FROGBOX! Move WITHOUT cardboard! RE-THINK

I like this idea!  FROGBOX delivers heavy duty plastic boxes to your doorstep and picks them up after you move in!  NO MORE CARDBOARD!


Rock on!  If you are a zipster (Zipcar-car sharing member) you get a discount

Frogbox is available in Seattle and Minneapolis-St. Paul and several cities in Canada.  For other companies check out "Green Your Move"

FLOWERS! GO GREEN-ORGANIC!

Flowers.  Beautiful, stunning, gorgeous, amazing, uplifting.  Flowers are bringers of love, luck, and good fortune, but have you thought about the pesticides that are tossed onto these beauties?  Thousands of tons of pesticides

to keep the bugs off of your red, red, rose. 

GO ORGANIC for your FLOWERS!  

Several organic flower delivery companies are out there and they deliver across the world (I've listed a couple from the USA and UK).

USA:  Check out Organic Bouquet --this flower delivery source provides pesticide free flowers! (and the prices are reasonable too!) 

UK: Arena Flowers 

Here is another alternative to all of the flowers on the tables at the wedding:  Edible arrangements!  I like this idea.  No more waste, and you can save money by making food part of the table arrangement (I love things that do two things at once!).  Be sure to request all organic ingredients! 

Apartment-Sized DIY Composter!

Hi all. This is my apartment garden. This is actually an exit/fire escape area. I put in raised beds right on the concrete! See the black containers next to the wall? That is my composter!




The other day I figured out a great way to compost in a small space without spending money on a composter or building one out of wood. Think vertical! Stack your garden containers! You know those black plastic containers your rose bush came in? Well, stack them up! Apartment gardens like mine have very little in the way of weeds and such, but we do get some. Place cuttings, etc in a container, then when it gets about half full (less time if you have only a little to compost) start another one on top. Rotate the compost by picking up the container and tossing it in an empty one.
Whalla! Compost!

Bicycle Delivery! Pie! Dinner! Organic Produce! Soup!

Pie!  I LOVE PIE!  Bicycles.  I LOVE Bicycles!
Pie + Bicycles = PIECYCLE  (in Seattle!)
They deliver pies with a bike!

PORTLAND, Oregon has an awesome company-- Portland Power!  They deliver more than just food!  All sorts of local products AND great food are available by BIKE!  ROCK ON!  Gotta LOVE Portland, Oregon!
Soupcycle --they deliver soup by bike in Portland!

Other cities have bicycle delivery!
 San Fransisco San Diego!
Austin Texas-- Whole Foods Delivers via bikes in Austin!!

 These companies deliver farmer's market fresh organic produce BY BIKE!
"Arborcycle" -Ann Arbor Michigan
From Earth to Kitchen - New York City

Off the Grid! --Bloom Energy

If you haven't heard of Bloom Energy I suggest you check them out.  Big time companies (Ebay, FedX, etc) are using their electricity fuel cells.  I like it because each electrical identity (home, apartment, company) etc has their own source of electricity.  There is no 'grid'.  Right now they run on fuel, but that 'fuel' could come from anywhere eventually (sun, wind, walking etc).
  

University Going Local-vore!

The University of Washington is going LOCAL for most of its food.  BECOME A LOCAVORE! 
Locavores eat only food grown close to where they live.  Most foods come from local farms, and farmer's markets.  A lot of big chain supermarkets (like QFC and Whole Foods) are joining the locavore/localvore movement and provide a selection of locally grown fruits and vegetables during the summer months. 

Restaurants on the UW campus will be sporting vegetables from the UW FARM.  Most foods will be coming from the State of Washington with most within a 250 mile radius.  GO DAWGS!  (For those of you not from Washington, the UW is the home of the Huskies). 

Here is a link to the article from the UW Daily:

HFS (UW Housing and Food Services)  partnering with more local businesses in the hope of carrying more sustainable products

GET THIS! HEMP Body, Orange Oil Tires

Gonna have my car and compost it too!  Check this out!  Motive Industries (Canadian automaker) recently launched a new bio composite car made out of HEMP! The Kestral.  It is true to its, name too.  It is small, sweet, and speedy!  Believe it or not this is not a new idea.  Henry Ford created a bio composite car in the 1940s! 

So we've got the body, what about them wheels?  Peel out of your driveway in a set of orange oil tires!  Yokohama says on their website, "There's never been a tire like the dB Super E-SpecTM-. . . the use of orange oil and other naturally-derived components significantly reduces the need for petroleum materials."  ROCK ON! 

Ok, so I'm going to get my electricity from running around, plug in my electric car AND have it made out of compostable, non-petroleum based products.  WE ARE CREATING A NEW FUTURE and I LIKE IT!

YO! D.C. Get a CLUE- COMPOST!

For those of you who missed it, the "other" Washington  and their House of Representatives have been composting for 3 years.   Well according to the Republican side of the isle it is costing too much money to ship compost over to a composting facility and they have decided to go back to using styrofoam instead. 

Check out the Washington Post Blog Post "Styrofoam Cups Coming to a Capitol Near You"

Tell me, EXACTLY, what is so expensive?  We need a way to reduce the amount of waste we produce.  How does throwing more of it in a landfill make it less expensive? 

WE NEED TO:

COMPOST IT! (most plastic has a compostable alternative! EVEN the HOT LIDS for COFFEE!) The waste becomes usable again and can be transferred to the community. It can even BE SOLD as COMPOST (granted it can't all be 'organic' at this time but it is a step in the right direction).  Check out Seattle's Cedar Grove Composting Facility. (Most of the compost available to consumers in this area is from Cedar Grove!  You can even get them to deliver in BULK!)

 So let me see if I've got this straight=== we keep stuff out of the landfill AND WE MAKE MONEY $$$  You would think this a no-brainer.  What other choices do we have:

• toss it in a landfill (which we then have to maintain, test, and re-structure for at least 200-300 years(seems pretty darn pricey to me) ; and if stuff starts to leak we have major problems, don't forget that all landfills have to make sure they don't blow up because of  rotting food creating methane gas.
•  put it on a barge and let it travel back and forth looking for a home to foul (gas is currently around $4.00/gallon people!)
•  Ship it even farther away and put other countries at risk.  Check out my previous post just on the problem with e-waste. 

COME ON D.C.  RE-THINK this!  GET A CLUE!  COMPOST = $$$ & a cleaner, safer, environment for generations