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Latest Eco Homes

Lite-House Surfdale Development 9 Aug 10 Strawbale Post & Beam Home with Views 9 Jul 10 eco healthy home in peaceful valley 27 Jun 10 Feng shui and passive solar eco home 12 May 10 Khandallah energy efficiency rental 3 May 10 For Sale: Beautiful straw bale lifestyle home on a hideaway 1.2 ha private retreat, Gisborne 28 Apr 10 Totarabank 21 Apr 10 Passive Solar House: Nelson (FOR SALE) 20 Apr 10 Profile your eco house

Latest Eco News

Urban Rooftop Garden (Video) 1 Sep 10 Living, Growing Roofs Beginning to Sprout in Aotearoa 31 Aug 10 End of fossel fuels? 30 Aug 10 Weekly Eco Market in New Brighton (Christchurch) 29 Aug 10 Ecobob Bi-Weekly Top 10 - 11th Edition 27 Aug 10 Submit news

Upcoming Events

Towards Renewable Energy 4 Sep 10 Sustainability Speakers Series 2010 7 Sep 10 Earthbuilding Workshop - Nelson 10 Sep 10 - 12 Sep 10 Eco Home Tour - Gisborne 26 Sep 10 2010 Earthbuilding Conference & Tour 24 Oct 10 Submit an event

Latest Articles

Sustainable living in a city 30 Aug 10 Building the Future - BRANZ 7 Dec 09 Livingroofs.org.nz - NZ guide to living roofs 7 Sep 09 Gardens for Kids 19 Aug 09 Throw a Green Birthday Party 19 Aug 09 Good Wood Guide 22 Jun 09 Attracting Bees to your Garden 28 May 09 How to Store your Garden Harvest 27 May 09 Submit an article

Ecobob - Eco friendly living in NZ

Find information on environmentally friendly products and services, eco houses, sustainable design and more.

Eco products in our green directory include green cleaning products, eco building products, bamboo clothing, eco friendly baby items and much more.

Join the conversation about green building and other eco topics in the online chat forum or look at our eco shop for eco friendly gift ideas.

Ecobob Bi-Weekly Top 10 (11th Edition)

Get your bi-weekly eco-fix with the Ecobob Top 10.

Every two weeks we bring you snippets of info and links to interesting eco stories on the web.

This weeks Top 10:

1. Plugging the voids in cities
2. Plastic to oil?
3. About soil and agriculture
4. The Greenest Street
5. Volunteer Mobs/Sustainable Farms
6. A commentary on Transition Towns
7. The Good Wood Guide
8. A Deeper Shade of Green
9. The Political Chemistry of Oil
10. Online gardening resource


Read the Top 10...

A Vision of Utopia?

The oil spill: Culprits & Victims

If you are going to watch one video on the effects of the oil spill and some of the background events that allowed this tragedy to happen, then this is it. In this TED video, Carl Safina gives an emotional insight, arguing that the consequences of the spill will stretch far beyond the Gulf. He also describes how many of the ‘solutions’ are making the situation far worse.

Watch the oil spill video here...

Help build the Rainbow Warrior III

When the French secret agents bombed the Rainbow Warrior, New Zealanders rallied behind Greenpeace. After that the Rainbow Warrior II was launched with the phrase “you can’t sink a rainbow”. 25 years later the Rainbow Warrior II needs to be replaced, and the world needs her more than ever.


Help build the Rainbow Warrior III

SHAC Challenge 2011

SHAC is accepting entries to the Sustainable Habitat Challenge for 2011. SHAC challenges teams to build or retrofit a more sustainable house, building, office, classroom or community hall. Form a tertiary, industry, or community-led team, and work collaboratively, involve young people and communicate widely about your designs.

www.shac.org.nz

The Good Life - Newly Released Book

In the newly released book 'The Good Life' journalist and TV presenter Francesca Price presents an upbeat/positive guide to living more sustainably in New Zealand. Topics covered include the ethical issues in a wide range of everyday subjects such as parenting, shopping, food, building and renovating, holidays and community life. Chapters include interviews with well-known Kiwis who are looking for the greener options in life such David Trubridge talking about his approach to furniture design, Kay Baxter sharing wisdom on gardening and self-sufficient living, Laurie Foon telling of her determination to make fashion more sustainable.

Read more or Purchase the book

Urban Forests

Forests provide invaluable ecosystem services. These include sequestering carbon, filtering pollution from air, limiting extremes in temperature, reducing stormwater runoff and increasing precipitation, to name a few.

