Greening Your Home Part 2: Decorating

Part two in a series about how to green your home (part one can be viewed here) is all about decorating and the little details. Home should be three things: an oasis, which makes you feel safe and healthy, a reflection of your personal style and it should smell wonderful.

The most important thing to remember when redecorating (or decorating for the first time) is that your style is more sustainable than whatever the current trend is. Focus on what you like and dislike and find furniture (see part one), textiles and decorative objects to fit your niche. Think about your style, do you prefer mid-century modern, girly antique, breezy beach cottage, or something else?

De-clutter Your Life

Alright, in my experience the best decorating strategy is to start by cutting out all the clutter in your life. This extremely freeing (when I get on a roll sorting into the trash, recyclable, give-away and sell piles I just feel like the queen of the world), but what's more is accumulating a bunch of junk you don't need is an unsustainable habit.

I know it's time to clean out when magazines are piling up on the floor, mail on the table, laundry goes undone, clean clothes remain on the floor... I think I'll stop listing things now since I am beginning to sound like a major slob.

MAGAZINES
Only keep subscriptions to those publications, which you read regularly and would miss if they did not arrive each month. Not only do they take up space but if you aren't reading the magazine it's a waste of paper. 

BILLS
Opt for e-bills to pay online. Saves paper and cuts the clutter.

JUNK MAIL
A year's worth of junk mail slays over one million trees, wastes 28 billion gallons of water and uses as much CO2 as 2.8 million cars. 41 Pounds is a service, which removes you from junk mailing lists for five years.

Things to keep around

STORAGE

Now that you've removed the clutter you need a place to store the stuff you DO want to keep. I made a couple of storage containers out of old shoe boxes. I don't know why but I can't stand to get rid of shoe boxes, they are so sturdy it just seems a waste. I was using them to store things hidden in my closet (because they aren't very attractive) but I found a pin on pinterest, which showed me the light. Here are my results:

I can post a tutorial on how to make these boxes (no sewing). Check out my poor sickly plant: that was a just because gift from boyfriend (aww). I just replanted it from the plastic container it came in into a big boy pot. It's not adjusting well.

Toss the things you don't need, hide the things you don't want to see, and as for the rest? Continue reading; there's no need to keep every surface in your home totally barren.

PLANTS
Plants are my favorite things in the world; I prefer to live in a jungle home with every surface (including the floor) supporting a pot with a plant of some kind. I think they are so pretty AND they can eliminate toxins from the air. Here is a list of beautiful plants and the toxins which they remove.

http://www.houseofplants.co.uk/Collections_freshair.htm

• Gerbera daisies (reduce formaldehyde levels)
• Chrysanthemums (reduce benzene and trichloroethylene levels)
• Orchids (reduce xylene and toluene levels)
• English ivy (reduces benzene levels)
• Bamboo (reduces formaldehyde levels)
• Butterfly palm (replaces your humidifier)
• Rubber plant (reduces formaldehyde levels, can be toxic to pets)
• Peace lily
• Heartleaf or elephant ear philodendron

Just a little plant pun for you: I would have given you flowers, but I never botany. *groan*

CANDLES
I love candles. They smell lovely and create ambient light. As long as you use candles made from soy or beeswax they are also eco-friendly.  Make sure to keep these around.

http://www.organic-fair-trade.com/Beehive-Glass-Beeswax-Candle.html

Soy wax burns cleaner, lasts longer, holds more fragrance, contain no toxic chemicals or carcinogens, and are all-natural (when no non-natural fragrance or color is added). Beeswax candles are naturally scented with honey and smell sensational. Look for sustainable brands because the bees need the wax to lay eggs in and store honey so we don't want to exploit their homes.

REFURBISH
Look at objects in a different light. For example, while shopping at ReSource Yard, a building materials re-purposing company here in Fort Collins, I found an old brick in a pile of other old bricks. Because this particular brick was the only one like it, it was practically useless on its own but check out how I decided to use it.

My wine selection is lacking, but before I had a place to store wine I couldn't buy as much. I've been looking for a unique wine storage unit for a while now. You never know what you'll find, if you look with a creative mind. (Haha rhyming, I give you permission to use that as your personal motto).

WHAT'S IMPORTANT
Say you have a collection of pig figurines. Find a way to display your collection where it's viewable, not in the corner gathering dust. Pig figurines may not be trending in the interior design world but if it's important to you it will make you feel that much more comfortable in your home. Your home should reflect your personal style.

 

http://www.kaboodle.com/reviews/vintage-pig-figurines-huge-lot-of-collectible-pig-figures

PICTURES and PAINTINGS

I love having pictures of my family and friends all over the house. I also have framed artwork from poster stores, Dustin Hawks (my brother-in-law), magazines (Yoga journal always includes a full page image of some scene in nature. I change these out every month), and even a few flea market purchases.

