We love offbeat gardening ideas around here, and this bicycle wheel trellis is just a stunning example of creative reuse!

Bike wheels are pretty durable, but a big accident can mean that your old wheel goes kaput. Maybe it gets cracked or bent too far out of shape to be trued again. Whatever the reason, once a bike wheel is dunzo, it's...dunzo. It's not easy to recycle, but just because it's not useful for pedaling anymore doesn't mean it's not useful at all!

Over at the Kirksville Permaculture Education Center, they shared a gallery of photos of this beautiful trellis. What a lovely way to reuse kicked bike wheels!

Of course, most of us don't have a a bunch of bike wheels sitting around our house, but I bet your local bike shop has lots of spent wheels laying around! Next time you're in the neighborhood, pop in! Chances are they'll be happy for you to take those off of their hands. In many places, businesses have to pay to dispose of trash and recycling, so there's a good chance you're helping them out as much as they are helping you.

The Kirksville Permaculture Education Center site didn't have instructions on how to build this trellis, but it looks super simple. Here's how I think it went down:

Materials

• Wooden H-frame - you can buy one or build your own from reclaimed wood
• 8 used bike wheels
• zip ties or popped bike inner tubes

Directions

1. Stake the frame in the ground wherever you want your trellis. Make sure it's nice and secure, because those tires and the plants that grow up them are going to add a lot of weight.

2. Use your zip ties or the inner tubes to link the tires together and link the tire grids to your frame.

3. Plant something that climbs - like grapes, luffa, or beans - at the base of your structure, and watch it go!

Want to see lots more photos of the bike trellis? Click here!

Let's face it: not every town is pedestrian-friendly. If you're driving, going a block or so out of your way feels like no big deal, but on foot it can be pretty frustrating to have to pass your destination just to cross the street at a crosswalk.

"Urban hacktivist" Florian Riviere made his renegade crosswalk to make everywhere he went more walkable. It's made from a reclaimed piece of carpet, and the artist says he was inspired by video games to reinvent his landscape.

This would be a super easy project to make, if you wanted to create your own pop up crosswalk. All you'd need are:

• An old piece of carpet
• White paint
• Black paint, if your carpet's not dark enough
• Masking tape

Just measure and tape off your stripes, paint them white, and you're set! If you need to use the black paint, just tape again when the white paint is fully dry, so you have clean lines on your finished crosswalk.

Of course, there is a question of safety here, right? Would motorists in your town stop for pedestrians on a makeshift crosswalk? Here in Atlanta, most drivers won't stop for me at proper crosswalks, even when there are signs that say "Stop for Pedestrians: It's the Law." But Atlanta drivers might be in a special category. How do you think this would go over in your town?

We're lucky to turn on the tap and have clean, drinkable water flow right out whenever we need it, but not everyone is so lucky. In much of the developing world, water is a scarce, precious resource. Women tend to carry the burden of water collection, traveling miles each day to carry water home for her family. And even then, that water is not always clean.

Procter & Gamble's non-profit arm recently developed sachets that transforms murky, dirty water into clean water suitable for drinking, cooking, and bathing. Here's how it works:

• Pour the mixture into 2.5 gallons (10 liters) of water.
• Wait for the residue to settle.
• Filter through cotton cloth.

That's it! The sachets cost around 10 cents each and each one filters enough water for five people. These sachet could change lives for people in the developing world who don't have access to clean drinking water and for victims of natural disaster victims. The company distributed their sachets in Haiti earlier this year after the devastating earthquake there demolished clean water access for many people.

Procter & Gamble teamed up with charitable organizations who work in drought-stricken regions like CARE to develop the sachet, which uses iron sulphate and a very small amount of chlorine to pull the dirt out of water and kill dangerous microbes. P&G aims to make and distribute 200 million of these sachets per year beginning in 2013, and they're already on the way to hitting their goal of 140 million sachets for this year.

Photo via Procter & Gamble Children's Safe Drinking Water

Asheville, North Carolina is home to the country's first hemp house.

Confession: I have a crush on Asheville. My sister-in-law lives there with her family, and it's one of my favorite places in the whole country! I could eat at Rosetta's Kitchen every day of my life. One of the things that I love most about Asheville is that it's a southern town on the cutting edge of sustainability. It's incredibly vegan friendly, most of the restaurants compost their food scraps, and it has a strong local art scene.

In 2009, an Asheville construction company broke ground on the first hemp house, and the company that designed it - Push Design - continues to build sustainable homes, including hemp homes, in the Asheville area.

Yep! It's a house made of hemp! If you're not familiar with hemp, it's more than just fabric that hippies make into patchwork pants. It's durable and a joy to sew and very low-impact to grow. Like bamboo, hemp needs few pesticides and little water to thrive, and it actually improves soil quality where it grows (unlike dirty cotton). Unlike bamboo, though, hemp is an actual fiber that you can spin into fabric, so there are no questionable chemicals or ethical debates about whether its truly a green fabric.

Hemp gets a bad rep because there's a lot of confusion about its relation to marijuana. You can't smoke hemp, and it's crazy that it's illegal to grow industrial hemp here in the U.S. It's cleaner to grow than cotton, and there's a huge market for hemp fabrics and other hemp materials in the states. Right now, all hemp products have to be imported from Canada and China, where it's legal to grow.