In urban settings these kinds of services are especially important in counteracting the detrimental effects of city living to both health and psychological well-being. Trees can also be of economic benefit to a city by providing shade to the north and west of buildings during hot summers thereby reducing the amount of energy used for cooling, and raising the value of properties.

Read more on Urban Forests...

Too much building waste

Construction, maintenance and renovation of buildings account for around 40 per cent of the world's material flows, so it's always sad to see an old building reduced to a pile of rubble...

More about building waste...

Connected communities

Over the past century, unprecedented technological breakthroughs have advanced the development of cities and promoted a move away from agricultural lifestyles. In urban areas, people have become increasingly dissociated from the source of their food and completely dependent on monetary systems as their primary resource.

Read about connected communities

Disastrous consequences?

For more than ten thousand years the earth has been in a relatively stable state - a unique period called the Holocene, which has allowed civilization to evolve into what it is today. This desirable state is now under pressure from what scientists say is largely human driven change. The question is: how far can we go before our actions cause disastrous consequences, or is it already too late?

Read more here...

How Food Shapes Our Cities

Every day, in a city the size of London, 30 million meals are served. But where does all the food come from? Architect Carolyn Steel discusses the daily miracle of feeding a city, and shows how ancient food routes shaped the modern world.

Watch this video now

Seed store to save the world

Genetic diversity is the stuff that evolution is made of. It allows a species to survive by adapting to a constantly changing environment. When a species population size decreases, some of the building blocks of that species are lost, and hence some of its ability to adapt to change is lost. This diversity within crops is the biological foundati...

More about the saving seeds

'Green roofs' - An eco friendly covering

What if a city could support natural ecosystems? What if it could blend into the rural surrounds, manage some of its own byproducts, clean its own air and even produce its own food? Such a city would use green roofs.

Read the article on green roofs

Rubbish good for building your house

People have been building dwellings for over 14,000 years, largely using materials accessible in their immediate environments. Whether that be wood, stone, clay, reeds, or ice, the practice has always been to use what's available and abundant. It's only since the advent of modern industry and mass production that we have been using products that are mass produced, and then transported over often vast distances to reach our doorsteps.

Building with rubbish

Couple builds an off grid sustainable earth house
Couple builds an off grid sustainable earth house They decided to design and build a home that was eco-friendly and could generate its own electricity. They used rammed earth for the walls, mixed with concrete – it is 450mm thick. 16 solar panels sit on the roof, generating electricity and another eight solar panels heat the hot water. The eco house is very well insulated with double glazed window...
Read more...


Attracting Bees to your Garden
Attracting Bees to your Garden Creating a Bee Friendly Garden Nothing evokes the sense of an organic garden like the hum of honeybees toiling among sun-warmed summer flowers. Honey bees are important for pollination of all our fruits and berries and many of our vegetables crops. They don’t need us but we certainly need them. World wide their numbers are on the decline and exp...
Read more...


Greywater expert backs Council approval
Greywater expert backs Council approval The Kapiti Coast District Council’s decision to approve Plan Change 75 and make the fitting of a greywater system and/or rain tank compulsory in all new dwellings has been applauded by an expert in greywater irrigation. Steven Roberts, Managing Director of Kapiti firm Watersmart, says legislating for the re-use of water from washing machines and...
Read more...


Smart choices indoors will help the great outdoors

Smart choices indoors will help the great outdoors While we can't all afford to build our dream "green" home, we are able to retrofit and apply practical eco-logic, making our homes more eco-friendly, with a smaller environmental footprint. Some houses tend to be easier to retrofit than others, and others are inherently greener and healthier, despite not being "consciously" b...
Read more...


Gardens for Kids
Gardens for Kids In today’s world any way to prise children out from in front of the TV or Xbox can be a real challenge for parents. One way to get kids outside can be to involve them in gardening. By designing the garden with the kids in mind it is possible to develop an exciting adventure playground and fantasy world within your own property boundary. A child’s...
Read more...


Sustainable living in a city
Sustainable living in a city HOMEGROWN REVOLUTION - Radical Change Taking Root Path to Freedom presents 'A Homegrown Revolution' A collaboration of selective media clips which feature their urban homestead and farm which focus on the need of radical action -- growing food in the city. This self produced, short music video was shown at Peter Seller's Cultural Art's class...
Read more...

Eco Houses

Do you own or live in an eco house? You can list your eco house on Ecobob for others to view. You can even sell your eco house.

You can make it easier for people to live in a sustainable way by listing your house as an example.

Browse eco houses | Search eco houses


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