World consumption of most common commodity triglyceride vegetable oils. Image credit:Wikipedia Certain plant oils, especially palm oil, have a reputation of being produced unsustainably. Many plant oils are low-cost commodities (see table above for recent global volumes). Certain of the commodity plant oils are used extensively in soap and personal care products; and demand for these is increasing (a growing market segment does not accept animal fat-based product). For personal care products of the future, a key challenge is to find sustainable feedstoc...Read the full story on TreeHugger

Credit: hessnatur We announced the Planet Green and hessnatur Eco-Tee Design Challenge winner, Lindsay Seligman for her One Life design, back in September 2009 and we are happy to report that the organic cotton t-shirt is available now. Click through to watch a video with the designer and to find out which animal outlines are "hidden" in the final design, above. ...Read the full story on TreeHugger

Photo: Public domain Get Ready for Lots of Acronyms At the ARPA-E Energy Innovation Summit (ARPA-E means Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy), the U.S. secretary of energy Steven Chu announced $100 million in Recovery Act funds for clean tech research in fields related to energy. The three main areas that are getting funded are: 1) Grid-Scale Rampable Intermittent Dispatchable Storage (GRIDS -- The DOE really loves acronyms), or ways to store energy on a very large scale, 2) Agile Delivery of Electrical Power Technology (ADEPT), or better ways to convert and switch power around, and 3) Building Energy E...Read the full story on TreeHugger

Oklahoma sunset with oil derricks, photo: Clinton Steeds via flickr. Recent headlines about the ongoing bar room brawl over climate change have made me mostly just hang my head at the absurdity of it all. From Sen. James "Oil and gas don't pollute" Inhofe wanting to inves...Read the full story on TreeHugger

The Monteverde golden toad went extinct in 1989. Photo: Wikipedia. This probably won't be the last word on the demise of the Monteverde golden toad, but a new paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences says that normal El Niño conditions, not climate change, lead to the spread of the deadly chytrid fungus and caused the iconic Costa Rican species to go extinct....Read the full story on TreeHugger