Living Archives - Page 4 of 5

Sweet Dreams Are Made Of This: Recycled, Sustainable Environment Furniture

Want to keep chemicals out of your home? Start with your furniture. Carcinogenic formaldehyde is typically found in most mass-produced furniture foams, while glues and finishes usually contain volatile organic compounds. Better known as VOCs, these spend years off-gassing toxic vapors that are potentially carcinogenic and deplete the ozone. Obviously, you’re not going to dump your brand-new living room set; luckily, if you’ve had said furniture for a while or have a penchant for vintage, much of the VOC impact is lessened. But if you do plan to invest in brand-spanking-new furniture this year, there’s no better place to get inspired than Environment Furniture. Crafted from truly eco-friendly materials—many of them recycled, like the old army tents that upholster the brand’s signature couch—Environment Furniture makes a sustainable statement in every room. Take this butcher table, crafted from sustainable reclaimed hard wood. (more…)

Leilani Munter: Life is Short. Race Hard. Live Green.

This article originally appeared on EcoStiletto.com, a website dedicated to sustainable, eco-friendly, green and organic fashion and health. Leilani Munter encapsulates the ecoista’s dilemma: It’s all well and good to want to live sustainably until you work in an industry that doesn’t share your views. What are you supposed to do, quit your job? Leilani takes this concept to an extreme most of us can’t even imagine. That’s because she is—if you haven’t already guessed from the photos—a racecar driver. Not just any racecar driver, mind you, Leilani has serious on-track cred. She’s the fourth woman in history to race in the Indy Pro Series. She set the record for the highest finish for a female driver in the history of the Texas Motor Speedway when she finished fourth in 2006. Sports Illustrated named her one of the top 10 female racecar drivers in the world. The girl really can’t drive 55. More like 200. But all that speed takes a serious environmental toll—and Leila…

Get Unnecessary Oil Out of Your Life

By Tracy Hepler The Green Lifestyle Series is supported by Yourdailythread, a modern guide for the eco-curious and social do-gooder. This post was originally featured on YDT's online magazine which offers a free daily email with entertaining and informative green tips. It has been over 65 days (at an estimate of 504,000 gallons a day) since the B.P. oil spill occurred in the Gulf of Mexico. While we here at YDT have left the reporting of it to major news sources, we can’t help but think about it and all the devastation that has come. On an individual level I have wondered, what can I actually do? There are obvious things like drive less, donate human and pet hair trimmings to Matter of Trust, but beyond that I wondered… I took a look around at everything around me and realized, it’s all from oil. Every possession was brought to me through oil and many of the products I owned include oil-by products. I thought, what if we get the unnecessary oil out of our…

How to Be a Bad Recycler

The Green Lifestyle Series is supported by Yourdailythread, a modern guide for the eco-curious and social do-gooder. This post was originally featured on YDT's online magazine which offers a free daily email with entertaining and informative green tips. We all want to be better recyclers…even the YDT staff is not perfect! So let’s shake up our philosophy and create new curbside habits. Set a goal to be a rad recycler this summer. What’s up in your community? Los Angeles and neighboring communities all have recycling programs. Some cities use public services and others use private. What do they have in common? To make money! That’s right, reduce, reuse, recycle is big business. How do we benefit? Recycling saves your community energy and lowers taxes. Most municipalities pay a flat rate for recycling while they pay a per ton rate for garbage sent to landfills. The more we recycle, the fewer costs are passed on to you, the taxpayer. What great incentive to fill the …

What to Do with Stale Bread

The Green Lifestyle Series is supported by Yourdailythread, a modern guide for the eco-curious and social do-gooder. This post was originally featured on YDT's online magazine which offers a free daily email with entertaining and informative green tips. The old adage, “waste not want not” was instilled in me as a child growing up. As I have gotten older that saying has come to mean more to me, especially when it come to wasting food. One of my personal pet peeves is never finishing my fresh baguettes before they turn hard. Fortunately I learned a simple recipe for day old/stale bread during my time living in Barcelona that uses three simple ingredients: stale bread, tomato and garlic. I share this 2 minute recipe below on the latest installment of YDT TV (or watch on You Tube here). Bon appétit! Want more recipe suggestions? YDT's co-founder Lauren loves to make croutons for soup out of leftover bread (the bread softens up pretty quickly in the soup). Do…

The Sustainable YOU: Be true to the environment and yourself

Got green? Sound familiar? It should. The “green” movement in America has become so talked about, so widely spread, that you would need to be hiding under a rock, lying at the bottom of the ocean, and stuffed with earplugs to not hear the colorful buzz around “sustainable” living. At this point, most of us are trying, even in small ways, to decrease our use of ozone depleting goods, taking inches off our carbon footprint, and devoting ourselves to a much more sustainable America. And the ideas behind many things green are typically two-fold: re-use and recycle. Of course, anyone of authority and opinion within the green community could, most likely, describe each of these in detail, as well as add fifteen more adjectives for all things sustainable; but this is not my aim. Funnily enough, I began to contemplate the American “green” movement three months ago, as I settled into living abroad in the small town of San Francisco de Macoris in the Dominican Republic. Given that …