March 9th, 2010

By Barbara Kessler
Green Right Now

When Ric Richards recently acquired an aging McDonalds in Cary, N.C., he knew the place needed an overhaul. The 25-year-old store was fraying at the edges.

LED lighting at Cary McDonalds

Richards decided to give these particular golden arches a green touch.

Once he’d decided that the building needed replacing, the decision to go eco-friendly was not difficult. Richards knew it made sense from a business standpoint – it would cut energy costs dramatically – and he figured it would resonate with the educated customers living in the Research Triangle region, especially those interested in lower-carbon living.

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March 24th, 2009

By John DeFore
Green Right Now

Outdoors enthusiasts, for obvious reasons, tend to be more concerned than your average folks with the future of the planet. But the marketplace for camping and outdoor gear is crowded with high-tech products using heavily engineered materials promising maximum durability and protection from the elements.

That doesn’t mean outdoor gear can’t be Earth-friendly, though. Certainly not according to Big Agnes, a Colorado company whose mission is “to help you sleep more comfortably in the dirt.” Big Agnes makes what company spokesman John Dicuollo calls “perhaps the
only double wall tent made of recycled components from the industry,” the Salt Creek 2 (pictured). The dye-free structure may not look like your camp-neighbor’s tent, but it packs all sorts of conventional usability features — reflective guy lines, waterproof tape on the seams — that are just as consistent with green principles as the tent’s body.

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October 7th, 2008

By John DeFore

Barring a mass return to quill-and-ink pot technology, one way to green the world’s desk drawers is to pump up the percentage of recycled materials in office supplies. Pentel is working that angle aggressively with a Recycology line that touches on most of the popular ways to manually put words and pictures on paper: Its pencils, gel and fiber-tipped pens, and permanent markers are all made with a high percentage of recycled plastic.

None of the items contains less than 50% recycled material in its body (ink and lead, of course, don’t count in that percentage); some are well over that threshold, like a “Cool Lines” pencil that is 75% recycled and 67% post-consumer waste.

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