Vegetarian restaurants are becoming more mainstream and, inadvertently or not, distinctive branding and signage helps them stand out from the herd.

It Ain’t Meat, Babe

You can take their word for it, this meat-free eatery in Tokyo’s Kinshicho district is, er, as meat-free as they come. Mind you, they’re not stating It’s Delicious, only that It’s Vegetable. At least it’s not Mineral. Flickr member non-euclidean photography captured the above Taiwanese restaurant’s front facade and sign in June of 2008.

Pot Pies?

Best thing about the Herbal (not “Horrible”) Pizzeria? When calling in an order, you never have to specify “no anchovies, please”. That said, what the heck is an herbal pizza? Try the Scarborough Fair, topped with parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme. Looking ahead, this shop’s already got a running start on the budding CBD-infused pizza sector. What’s more: they work with Gold Bee to ensure that they only use the finest CBD oil to infuse into their slices of pizza goodness! Goodbye ham & pineapple, hello hemp & pineapple express! Flickr member Jeff snapped the venerable vegetarian pizza parlor in early 2011.

Oh Yah

Chicago-area foodies oughta check out this place, recommended by Flickr member Eric Allix Rogers as “still the best vegan soul food joint in South Shore.” While such glowing reviews are a good sign for any restaurant, this one has some bad issues with its sign. Not the tilted and/or missing letters… they evoke a certain sense of charm. Nope, we’re referring to the font used on the sign just below. Pro tip: a restaurant that offers meals sans meat should present signage sans Comic Sans.

Goulash Vegas

What happens in Budapest stays in Budapest, whether one’s Hungary or not. Welcome to Las Vegan’s, a rather inconspicuous dining kiosk that probably won’t make anyone’s to-do Liszt. Flickr member Sharon Hahn Darlin took a gamble on this cutely-named diner on the Danube in June of 2018.

Milkshaken, not Stirred

Vegetarian sushi is one of those uncomfortable conjunctions like jumbo shrimp, plastic glass and military intelligence. Still, you’ve gotta give Emeryville, CA’s Sushi Village props for advertising “vegetarian drinks”, whatever that means. We can guess what it doesn’t mean: no Bloody Marys, Moscow Mules, or anything made with Wild Turkey bourbon. Flickr member David Cohen felt intrigued enough by the concept to snap the store sign back in October of 2006.

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Any one of these bizarrely named churches could be in your hometown though they appear to hale from an altered state… pray we do not “altar” them further.

Prayer House Rock

Elvis may have left the building but he left a half-eaten peanut butter, banana and bacon sandwich on the collection plate. Welcome to the 24-hour Church of Elvis, a Portlandia attraction that isn’t really a church and has no known affiliation with The King’s estate. On the other hand, the eclectic storefront at 408 NW Couch is the self-stated “Worlds first 24-hour coin-operated Art Gallery” so at least it’s a profitable enterprise… like most churches. (images via brx0 and Steve Schroeder)

Let the Spirit Move You

Here’s the Palm Bible Church in Soweto, South Africa, whose sign out front bears the perplexing slogan “The Move of God”. Somehow we doubt that refers to Sunday being a popular moving day but hey, we’ve been wrong before. Let’s move on. (image via Paul Birnie)

Sin In Stranger

“Sin will find you out”? Hoo boy, that ship sailed a LONG time ago! Perhaps a better – or at least, more enticing – slogan might read “Salvation lies within”. We get it, though: neon signs don’t come cheap and like The Godfather says, fear can be a potent motivator. (image via Sam Lavy)

Pews ‘R Us

When they say “Find It Here”, they don’t mean sin… OK, depends on what type of used furniture you’re buying and what purpose it’s to be used for. Wait, you may be asking, what does used furniture have to do with a church? We can only shrug our shoulders and refer you to “Bill”… if you can find him. (image via Julia TortoiseHugger)

Fertile Pastors

The New Dimensions Worship Center might be “A Place of New Beginnings” but if their sign’s any indication, it’s also the scene of many happy endings. Gotta give ’em credit, though: while other churches advise that laying in bed on Sunday morning shouting “OH GOD!” doesn’t constitute going to church, New Dimensions replies “Why not both?” (image via David Smith)

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The casting call is coming from inside the house, and these real-life horror movie houses achieved infamy as on-location sets for some memorable film shoots.

