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Five years ago, director Chris Paine ruffled a few feathers with Who Killed the Electric Car, a blockbuster documentary that exposed the development and mothballing of electric vehicles in the early 2000s. Now, with the first mass produced electric cars on the road, Paine is back with Revenge of the Electric Car, a behind-the-scenes exploration of the nascent EV industry.......read more
Battery-powered semi trucks? Trains that pick up cars full of passengers without stopping? Personal mobility capsules that attach to planes, trains, and boats? Sound a little far-fetched? Well it may be less sci-fi than you think, according to this video commissioned by Alstom. The animated clip, produced by Paris-based studio Le 7e bureau, envisions a prospective transportation future......read more
In 2000, Bill Ford spearheaded a sustainability report for the company his great-grandfather founded nearly a century earlier. "Sustainability issues are neither incidental nor avoidable," he wrote in the report, "they are at the heart of our business." At the time, the green ideas were not well-received. Today, in the wake of rising fuel prices and global economic crisis, they are at the center......read more
Nick Gentry's floppy disk paintings are musings on throwaway culture and technological change. The London artist assembled this video of his work, scored by a track from UK beat maestro, Burial. From Nick's artist's statement: "Since graduating from Central St Martins in 2006, the focus has been to explore how technological advancement is affecting society. Throughout history,......read more
If necessity is the mother of invention, then the state of the environment should be driving innovation around the world. And indeed it is. In our new series "The Big SHFT: 10 Innovators Changing Our World," we team up with Ford Motor Company to profile leading innovators who are shaping new sustainable businesses and influencing positive change around the world. Executive produced by SHFT......read more
Tom Szaky is the quintessential eco-entrepreneur. While a freshman at Princeton, Szaky founded a company that recycles garbage into plant fertilizer, then packages it in discarded soda bottles. Fast forward five years, and TerraCycle Plant Food is available in every Home Depot, Target, Wal-Mart, and more than 3000 other locations. Today, TerraCycle is finding new uses for trash, creating products......read more
If there was a hall of fame for sustainable business, Dr. Mike Biddle would be one its first inductees. Twenty years ago, the trailblazing plastics engineer launched MBA Polymers in his garage. He was determined to prove that complex polymers from consumer plastics could be recycled into useful raw materials. Mike developed a patented series of techniques for separating and refining plastic waste......read more
Feeling a little down about the state of the planet? Here's a two-minute slice of techno-optimism for you. Filmmaker Michael Marantz assembled "The Future Is Ours" from a bunch of clips he found on the net, and the result is this stirring tribute to the people pushing humanity ahead into the future. According to Marantz, "We need to be inspired by the immense possibilities of the future and......read more
Ten years ago, when Harrison Dillon and his partners founded Solazyme in a garage in Palo Alto, CA, their goal was to create clean, renewable diesel fuel from algae. And so they did. But it was clear after a couple of years that they needed to find other applications for algae-based biofuel to make their business fly. Today, the San Francisco-based company's technology is being used to......read more
There is only a handful of things that literally every human on earth loves, and they include lasers, forests, and music. Creative studio Marshmallow Laser Feast combined all three of those wonderful things with "Laser Forest," a real-time interactive experience created for STRP Biennale in Eindhoven, Netherlands earlier this year. Using drones, laser beams, projection mapping, and custom tools,......read more
