The words luxury and green are "used so often no one knows what they mean," according to a yesterday's NY Post. The article offers ideas for teaching your kids responsibility without boring them to tears and seems to use similar content to our Easygoing Green policy. (Is that flattery?) Unless you haven’t turned on an iPod, computer, TV, or radio in the past year, you’ve seen enough green terminology—“natural, fuel efficient, organic, conservation, human rights, sustainable, fairly traded, socially responsible”—to toss a Prius-sized salad. And who wouldn’t want to be green when that simply means breathing clean air, eating healthy food and sleeping in a toxin free environment? Certainly one only has to spend a few hours outdoors breathing the polluted air in Phoenix, LA, or Beijing to see why it matters.
Yet less than four percent of Americans know that coal fired power plants cause even more air pollution than automobiles. A 2008 EcoPulse survey found fully half the respondents couldn’t name one feature of a green home. While 83 percent of US consumers worry about climate change, 26 percent could not name one company that makes a green product. Most people from the Northern Hemisphere know Boston is famous for its clam chowder and Irish stew can be ordered in any good Irish pub around the world, but only one in 40 know the most common soup in the Pacific is plastic soup. Floating in the North Pacific is a sea of plastic soup almost one and a half times the size of the continental US. Often called the Pacific Garbage Patch, this five million square mile area is a graveyard for marine life.
What sources or criteria do you use to cut through the buzzwords like luxury or green?
This blog is for bottom-up dispensers of cool who enjoy eco-travel deals and healthy living. We feel that "the small, the slow, the local, and the personal" will build the new economy. Your comments will help enrich this information for all of us.
Photo by Richard Burk
7 comments:
What's the iguana's name? Is he your pet?
I took the photo this past summer. He is larger and more colorful now. I rescued him about 5 years ago on a cold south Florida morning when temperature was 40 and I was riding my bike and found him in the road after falling from a tree. He had already lost his tail and his body was only about 18" long. I thought he was dead until I picked him up to get him out of the road. He moved and I took him home to warm him up. He later moved into that palm tree behind my house and has since found a female and had a few years of offspring. He and his family like to wander my garden and eat the weeds and sometimes my herbs. I have not named them. They are beatiful peacefule creatures. This particular creature has some history with the blogger. I will let him know his picture is now on the internet. Maybe with his new fame and royalties he can have his food delivered to his tree instead of sometimes having to swim accross the lake for more food.
I appreciate the data from the research and think that your article will certainly add to awareness for those who are just learning. The National Building Museum in Washington DC had a wonderful green home sample that I visited and it was amazing how many aspects of the interior were green. Check it out. Also,the Cheaspeake Bay Foundation built an environmental house near Annapolis that has gotten rave reviews.
Too much green? Green glut? That's wimpy. Read about someone who sees RED when we whine about green fatige-- http://blogsofbainbridge.typepad.com/ecotalkblog/2008/10/you-say-you-hav.html#more
Great sense of humor.
nice article upon pollution issue.....
With the increased interest in all things green, how do consumers know if the products they are buying are really eco-friendly?
We have developed industry unique and proprietary Green Standards for every product we carry.
Here is an overview of the Standards - http://www.buygreen.com/greenstandards.aspx
What we are trying to accomplish:
- Making it easy for consumers and businesses to find a broad range of green products
- Put the rating and the product in one spot for easy reference – see the rating emblem on every product picture
- Creating a broad view for a wide range of products using a lifecycle approach
- Applying a standardized and transparent strategy for our customers
- At the bottom of every product page you will see a link that provides a full two page detailed report on the rating for that product.
We have attempted to create a comprehensive analysis in a simplified way all found in one convenient place. We like to say there is no Black and White when it comes to Green.
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