Amityville Horror House

The so-called Amityville Horror House can be found at 108 (formerly 112) Ocean Avenue in Amityville, NY. Producers of the 1979 film sought permission to shoot on location at the actual house where Ronald DeFeo Jr shot and killed 6 members of his family in 1974, but were denied. Instead, a house in Toms River, NJ was altered to resemble the three-story Dutch Colonial home, right down to the distinctive “pumpkin eyes” attic windows. Ironically, the house on Ocean Avenue itself has been altered and no longer sports the quarter-round windows. (images via austinpomer and Encouraging Quotes)

Poltergeist House

This house at 4267 Roxbury St. in Simi Valley, CA is where the 1982 horror film Poltergeist was filmed. Unlike the movie home, this house did NOT implode into some sort of supernatural black hole. The photo above was taken 35 years after filming completed and not a whole lot has changed other than the extensive brickwork in the front yard. One would hope the masonry wasn’t sourced from any abandoned cemeteries. (image via Jack Stephens)

Silence of the Lambs House

Also known as Buffalo Bill’s house, this rambling three-story Victorian home in the Village of Layton, Fayette County, PA featured prominently in the 1991 shock horror thriller The Silence of the Lambs. The home was put on the market by its owners in 2016 but, to quote Trib Live, the sale was going “torturously slowly”. Not for the obvious reason, mind you, but likely due to the 4-bedroom house only having one bathroom. Now THAT’s what we call horrible! (image via Paul McCarthy)

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Recycling isn’t going to solve our waste problems. Between the contamination that happens when we don’t recycle correctly and the degradation of plastic over time, it’s a band-aid at best, and millions of pounds of “recyclable” materials end up in landfills no matter which bin we put them in. Of course, that doesn’t mean we should just accept plastic pollution (including the micro plastics that litter the oceans and our own bodies) as a fact of life. But it does mean we have to change our approach.

Recyclability Doesn’t Matter Anymore

According to the most recent EPA stats available (which are from 2015), the amount of plastic waste generated in the United States is actually rising. Up to 70% of plastic entering recycling facilities around the world is unusable, and some of it – like plastic bags – gums up the machines, ruining entire loads of potentially recyclable materials.

If you’re wondering where our plastic goes when it doesn’t get recycled, a recent Guardian report from 11 countries tracked how waste from the U.S. makes its way around the world. Hundreds of thousands of tons of it, from plastic bottles to e-waste, are shipped every year to impoverished countries like Bangladesh, Laos, Ethiopia and Senegal in what is essentially a new form of colonization.

We don’t know how to deal with it, so we put it all on ships and send it “away,” where it becomes someone else’s problem, spilling out into their own natural spaces. The toxic fumes that can result from burning or processing plastics contain substances like dioxins, heavy metals and hydrochloric acid.

It’s easy to blame all of this on consumers not taking the time to properly sort recyclables. But the recyclability of plastics can be arcane even to people who are well-educated on the topic, since facilities vary in the types of plastic they’re able to take, and the numbers printed on containers within that meaningless mobius loop recycling symbol don’t necessarily tell us whether they’re accepted by local waste processors.

Planning for a Circular Economy

The solution to all of this is actually pretty simple. The manufacturers who produce products, packaging and even architecture in the first place should have their own plans and systems to take it back when its usefulness to the consumer has ended. Moving toward a circular economy with a closed-loop system would place the responsibility for the waste produced by a given object in the hands of its manufacturer, driving motivation to come up with less wasteful solutions in the first place.

There’s no shortage of innovation when it comes to plastic alternatives that aren’t made of fossils fuels. Among the solutions that have already been proposed are edible seaweed-based materials, bioplastics made of arthropod shells, biodegradable combinations of cellulose and natural resins, mushroom-based foam and more. Some of them, like Sulapac, can be produced on existing production lines, so if companies really wanted to, they could instantly switch from their current plastic materials to a sustainable alternative.

But biodegradable plastics can pose problems of their own. While we might imagine that disposable tableware marked “compostable” is better than plastic or styrofoam, it can still end up in the ocean, where it takes years to break down and can potentially endanger wildlife. It also has to be sent to special industrial composting facilities, which don’t exist in every area. The thing is, with the possible exception of edible or plant-based options like banana leaves, few of these biodegradable innovations actually help if they’re still being used to produce single-use disposable items.

Individual actions still matter, and a big piece of the puzzle is changing our own thinking around convenience and the value of durability, but ultimately, like with climate change, we can’t let corporations off the hook. Just 100 companies are responsible for 71% of global emissions since 1988, and 20 companies represent the world’s biggest plastic polluters, including energy companies, beverage behemoths and meat and dairy processors. They have the money and the power to dramatically reduce pollution of all kinds.

Few companies are going to take the initiative to do this until we reach a critical mass of consumer demand, putting pressure on corporations to take responsibility and following up with legislative action. In a time when we’re dealing with so many pressing crises at once, it might be difficult to imagine pulling that off, but at the risk of sounding trite, changing anything for the better starts with imagining the world we want to live in and working from there.

Top image: Mi Zhou’s soapack, which uses soap as zero-waste packaging for shampoo and other liquid toiletries.

We haven’t quite reached the predicted point at which drones become an intrinsic part of our daily lives, but small autonomous flying machines are learning how to do a lot more than spook people with their surveillance potential and take amazing aerial photographs. Not that they aren’t still really good at both of those. A lot of the news we read about drone advancements is a bit dystopian, warning of the looming potential for wildly invasive policing and the kind of automation that seems to threaten jobs en masse. But drones are set to accomplish some pretty cool things, too – in addition to delivering packages and piping hot food faster than ever.