It turns out that beyond making clothing, hemp makes a great green building material called hempcrete! Check out this video all about the Asheville hemp house:

So, what do you guys think? Would you live in a hemp house?

Image Credit: Creative Commons photo by moonlightbulb

Renewable energy systems - or energy development - is the process of creating sufficient primary and secondary sources of energy to help us supplement and even eschew our use of fossil fuels. The delivery of energy services and the production of many manufactured goods have caused technologically advanced societies to become increasingly dependent on external energy sources.

Depending on factors like the climate, levels of traffic congestion, and pollution these energy level uses differ from society to society, and  it has allowed people who can afford this energy to live under otherwise unfavorable climate conditions.

Renewable energy is power harnessed from natural resources like tides, rain, wind and sunlight, and which can also be naturally replenished. Around nearly 20 percent of all global energy in 2009 came from renewable sources, compared to electricity generation which was around 19 percent.

Alternative Energy

Wind power is one of the most popular forms of alternative energy, and it is growing at the rate of 21 per cent every year. By the end of 2011, photovoltaic installations had increased by over 70 per cent worldwide, and presently, ethanol fuel from sugar cane now provides over 18 per cent of Brazil’s automotive fuel.

Alternative renewable energy systems have benefited from increased concerns surrounding the environment, and coupled with rising oil prices and governmental support, new and improved energy legislation continues to benefit countries all over the world. By the year 2030, scientists believe that nearly 100 per cent of the world’s energy will be able to be sourced from wind, solar power and hydroelectric energy solutions.

Solar

There are also a number of rural areas that have benefited from renewable technologies, even though many renewable energy projects are large-scale. In human development, sourcing energy is crucial, and globally, it’s estimated that over 3 million people now generate their own power from solar panels attached to their homes. Villages and small scale counties have started implement micro-hydro systems that provides power to the local community, and over 30 million households worldwide receive power in the form of bio gas.

Hydro

Hydroelectric energy is one of the oldest forms of harnessing energy, and there are hundreds of stations all over the world. This type of energy is created when the gravitational descent of a river is compressed into a single location, creating a place where concentrated pressure can be used to spin turbines, thus driving an electric generator.

There have been a number of unexpected results when it comes to hydroelectric energy however, and one such in the Amazon showed that a hydro dam generated nearly four times as much greenhouse gases than electricity production from oil. Results like these have driven scientists to the furthest reaches of our oceans to implement underwater turbines, removing the need for a dam and the subsequent greenhouse gas effect. Research into hydroelectricity has even shown that electricity can be stored in water reservoirs that at placed at different altitudes, through the process of pumped-storage hydroelectricity.

Written on behalf of ENER-G, they are an all encompassing renewable energy company who specialise in a variety of techniques ranging from landfill gas extraction, energy from waste and anaerobic digestion. Click here for some anaerobic digestion advice.

Image Credit: Creative Commons photo by Evi Christodoulou

We've talked about park lamps fueled by dog poop, and now a group of teens in Africa have developed a generator that runs on urine.

Yes, there's a bit of an ick factor any time we're talking bodily functions, but in areas where electricity is at a premium or not available at all, this innovation could make a huge impact on folks' quality of life. If you're reading this on a computer, chances are electricity doesn't feel like a luxury, but for millions of people the lights don't come on at the flip of a switch.

While turning the lights on might not seem like a big deal, we take electricity for granted in so many other ways, like heating and cooling our homes when the weather is sweltering or freezing. Or in hospitals, where electricity saves lives by powering medical equipment.

How it Works

The generator - showcased at this year's Africa Maker Faire - was developed by:

• Duro-Aina Adebola, age 14
• Akindele Abiola, age 14
• Faleke Oluwatoyin, age 14
• Bello Eniola age 15

One liter of urine can produce six hours of electricity in their generator using an electrolytic cell to separate the hydrogen from the urine. The hydrogen moves through a filtration system and liquid borax, a system that purifies the hydrogen gas so that it can power the generator.

Six hours of pee power means folks in rural and developing areas can generate their own electricity without petroleum products. Can you imagine the impact this could have if researchers could scale it up, so whole cities could run on pee power?

Images via Maker Faire Africa

Here in the developed world, we're lucky to have lots of eco-friendly and efficient roofing options, but in the third world most of those choices are out of reach. Researchers at the New York Institute of Technology are looking to change that and address some of the single use plastic problem at the same time with their plastic roof concept.

Using reclaimed plastic soda bottles and plastic pallets, they're working on a roof design that's well-insulated, lets in natural light, and is affordable. The project is called SodaBIB, and it could change lives for a lot of people. Jeff at Sustainablog explains:

...makeshift roofing of materials like corrugated tin often provides minimal protection in normal conditions… and often none when disasters like hurricanes strike.  These materials often trap and/or radiate heat, and provide no natural lighting, making for an uncomfortable and unhealthy living space.

Part of what makes this concept great is that the plastic waste used in its construction is already littering the areas that need it and that they're developing something that's easy to assemble.

The SodaBIB is still in development. They've built a small prototype that works great, but now the researchers are trying to raise money to create a full-scale version that's the size of a greenhouse. To create the roof, each pallet goes into a laser cutter that creates the sockets where the soda bottles screw in. Creating the pallets and assembling the prototype takes time and money, and they're looking for some help with the latter.

You can learn more about The SodaBIB Project over on their website, and if you'd like to donate to help support their efforts, check out their Kickstarter campaign.