Image source: Ecologic Products

Not that we are advocating for a throw-away culture, but if you happen to be hosting a holiday party and have more guests than tableware, why not try the Ecologic tableware made from 100% organic plant fiber. The bowls and plates are made to last for years, but are healthy enough that they can be thrown in your compost bin when you are done.

More images after the jump.

The short and sweet answer is yes.

One of those "will-you or won't-you?" questions this season may well be around holiday greeting cards. Sending no cards at all is obviously the greenest option, but not very festive. If you've always sent paper-based cards, you may feel that guilty tug to continue the tradition. If you are dedicated to sending e-cards...continue! Which type of greeting is greener - e-cards or paper-based? That question's not quite as fraught with difficulty as the old "paper versus plastic" conundrum. E-cards are more energy-efficient than paper cards. However, having options is always good, so hit the jump to see two great choices.

Recent Comment by Anthony : ""According to Mr. Electricity, the average laptop computer uses 140-330 watts, or about..." [read]

James Russell, architecture critic for Bloomberg, should have been at the Re-Imagining Cities: Urban Design after the age of Oil conference last week, because he certainly has the right idea. He concurs with this writer that the solutions for building in a world with expensive oil won't be high tech but simple and logical, things we have known for centuries and have just ignored. He writes:

Americans finally may have understood the relationship of oil supply and demand. If you want fuel to be cheap, you have to use less of it. For all the talk of achieving energy independence through drilling, solar or wind, it's conservation -- even without a concerted, coordinated national effort -- that has proven to be the quickest route.

That's why green-design efforts won't stop, especially in the heating-oil dependent Northeast.

TreeHugger readers have a love/hate relationship with London designer Ross Lovegrove; most loved his solar trees and hated his car on a stick. He is at it again with his Alpine Capsule,

A compact shelter where one may spend the evening admiring the stars and the beautiful surrounding mountain range. It would offer the opportunity of overnight stays within a spectacular 360 degree view.

On Planet Green, Kelly is cooking up a series of one pot meals. She tries to find cooking techniques and recipes for people without a lot of time (who usually buy too much takeout) or money (not uncommon these days) so these meals are "fast, easy, nutritious, delicious and cheap."

What she and her readers need is the Pot Plate, designed by Joong-Ho Choi & Hyun-Soo Choi to reduce the number of dishes and the space required for them all. You cook your food inside and used the compartmentalized lid as a serving tray.

We have been showing some of the work of students at London's Architectural Association School of Architecture, where they were looking at models for integrating food production into the fabric of the city.

Taebeom Kim envisions a Gastronomic Garden. Pruned writes:

Of the four projects, this is the least site-specific and therefore hardest to determine how well it fits into the city or if its contextual engagement is, per the studio brief, primarily urban. Is it in London or could we even be in the countryside? One has to give it a generous benefit of a doubt to accept that it wasn't arbitrarily plopped into place.

My bike and I are off to Boston for the Greenbuild International Conference and Expo, to see eight hundred exhibitors, dozens of speakers ranging from Archbishop Desmond Tutu to Van Jones and Bill McKibben, with Bill Clinton thrown in. It's huge, and every hotel room in Boston is booked.

Yet 15 years ago it might have been held in a phone booth; the green building movement was tiny and disorganized. There were no standards for green buildings, no rating systems, no LEED. Now the US Green Building Council has marked the 15 years since its founding with a series of videos, starting with Do We Have the Will, shown above.

Danish Architect/Planner Jan Gehl and Janette Sadik-Khan of the NY DOT recently prepared a report for New York City called "World Class Streets" (PDF here). It suggests that "a vastly disproportionate amount of space is allocated to parking cars than to public seating spaces." For example, Main Street in Flushing squeezes twice as many pedestrians into one-third of the space.