• Support a local artist to find new art and help your community.
• Look for art at flea markets, garage sales, antique stores and thrift stores.
• Recycle pages from books, magazines, newspapers and turn them into art.
• Frame photographs and hang them artistically, below is a beautifully designed gallery wall:

http://www.homelife.com.au/homes/galleries/decorating+with+craft+,17075?pos=4

FABRICS and TEXTILES
Unless they're organic, the cotton sheets on your bed were probably sprayed with 1.25 pounds of pesticides. Conventionally grown cotton uses 25% of the world's insecticides and 10% of all pesticides. These carcinogens seep into groundwater and contaminate the habitat for fish and other wildlife. Regular cotton sheets are also treated with formaldehyde and some of the colored dyes may contain heavy metals. Now you know why your mom told you to wash your sheets before sleeping in them.

As for cotton-polyester blend sheets, they don't tend to last as long (meaning you have to buy more often... so not green) and are derived from petroleum. So when you're looking for a new set of sheets, be sure to look for the following:

• Organic cotton (or linen, or pesticide-free bamboo)
• Free of harsh chemical dyes
• Not chlorine bleached

A few brands to check out:

• Anna Sova ($130 for a complete set)
• Coyuchi ($50 - flat and fitted sheets sold separately)
• Loop ($200 for a complete set)

and for those not rolling in dough, Target has a line of organic cotton sheets starting at $25 for a set.

http://www.target.com/p/target-home-325-thread-count-organic-cotton-collection/-/A-12173470

All the statistics above apply to curtains, towels and blankets. Look for organic cotton or wool blankets to snuggle up with this winter so you don't have to turn up the heat (double green win!)

Did I miss something? Leave your sustainable decorating tips below in the comments, and come back soon to learn about Earth-friendly cleaning in Part 3 of Greening Your Home.

Sustainable Holidays

There's just one week until my Thanksgiving week long break and I can't tell you how relieved I am to realize it's just around the corner. In some ways this break is bittersweet because it is the last Thanksgiving I will see in my Undergraduate as this is my final semester at university (for now). On top of that Christmas and other winter holidays are waiting to burst forth with sparkling twinkle lights, soft frosted sugar cookies, striped peppermint canes, peace, love and good will toward man.

Wintertime brings forth thoughts of joy within my spirit, but with these holiday parties, gifts and excessive food we also see a lot of waste, which is not very Earth-friendly. I would never suggest that anyone should cut out the important traditions, or stop giving gifts or never throw a party. What is life, let alone Christmas without these things? However, winter sends our consumerism into overdrive and I am here to give some tips on how to reduce (not remove) some of these excessive purchases.

Invitations and Cards

Let's start at the very beginning, a very good place to start. When we read we begin with ABC when we throw a party we begin with invitations. On this topic, I'm torn. It's always quite lovely to receive a beautiful invitation to a wedding, holiday party, or shower. On the other hand, the paper industry is the third largest producer of greenhouse gases in the U.S.

 http://sfgirlbybay.blogspot.com/2007_11_01_archive.html

• Evites (like those from Punchbowl.com) are virtual invitations, which may provide the answer. 
• Another idea is to use partly or 100% postconsumer recycled paper.
• Non-wood pulp paper:
• Cotton paper from Crane's, which uses leftover waste from the textile industry.
• Botanical Paperworks is a company which uses biodegradable materials to make cards with seeds in them. You plant the card and can enjoy a garden of beautiful wildflowers next spring.
• Kenaf and hemp papers are a good choice, because kenaf and hemp are sustainable and easy to grow without pesticides.
• Resource for recycled tree-free paper: Vickerey.
• Avoid cards which are embedded with metallic sparklies or are coated in plastic. They are tough, if not impossible to recycle.

Gift Wrap

Gift wrap is often not recyclable due to the large amount of ink used in printing, nor is gift wrap generally made from recycled materials. So considering the gift wrap is rarely appreciated before it is torn off the gift and wadded into a ball to be used later in gift wrap basketball (is that just my family?) it's a bad idea to use conventional wrapping paper. But good news everyone, there are alternatives:

• You can find gift wrap and bags made from recycled paper and tree-free materials on Lucky Vitamin.
• Wrap gifts unconventionally: Gifting your foodie friend kitchen utensils and a gift card to their favorite restaurant? wrap it in a pretty kitchen dish cloth. Wrap a gift inside a usable tote or purse; two gifts in one!
• Make a cute origami gift box (see my tutorial here) or gift bag (see tutorial on How About Orange) from magazines or newspaper. Recycling is the best! Plus, magazines have beautiful glossy pages.
• Save still pretty bows and ribbons from year to year (key words, still pretty; don't be saving ratty old bits of useless material.)

Origami gift box from magazine pages.

