>> Venice boardwalk got 12 new recycling bins! Purchased with proceeds from a tax on private trash haulers, the bins will be emptied and maintained by homeless people working for a local non-profit agency called Chrysalis Enterprises. The recycling program will pay for itself by selling the collected materials to recycling companies. Above is L.A. Council member Bill Rosendahl at the bins' "unveiling" on Thursday.
>> Buy, sell and trade children's clothes at eco-store Eden’s Green Closet, 1423 Abbot Kinney Blvd., Venice. (via Ideal Bite)
>> Chat about "staycations" -- and the potential half-cent sales tax for L.A. County transit projects and other transportation -- with Metro Board Chair Pam O'Connor tomorrow at noon.
>> Respected eco-blog WorldChanging bans "skeptical" comments on climate change. "We will delete comments which deny the absolutely overwhelming scientific consensus on climate change, just as we would delete comments which questioned the reality of the Holocaust or the equal mental capacities and worth of human beings of different ethnic groups."
>> State Republicans are trying to roll back policies that address climate change, such as curbs on greenhouse gas emissions and regulations banning some diesel engines. "None of those laws has any direct connection to the state budget; changing them will do nothing to close California's $15.2-billion deficit."
>> Read an interview with Jane Goodall, best known for her work with chimps. Now, Goodall's working on saving the environment -- and encourages you to do the same.
Wine drinkers: You can now up-cycle your corks! In addition to the juice pouches and cookie wrappers and other detritus from our grab-n-go culture, the eco-company TerraCycle's now accepting wine corks -- both natural and synthetic -- which the company will turn "into cool products that will be available nationally at major retailers."
It's unclear what exactly these products will be, but the illustration provided on TerraCycle's Web page looks like a doormat will be one of the goods produced.
Best part of this dealio: While other TerraCycle programs require you to sign up and are really geared towards groups and organizations, this wine cork program makes up-cycling easy for mere individuals. If you've got fewer than 100 corks, all you have to do is mail them in to TerraCycle, ATTN: Cork Brigade, 121 New York Ave., Trenton, NJ 08638.
Got more than 100 corks? Then go ahead and sign up with TerraCycle to get prepaid return shipping labels.
Image courtesy of TerraCycle
One yummy benefit to procrastination: If you hit the farmers' market during the last hour or so, you can get some really, really great deals on organic fruit.
Yesterday, I got two 3-packs of strawberries -- for $6! Yes -- that means just a buck for each one of those little green baskets. The Bautista Family Organic Farm booth was trying to sell all its strawberries before the Wednesday Santa Monica Farmers' Market closed, and I lucked out.
Regular prices got me great deals too though. I got six sweet organic nectarines for $6!
And five heirloom tomatoes plus three zucchini -- all organic from Tutti Frutti farms, all for $6.
Best way to make sure you get the most out of your organic, local strawberries: Wash and cut them as soon as you get home, and eat the really ripe ones during the process. This morning I had steel cut oats decorated with strawberries.
Photos by Siel
 If there's one beauty product that makes environmentalists queasy, it's nail polish. The glossy stuff's known for containing some of the most hazardous ingredients of all personal care products, including formaldehyde, phthalates and toluene. In fact, nail polish is considered hazardous waste in California.
"There is no purely nontoxic nail polish," says Umbra, eco-advice woman at Grist.org, and advises that "If you are willing to give up one beauty product, make it nail polish." More recently, Sarah van Schagen tried out five supposedly less-toxic conventional nail polishes, concluding that "The chemical smell from all of these suggests that pursuing your polish habit may not be the best bet for your health."
Yet despite that toxic history, eco-preneurs haven't given up on nail polish. Walk into Whole Foods and you'll see a few brands of "green" nail polish lines that tout themselves as better, safer alternatives. And while some of these have often eliminated the worst of the chemicals, only a close study of the ingredient list will reveal how green these brands' eco-claims are.
 Enter Acquarella, self-described as "a safe, non-toxic, water-based alternative to conventional products." Acquarella piqued my interest when I heard it would participate in the Green Beauty Panel event last month. I wasn't able to make it to the event, but decided to give the nail polish a try.
