According to a press release for the map, NYC spends $300M carting 600M tons of trash, often to places as far away as Virginia and Ohio. The sites on the map were selected as spots to help reduce both the expenditure of money and resources. “Beyond just shopping at thrift stores and recycling your discards, we New Yorkers have great opportunities to reduce our impact on the earth by taking what would otherwise be going to a landfill and finding a way to give it new life and a new worth,” said Aaron Reiss, the map’s designer.

The map is great because it illuminates the resources that are all around us that might help us live simpler, lower impact lives, but might otherwise go unnoticed.

For non-New Yorkers, the Open Green Map has almost 31K green sites around the world and is available online or as an iPhone app. Both the Less = More NYC map specifically and the Green Map in general demonstrate the power to technology to help save resources.

One question we have is why the “Less = More” Map is available as a print copy at all? The paper version has a mere 13 sites versus the online version’s 150 and counting. Considering the ubiquity of smartphones, one of the first ways of cutting waste might have been to not make a paper map (it is made of 100% recycled paper). Big, foldout maps seem to be going the way of the phonebook…but we digress.

Find pick up locations for the print version at www.facebook.com/Less.is.More.NYC. Or send a SASE to Less = More Green Map, 220A East 4th St., NYC 10009 for a print version.

Fashion: A: a prevailing custom, usage, or style; B: the prevailing style (as in dress) during a particular time.

Americans love their clothes–the average family spends $1700 annually on them, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Girls and women average $663 dollars a year and men and boys $382. While these numbers are lower than years past, our affordable duds depend on cheap, often exploitive labor practices and lax environmental safeguards from the countries that provide them. According to the World Wildlife Foundation, “2.4% of the world’s crop land is planted with cotton and yet it accounts for 24% and 11% of the global sales of insecticide and pesticides respectively.”

But the expense and questionable origins of our clothes might be easier to overlook if we only bought what we needed. Such is not the case. A recent Wall Street Journal article claimed that most people only wear about 20% of the clothes in their closet (the percentage of unworn clothes is greater with women than men). If the utilitarian part of our wardrobe is only 20% of the total, what drives us to buy that other 80%?

Fashion–that ever-changing, impossible-to-pin-down look–is often what drives our decision to buy stuff we don’t need or quickly tire of. Granted, many of us follow fashion by professional necessity. But many times our desire to be fashionable is driven by a need look good and, by extension, feel good. We might feel emboldened by our new, fashionable outfit…until that outfit is unfashionable.

There’s a reason people say they are “slaves to fashion”–they feel bound to keep hitting a moving target. Just when we think we the mark, it’s moved.

If you’re interested in escaping the shackles of fashion or just want to save money and natural resources, we have a couple suggestions:

1. Try a uniform of mostly classic cut, muted clothing. We’ve covered that topic at length here before. Uniforms save time, space and money.
2. Realize that confidence makes the outfit, not the other way around. We have seen few better treatises on this point than Mackelmore and Ryan Lewis’ “Thrift Shop” (G-rated video above). They show that both a $50 Prada t-shirt or a $5 thrift shop polyester button down can make you look and feel great when your right attitude is right. If either work, your pocketbook and planet might prefer you choose the button down.

IPPINKA (pronounced ee-pink-eh) has one of the highest concentrations of useful, well-thought-out and designed products of most any store we’ve seen. Much like LifeEdited, the shop has a paradoxical relationship with stuff. The Dieter-Rams-inspired company describe their ethos like this:

IPPINKA wants you to consume less. We want to help you choose products that will serve you for a long time, instead of constantly buying similar products to replace each other.

Based on the stuff they carry, we believe them. We recently picked up a few products for the LifeEdited Apartment including a collapsible latex kettle (above), reusable, biodegradable Abeego food wraps (replaces plastic wrap) and a pour spout that acts as instant strainer for any pot.

