Toilet paper aisle. Image credit:
Flickr, Noricum
You know that feeling when you walk into the paper product aisle at the market and you’re overwhelmed with choice? Being a green consumer, you naturally want to make a green choice, but how? And, maybe more importantly, why? Need help? Well, viola! Greenpeace has released its
Recycled Tissue and Toilet Paper Guide, a credit card-sized shopping guide to help consumers find the greenest household paper products....
If you like it colourful and silky, eco-friendly and hand-crafted,
Rajboori has just the things for you. These luxurious eco silk textiles brighten up any home with a bit of Indian colours and modern designs.
...
Designer Joan Nadal took on the challenge to re-design one of the most common everyday objects: the humble clothes hanger. A small object with a large environmental footprint if we consider that
of the 8 billion polystyrene or polycarbonate hangers manufactured per year, only 15% are recycled. That is enough to fill the Empire State Building 4 times! The solution: make recyclable hanger from just one material, and if you can, recycle something along the way.
BoB Hanger does exactly that: it’s made from recycled cardboard and needs two reused bottles to function....
Bucky Fuller said:
“Our beds are empty two-thirds of the time.
Our living rooms are empty seven-eighths of the time.
Our office buildings are empty one-half of the time.
It’s time we gave this some thought.”
While Bucky notes that beds are used for a third of the time, we are asleep for much of that. So why do we give them so much space? What else can we do with them? TreeHugger has shown dozens of transformer sofas, but what about a more permanent solution?...
AOL
People spend a lot of time on mattresses; John and Yoko famously didn't get out of bed for days on end. Julie Scelfo at the
New York Times looks at what goes into a mattress, and in particular, what “organic,” “natural” or “eco-friendly” mean, and came to the conclusion- not much. ...
Pottery Barn's Green Glass Tumblers are made from recycled Bordeaux wine bottles. Photo: Pottery Barn.
I love it when a retail giant highlights eco-friendly products, so when I picked up
Pottery Barn's Christmas 2008 catalogue, I was excited to see they have labeled items to make it easier for eco-conscious shoppers to find green products. It's a big step forward from where Pottery Barn stood a year ago, when, as TreeHugger Collin Dunn pointed out, their Eeco-chic classification was little more than lip service. ...
Photos: dqb studio.
Art director and photographer formed in Milan and New York, Dominique Besanson returned to Buenos Aires a few years ago and started thinking what she could do creatively. It was then when she thought of gathering her love for handcrafts and knitting with her care for the environment and created DQB, a line of accessories produced with discarded materials from the textile industry.
More info and beautiful pictures in the extended....
Image source: Oeuf
Oeuf (pronounced UH-F. Means "egg" in French), maker of children's furniture, toys and clothes, brings more multi-functional items that can age and change as your child does. Items are all manufactured in Europe from socially responsible manufacturers. The children's clothing is all very cute and has a very grown-up, European look to it....
Image source: Yumi & Laurie
The new, 100% organic cotton and bambo blend towels/wraps/blanQuettes by
Yumi and Laurie offer an eco-friendly towel with multiple colors and patterns on each towel - something not often seen in the world of eco-friendly homewares. The designs are inspired by a recent trip to Asia and the blanQuettes are large enough to cuddle up with on the couch or use as another layer in bed during those cold winter nights. ...
Image source: Getty Images
You may not know their name, but there is a high chance that you have their products in your home if you've ever purchased a
pillow from
Bed, Bath and Beyond,
Sears,
Ikea,
Bloomingdale's,
Costco,
Wal-mart,
Target or
Marshalls.
Hollander Home Fashions makes one out of every three pillows on the market today and
Sustainable Business reports this morning that they plan to become a zero waste company by 2010....
Photo used courtesy of
Vagawi
The U.S. Department of Energy has established that in many cases using an electric space heater in one room is much more efficient that
heating an entire home efficiently with a gas furnace (especially an older unit). With so many space heater options out there, it is not so much a question of using one, but which one to use.
There are a lot of great options out there, so while we can't cover all the great ones, we are going to focus on a few models which have either been praised by online reviews (such as Amazon, Viewpoints, Epinions, etc), Consumer Reports, and/or Good Housekeeping.
We have separated these units out to the more common forms of portable heat. You have your basic convection heater, fan forced convection, oil filled heater, mica panel, and radiant heater. Each of these offer a slightly different means of heat to meet your needs, and we shall describe their pros and cons along with their unique features....