Open a bottle of Acquarella nail polish, and the first thing you'll notice is that the stuff doesn't smell like a noxious stew of chemicals. Acquarella prides itself in avoiding formaldehyde, phthalates and petrochemical solvents. I tried on the purplish "vamp" color; the nail polish dried about as quickly, and lasted about as long, as conventional nail polish! The Acquarella nail polish remover -- which also didn't have that strong, chemical smell of regular removers -- worked quite well, though taking off the polish did seem to take a few extra minutes. Afterward, my nails looked normal and healthy -- not stained, dry and stripped as they tend to look when I wear then remove conventional nail polish.
But how eco are Acquarella's claims? Sniff test aside, I really had a tough time figuring out exactly how safe Acquarella's products are, mainly because the ingredient lists are so vague:
- Full ingredient list for the nail polish: water, acrylic polymer emulsion, non-toxic colorants.
- Full ingredient list for the remover: water, tall oil fatty acids and alcohols (plant-based), nonionic surfactant, organic buffer.
Notice how unspecific most of these ingredients are. "Acrylic polymer emulsion," for example, is a broad category; some of these emulsions are considered unsafe. "Non toxic colorants" doesn't actually give us any idea what ingredients give Acquarella polishes their color. That, plus both "nonionic surfactant" and "organic buffer," say more about the function of these ingredients versus revealing what the ingredients actually are.
This vagueness is something the company plans to fix, according to Mark Deason of Acquarella, who says a more specific ingredient list -- specific enough that the products can be entered into the Environmental Working Group's consumer-oriented product safety database, Skin Deep -- should be available by the end of this month. In the meantime, Deason said the "acrylic polymer emulsion," is a styrene-acrylate copolymer, and that the "non-toxic colorants" are similar to the stuff in kids' water paints.
Label-reading picky environmentalists may want to wait to pick up Acquarella until the company does indeed come out with its more specific ingredient list, which then will allow Skin Deep to give Acquarella products a safety rating. Acquarella products are available locally at the Hall Center in Santa Monica, as well as online on Amazon.
Of course, some environmentalists will never like nail polish, safe or not. After all, Acquarella doesn't apologize for the fact that it is all-synthetic -- nor does it market itself as a necessary product. But for those not ready to give up their nail painting habits (in typical ambivalent fashion, I don't paint my fingernails but do paint my toenails), Acquarella's available as a safer, less-smelly alternative.
Top photo by Shelli Friedberg via Flikr; bottom photo courtesy of Acquarella
If you're not ready to make your own green cleaners -- but cringe every time you throw out another plastic spray bottle (into the recycling bin, but still), TerraCycle has a solution for you: Green cleaners packaged in reclaimed soda bottles!
Yep -- The anti-waste people who brought you the eco worm-poop fertilizer in used soda bottles are now packaging eco-cleaning products in the same reclaimed containers. TerraCycle's 5-product line includes all-purpose, window and bathroom cleaners, as well as a degreaser and drain maintainer. All products are non-toxic and biodegradable; they're also free of 1,4-Dioxane, fragrances, and dyes.
According to James Artis of TerraCycle, the 1-liter bottles are either used bottles collected from local recycling centers or end-run and off-spec bottles from larger bottling companies. The spray trigger heads, too, are end-run or off specs. "The shrink label is the only part of TerraCycle’s product that is not rescued from the waste stream," Artis notes.
I tried out both the all-purpose cleaner and window cleaner during a cleaning frenzy this weekend. Both work great -- I can finally see clearly out my balcony windows! Want TerraCycle cleaners of your own? Get them at Office Max and select Targets across California. Cost: $3.99 for all products except the drain cleaner, which costs $8.99.
Earlier: TerraCycle turns juice pouches into pencil cases
Image courtesy of TerraCycle
>> Get a green gift for dad on Father's Day, with some help from Grist's eco-friendly gift guide.
>> Order local, organic groceries online. Michelle Slatalla writes about a growing number of online retailers connecting consumers to local farms. Spud.com delivers to the L.A. area -- but "local" here's defined by a 500-mile radius. (via Lifehacker)
>> The problems with a car culture mentality -- as described in a 1947 article in Time magazine: "this peculiar state of mind had not only sucked thousands of American oil wells dry, stripped the rubber groves of Malaya, produced the world's most inhuman industry and its most recalcitrant labor union, but had filled U.S. streets with so many automobiles that it was almost impossible to drive one." (via kottke)
>> Minivans: Not doing well. These soccer mom vehicle sales are sinking, along with the sales of trucks, SUVs, and other huge gas guzzlers.