Search & Rescue Missions

Applications for drones in scenarios that are just too dangerous for humans to navigate seem to grow broader with each passing day. As engineers find ways for flying drones to bear more weight, fly with more precision and use sensors for the greatest possible accuracy, the machines are able to take on ever more complex tasks. Interesting new concepts like the NET GUARD, which can fly to high altitudes to catch people jumping from tall burning buildings, aim to test the limits of drone technology – but many designs are already out there saving lives.

Lifeguards in Australia just happened to be testing a new drone called the Little Ripper when a distress call went out. Two teenagers were drowning in the surf down the shore. The helicopter-shaped drone located the teenagers and dropped them a floatation device, which carried them back to shore. It’s equipped with an emergency kit, GPS beacons and a camera and has a 2.5-hour battery life. It was originally developed as a real-time shark detection system.

In Rwanda, a California startup called Zipline uses drones to send urgent medical supplies like blood to remote clinics and hospitals almost instantaneously. Even the most sensitive items can be shot off into the sky over the harshest of terrains with a range of 75km one way (about 46.6 miles.) Again, this isn’t theoretical – it’s in use right now, and expanding to new countries.

In Sweden, automatic external defibrillators (AED) are transported by drone to people experiencing cardiac arrest faster than an ambulance can reach them. Land Rover’s ‘Discovery’ vehicles have officially joined the Red Cross emergency response fleet, and each one comes with an advanced eight-rotor drone fitted with a long-range thermal imaging camera capable of spotting a person from over 1,440 feet away.

Saving the Lives of Animals

Drones are already helping scientists fight wildlife extinction. They’re more accurate at counting animals in the wild and generating data than people, they can monitor and assess dangerous situations like whales trapped in fishing nets and deliver the right supplies to human first responders and even watch out for poachers targeting perilously endangered species like rhinos. Drones equipped with medicated peanut butter pellets are helping scientists save the lives of the most endangered mammal in North America – the black-footed ferret – by feeding their favorite prey, the prairie dog, which has been dying from a deadly disease called sylvatic plague.

For a while, it seemed like efforts to use drones to save the lives of animals could be undone by scenarios in which they actively harm them instead. Dutch police got the bright idea to train eagles to take out suspicious drones that could be used to commit crimes, but people were concerned that the propellers could hurt the birds. As it turns out, the eagles weren’t particularly good at the job, and the program was suspended.

Augmenting Sustainable Technologies

Drones of various sorts could be deployed as tiny autonomous assistants for other forms of technology, helping to maintain complex systems or just making sure we don’t run out of juice in our electric cars while far away from charging stations. The Volt car-charging drone by Yeop Baek is a quadcopter that can be summoned by smartphone, allowing drivers to request a refuel no matter where they might be at the moment – a service that seems like it could be extended to gas cans for a greater number of drivers in the present.

A Latvian startup called Aerones is working on 28-motor quad copers designed to clean and de-ice massive wind turbines quickly and safely so they can produce maximum output. In some cases, drones could even outperform standard technologies, like the ‘Twing’ by Swiss startup Twingtec, a kite-like flying machine that can soar to high altitudes to harvest strong, steady winds, even when the air lower to the ground is still.

Drones could also collect data on weather, pollution, soil moisture, lava flows – you name it. They could help extinguish forest fires, map changes in forested areas and replace gas-guzzling agricultural machines, helping to reduce emissions. In fact, this last point connects to one of the best known uses for drones, one that’s usually pretty easy to make fun of – having whatever crap we want delivered to us on demand.

Convenience, Art & Fun

Amazon, UPS, Google and DHL are among the companies exploring ways to deliver packages via drones instead of trucks, and Uber Eats is getting ready to test food delivery drones with the aim of getting its “UberExpress” program off the ground by 2021. If having takeout and our latest Amazon Prime purchases dropped off on our doorsteps by drone seems like peak human laziness, consider how many delivery cars and trucks it could help eliminate on the road.

The Smithsonian did some research, finding that in some cases, using electric-powered trucks would be more efficient and easier, but in others, drones help reduce both energy usage and greenhouse gas emissions. But the results really depend on how heavy the package is, where it’s being delivered and the locations of warehouses.

In any case, drones are almost ready to be omnipresent for all sorts of purposes, even if that means hovering over us to provide light or protect us from the rain, as in the case of designer Fabien Roy’s “Low Gravity” drone lamp or the “Free Parasol” by Asahi Power Service. They’re already helping artists produce incredible landscape photography, amazing illusions, massive murals and more. They’ve even been programmed to rain candy from hovering clouds on demand, an idea that kids came up with themselves.

All of these functions have come a long way in just a few short years, and it’ll be interesting to see how the technology progresses in the near future.