Even mighty Walmart can't get a handle on "zero waste" when it comes to the apparel it sells, reports Stephanie Rosenbloom in the New York Times (8/18/10). It's an issue since "about 15 to 20 percent of the fabric used to produce clothing winds up in landfills because it's cheaper to dump the scraps than to recycle them." Where Walmart has used its clout to support compact fluorescents and concentrated detergents, it apparently hasn't yet exerted as much muscle where clothing is concerned.

Manufacturers face other obstacles, as a zero-waste goal likely would involve "re-engineering the supply line," and "overhauling a factory is obviously expensive." But that's not stopping zero-waste zealots like Timo Rissanen, co-author of "Shaping Sustainable Fashion," who says he is re-learning how to design, scrap-free. One technique involves creating a pattern that fits together like a jigsaw puzzle. Another avoids cutting the fabric altogether, and instead drapes it over a mannequin to be tucked and sewn.

Parsons the New School for Design is also now offering a course in zero waste in which students will be challenged "to figure out how to create zero-waste jeans without compromising style." This includes not only fabric waste, but also "the dyes added only to be washed out again, the energy used to transport the denim all over the world, the packaging, and the gallons of water used by consumers to clean the jeans." The winning design will be manufactured by Loomstate, an organic fashion label, and sold at Barneys New York next spring.

Frito-Lay is making more noise than it would like with its newly biodegradable bag of solar-baked chips, reports Suzanne Vranica in the Wall Street Journal (8/19/10). Frito might have expected nothing but praise for its new bag design for its Sun Chips brand (commercial). After all, the estimated life-span of a traditional snack-chip bag, which is made of "polymers such as polyproylene and polyethylene," could be as long as 100 years.

But the new Sun Chips bag, which was introduced in January, is made of polylactic acid, "which fully decomposes in about 14 weeks when placed in a hot, active, compost pile." The only problem with this is that the new bag is really, really noisy. It is so noisy that J. Scot Heathman, an Air Force pilot, tested its loudness using a RadioShack sound meter. He squeezed the bag and recorded it at 95 decibels (video). That compares to 77 decibels for an environmentally-unfriendly bag.

Indeed, Frito's new bag is so noisy that there's even a Facebook group called, "Sorry But I Can't Hear You Over This Sun Chips Bag," with more than 30,000 fans. The real issue is that the noisy bag may be hurting Sun Chips sales, which have been in decline since its introduction. But Frito is not backing off, and is now posting at-shelf signs reading, "Yes, the bag is loud, that's what change sounds like." However, a Frito engineer admits he's working on developing a quieter, crunch-free, biodegradable chips bag.

"There's something going on with bamboo bikes," says Jay Townley in a New York Times piece by Malia Wollan (8/12/10). "They're catching on with urban and commuting cyclists," adds Jay, a market researcher. Bamboo bikes are still a relative rarity, but some cyclists like both the bike's "eco-credibility" as well as their distinctive look. Unlike steel, bamboo grows like a weed and can be composted. But interestingly, it has a "strength-to-weight ratio similar to that of steel."

Some cyclists are willing to pay dearly for this: "Nick Frey, owner of Boo Bicycles, builds and sells high-performance bamboo-frame bicycles ... ranging from $3,000 for just the frame to $10,000 for a tricked-out racer." Ironically, super-cheap bamboo bikes -- selling for about $60 each -- will soon be built in Ghana, as part of the Bamboo Bike Project sponsored by Columbia University. Other enthusiasts are taking a do-it-yourself approach, using one of the "step-by-step, how-to-build-a-bamboo-bike guides on the Instructables web site."

Marty Odlin of the Bamboo Bike Studio in (where else) Brooklyn, offers bamboo bike-building workshops. Marty and his students harvest their own bamboo "from patches on the property of landowners who eagerly granted permission to anyone willing to assist in taming the plant ... Because of high demand, the studio now orders bulk shipments of bamboo from Mexico." He also has created a "mail-order, do-it-yourself bamboo bike kit." Other bamboo bike makers include Signature Cycles, Renovo Design, Panda Bicycles, Organic Bikes and Calfee Design.