>> L.A. looks into recycling its wastewater,
what with the state drought and all. The success of Orange County's
"toilet-to-tap" project could also help propel L.A.'s water recycling
project -- though it sounds like it'll be a while before we approve,
build, and start running an L.A. plant.
 Are e-books like the Kindle (left) and Sony Reader (right) more eco-friendly than paper books? The short answer is that we don't know -- yet. We have a pretty good idea of the carbon footprint of paper books, thanks to a newish study, Environmental Trends and Climate Impacts: Findings from the U.S. Book Industry, released earlier this year by the Book Industry Study Group and the Green Press Initiative. That report concludes each paper U.S. book releases 8.85 pounds of carbon dioxide.
 Unfortunately, the study doesn't cover e-books. "In order to address e-books effectively, I’d need to look at a lifecycle comparison that analyzes the impacts of e-readers vs. paper as a medium," said Tyson Miller, founder and director of the Green Press Initiative, in an interview published on Sustainablog. "I do hope that we can explore much more in-depth in future iterations."
The lack of studies effectively comparing the carbon footprint of paper vs. electronic books hasn't stopped the e-book industry from marketing both e-books and e-readers as eco-friendly products. There's even a Read an E-book Week, which appears to have been started by a couple of e-book writers, who claim on their website that "E-Books Can Help Reduce Your Carbon Footprint."
Sony, too, has been pushing its Sony Reader (right) as an eco-product. In an interview with the Sietch Blog, Rick Clancy, senior vice president for Corporate Communications at Sony, recently recommended the Sony Reader thusly: "Think of all the trees that can be spared if more people read e-books. Another great feature is that the Sony Reader uses very little energy. My understanding is the device can go through about 1,000 page turns without needing to be recharged."
To actually measure the carbon footprint of an e-book, however, would require doing a lifecycle analysis of the e-reader -- including its production methods, materials used, energy required for the reader's use, and recyclability. A future study will likely come up with a ballpark average figure, but variables will remain depending on how one obtains and uses the product (Is the reader charging up the book via solar power or coal power? Will readers discard and buy new e-readers as often as they do cellphones or computers?).
And beyond the paper book to e-book comparison, there's the reading habit comparisons for both. For instance, someone who only reads paper books -- but mostly borrows the books from the library which she gets to by bicycle (that's me) -- will have a vastly different reading carbon footprint than someone who drives their Hummer to the bookstore and buys books printed on virgin paper.
But what all of this got me thinking about is whether people would even use e-books for the same purposes that they do paper books. A while back, I wondered whether or not Google Docs would actually make offices more eco-friendly (I'd gotten an e-mail from a Google person touting Google Docs as eco) since it's unclear how the carbon footprint of "traditional" paper use compares to that of going paperless.
I posed this question to Jamais Cascio, futurist of the Cheeseburger Footprint fame, who said "I guess that the question can only be answered by looking at what you're doing with paper & paperless, and just how fungible the two really are." More on that and a review of the Sony Reader next.
Green eco-boutiques are springing up all over the Valley. Already, there's greenROHINI in Sherman Oaks and Deborah Lindquist's boutique in North Hollywood. Now, Valley Village is getting its own eco-boutique: Green and Greener.
Self-described as an "eco-living general store and design center," Green and Greener will carry everything from sustainable clothing to clay plaster to gardening supplies. In addition to the products, Green and Greener will showcase eco-living inspired art, as well as offer eco-consulting services. Alegre Ramos, who owns Green and Greener with her husband Sean, is an LEED-certified Accredited Professional as well as a businesswoman, and will continue her work in green interior and landscape design too. In fact, Alegre re-did the Green and Green building itself in eco-fashion; you can see the green transformation the building went through here.
Get there on opening day, June 10 from 10 a.m. - 6 p.m., and you'll get 10% off your purchase -- in addition to a free gift with your purchase.
