Ayatola, at Xtracycle’s booth. Come find our booth and get an invite to the after party [...]
Help Design Our T.V. Show
I’ve been asking you all to vote in our silly (i’m being kind) little reality t.v. game these last few weeks because of the prize: our own show on mtv, about whatever we want. Well, the contest show was so stupid (there, I said it), that, lo and behold, it didn’t get good ratings, so [...]
Fat as Fuel
The Xtracycle/Ginger Ninjas motor vehicle, Millie the Millennium Van, was first put on a diet of recycled fryer grease beginning in 2002. Millie is a ’74 schoolbus outfitted for bringing the show on the road, as she has been faithfully doing since her (re)birth on the Millennial New Years. In her conversion experience, Ross and [...]
Where to Buy Books
While we’re on the subject of book buying….before I joined Ross to launch Xtracycle I was thinking of starting a dot-com like everyone else I knew. It would be like Amazon but instead of putting little bookstores out of business it would help keep them running, maybe even make them stronger. And it would have [...]
What do diapers and airplanes have in common?
I don’t know. But they both remind me of one of my favorite books. Probably one of the first books any aspiring environmental impact minimizer should buy, read, and read again in a couple of months. It’s called the Consumer’s Guide to Effective Environmental Choices (put out by an awesome group called the Union of [...]
