Billboard bags, the perfect swag

Did you know that 176,470 billboard ads are printed annually on 7,500 tons of vinyl to create attention grabbing, car swerving, crash inducing ads? Once they are removed from their structures, these large sheets of premium vinyl used to be headed for the wastestream. But now you can give your billboard ad new life.

AdVinylize is an affordable and eco-friendly solution for recycling used billboard vinyls into a variety of promotional products such as tote bags, messenger bags, and other innovative accessories.

Imagine, giving back a piece of your company in the form of unique, one-of-a-kind product such as tote bags, cooler bags, messenger bags or custom designed products, demonstrating your stewardship and commitment to the environment. By recycling your outdoor boards into corporate promotions, the life of your brand extends way beyond the life of the ad.

Billboard bags, I love me a swag bag.

posted by KDL | follow me on Twitter:  newscaster

A Farm Fresh Thanksgiving

(original post via Farm Fresh RI Blog)

After a rough start to the season – tomatoes and potatoes got blight, strawberries rotted in the rain – a mild November is producing a bounty of late fall veggies. Slightly frost-kissed, their flavor is rich and crisp and perfect for a celebration of the harvest. It’s a fitting turnaround for the place that Thanksgiving calls home. Ah, autumn in New England.

Make your Holiday dinners a 50-mile meal, focused on seasonal ingredients from our local farmers. They’ve endured a tough 2009 to grow our food and finally have the crops to show for it.

Courtesy of the Brown Herald

At the Wintertime Farmers Market in Pawtucket every Saturday 11-2, you’ll find a variety of veggies, fruit, eggs, meat, seafood, cider, flowers from 30 different farms and cheese, bread, pastries, coffee, jams from 20 other local producers. Plus, live music and a cooking demo by Chef Sophie of My Little French Cottage with butternut ginger soup and carrot leek potato soup to taste. It’s our state’s largest farmers market, with 50 local producers all under one roof and the widest variety of local foods available for your everyday meals and your holiday dinner. Some highlights at the Wintertime Market:

• Cranberries from Fresh Meadows Farm
• Beef and Pork from Aquidneck Farms, Hill Farm, Stoney Hill Cattle
• Chicken from Pat’s Pastured
• Apples and Cider from Hill Orchards, Barden Orchards
• Jams and Sauces from many farms and producers
• Local Cranberry Ice Cream from Kafe Lila for your hot apple pie
• Broccoli, Sugar Pumpkins, Sweet Potatoes, Squash, Onions, Potatoes, Carrots, and so many more veggies from a whole lot of farms!
• If you’re looking for a turkey, they’ll likely sell quickly at the market. You may want to contact a farm directly to inquire.

There’s such great abundance right now of incredible food grown on farms right here in our own communities. Honest, fresh and bursting with flavor. It’s something to be truly grateful for.

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We here at Green Life Smart Life are thankful for organizations like Farm Fresh RI, who work to provide the community a link to one of our most valuable resources: our farms.  We love our locally source and organic produce and are lucky to have a farmers market even in the winter months.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone.  Eat well and be well.

 

Posted by: Ashley / follow me on Twitter

A not so traditional Secret Garden

A secret garden on the rooftop of Minneapolis Target Center, home of NBA Minnesota Timberwolves is making the view from up above beautiful.  The Minnesota heat which reaches 140 degree won’t be such an inconvenience anymore.  The 2.5 acres of plants will keep the same temperature as the air and this will reduce the significant cooling and heating costs of the building.  Besides lowering the bills it will also keep 3.68 million gallons of water from running into the Mississippi.    

This is a great opportunity for Minneapolis and will be even greater when hopefully this fad starts catching on nationally.  Toronto has passed a new law mandating “green” rooftops for all new developments.  Any new development with 2,000 square meters must make sure their roof top holds between 20 and 60% of vegetation.  This new law is for residential space, commercial space as well as industrial.  There are mixed reviews about this law, many grumbles due to the extra expense this will cost.  But to others they see this extra expense paying off in the end. 

Chicago has joined by having 600 green rooftops.  This could be the start of something great for our environment, and why not it’s unused space.  Although the US has not made it mandatory like Toronto, Chicago holds the highest amount of green rooftops. 

