Green Options

Futurenatural have been featured before on Feelgood Style and I couldn’t agree more with the peeps over at Nylon Magazine. Here’s some scoop in case you haven’t yet heard of Futurenatural and some reasons why Nylon got all starry-eyed, saying “Our new favorite store let’s you be an Earth angel. How much time can you really spend in Sephora sifting through beauty labels? How much stuff should you trash to be “eco friendly? It’s a tough situation, but we’ve found something to make it easier:  Futurenatural, a modern organic beauty boutique.”

Performance gear-producing Patagonia, known for their forays into sustainable clothing produced with environmental ethics in mind, has produced the first recyclable-nylon shell and pants for technical outdoor wear.  The company has produced recyclable nylon gear before, in the form of pants and shorts, but these are the first shells produced in the industry that can be recycled.  Patagonia will provide recycling for their Shelter Stone products through their already-active Common Threads recycling program

In Part 1 of How Safe and Green Are Your Crafting Supplies?, I went on a quest to find out about the safety of my test case crafting product, fusible web. (As you’ll recall, it’s a synthetic product that’s like a cross between fabric and glue, and it works as an adhesive when you iron it.)

Though I was not 100% reassured by what I found, there are at least some safety regulations in place for arts and craft supplies, and fusible web does meet those standards. So let’s move on to my next challenge: assess the environmental impact.

The environmental impact of many products is pretty evident. Oil is a non-renewable resource and it creates toxins when you burn it, so I think it’s a no-brainer to bubble in “No” on the sustainability question in the answer booklet. Bottled water exchanges an efficient public delivery system for an inefficient private one and creates a massive pile of barely recyclable containers.

Fusible web, though, isn’t as immediately apparent to me. Obviously, any product that is manufactured (unless it’s Cradle to Cradle certified, Autumn reminded me) uses up resources and thus isn’t as environmentally benign as going without or re-using something that was already made. But beyond the issues posed by using any manufactured product, is there anything else going on with fusible web that is praiseworthy or less so?