Other objects we’ve coveted are the thin Japanese KONTEX towels, some gorgeous Lithuanian linens, a ceiling mounted drying rack and a clever tea mug that allows you to steep whole leaves without a separate strainer. I say “coveted” as IPPINKA stocks limited quantities and if you don’t buy something when you see it, it might be gone the next day. It’s sort of like a daily menu for products.

The site also gives its visitors the opportunity to vote on upcoming products to gauge whether they’re worth carrying or not.

To us, IPPINKA represents an ideal form of consumerism. Rather than urging its customers to spend as much as possible on stuff useful or not, IPPINKA humbly offers up their products saying, more or less, “If you must buy something, it should probably be this.” Check out more at www.ippinka.com.

[Full disclosure: the author received a complimentary set of the Abeego food wraps from IPPINKA...but that was it.]

With the growing popularity of micro-apartments and small space living, I fared forth in high hopes this year. Unfortunately, the small-space offerings–with the few exceptions noted below–were few and far between. The fact is there is still big money in big spaces. There were, however, a few things that piqued my interest.

One of my favorite items was a modular piece of furniture by the company Cezign. It’s not small space designed per se, but the design could adapt to any space. The all-American made rectangles are covered in beautiful wool felt and can be configured in many different ways–from a bed to couch to…whatever. One small drawback (don’t laugh): They retail for $900…each. Considering you’d need three to six to make a functional piece of furniture, that’d add up quick.

Folditure–the exotic looking, super-thin-packing furniture company–has a new chair called the Tilt. When folded, it’s a mere .62″. The Tilt is slightly more conventional looking than the company’s other offerings. While the aesthetics might not be everyone’s cup of tea, the chair felt solid and its ability to hang in a closet is pretty nifty.

A company called Monstrans offered another flatpack chair made of bamboo ply. I was a bit suspicious of its sturdiness so I asked their representative about its weight load. He responded that it’s sold as an art piece, meaning it might not be the best seat in the house for your bigger friends. He did say that the chair has been subjected to a couple years of heavy use without problems, and it did feel solid.

Semi-Handmade makes high quality replacement doors for IKEA cabinets, which is to spaces big or small. When building the LifeEdited apartment, by far the most expensive material cost was the custom cabinetry. We know IKEA stuff isn’t the world’s best, but their prices are so compelling that many of us end up using the big blue’s cabinets anyway. Semi-Handmade’s doors feature natural veneers like walnut and reclaimed barn wood on top of MDF. They look pretty decent and with prices starting around 30% more than IKEA’s top of the line stuff (which aren’t that expensive), it’s can save you a ton over custom, while achieving a custom-quality look. Obviously this would work well for kitchen cabinetry, but also built-in cabinets for a small space.

Finally, there was Itsy Bitsy Ritzy Shop. As you might be able to glean from their name, IBRS makes high end furniture proportionate to small spaces. They make shallow banquettes with storage, tiny sofa beds, modestly proportioned dressers, under-bed storage drawers and more. On their site, they feature a fully functional 216 sq ft room–a sign that they are serious about small. Their furniture is all made in Connecticut out of solid wood (I didn’t catch the prices, but imagine they’re steep). What’s cool about IBRS is they treat small spaces as a legitimate places to live–not simply places to jam hand-me-down, oversized crap. This seriousness, we hope, is a sign of things to come.

This is by no means a full report of all the great stuff at ICFF–just one with the small space in mind. Let’s hope next year brings even more interesting designs for the compact home.

In a smart move, pocket neighborhoods are designed to promote community but also have enough autonomy and privacy for members to do their own thing. One particular design flourish that supports this is the orientation of the houses. By nesting the houses–i.e. the ‘open’ part of one house like its entrance faces the ‘closed’ part of another like its side or back–separation is created without a big yard. Strategic use of low fences and perennials create further barriers for the tightly spaced houses.

