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?

After twelve years of promoting eco-conscious living and valiant efforts at keeping their carbon footprint low, the Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival has once again raised the green bar.

This week, Bonnaroo and it's partners announced the installation of its first permanent solar array. Although the use of PV panels and solar-powered stages is not new to the festival circuit, Bonnaroo is once again pioneering the way for eco-minded music festivals. Generating more than 61,000 kWh per year, this system will mark the first of it’s kind for any US musical festival.

To read more details about Bonnaroo's environmental programs and the new solar array check out our sister site, Green Up Music.

These plastic bottle structures turn waste into something useful again!

Single-use plastic bottles are a huge environmental problem. They take hundreds of years to degrade, and they pollute our oceans, beaches, and cities. We need to start adopting reusable replacements for things like plastic water bottles, but in the meantime that waste just piles up in our environment and our landfills.

Luckily, there are some savvy artists and designers out there making the best of this bad situation. Check out these 5 beautiful examples of plastic bottle design!

1) Fish Sculpture on Las Olas Beach

This 35 foot wide, 15 foot high water bottle sculpture lights up from the inside and makes a statement about plastic waste's impact on our world's oceans. It's on display through February 2013 on Las Olas Beach in Fort Lauderdale.

2) Plastic Bottle House

Jasmine Zimmerman constructed this beautiful sun dome using discarded plastic bottles.

3) Soda Bottle Canopy

Designer Garth Britzman created this beautiful canopy by filling empty soda bottles with colored water and suspending them. You can see another photo showing how the bottles are hung at the very top of this page.

4) Undersea Sculpture

This art installation by Aurora Robson uses upwards of 20,000 discarded plastic bottles.

5) Plastic Bottle Sphere

The company Sodastream created this plastic sphere from 562 empty plastic bottles to draw attention to how much plastic waste bottled water generates.

Have you seen any amazing art pieces made from discarded plastic bottles? Tell us about them in the comments!

My mom sent me this photo of an art installation on Las Olas Beach in south Florida. It's a pair of giant fish sculpted using hundreds of empty plastic bottles!

The sculpture uses hundreds of empty water bottles and makes a strong statement about consumerism, waste, and single use plastic. The city installed the piece in late November as part of Fort Lauderdale's "Light Up the Beach" event, and the sculpture will be up until February 2013.

The fish light up from the inside, and they stand 35 feet wide by 15 feet high.

I grew up in south Florida, and I can tell you first hand that the beaches there have a huge problem with plastic litter. Just last year, Miami banned plastic straws in to-go drinks from hotels to try tackling some of the plastic waste that litters south Florida's beaches, and plastic water bottles are another huge problem. Locals and tourists alike tote disposable plastic bottles to stay hydrated in the hot summers, and often these bottles get left behind when they go.

From the beach, it's a quick trip for those bottles to end up in the ocean, where they eventually join one of the plastic gyres: dead zones in the ocean where plastic pollution makes the waters too toxic to support marine life.

Hopefully, the larger-than-life fish sculptures will strike folks as more than a curiosity. The hundreds of used plastic bottles represent the waste that litters south Florida's beaches and the world's oceans. Maybe it will move some people to start bringing a reusable bottle or - at the very least - recycling those single-use plastic bottles.

Image Credits: Pam Levine; Light Up Fort Lauderdale

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