There are so many benefits to having a green roof.  They are such a great way to insulate buildings and homes, and they reduce energy bills.  It is a great way to release oxygen into the air so car pollution is decreased.  This will also create a great space for workers at companies with green roofs to be able to enjoy the outdoors on a lunch break.  It is also possible to grow flowers, herbs, vegetables on these roofs; the Fairmount Hotel in Vancouver used their roof top space for this and therefore saves their kitchen almost 30,000 a year in food cost. 

By Kate Kiselka. Follow me on Twitter

Designer Green Countertop Options

Having attended Greenbuild last year, I am impressed at the increase in new “designer” options for surfaces and finishes I found at the 2009 show. I was already very familiar with Paperstone having just installed it in my house, but found some new options I might have to explore for my yet to be finished pantry.

ECO by Cosentino is a new  line of green countertops for kitchens and baths that is composed of 75% post consumer and post industrial materials. It reuses products that would typically end up in landfills, including glass, bottles, broken mirror, and porcelain from sinks and toilets, which are bound together with a corn based resin to create a durable and beautiful surfacing material. According to the company, ECO will utilize the equivalent of 60,000,000 glass bottles every year. Available in 10 designer colors, ECO prices at $68 – $110 sq/ft.

IceStone, a favorite of mine since the minute I saw it, is simply beautiful.  Durable surfaces made from 100% recycled glass and cement, IceStone looks a bit like granite but in my opinion, is brighter and sleeker. Didn’t get pricing but I’m going to guess comparable to the others listed here.

EnviroGLAS Products Inc. converts post-consumer and industrial glass bound for the landfill into sustainable and pretty cool looking hard surfaces such as their EnviroSLAB countertops. A standard 25″ x 60″ x 1″size countertop brings  100% recycled glass terrazzo into an affordable price range for anyone remodeling or constructing decorative surfaces and countertops. With eight glass options and fully customizable pigmented epoxy resin, can be custom manufactured for a price of around $50 sq/ft.

EcoTop is a bio-composite surface materials used for countertops, tabletops, floors and walls that is a made form FSC certified fiber that is a 50/50 blend of bamboo and post-consumer recycled paper. Bound together with a 100% water-based co-polymer resin formula, the product is VOC free and contribute to your LEED- H points. It comes in ten colors and looks similar to Corian and prices around the same. We put EcoTop in our master bathroom and laundry along with our shower surrounds.

I love the growing list of sexy, sustainable products for home design.

 posted by KDL | follow newscaster on Twitter

NBC Green Week – Really?

Well, they had it coming.  Last week, NBC Universal (owned by GE) declared it Green Week on the network, an effort within its larger Green is Universal campaign.  Before this week, I just brushed it off as yet another big company jumping on the bandwagon of using green to market themselves as hip, cool, forward thinking and innovative.  Then they launched Green Week.  And the jokes began.  This is in fact the network’s 3rd year of doing a Green Week where, as one late night talk show host jabbed, “they ask everyone to go green by watching TV!”

Well, there’s more to it than that but aside from the message they are trying to spread, the campaign is riddled with greenwashing and overuse of the term green in general.

On the Green is Universal home page, their backdrop features cute little sayings like

Green lives here

Green connects here

Green shops here

Wait, what?  Green shops here?  What the hell does that mean?

If that isn’t asinine enough, try clicking through their “Make Green Count” section where they suggest – wait for it – turning off your computer to save energy.  Oh, and the lights.  Also, use reusable water bottles!  OMG revolutionary.  You mean if I turn OFF my lights, it will save energy?  WHY HAVE I NEVER BEEN TOLD THIS BEFORE?

Oddly enough, they never suggest turning off the television to save energy.  But then if you did that, you would miss all of the little green messages being broadcast through popular shows like 30 Rock and The Office.  So really the message here?  Watch TV – save the planet!  That seems like an environmental platform even conservatives could rally behind.

Maxim Magazine had the best attempt at broadcasting the ironic hilarity of NBC Universal’s promotion of green.  Enjoy:

The tree is my favorite part.

The lesson here is: If you really aren’t green at all, please don’t vomit the word out of every orifice of your company.  You’re rendering the term completely useless and doing nothing real to help the environment.  And it’s 2009 – you can’t fool us anymore.  We have the Google.

Posted by: Ashley / follow me on Twitter