Your local freezer aisle just got a lot cooler. Cool Hunting reports that Stahlbush Island Farms has introduced BioBags, biodegradable packaging for its line of frozen vegetables, and fruits. The company’s new bag does away with the widely used polyethylene-based material in favor of brown craft paper, and water-based ink. In turn, that substitution cuts down the breaking-down process from several centuries to just a few short months.

Cool Hunting has more about the long-time sustainable farming efforts of the company, whose products can be found at Whole Foods, Sunflower Farmers Market, and New Seasons Market. 

Located in Oregon's Willamette Valley, Stahlbush Island Farms has an outstanding reputation for sustainable agriculture, producing enough electricity from fruit and vegetable byproducts to power around 1,100 homes. The recent BioBags endeavor is the upshot of a collaboration with Michigan-based Cadillac Products Packaging Company, who helped design and manufacture the eco-friendly bags.

The BioBags follow a wave of efforts toward more sustainable food packaging, including the release of Frito-Lay Brand’s new 100-percent compostable SunChip bag.  [full disclosure: Frito-Lay Brand is a business unit of PepsiCo. GOOD is a partner on Pepsi's Refresh Everything project.] The bags—the first full packaging to be completely compostable—are made from corn-based polymer, and canbiodegrade in a backyard compost pile in a mere 14 weeks. 

Think the trend of businesses making green office renovations is just a passing fad? Not according to the latest issue of EL Insights, which reports that the U.S. green building market value will balloon from $71.1 billion now to $173 billion by 2015. Commercial green building is expected to grow by 18.1% annually during the same time period from $35.6 billion to $81.8 billion. In this case, green building is defined as building with resource use and employee productivity in mind.

The explosive projected growth can be attributed both to a growing recognition of green building's potential cost-savings as well as incentives from the government (i.e. the multi-million dollar Sustainable Communities Challenge Planning Grant program and the Sustainable Communities Regional Planning Grant program). Green renovation will also comprise a significant portion of future green building, thanks in no small part to government projects like then Recovery through Retrofit initiative, which offers $80 billion energy and environmental retrofits for federal buildings.

The growth in green building will lead to a number of changes in the larger building market, according to EL Insights: Construction workers will increasingly seek out green training programs, companies will spend more cash on green building technology (GE is already doing with its ecomagination initiative), and homes touting green building features will do better on the real estate market. All of this will result in cost savings for building and home owners, who will reap the benefits of lower energy and heating bills.

So if you haven't been paying attention to the U.S. Green Building Council, now is the time to start--the non-profit offers virtually endless amounts of information on green building studies and LEED certification.

Our friends at Column Five Media have made this excellent chart explaining how wind power works, what the economic benefits could be, and really anything else you could possibly want to know about wind power. Click here to see the larger version.