MTV SWITCH blog

Designers are coming up with bottles that are just too chic to trash. Grab a reusable Sigg water bottle and choose your favorite designer: from Kenneth Cole to Donna Karan. To see the latest designs, check out Elle.com. With millions of bottles going into landfills each year, it's nice to see bottles worth keeping...and showing off.

It's spring time, which, of course, means the start of more than a few sports seasons. But if you’re tired of grabbing your baseball glove to go sit in the outfield and eat grass (maybe just a personal experience there), here are a few new sports to try that only require some space and minimal equipment.

Track Events

Get out there and get competitive. Set up sprints, triple jump, and long jump. Or add your own events, like tug of war. The winner gets bragging rights…until next time.

Ultimate Frisbee

Grab a disc and some friends for a game of ultimate Frisbee. Set up two endzones with shoes or other markers and get a game going. For rules and more info, check out the Ultimate Players’ Association (UPA).

Kickball

With a ball and a few base markers, you can start up a game of kickball. The basic rules are easy and then beyond those you can add your own.

Oliver Heath is a wind-surfer turned architect and designer and his love of the outdoors has given him a unique perspective. His designs are modern and the materials are environmentally friendly. Check out the inspiration that comes from bringing elements of the outside inside without wasting natural resources. Whether looking for design ideas for a dorm, apartment, or house, his books offer great ideas and pointers.

-Jess 

Eco-Libris offers a unique way to offset a booklover’s carbon footprint. Simply choose how many books you want to balance out with Eco-Libris, pay for it online, and a tree will be planted for each of these books.

And you can show off your newfound environmental responsibility with pride by placing a provided Eco-Libris sticker on each book you “redeem.”

That’s playing conservation by the book!

If you've ever volunteered to help pick up litter, you may have noticed that beer bottles are second only to cigarette butts in their abundance. But all that glass has the potential to be more than trash.

In China , a farmer took 66 bottles of beer and set them up on his roof as a solar water heater. And Heineken once produced square beer bottles that could have a second use as bricks for housing. Now that’s thinking out of the bottle!

-Jess 

Climate change has made it harder for all of us to depend on the predictability of the seasons to dictate our fashion choices. With balmy days in the winter and sudden cold snaps in the summer, we need a way for our wardrobe to cope.

Here are some tips to keep up with a fickle (and perhaps grumpy?) Mother Nature:

Layer, Layer, Layer
Instead of wearing a big coat that you may be sweltering in later, how about layering a tank, shirt, and hoodie instead? That way you can conveniently peel off the layers as the mercury gets higher. Or be crafty with a cardigan!

There Is No Such Thing As "Off-Season" Clothing
Do you pack away your sweaters or shorts when they are "off-season" -- only to find yourself digging them out when the weather goes haywire? Maybe global warming has made off-season all-season!

Be Creative
Shorts with coats? Tall boots with a summer ensemble? Look at the "bright side" of climate change, kids -- it's the perfect opportunity to break some fashion barriers!

Take Advantage Of All The Sales!
It seems like the clothing shops haven't quite got hip to the whole weather mix-up yet -- their loss is your gain! Grab those half-price off-season bathing suits -- you may be wearing them next week!

-Valerie 

We're not going to tell you to stop drinking orange juice, mostly because we're not nutjobs. But it's pretty cool to look at the environmental workings of the orange juice industry, to see what separates frozen concentrated orange juice from its unfrozen ilk.

As Slate's Green Lantern points out, a little knowledge can feel as  sweet as tangy orange juice pouring down the gullet. Drink up.

-Tal