November 29th, 2011

What if your bank notified you it was lowering your mortgage rate to help you build for the future?
Or your health insurance company called to say it is sending a rebate and a free fitness center membership.
You’d be darn suspicious of these maneuvers.
So it will take you a minute to wrap your mind around this: Picture a big name clothing and outdoor gear store that wants you to quit shopping so much.

[Read more →]

April 8th, 2010

By Shermakaye Bass
Green Right Now

Who’d have thought that silk skirts could change lives?

Fans of Ecoquette

Marianne Tyrrell suspected they could. A life coach and former delegate to the UN World Summit on Sustainable Development, she’s always known that when women feel visually transformed they often feel mentally changed. Add to that the knowledge that, by looking and feeling good, they are creating jobs for other women across the globe. Then add that they’re helping the environment — and saving gorgeous vintage silks from certain doom.

[Read more →]

December 31st, 2008

By John DeFore

Unless you avoided the conventional gift-buying routine entirely this holiday season, odds are good that you spent much of December in some retail environments whose construction and operation involved a lamentable level of waste.

Outdoor-gear merchant R.E.I. is a few years into an effort to chip away at waste in its stores. This September the chain opened a store in Round Rock, Texas (just north of Austin) that is phase two in its development of a long-term eco-friendly model. Most of its innovations have been tested for over a year in a Boulder, Colorado location, but that store, which opened in October 2007, was a renovation of an existing space. This one, situated in a cluster of stores whose heavy traffic is generated by the area’s only IKEA, was built from scratch to accommodate its green agenda.

[Read more →]