Green Options

Happy trash can makes police angry. Police arrest happy trash can. Twice.

These photos are from a Greenpeace campaign against plans to build a waste incineration plant was held in Zelenograd, Russia. The campaign, in addition to costumed antics, has collected around 90,000 signatures in opposition to the plan.

But the real story is these photos, just now starting to make their rounds online. The police first try to fit the man in the can into a police car, then next time they try to shove him in a bus. I’d cry police brutality, but first I’ll have to stop laughing.

Ah, the smell of coffee wafting through the evening air. Except this time that aroma doesn’t come from our French press but rather our fireplace. No, we haven’t thrown can of perfectly unacceptable canned, non-fair trade supermarket java into the fire, but rather a firelog partially made from coffee grounds. Sounds rather sustainable, huh?

Okay, we probably won’t often claim that burning anything is sustainable as the CO2 wafts into the atmosphere. [...]

Last year, the Green Options writers shared their New Year’s Resolutions. In the course of the year, our blog network has grown and grown and grown.

This year I decided to continue the tradition by asking the writers at Eco Child’s Play to share their green resolutions for 2009.

Here’s what a few of our writers shared:

• Jessica  Gottlieb

I’m only walking the grocery store in 2009. Driving meant that I could pile more in my car that we’d needed to consume, and, of course, I was in the car.  Less stuff will come in or I’ll get stronger. Whole Foods is a half a mile away, and I run marathons so it’s inexcusable that I’d drive there.

• Jamie Ervin and The Polka Dot Family

Our green New Years Resolution is to grow and preserve enough food to carry our family through next winter. Our family also hopes to continue spreading the “green love” through outreach, education and implementation of change, especially in our local schools and among our neighbors.  We hope to continue growing little green people who have a strong social conscious. Most of all, our family resolves to keep living green one step at a time!
Jamie has also written about her New Year’s resolution to make soap!

You might be more green than the definition of the word at home but does this carry through to when you step into the doors of your office? Not according to Envirowise, British sustainability business experts who says that good domestic environmental practices do not necessarily translate to the workplace.

VerTerra has made doing the disposable dishes a flip of the wrist — and not into the trash can bound for the landfill. We Heart World has given the VerTerra compostable dishware the thumbs-up approval. We Heart World says:

With Verterra dinnerware, you can:

• Microwave them
• Use them in the oven
• Re-Use them (even though they are billed as a single-use product)
• Use them when guests are over for dinner (they are

[...]

Look at this genius kitchen set up by Dutch designer John Arndt via design sprout. It uses the genius inner workings and complex yet simple systems in nature as a beautiful example of how to go about sustainable design. This marvelous piece of furniture was engineered to use the waste from one process to fuel the others. For example, the mini ecosystem design includes

This is another one of those wonderful books that will get tattered and worn because it is so oft referenced. Food Not Lawns, by Heather C. Flores appeals to food and community activist that is sometimes buried underneath the suited business exterior that I don more days than I would like.

Her approach is very accessible and not aggressive, the writing style is friendly and inspiring, and the hand-spun illustrations are not only descriptive, but fun.

As I read through this book, I started applying sticky notes to areas I want to not only reference for myself, but share with my fiancee who is starting to become somewhat obsessed with our compost experiment in the back yard. There are like 50 sticky notes already . . .

Sometimes, you come across a Website that’s just so full of great, inspiring and exciting information, you can’t get enough of it. That’s what happened when I came upon the Buckminster Fuller Challenge Idea Index, a database of entries into the annual Buckminster Fuller Challenge to solve “humanity’s most pressing problems in the shortest possible time while enhancing the Earth’s ecological integrity.”

The challenge, launched last year, honored its first winner this past June: a plan for a “Comprehensive Design for a Carbon Neutral World: The Challenge of Appalachia,” submitted by John Todd, a research professor at the University of Vermont and founder and president of Oceans Arks International. And just last month, the institute unveiled its Idea Index, which provides details on entries in every area from community and energy to transportation and water. It’s too much to take in all at once, so today, let’s look at some of the innovative ideas in one area alone: food.

This is a guest post by Aaron Szymanski, President of Evo Design, an award-winning industrial design firm housed in a refurbished water treatment plant in Watertown, CT.

The good thing about the economy sucking cheese right now is that it’s given me some free time to catch up on my reading. I moderate a discussion forum called “The Green Room” and  while catching up on what people are sniping about I came across an interesting thread that included many questions.

The primary question being, What are we really supposed to do to be more green? My contribution to the group was that I believed people wanted to do the right thing but that it was truly unclear to them exactly what is better.

For example, after reading E the Environmental magazine’s recent issue, I felt ultimately that we should all be vegetarians. I’m not a die-hard meat lover but I’ve read enough credible writing that lead me to believe that it’s impossible for the earth to produce enough veggies to do this. Meanwhile, pondering the question, I still eat Slim Jims and summer sausage.

Having discussed one way to be compassionate in your home by safely catching a fly, I feel compelled to be of even more assistance in helping you to be a kind, friendly presence outside of your own abode as well. So now that you are well practiced in the fine art of catching and caring for critters of all makes and models, I hope you are ready, willing, able, and eager to go out and practice some more random acts of kindness.

And as someone who loves gardening, from the toil of clearing a plot and weeding the rows to the belly-filling delight come harvest time, I thought I would share some tips on how you can be a compassionate, caring, careful gardener.

This is particularly important, too, since even small family gardens can become places of profound natural tragedy, places of mass murder and intensive pollution, places of blood, sweat, and tears. Ironically, gardens can often be the least “green” when the plants in them are shining with the deepest, richest shades of green.

And the main reason for these instances of terror and destruction and death? One word: VARMINTS.

Yessir, critters, pests, thieves…call them what you will. They come in many forms, and they seem to come at every moment, nibbling and draining and infesting and infecting and basically ruining everything that you plan to enjoy. Yes’m, the varmints launch a perpetual (seemingly organized and strategic) assault on your goodly little garden…and so appropriate countermeasures surely seem justified.

But, alas, most of these countermeasures employed on any scale are far from careful, far from compassionate, and extremely far from sustainable or natural or eco-friendly. Just go into any garden center or hardware store and look at the panoply of pesticides, sitting there as an ingredient in a witches’ brew with other chemical fertilizers and enhancers. You may start to feel dizzy even before opening one and inhaling the fumes!

So, then, how can you make your garden green in the healthiest, most sustainable and ecologically friendly ways? How can you be a careful gardener and a small-scale steward on your own little plot? How can you save lives even as you nourish your and your family’s (and maybe even your whole neighborhood’s!) lives? Here are just a few ways you can garden green to get a green garden.

San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom is proposing a law that would make recycling mandatory in the city. The law would require:

• All landlords to provide adequate recycling and composting for their tenants;

• Businesses that sell items (e.g., takeout food) to allow the public to deposit small amounts of recyclables, compostables and trash in their receptacles;

• Event organizers to site and manage sufficient groups of recycling, composting and trash receptacles;