Green Options

For some reason, when I think of products that need to ‘go green’, certain types of items tend to top the list.  Cleaning products.  Plastic children’s toys.  Paint and building materials.  Baby supplies.  Food.  Clothing.

Playing cards had not yet entered my mind.

So imagine my amused surprise the other day when, while shopping for a new deck of quality cards for bridge (my husband had even requested a plastic set), I stumbled across Bicycle’s new (launched in 2008) line of Eco Edition Playing Cards.

While there is almost certainly a good level of bandwagon-jumping greenwashing going on here, there is still much good to say about these cards.  According to Bicycle:

Our playing cards are crafted from sustainable forest paper, starch-based laminating glue and vegetable-based printing inks.  This pack of cards is recyclable.

Are you pleased with your baby bodycare products?  One excellent source for natural bodycare and greener baby products is UK-based Ethical Superstore.

Says Ethical Superstore: “Grow up green with products that are ethically better for your baby and better for the planet, too…We’ve also got great books for green parents, organic baby food, natural bodycare, organic cotton clothing, soft toys and games.”

Here’s one thing you may want to NOT add to your green holiday gift list: a video game console. Not only do they lead to hundreds of hours of glazed-over staring, but video game consoles are also pretty significant energy hogs.

The Natural Resources Defense Council and Eco Consulting published this month a very valuable report on the energy use of game consoles and we can use them more effectively to save energy (and thus reduce our contribution to global warming). You can see the full report here.

Do you play virtual games? Try this new flash game Gaiam just launched called ConcentratiOm (based on concentration). It features Rodney Yee (we recently featured here) and Colleen Saidman demonstrating yoga poses. . The way it works is simply based on concentration and players must uncover yoga mats and match up each pose with its name before time runs out. You can check it out here.  Simply play and you may win:

• 3-day yoga retreat + airfare
• $750 in Gaiam & Visa® gift cards
• 3-month Gaiam Yoga Club membership + 1GB iPod Shuffle®
• Gaiam yoga DVD collection

“Learning and remembering yoga pose names has never been more fun! See how many yoga poses you can match to their names in 2 minutes and enter for a chance to win fabulous prizes! Whether you’re new to yoga or an advanced yogi, you’ll have fun giving those brain cells a quick yoga workout. New poses every time you play!”

This is a fun educational game for anyone interested in learning more about yoga.

Recently, browsing around the “Ecosphere” I also read

Color/pattern recognition? Check! Memory skills? Check! Additional stuff for your kids to fling onto the floor? Definitely a check! Make a matching game with your kids out of recycled materials, and you can have all that and more for the price of nothing.

STEP 1: Gather matching materials. For my matches, I used leftover paint chips from our playroom makeover (I am totally not the only one with leftover paint chips!). I cut each paint chip into two identical pairs, and used decorative scissors to cut away any writing–this will be a color matching game. For other kinds of matching games, you could make color/color word pairs, pairs of family or friends from surplus photos, alphabet pairs using cut-outs from magazines, color pairs made from painting or coloring on used typing paper, etc.

Reduce, recycle, rethink.

Solar power, wind power, carbon credits.

It’s not what you expect in a board game, but the eco-friendly game Earthopoly focuses on the environment, teaching kids to go green while playing a game.

Earthopoly is an eco-friendly toy educating kids about climate change, conservation, and taking care of the Earth. A take-off on the standard Monopoly (which is all about the money…) with an environmental focus, children collect carbon credits and trade them in for clean air, increasing property values through recycling and reducing.

 Let’s face it, dealing with heavy issues like global warming can get depressing.  It takes a cartoonist like Denis Thomopoulos to help us find our funny bones again! Bookmark Hippoworks and visit it often!  You and your kids will come to love the characters and appreciate the way Thomopoulos slips in a bit of adult, snarky humor as he brings big issues down to kid level. 

There are games and puzzles, coloring pages and support material for educators.  [...]

THE TEN PROJECT

www.thetenproject.org

THE PROJECT’S AIM

To distribute a game in 2010 to every single ten-year-old living in the ten most influential mega-cities of the future, to inspire them to create a ten-year plan for redesigning their world into one that will be sustainable and worth inheriting in 2020.

THE GAME’S AIM

As the game Monopoly prepared previous generations for capitalism, this game aims to make lucrative sustainability second nature to the children of a new world [...]

"Be a force of nature" is the motto of Xeko, a trading card game created by the Matter Group in collaboration with Conservation International. This eco-game asks children (and adults) to take on the critical mission of creating the strongest ecosystems in the threatened hotspots of our planet. By playing Xeko, children learn about the complexities of ecosystems while trying to save them.

Xeko doesn’t just talk the eco-talk, though:

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Editor's note: EcoGeek.org's "EcoGeek of the Week" interview series is a relatively new feature over there, but we've been impressed with the subjects they lined up. When Head EcoGeek Hank Green asked us if we'd like to run the feature, we happily obliged."EcoGeek of the Week" appears every Tuesday at EcoGeek.org… and now also at Green Options.

Just because I love the actual world doesn't mean I'm not a pretty big fan

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