Green Options

If you are going to be anywhere near San Francisco City Hall this afternoon, please consider going to the fourth floor to voice your support for greywater recycling. There will be a meeting at the Building Inspection Commission today to vote on a SF city amendment which is attempting to make it more complicated for city residents to recycle and conserve our own water.

Time: Wed, Oct 21, pm @ 2pm

Where: SF City Hall, Room 416

Rain barrels made from recycled food grade containers for water conservation.

If there was such a thing as a crafty recycling Must List (What? No such thing as a crafty recycling Must List? I’m totally going to write one), vintage buttons would be at the top of that list (…and I’m going to put vintage buttons at the top when I write my list).

Not only has the entire CraftyStylish blog declared March as button month in celebration of West Coast Crafty’s new book, Button it Up, but we here at Crafting a Green World are known to love our buttons, too–check out these vintage button monogram pillows, or the felted wool weekend projects that include button-topped flowers. Flowers!

So if you finish all those up and you’re STILL craving yourself some button crafting, check out five more crafty little projects that will let you get your button on:

Making green the new business as usual is catching on fast. Smart business leaders are looking for ways to cut costs and reduce their environmental impact — but they may not know exactly how to do it.

Environmental Defense Fund has just launched the Innovation Exchange, a first-of-its-kind online resource that allows businesses to quickly identify steps they can take, from greening their fleets to reducing paper use.

The new EDF site provides companies with recommendations, case studies, publications and tools to make changes that are good for the environment and the bottom line, for example:

• Advice by industry, from financial services to transportation.
• Dozens of case studies from a range of companies.
• Five simple steps to get started.

A startling new WWF study has revealed that people living in Hong Kong currently use twice as many resources as residents in China, more than double the sustainable level.

To feed the vibrant city’s massive demand for natural resources, and absorb the CO2 emitted, residents need an area of land and sea larger than 250 Hong Kong’s, an incredible seven-fold increase since 1965.

According to Mathis Wackernagel, Executive Director of the Global Footprint Network, “Although small geographically, Hong Kong not only has significant resource demands, but it also has an over-proportional influence on the world.