Whole Foods Market arrived in London last year with a bang. The Americans couldn't wait, the Brit's were curious and the press was out for blood. The place was huge with 500 employees and 3 floors of products and restaurants and crowds of people. Whole Foods predicted that they would be opening 40 stores around Britain. But one year later the store reported losses of 9.9M pounds ($18.4M) this year in the UK. It seems that the shoppers weren't buying--they were just looking. People went to see it once and then went back to their own supermarkets...

Urban mining is a new concept for getting more people to recycle their old electronic gadgets and other stuff that contains precious metals. These include gold, silver, platinum, iridium and a range of others, that make your cell phone go beep and blink. Without these rare metals, the Pantone colours on my Sharp 812SH display would look a lot less bright, and you can probably forget about your new iPhone display, as they become too expensive to mass-produce. In northern Japan, Takashi Nakamura, a professor at Tohoku University working on the urban mining project in Akita, notes that if Japan wants to survive the era of industrialization, the governmen...

Image source: 2twentythree3.com So. You've been reading Treehugger for years. You know everything there is to know about green. You probably know what we're going to post even before we do. In that case, you're probably up for the Smart Cart Quiz Challenge. Brought to you by the new eBay Marketplace, World of Good, The Smart Cart Quiz shows consumers how they can "vote" with their almighty dollar. Each question asks what sounds like an outrageous statement, and then includes facts with the answer so the reader has a comparative figure for what that money could be use...

Proving that Big Coal's nefarious influence knows no bounds, a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has shown that pollution from coal burning has contaminated the Arctic for the last 100 years. Measurements taken from an ice core in Greenland, dating from 1772 to 2003, showed that the levels of the toxic heavy metals cadmium, thallium and lead were much higher than predicted -- which may have impa...

Obama lovers can wear their presidential endorsement on their sleeves—literally—with pro-Barack T-shirts from Obama Is The Man, the brain child of Aron Kressner of Vivavi. Made from 100 percent organic cotton and printed with water-based inks, the shirts come in six different sizes, in both men's and women's styles. (How's that for democratic?) Better still, a buck from each sale goes to the Obama campaign. You can even view videos made by people who are promoting change in their own live...

:: Beat the back to school blues with a splash of green! Consult our How to Go Green: Back to School guide. :: Take comfort food to healthier heights with this fresh-from-the-farm Olive Oil Mashed Potatoes recipe. :: Follow these five uplifting and energizing tips to give green conferences, parties and gatherings more zest. ...

When By Kids For Kids (BKFK) and The Weather Channel launched the Going Green Challenge to inspire kids to come up with neat inventions to help make an eco-difference there’s little doubt that the field was an open one. With a myriad of issues in need of resolution, the grand prize winner, Elizabeth Rintels, 12, of Keswick, Virginia, came up with a “Water Watcher” invention that helps monitor water usage in an ingenious way....

Geothermal energy is probably the greatest potential renewable energy source with the least amount of public awareness. It certainly spends much less time in the public gaze than wind, solar or biofuels. Recently the US Department of Ene...

photo by Theirry via flickr I find it more than slightly ironic that the National Clean Energy Summit is being held in Las Vegas, a city that on environmental grounds and water usage alone probably should not exist, but nonetheless it’s happening. Yesterday evening Bill Clinton opened the event will a speech which, among other things, outlined what he believes the US government should do to support renewable energy. At the Federal level these are his recommendations: And my comments, where warranted, in italics. ...

Via PhotoBasement Bike Paths World's 10 Best Biking Trails That's the Bike Path? Good Luck! Mexico City to Build 186 Miles of Bike Paths by 2012...