Getting an average of 76 miles per gallon, Alaska Airlines is America's most fuel-efficient airline, reports Scott McCartney in the Wall Street Journal (8/12/10). Of course, unlike with cars, the mileage for planes is measured on a per-seat basis. That's still pretty good, relatively. However Alaska's achievement is not purely a function of flying more fuel-efficient planes than some of its competitors. While it is true that Alaska's fleet of 737s averages just eight years old, and new jets tend to be more fuel efficient than older ones, other factors apply.

For one thing, Alaska "flies primarily on the West Coast, with fewer fuel-burning delays." The airline also "installed smaller water tanks on planes to save weight, and took out some insulation blankets that soaked up water condensation but weren't needed for aircraft safety." It changed its on-ground procedures "so that electrical power is plugged into arriving flights within five or ten seconds of setting the parking brakes, letting pilots shut down engines faster."

Alaska has also "pioneered satellite-navigation routing ... that enables shorter arrival and departure routes ... and can let planes essentially coast into landing from high altitude, rather than a series of descents and leveling off by powering up engines." That alone saved some "250,158 gallons of fuel." All told, Alaska Airlines is saving about "1.8 million gallons of gas a year" and is burning "about the same amount of fuel in 2009 as it did in 2000 -- just over 300 million gallons ... but the airline was 33 percent bigger in terms of available seat miles than it was nine years ago," when its mpg was just 57.

"The wealthy and the powerful have always been the first to acquire new kinds of light and have always had more of it than others," writes Jane Brox in "Brilliant," as reviewed by Elizabeth Royte in the New York Times (7/31/10). Jane chronicles the history of light, going back 40,000 years, when Lascaux cave-painters "made lamps of animal fat puddled in hollowed-out stone" so they could see what they were painting. Over the years, humans have "lighted their way with corralled fireflies, torches of burning pine knots, or dried salmon on a stick."

And you thought compact fluorescents sucked. On the Sheltland Islands, people used to stick a wick down a dead bird's throat, mount it on a clay base and light up. When times were really tough, folks sometimes had to make a choice between burning their "candles" and eating them. But Jane's book is really more about "the cultural and psychological changes wrought by more and better light to our eventual dependence on coal-gas and the electric utilities."

With the advent of street lights, for instance, "the illuminated city and the glamour and liveliness of its night came to define almost completely what it meant to be urban and urbane." This made rural residents feel left behind, especially "after rural free delivery began distributing catalogs and magazines depicting electric irons, washers and lamps." This illumination gap persists to this day in developing countries and Jane argues for more light there and less elsewhere, quoting Cyril of Jerusalem, who asked, "What [is] more helpful to wisdom than the night?"

Scientists at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) are working on creating "a miniature sun right here on earth," reports Michael Judge in the Wall Street Journal (7/16/10). What they're working on is nuclear fusion, and the goal is energy independence. "Fusion is actually the ultimate form of solar power because it makes energy the exact same way the sun does," says Dr. M. Sanjayan. Basically that means smashing "hydrogen atoms together with such force that they fuse, releasing enormous amounts of energy as heat."

The NIF's Ed Moses makes it sound easy: "By just taking the molecules of hydrogen and H2O we can get a huge amount of energy," he says. But it isn't: NIF's scientists and others have been working on nuclear fusion for "more than 50 years," spending "billions of dollars," but so far no luck. Ed hopes nuclear fusion's feasibility might be validated within the next two years and Dr. Sanjayan thinks it must be.

"This is what it's going to take to solve our energy problems," he says. "Hundreds, thousands of attempts made by hundreds, thousands of people until one day, maybe, they hit pay dirt." If not, Japanese scientists are working on "solar panels that beam down solar energy" from outer space. Austrialians hope to drill for geothermal energy deep below the earth's crust, and Americans are designing underwater turbines for New York's East River. These and other energy innovations were recently featured in "Powering the Future" on the Discovery Channel.

"Walmart can move quicker than probably any government on the planet," says Jeffrey Hollender of Seventh Generation, in a Wall Street Journal piece by Ellen Byron (8/26/10). These are startling words from a guy who once said that "hell would freeze over" before he would do business with Walmart. Jeffrey's company, which makes "environmentally-friendly household products" may indeed seem to be a strange bedfellow for Walmart, but all that's changed now.