Pocket neighborhood houses need not be new and they can be any style, as indicated on PN’s website:

Residences in a pocket neighborhood can be any style — Craftsman Cottage, Contemporary, Spanish Mission, Screaming Solar or Modern Modular. They can be detached single-family houses, attached townhouses, or clusters of urban apartments. The key idea is that a limited number of nearby neighbors gather around a shared commons that they all care for. There are a number of design principles that make pocket neighborhoods successful, but style is not one of them.

Those design principles include a cap on the number of houses in the neighborhood (12 max, but multiple clusters can be joined by walkways), no cars or traffic in the commons, no parking in front of the houses and the active rooms like porches should face the common spaces.

While there are a number of pocket neighborhoods with larger houses, Ross Chapin Architects (RCA) seems to promote “cottage style houses” as the optimal house-style for the neighborhoods. The PN site explains why:

If houses are too large, residents tend to spend all their time indoors. With slightly snug houses, the porch, gardens and shared common buildings get used more, which fosters connection among neighbors. As well, a house that is ‘not so big’ is more likely to be fully lived in and cared for.

These cottages are less than 1000 sq ft and include design elements like large windows and built-in cabinetry that make the space feel larger and use every square inch of space to its fullest capacity. This layout of multiple small homes clustered together reminds us of the upcoming Napoleon Complex by Four Lights.

So far RCA has helped build 13 pocket neighborhoods in the northwest. They take pains to say they are an architecture firm, not a developer, and that there are numerous zoning issues that make establishing a pocket neighborhood difficult in certain areas. They have resources for developers and a book if you’re interested in establishing a pocket community of your own.

We see the pocket neighborhood as a great option for establishing a strong community while using minimal resources and being adaptable to environments ranging from urban to rural.

Do you have firsthand experience with pocket neighborhoods or similar communities? If so, let us know your thoughts in our comments section.

images via Pocket neighborhoods

Like the East Village loft by Jordan Parnass or the Spiritual Mode living thingy, the Bordeaux space relies on a freestanding structure that houses the bathroom, sleeping loft and storage rather than containing these things in walled-off rooms and closets. These structures are ideal for raw, open spaces, and like they mention in the video, they keep all the functional parts of the house compact, creating an open feel in the rest of the small space. They also make good use vertical space–important here because they could not build higher than one story due to building code preserving the historic integrity of the neighborhood.

Creative adaptation of existing structures is a vitally important topic in looking at the future of architecture. While it’s cool to build amazing new houses, most of the homes of the future are already here; some, like this one, have been around for hundreds of years.

Via Fair Companies

images via Matthieu de Marien

Now Schindelhauer has released a production version of the ThinBike. The bike has evolved quite a bit from Graham’s steed. There is now a front disk brake for superior stopping. It has 24″ inch wheels like those on a cruiser BMX that are stronger and quicker than the previous model’s 700c wheels. It has a two-speed SRAM Automatix shifting system in the event you encounter a hill or bridge. There is a LightSKIN seatpost with integrated LED lights. And it comes with its own proprietary bike rack. Carried over from the previous version are a lightweight aluminum frame (though in different geometry) and a Gates Carbon Drive drivetrain. With its smaller wheels, improved braking, greaseless drivetrain and ease of storage, the new ThinBike will undoubtably make an awesome urban bomber.

And more good news: You can get the bike in the US through Belt Drive Bikes for $1488.00. We look forward to riding ours in the near future. We’ll let you know how it goes.

Similar to the book “Your Money or Your Life“, the MMM blog dolls out doses of financial realism along with practical advice. Unlike the book, it’s doled out in easy-to-digest blog-post portions and written in a very funny prose style.

He lays out the problem, which is the common idea that:

Life is hard and expensive, so you should keep your nose to the grindstone, clip coupons, save hard for your kids’ college educations, and save any tiny slice of your salary that remains into a 401(k) plan. And pray that nothing goes wrong in the 40 years of career work that it will take to get yourself enough savings to enjoy a brief retirement.

Instead, he proposes that our lifestyles are the problem, saying:

Your current middle-class life is an Exploding Volcano of Wastefulness, and by learning to see the truth in this statement, you will easily be able to cut your expenses in half – leaving you saving half of your income. Or two thirds, or more.