And while getting around the Valley without a car isn't always easy, Green and Greener shoppers will be rewarded for their de-car-ing efforts. Customers get a 10% discount on their purchase any day they get to the store without driving. Green and Greener's put together a handy public transportation map to help you out -- and bike racks are right out front!
Green and Greener. 4838 Laurel Canyon Blvd., Valley Village. (866) 337-5602
Photo by Joshua Targownik
 What perfume did you wear as a teenager? I went through a lot of Poison -- and now I find out that toxic stuff contained four different phthalates!
This I discovered reading "Not Just a Pretty Face: The Ugly Side of the Beauty Industry," a new book by Stacy Malkan, cofounder of the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics. The reason for the book? Many of the personal care products people use on a daily basis contain lead, formaldehyde, phthalates, parabens, and other carcinogenic chemicals. Why? Because cosmetics companies are allowed to use the stuff -- and the stuff is cheap.
Instead of taking a precautionary approach as many European countries do, the U.S. goes by a "prove harm" approach. Writes Malkan: "The Environmental Protection Agency must prove a toxic substance 'presents an unreasonable risk of injury to health or the environment' before regulating it -- which roughly translates to 'show us the dead bodies.' "
Nor does the Food and Drug Administration require manufacturers to demonstrate that cosmetics products are safe. This means that the cosmetics industry regulates itself -- meaning products are only tested for short-term obvious health effects (rashes, eye irritations and the like). "Most chemicals in cosmetics have not been tested for their potential to cause long-term health problems such as cancer or reproductive harm," Malkan writes.
To prove its point, "Not Just a Pretty Face" covers a lot of ground, from scientific studies to the history of the Environmental Working Group (including its popular consumer cosmetics database, Skin Deep) to the inner workings of the Cosmetic, Toiletry, and Fragrance Assn. And while there's much to be distressed about, Malkan also points to some positive signs -- most of which is actually happening in California!
For example, the California Safe Cosmetics Act, which mandates that companies let the state know if the ingredients used in products are linked to cancer or birth defects, went into effect January 2007. More recently, the California Toxic Toys Bill passed. That bill, which goes into effect January 2009, bans phthalates from children's toys sold in California. In addition, the California Green Chemistry Initiative was unveiled early this year, with three fundamental policies: "creating a new regulatory and enforcement system, strengthening consumer protection laws and better informing consumers about toxic substances in products," according to the L.A. Times.
"Not Just a Pretty Face" in fact, is also an encouraging and empowering story -- in which most of the heroes are women! Jane Houlihan of EWG, Jeanne Rizzo of the Breast Cancer Fund, and of course, Malkan herself, are all leading the fight to make consumer products safer. Even new beauty innovations are being done by women. "Not Just a Pretty Face" tells the story of Amy Cannon, the world's first PhD in green chemistry, who's used UV light to shrink-wrap hair into a non-toxic perm.
You too can be part of the effort to ensure the products on store shelves all become safe products. Until that happens, read "Not Just a Pretty Face" to get educated and get tips on making wise consumer choices. And when purchasing products, use the Skin Deep database to help you pick the safest and greenest products on the market.
Earlier: Simplify your beauty routine for your health and the environment's, says Stacy Malkan.
>> L.A. lifeguards get into hybrids. Ford presented 10 Beach Patrol Escape Hybrids to the L.A. County Lifeguard Headquarters in Venice last week. "With four-wheel drive, it'll return 29 mpg in town (or on the beach), and 27 mpg on the highway." The fleet will grow to 45 vehicles. (via Treehugger)
 >> BBC correspondent discovers that -- gasp! -- L.A.'s subway "system" is still incomplete. But kudos for him for taking the train to the Kodak Theatre.
>> Suits made of recycled PET bottles are coming to Sears, which plans to sell them for about $200 a suit starting on Father's Day.
>> Sex toys sans phthalates. Get more eco- and health-friendly beads and rings from natch snatch. (thanks to Susannah for the tip.)
>> The rise -- and hopefully fall -- of high fructose corn syrup. Hansen’s Natural Soda is replacing HFCS with cane sugar, and to mark the occasion, Mark R. gives us a little HFCS history.
Photo by Cathy Cole via Flickr
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