"What I realized is if you could get Walmart moving quicker and more aggressively in this direction, we'd be able to solve the challenges we're facing much more quickly and much more efficiently," says Jeffrey. And so, beginning "next month, Seventh Generation staples, including laundry detergent, dish soap and all-purpose sprays, will be sold in about 1,500 Walmart stores. By September, other cleaners, diapers and baby wipes will be available on Walmart dot-com.

"We've shifted dramatically in the way we see the world," says Jeffrey. Part of that shift includes adjusting its prices to Walmart-friendly levels, "so that its products cost as much or only slightly more than the leading national brands." The move promises to help Seventh Generation tap into the great American mainstream while giving Walmart perhaps a bit more "green cred." Both companies sense great growth potential: "Sales of green household and laundry cleaning products rose to $557 million last year, having more than tripled since 2005," according to Packaged Facts.

Apparel makers are using an "Eco Index" to go greener, but aren't quite ready to share their scores with consumers, reports Christina Binkley in the Wall Street Journal (7/22/10). The "Eco Index" is a software program that's been under development for about three years by "roughly 100 well-known apparel brands and retailers." It's designed "to help them measure the environmental impact of their apparel and footwear, from raw materials to garbage dump."

The garbage dump is a big one: "Americans tossed out 12.4 million tons of textiles in 2008 -- a number that has risen far faster than other sources of trash," according to the EPA. Levi's, in response, now uses its care tags to ask consumers to donate old clothes to Goodwill, which earns them some brownie points on the Eco Index. This doesn't necessarily make Levi's jeans any greener, and some question whether the Eco Index methodology -- which is based on information provided, but not proven, by the manufacturers and their suppliers -- is valid.

Another big question is if, and how, to communicate scores to consumers. The prevailing opinion is that the scores need to be presented in the same way by everyone, either by "a single number on a hang tag" or perhaps by posting information online. In the meantime, Levi's says that the program has prompted a streamlining of its transportation routes as well as packaging reduction. Timberland now awards gold, silver or bronze stars to suppliers who improve their environmental standards. "I now have tanneries fighting over the points needed to get a silver rating," says Timberland's Betsy Blaisdell.

Three years ago, on the cover of the Hub's July issue -- always our "brand identity" issue -- we featured BP (link). We would laugh about the irony if the reality weren't so tragic. An oil company bent on projecting a "green" image certainly made for a good story at the time. It's hard to resist the allure of such a narrative when success might make a real difference in the world.

Clearly that will never happen when the storyline is just a tactical cause-marketing come-on that nobody believes is for real. For a brand to re-badge itself as completely as BP apparently had once hoped requires a profound cultural shift that evidently never happened there. For me, the memorable thing about our BP story was the way Ann Hand, then its marketing chief, framed it. Ann clearly was proud of Helios House, which was BP's "sustainable" gas station. But her main focus was less on "green marketing" than on creating a better customer experience.

"It just felt like it was a worthy cause to try to get after the guest experience rather than just accepting the self-fulfilling prophecy that buying gas is a bad customer experience," she said. Had BP succeeded in this modest goal, it wouldn't have prevented the oil spill. But we can still give Ann Hand credit for recognizing that improving a brand's identity can be as simple as making something as mundane as filling your gas tank more pleasant. That doesn't help the planet right now, but it's a cause worth considering.

Yokohama Tire is making tires using "a processing oil that is derived from orange peels," reports Steven Ashley in the New York Times (6/20/10). Gives a whole new meaning to "peel out." Yokohama is one of a number of tire-makers finding ways to reduce the amount of petrochemicals in its products. It sources its orange peels from a nearby orange-juice factory.

The coolest part is that "the orange oil compound works to reduce rolling resistance by about a fifth over conventional treads ... but in cornering and braking maneuvers it quickly generates heat that softens the rubber tread to deliver better grip." Not to be outdone, Michelin makes a tire that "uses sunflower oil in its formulation for improved traction at low temperatures and shorter braking distances in the wet."

While admirable, such efforts have far less environmental impact than simply making the tires more fuel efficient. "Only 12 percent of the carbon dioxide emissions associated with tires arise from the raw materials and manufacturing," says Forrest Patterson of Michelin. About 86 percent is related to fuel consumption. There's also the environmental impact of the "300 million tires that domestic drivers discard each year." The tires can be re-used for any number of purposes and "some of these recycled materials are reused in tires."