Image source:
Muu Kids
Muu, new to the world of children's furnishings, is launching its kids furniture line that is both customizable and modifiable - the Sam Collection. The pieces are beautifully built and sturdy. Best part - each of the pieces are designed to change as your child gets older to provide a new function and continued use. Then when you have your next child, simply convert the furniture to its original form and, voila, you're ready to go. No need for new furniture....
Eden Home should be a boon to all the eco-enthusiast
online shoppers everywhere. Touting everything from clay cookware to organic bathroom linens to soap made of shea butter and
olive oil, Eden Home seems like a classier, eco-friendlier online version of
Bed, Bath & Beyond. ...
Photo: courtesy Richard Byrd
Got three million and change? Get in line. The hottest eco-friendly home on the market is a $3.5 million,
LEED Platinum, 1920s Spanish stunner recently renovated by Adrian Grenier’s go-to green expert Richard Byrd of “
Alter Eco” fame. The guy may be brand new in the eco-development department, but in this, his first sustainable home, he hits all the marks. Think
reclaimed materials like 300-year-old Spanish roof tile,
CFL bulbs,
solar trees, low-flow sinks and toilets, and a carpet made entirely from
post-consumer waste recycled plastic water bottles. (Check out more pics after the jump!) And that's not all...
...
The Used Mattress Dilemma
What’s the eco-conscionable thing to do with a used mattress? Pawn it off on a (really) broke friend? Try to give it to Goodwill or list it for giveaway on the Free page on
Craigslist? These options are tough, because the idea of sleeping on a used mattress just strikes most as creepy—it’s like wearing secondhand underwear. So you likely do what most of us do—haul it out to the curb and leave it by the trash for the garbage men. As a result, around 40 million mattresses get flipped into the
landfills every year. And let’s face it—the options for eco friendly solutions seem pretty slim.
Enter
Architecture for Humanity and
Rubicon National Social Innovations: they’ve teamed up to launch the
Discarded Dreams design competition bent on reusing that seemingly unrecyclable bedding.
...
We wrote about the
Digital Water Pavilion and commented on
how sustainable the Expo Zaragoza is in itself. However, we find the urinals of this Water Festival in Spain are worth an extra post as it illustrates perfectly how one small decision can make a big difference.
46 eco-friendly urinals have been installed at the Expo, which all together save around 48.000 cubic meters of water during the weeks of the show. According to
El Confidencial, that is the equivalent of 19 Olympic swimming pools.
Jump to see image....
TreeHugger loves the Murphy bed concept; it's a great way to live comfortably in less space, since you don't need a bed when you're awake, and don't need the living space when you're asleep. We've seen some great examples, including the
bed/desk/closet combination, this
sofa/bed combo, and this
elegant version, integrated with shelving. Still, most Murphy's require a clear area to fold down into, which either requires a daily ritual of furniture-moving or sacrificing otherwise useful space for the bed's footprint. But if the bed came down from the ceiling...
You could leave your stuff where it is, putting the bed above it. That's the rather brilliant idea behind BEDUP, designed by French designers Décadrages. It installs in your ceiling, rather than the wall, and sort of floats down when it's bed time. No furniture-moving required; it can stop at various heights, using a variety of braces to help it integrate with your bedroom's furniture. It's even possible to integrate lighting into the bottom of the bed, for use when it's in storage mode. Watch
this movie to see it in action, and hit the jump to see it installed in a living room and home office.
::BEDUP (in French) via
::Freshome...
After our initial launch, we were thrilled to find Crate & Barrel's
Kona rug. And over the past few years we’ve covered the company's various eco-products, such as their
glass food storage containers, their
Bamboo Bento collection and, in the past year, their
“green sofa.” Nowadays, we’re amazed at what they’ve come up with.
At first, we were skeptical of Crate & Barrel’s most recent e-newsletters, touting their commitment to sustainability, but we’re beginning to see that this might not be a case of your average green washing. “The best place to start making the world a better place is right at home,” reads the introduction to the environmental part of their website. “At Crate & Barrel, green is not a trend. It’s an ongoing mission.”
...
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on 11. 4.09
Stage your own remake of The Battleship Potemkin with the Staypuff Crib from São Paulo's 
These aren't your mother's convertible beds. The 
