EnvironmentLA - The City's official site for information about projects and programs that are making Los Angeles more sustainable and environmentally friendly.
Los Angeles Department of Water and Power - LADWP offers environmental Green LA programs, including Trees for a Green LA, Energy Efficiency for a Green LA, Solar Energy for a Green LA, Electric Vehicles for a Green LA, Green Power for a Green LA, Recycling for a Green LA and Educational Services for a Green LA.
Green LA Action Plan - The City's official plan to improve energy conservation, transition to renewable power sources, and change the ways citizens commute to work and school.
US Green Building Council-LA - A resource for agencies, municipalities, professionals and companies interested in sustainable, green buildings.
It seems fitting that Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s first 100 percent recycled text books are a series for K-5th graders called “Go Math!”
Because the math (and the science) tells us that the earth is warming and we’d better figure out how to recycle, reuse and reduce or plan to jettison the planet in a big spaceship in the not-distance future.
The “Go Math!” series will be available in spring 2010 and has already been adopted by the state of Florida. The company estimates that the green textbooks will save 40,000 trees and 8 million gallons of water in Florida alone. It will reduce carbon air emissions by 3.8 million pounds and eliminate 1 million pounds of solid waste, according to HMH.
If you’re ready to turn over a new, green leaf this school year, there are plenty of opportunities to go eco-friendly, from recycled paper and pencils to lunch boxes and sandwich wraps made of recycled PET plastic. Compared to last year, there are more green school supplies now available and more stores are carrying them. Here’s our guide to some of the basics you be looking for:
Paper products are getting unquestionably more environmentally sensitive. With even big name brands like Kimberly-Clark publicly committing to using fibers from sustainably managed forests, you can expect to see stores make more room on the shelves for at least one “alternative” paper product brand.
There’s a funny scene in the Larry David show Curb Your Enthusiasm in which Larry, and the displaced New Orleans family encamped in his house, wink and smirk over the toilet paper that his wife has installed in the bathrooms.
Being an environmentalist – as is her real life counterpart Laurie David – Cheryl David had outfitted the water closets with recycled TP.The running joke was that everyone had noticed the difference. And they weren’t in love with the experience.
Such is the reputation of recycled TP. Although, it seems as though I have successfully slipped it by my family. Has it gotten better (I think it has)? Or are they smirking behind my back? Probably a bit of both. I don’t really know, and it doesn’t matter because we won’t be returning to conventional stuff.
I thought we’d get ahead of ourselves if we talked calendars, but now that I’ve moved into that zone where I’m noting appointments on little pieces of scratch paper because I don’t have any “January”… It’s time to get set for ‘09.
Let’s first acknowledge that, yes, keeping an online paperless calendar is the greenest way to go. Hats off to my friends and colleagues who have an electronic calendar following them around on their Blackberries. I’m not so deft with tiny keyboards and as the household commissar I must have something a bit less virtual. I am the keeper of the Master Schedule and when teens related to me try to foist off the details of their next band concert or Starbucks tete-a-tete, I direct them to the Master Schedule.
Catalog mailings are nearing full swing now, with mailboxes being deluged by hefty full-color enticements to get that Christmas shopping done by phone.
Obviously, online shopping is more prudent, ecologically speaking. However, at the recent Business of Green Media Conference in Boston, the printing industry showed signs of taking green issues seriously.
Consumers can “take solace” in the fact that many catalogs are recycled and others are certified as coming from sustainable forests, said Beth Reardon, a corporate accounts manager with Appleton Coated, one of more than 30 companies represented at the conference’s Expo.
These certification groups were created as a result of concern for the planet’s forests. They review companies’ practices to assure that they do not use old growth or rainforest timber, or engage in disreputable forestry practices that can lead to habitat loss or the displacement of human residents.
Well, slap us with a ruler, it’s time once again to hunt down school supplies, to elbow into the desperate mob with our mandates to secure a thousand pens, pencils, highlighters, fine tip Sharpies, binders and the mysterious “folders with brads.”
With the eco news streaming like ticker tape from the big office stores this year, we thought it would be an easy assignment to find what we needed in recycled versions. We were surprised that this was not the case. The stores we sampled (Office Depot, Office Max and Target) offered only a handful of green notebooks and non-toxic pens. At Office Depot we nearly struck out, looking in vain for recycled filler paper, reasonably priced eco-responsible spiral notepads and pencils made from post-consumer waste. We did spot a reusable shopping bag at the checkout line. But we had only a lone green item, Ticonderoga EnviroStik pencils, to put in it!
Tired of combat crawling through towering stacks of un-green paper and binders, we turned the Internet. Aha! Here we found much greener pastures. Online, even the Big Box stores that had failed us in person had the environmentally good goods. Go figure. Serves us right for expending $4 gasoline to search out environmentally friendly products. Our findings, and a powerfully definitive list it is:
By John DeFore
Solid-wood furniture is pricey and obviously involves harvesting trees, but the alternatives aren’t necessarily much more appealing: Particle board, while transforming waste materials into something useful, is usually glued together with resin containing the carcinogen formaldehyde. A newer innovation, the “zBoard,” hopes to supplant particle board and MDF in a wholly eco-friendly [...]
