Green Options » hygiene

DIY Beauty: Make Your Own Facial Scrubs for Any Skin Type

Becky Striepe — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 11:00:01 +0000

So you’ve treated yourself to a little handmade spa action, and your skin is feeling fantastical! Now, you just need to maintain that healthy skin. Check out these facial scrub recipes for dry, normal, and oily skin!

The best way to apply your scrub is to gently massage it on with a damp washcloth, and make sure you rinse your face thoroughly when you’re done. Also, don’t miss the easy peasy toner recipe at the very bottom!

‘Water For People’ Golf Classic Offers Sport and Balance with Nature

Michael Ricciardi — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 18:37:27 +0000

Recognized as one of the US’s 100 best gold courses (Golf Digest), the ‘Sanctuary’ will once again host the 5th annual Water For People Golf Classic on August 19, 2009. Situated in Sedalia, Colorado, and adjacent to over 12, 000 acres of protected open space, the Sanctuary was carefully designed and “placed” within one of the most fragile and beautiful ecosystems in the State, if not the entire country.

The private course offers stunning 180 degree vistas of Pike’s Peak (southward) and Long’s Peak (northward) and is home to some of the tallest pines in the State. To preserve its core beauty and “balance with Nature”, the Sanctuary permits only 9,000 rounds of golf annually, and the majority of these are for charity fund-raising tournaments.

World Water Week in Stockholm Focuses on Sanitation and Hygiene

Nayelli Gonzalez — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 00:07:13 +0000

A fleet of scientists, business leaders, and policy makers have convened at the 2008 World Water Week in Stockholm, Sweden for the past week to exchange views on the world water crisis and promote initiatives to build a clean and healthy world.

Organized by the Stockholm International Water Institute, the conference this year focuses on sanitation and hygiene issues related to water, which compliments the United Nations’ 2008 International Year of Sanitation theme.

“Sanitation is one of the biggest scandals of all times,” Prince Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands, who heads the UN Advisory Board on Water and Sanitation, was quoted in an article by news agency Agence France-Presse. “It’s something that we have to put on our radar screen. Some 7,500 people die every day due to this lack of sanitation,” he added.

According to the UN, 2.6 billion people around the world lack access to adequate sanitation, while half the world’s population lacks access to clean water. Consequently, citizens in underdeveloped countries experience premature deaths, illness, a degradation of living quarters and damage to the environment and local economies at alarming rates. Combined with the effects of global warming and the world water crisis, this creates cause for alarm.

A goal of World Water Week is to encourage the 2,500 international conference attendees to strategize ways to advance best practices, scientiﬁc understanding, and policy making processes related to water, health, poverty, and the environment.

Using preventive medicine, building sustainable cities, changing human behaviors, and comprehending sanitation’s link to global warming are other items highlighted during the week.

Another honorable mention for WWW is its commitment to arranging an environmentally responsible conference; using less bottled water, promoting carbon off-setting, recycling, providing organic and fair trade food, and supporting eco-hotels are all part of the conference’s plan to bring the issues home.

More information on conference topics:
WWW press releases

Photo: Stockholm International Water Institute

Will You Soap My Back? The Impact of Your Shower

Simran Sethi — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 15:03:07 +0000

Simran Sethi and Sarah Smarsh are writing a series on the impacts of everyday things. They will be posting previews on the Green Options Media blog network before launching the posts on Huffington Post. Here’s a sneak peek at what happens in the shower.

The magical cleaning agent in your bar of hygiene is likely cow fat or oil from, say, coconut. At the manufacturing plant, a chemical process removes the valuable glycerin in the fats and oils to be used in other products. The leftovers are mixed with sodium hydroxide and then blasted dry to form soap pellets, which are then mixed with the colorants, fragrances and other ingredients that allow a humble soap to go by the name of Carribean Breeze or Lilac Meadow.

While the production of soap—or anything, really—has environmental repercussions all its own, the pretty smells in our personal care products are, perhaps, the issue most worth examining here. Many of the chemicals producing fine aromas have been linked to not-so-fine human ailments or tested on animals, and their disposal—down your shower drain in a sudsy stream—fills our water system with chemicals that do not readily biodegrade (or breakdown).

Now, how about a shave?