He elucidates the particulars of this wasteful behavior and shares the tools that have enabled him to get his household expenses down to $27K/year. He also runs through case-studies submitted by his readers.

His prescription is more or less as follows:

Getting rid of your Debt Emergency if you have one. Live close to work. Move to another city if you enjoy adventure. Don’t borrow money for cars, and don’t buy stupid ones. Ride a bike wherever you can. Cancel your TV service. Stop wasting money on groceries. Give your kids the opportunity to achieve greatness without being pampered. Lose the overpriced cell phones. Learn to appreciate the life-boosting joy of using your own body to get things done. Learn to mock convenience. Practice optimism.

All of the above topics he expands on at length in his highly readable style.

If you don’t think MMM is on point, consider that the average American household carries $7,073 of debt, according to the US Census. If you just look households that carry credit card debt versus all households, that number rises to $15,162. Average household mortgage debt is $147,967 and average student loan debt is $33,445. These hefty numbers are coupled our current 3.7% personal savings rate; compare that to the 7.5% in the early 1950s and 10.5% percent in the early 1980s. Real incomes have increased over the last several decades, but the income distribution has been far from equal, with small populations enjoying the bulk of the increases, so many people find it hard to get in the black.

While rising costs for things like health insurance, housing and school surely account for much of the rising debt and falling savings, much of the blame–according to MMM–is attributable to our fiscally uninformed, lavish, consumer-obsessed lifestyles whose spending behavior is grossly mismatched with our income. It’s also mismatched with our values–spending money on stuff that has little bearing on our long-term happiness.

Check out more at www.mrmoneymustache.com

Image Rain of Money via Shutterstock

The obvious recourse for all of us who want more physical energy is to quit our jobs and watch documentaries all day. Or maybe, just maybe we can curb the amount of thinking we do in the day.

We have looked at how meditation and doing nothing might actually increase our levels of productivity at work by training our minds to focus in the face of distracting thoughts. This ability to focus and pay attention is often called “mindfulness”–it’s not the elimination of thought so much as it’s the ability to be absorbed in what we’re doing and only what we’re doing. If we’re writing, write. If we’re designing, design. And so on. While this falls far outside the scope of the study, we could imagine that our physical capacities–even if it was only our perception of what our physical capacities were–would be greater if our thoughts were only concerned with the things we’re doing rather than the contents of the 20 open tabs in our browser or the texts on our phone or that fight we had with a friend. Whether through meditation or avoiding indulging in distraction, we might all feel more energetic and get more done by limiting our thoughts to the task at hand.

Via PopSci

Brain Melting image via Shutterstock

One of the most useful features is that Kevo lets you lend your keys remotely. You can send your virtual keys to a houseguest, neighbors or contractor via your phone instantly. Other features include:

• Military grade PKI encryption to prevent hacking into phone (we’re assuming that’s a good level of encryption).
• Automatic deactivation once you’re in the house, so someone can’t open the door while you’re at home.
• If you lose your phone, you can log into the Kevo app via someone else’s phone to open your door. You can also log into their web portal to disable key on your lost phone.
• Multiple low battery warnings. Its four AA batteries are said to last about a year.
• Standard slot for normal key.

For it’s first release, Kevo is only supported on the iPhone 4S and 5, though we imagine that will change. For non-iPhoners, there is either the standard key or a fob (one is included with purchase) that acts the same thing as the phone.

We do wonder whether Kevo will be like radio/showerhead, where in a few years, when new phones are totally incompatible with the lock, you have this weird lock surrounded by a bunch of LEDs. Then again, having a key-free existence is mighty tempting, as is being able to lend keys to people from anywhere in the world that has wifi. Also, since Kevo works off of Bluetooth, there’s a good chance that the system will be technologically relevant for a good while.

According to Mashable, Kevo will be taking pre-orders in June and shipping later in summer. The price will be around $249.