Gifts

When it comes to gifts, people generally default to things. Change your mindset. Unless you know exactly what someone wants or needs, a thing might not be the answer to your gift giving questions. What to give instead? Gift certificates are a great place to start, not generic, impersonal ones but ones that really show you know who they are and what they like. Have a friend who loves yoga? Get them a a punch pass to a local yoga studio. Remember that foodie friend I mentioned earlier? Restaurant gift card! More ideas:

• A donation to a charity in their name.
• Tickets to their favorite concert, sports team, the ballet, the opera, the movies... etc.
• Gift card to a salon or spa.
• Mom and dad would love a framed picture of you and your siblings.
• For your gal pals, a night out and an overnight stay in a luxury hotel.
• For a sporty friend, sessions with a personal trainer.
• For that recently married couple, a bottle of the wine served at their wedding or honeymoon.

See it's not so hard. Homemade gifts are also very appreciated. They show you put time and energy into their gift. Here are a few links to homemade gifts (pinterest is the best pinterest)

• 186 Homemade Christmas Gift Ideas on It's Written on the Wall
• 25 Handmade Gifts Under $25 on 36th Avenue 
• 101 Handmade Gifts for Men on Everything Etsy

That should keep you busy for a while.

http://www.realsimple.com/holidays-entertaining/gifts/wrapping/creative-gift-wrapping-ideas-00000000014208/page11.html

Refreshments

No one can deny that food and booze can make or break a party. Food and booze also tend to be served in excess at parties, with good reason. No host or hostess wants to be caught without food to serve the seven who RSVPed "no" but decided to come anyway or the plus one your nephew forgot to mention he was bringing (*hint hint* this is also a commentary on party etiquette).

Thanksgiving: the holiday we give thanks for what we have (to waste)  

http://people.desktopnexus.com/wallpaper/823264/

More than 25 percent of food produced for humans is thrown out (that comes out to about 50 million tons of food every year). This food ends up in landfills, which are major sources of human-produced methane, a greenhouse gas that is twenty-three times more prolific than CO2. The moral of the story is to:

• only serve the amount of food you'll need,
• store the leftovers for a meal tomorrow,
• use local and organic ingredients,
• recycle and compost waste, and
• use cloth napkins and reusable dishes and utensils.

As for alcohol serve organic alcohol as often as possible. Why does it matter? Alcohol come from plants and it takes a lot of plants to make that much alcohol. This means a heck of a lot of pesticides; not good for you, or the planet. Organic alcohols:

• Square One Vodka
• Juniper Green Organic London Dry Gin served with Q Tonic
• Tarnantas Organic Cava Brut
• Bison Brewing Organic India Pale Ale

Decorations

In my family decorating the house for Christmas is a Christmas tradition I love (in fact one year a cried... I don't actually remember why but it had something to do with Christmas decorating and not doing it as a family... or something). I love changing the decor in my apartment (especially the door wreath) seasonally, but Christmas is when I really go all out with the decorations (this is probably true for most people).

Unfortunately some of the decorations on the market are not very Earth-friendly, namely twinkle lights. A string of 300 hundred of these lights can use 30 kilowatt-hours of energy (emitting 45 pounds of CO2) over the holiday season. And with those big fat lights, your looking at 450 kilowatt-hours (700 pounds of CO2). The solution? LED lights! Not only do they only use 3 kilowatt-hours during the holiday season, they don't get hot so your fire risk goes WAY down.

Old town Fort Collins in winter. I wonder if they use LED lights...

http://www.city-data.com/picfilesv/picv8550.php

Use decorations you can reuse from year to year (i.e. a paper garland is a no-no, also not chic. That goes for confetti too, which is ridiculously hard if not impossible to clean up). Look for decorations at antique stores, thrift shops and garage sales instead of buying them new.

Other than that, the only thing I can suggest is forgetting the Christmas tree all together. But I would never suggest that because I LOVE Christmas trees. Seriously.

This room is unquestionably gorgeous!

http://freshome.com/2009/12/13/10-beautiful-christmas-tree-decorating-ideas/

However, consider an artificial Christmas tree. No luxurious spruce smell, but also no messy needles. Or if you could never go without a real Christmas tree, buy one with roots attached that you can replant when Christmas is over.

Clean-Up

Don't give up on being green just because you are over-whelmed with a mess after a party. Hopefully you've already reduced a lot (a major point of this post in case you missed that) and you are left with a relatively easy cleanup. Use green products like Seventh Generation and Simple Green (more on green cleaning products later). Replace your plastic trash bags with recycled trash bags or use biodegradable bags, such as BioBag. Avoid disposable dishes and utensils! Here's a few tips if you need more dishes to cover your guests:

• Check out vintage shops for unique (and cheap) dishes that send you good vibes, man.
• If you buy new, get organic or renewable fabrics, recycled glass, sustainable woods, and ceramics colored with nontoxic dyes.

