Tin can reuse is a popular topic here at Crafting a Green World. We’ve gone over tin can reuse, general metal reuse, and eight simple to advanced projects having to do with the reuse of tin. Well we’re not done yet!
August is National Inventors Month and in celebration of this imaginative occasion, Altoids has partnered with HowStuffWorks.com to honor creative citizens they call “Tinnovators.” These inventors have found ingenious uses for their Altoids tins once the mints are gone.
As I mentioned in my Intersolar post earlier this week, attending the Intersolar conference and tradeshow is a good opportunity to experience the growth and employment potential of the PV (photovoltaic) solar industry. Specifically, I was looking for tips to pass on to Ecopreneurist readers, and I found that this show (and possibly others) is/are a great way to get free information about starting a solar business.
On the last day of the show (yesterday), Jeff Spies, Director of Training & Tradeshows of AEE Solar gave a half-day workshop called “Launch and Grow Your Solar Business”. Free to attendees of the Intersolar exhibits, the workshop covered everything from the qualifications needed to become a solar dealer to common configurations of residential and small commercial solar power installations to business strategies. And, if you would have signed up before early June, registration to the exhibit portion of the show would have been free (and after that point it was $100).
This post answers a question posed by @jonat82 in a Twitter conversation:
How do you convince your property managers that greening the building is a financially sound investment?
Unfortunately, there is no silver bullet argument for this one. Like the majority of small businesses you probably lease your facilities. If you do, you’ll find that some greening strategies require the cooperation of your landlord.
Don’t give up hope.The inclusion of environmental criteria into relevant lease clauses, such as requiring Energy Star appliances or providing recycling services, are becoming more commonplace. So, the best time to talk to your landlord about greening is when you are signing or renegotiating your lease.
You hear so much about people striving to live a greener, more sustainable life. You may at times wonder, who else is doing it, and is all that happy talk translating into real world results?
Three friends decided to find out. As they put it,
Mandy, Ryan and Brady are ‘bikepacking’ 12,000 miles to the East Coast and back to California, using solar-powered electronics and leg-powered bicycles. The result is a feature-length documentary film that will present [...]
I am cheap. Cheap, cheap, cheap. Oh, and also eco-friendly, but mainly just cheap.
My favorite thing about the D.I.Y. lifestyle is that it’s also a thrifty lifestyle. It’s inspiring to take an unwanted, perhaps even damaged material something that someone else might discard or donate, and turn it into something that’s beautiful and useful again.
Take those sweet, knitted or crocheted afghans that I’m always coming across in thrift stores or dumpster-diving, or that often get re-gifted to me because I like handmade stuff.
I respect the love and time that goes into the act of knitting and crocheting, and the dedication, especially, that it takes to create an entire afghan, but frankly, I have enough of my own already, and I don’t necessarily need another one, especially if it’s just so-so or (gasp!) ugly.
An entire afghan, though? That’s a nice, large swatch of material to work with. I’ve been sewing up a storm with my thrifted and re-gifted afghan stash, lately, making some simple summer dresses for my little girls. Here are some tips so that you, too, can sew with knitted or crocheted materials–it’s not as tricky as it seems:
Fleece isn’t a natural fabric, but it is vegan, is often (although it’s just as often nearly impossible to tell when) partially to completely made from recycled plastic bottles, and has many of the same qualities of wool, in that it’s breathable and wicks moisture away from the skin. It doesn’t readily hold stains, doesn’t ravel, is thin and light and yet soft and plush, and can be washed easily.
It’s one of the staple fabrics that, as a cloth diapering momma, I bought every time it was on sale. Only now? All my babies are toilet trained, and I still have, pardon my French, a butt-load of fleece.
One of the things that I like to do as an eco-friendly crafter and that I like to teach my children as a natural parent is to remember to have respect for our stuff. We should keep only what we can use or enjoy, and we should use and enjoy what we have. Thus I need to either use or lose my fleece stash, and that’s my goal this week.
Fortunately, the same qualities that make fleece an excellent material for cloth diapers also make it an excellent material for a light and comfortable matress pad. Additionally, it comes in a width that’s perfect for my queen-sized bed and workable for my daughters’ full-sized bed, and the sewing on it will be absolutely minimal because fleece doesn’t ravel–just cut it to shape, throw on some elastic, and we’ll be good to go. Here’s how:
In celebration of my first week of summer vacation (and to make up for totally blowing off my Crafting a Green World blog responsibilities while I graded 42 final papers and calcuated 42 final grades), I am posting a serious, savvy, stash-busting craft project every day this week. I’ve put off the mending, the upkeep, the interior design, and the works-in-progress for too long, and it’s time to bust some stash and clear out some projects.
First up: my favorite pair of jeans. My dancing jeans. The jeans I hemmed with bias tape. The jeans that I wear most often when I carry my sketchbook around in my back pocket.
The jeans with the two huge, gaping holes in the back pocket.
Hurry and go dig out your favorite pair of jeans with the hole in the back pocket, because we are about to mend it.
Mom always said, “Get your feet off the coffee table!” and “Use a coaster!” Why not give her some new coasters for that precious coffee table this Mother’s Day? These stitched cork coasters are an inexpensive and super easy gift. Read on for a complete how to for making your own.
We recently celebrated my son’s second birthday which happens to be on Earth Day. Being an “Earth Birthday Boy” we naturally celebrate in an earth friendly fashion.
One of the many traditions in my family is to break open a pinata at a child’s birthday party. Pinatas are a hit (pun intended) with children because they usually contain treats. What kid doesn’t want a chance at breaking open a pinata! As kids we loved being blindfolded, spun in circles and pushed towards the swinging pinata for a strike.
I knew the tradition could carry on but not without a green twist, of course. The idea of this eco-friendly mission is to forgo the plastic and create a healthy and environmentally sound party which includes a pinata. Growing up we never thought about how much waste a pinata created. We just knew that when the pinata was punctured we’d get loads of candy and maybe a few plastic toys.
In today’s rapidly changing sustainable business landscape, it’s becoming increasingly important to be aware of what’s happening, emerging, and yet to be created where you could fill a need. How best to do that?
A special guest post by Aaron Schoenberger for Green Printer’s ‘Design Goes Green’ series.
A common misconception, one that I’ve seen a thousand times, is the idea that simply printing on recycled mediums, with soy ink, will make one’s marketing materials green. In essence, it’s not only the printing that makes a company green, but also the research and time spent identifying target markets, concocting copy that’s both precise and somewhat vague at the same time, limiting the want to send promotional material to everyone on the planet, and a host of other factors that, if not done properly, will result in a slap on the wrist from good ole’ Mother Earth.
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