The end... Good luck to you with your holiday season. Leave a comment to tell me how you plan to utilize these tips or share your own.

Greening Your Home Part 1: Big Purchases

In my opinion home should be two things: an oasis, which makes you feel safe and healthy and a reflection of your personal style. Okay, three things, it should also smell terrific. Whether your home is a sprawling house in the suburbs or a closet-sized apartment in the city home should make you release a sigh at the thought.

Greening your home doesn't require a decorator or another mortgage. In fact, if you went and replaced everything in your home to "greener" products, you would actually be the anti-green (red?). So let's break this down: we want to reflect our personal style, we want to feel safe and healthy and we want a nice smell. Over the next couple of weeks I will try to address each of these topics.

Today, let's talk about the big things for decorating in an Earth-friendly, sustainable way. Furniture, floors, walls and building will be the main focus.

Furniture

The most prominent feature in your home (besides the walls and ceiling and stuff) is probably your furniture. If you really need to replace your furniture you should, just keep in mind it take a lot of energy to manufacture new products and processing emits toxins and chemicals. Here are some alternatives to buying new.

ONE: VINTAGE
Antiquing is an action for a reason: not only can you find carefully made (things were just made better long ago), GORGEOUS furniture, it is completely ecofriendly because no energy is required to produce it (it's already been made, and used, and maybe used again). Check out local antique stores, flea markets, garage sales, and furniture consignment store (How to shop garage sales etc. coming soon!).

http://www.casasugar.com/Roundup-10-Antique-Desks-Modern-Feminine-Bedrooms-2892134

And if you think antiques are stuffy, or boring, check out the above image, which is totally chic.

TWO: REFURBISH

A little sprucing up can do wonders for furniture, sometimes making it look new and always returning unique results. As an added bonus, upgrading furniture uses 85 to 95 percent less energy than producing a new piece.

THREE: REPURPOSE

In Fort Collins and Boulder, CO there is a company called ReSource Yard. They operate by removing usable cabinets, doors, windows, hardware, lumber, etc. from buildings, which are being remodeled or torn down. They then sell these building materials. My dad made an entertainment center entirely from material bought at the location in Boulder. 

Look for something like this is your area or check before purchasing furniture whether it has been repurposed. Scrapile is a Brooklyn-based company, which uses piano wood scraps to make furniture and home accessories.

FOUR: ECOFRIENDLY PRODUCTION

More and more you can find new furniture in furniture stores made from sustainable materials. Check for Forest Stewardship Council certification on wood. Bamboo is a good choice because a forest of bamboo that has been clearcut can regenerate in as little as 3 years (compared to the average conventional wood forest, which can take 30-50 years, or even longer). Fabrics should be organic (for more about organic products check out future post on organic foods).

FIVE: GIVING

When you DO need to upgrade your furniture, be sure to donate (or give to a poor college student) the old furniture. If you liked it at some point, chances are someone else will like it too. Also, it can't hurt to get that karma boost from having such a kind-hearted nature. If you feel that your karma is maxed you can also try selling the furniture in a garage sale or on Craig's List.

Building

FLOORS

If you deside to replace whatever floors you have, please consider the following...

Carpet, though soft and confortable, are loaded with volatile organic compounds (VOCs) such as toluene, formaldehyde and xylene, all of which are bad for your nervous system and the Earth. Carpet is also very difficult to clean, even if you steam it, therefore they accumulate soot, fungus, flea eggs, dust mite poop, arsenic, mercury and pesticides. Yum!

Instead, opt for either bamboo flooring (for the same reasons mentioned above) or reclaimed/refurbished wood (possibly from a piano factory). Lay out some areas rungs, which are easy to shake out. Look for those made from natural fiber with no nasty glues.

If you absolutely must buy carpet for whatever reason, Interface is a company that, while not completely guilt free, at least uses some recycled and renewable materials in production.

PAINT

Painting is a great way to drastically change the look of a space, but most paints contain high levels of VOCs, which is probably why you get that headache when you paint. The best thing you can do is look for low or no VOCs latex paints or milk-based paints. We don't want petroleum-based paints (don't even get me started on petroleum). Check out BioShield paint by Benjamin Moore or Old Fashioned Milk Paint. If you learn nothing else today, learn this: never dump unused paint down the drain! (Also, just covering my bases but please don't set it on fire... I know you were totally just about to do that.)

WALLPAPER
I know, wallpaper brings to mind scenes of interior design nightmares, but there are some very chic patterns available (it's making a comeback ya'll). Most wallpapers are made with vinyl, aka PVC. If you have room to learn two things today, I suggest you learn this too: vinyl is literally the worst. Look for the wallpaper that is vinyl free (since '93).

That's all I have today. Leave a comment below if there's something you'd really like to know more about.