Green Parenting for Non-toxic, Healthy Homes
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Our home is filled with eco-friendly toys, largely sent to us for review here on Eco Child’s Play, and we have a family commitment to avoid junk toys. Not only are junk toy materials bad for the environment and your children’s health, Climate Counts has discovered that toy companies are ignoring their impact on climate change. [read the full article...]
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Hankettes began in 1996 as a small home business in the founders’ attic, making simple handkerchiefs out of organic cotton. Today, they make and sell some of the greatest in reusable “green” products out there. And there’s now much more than just handkerchiefs!
What makes Hankettes so great? There isn’t a single aspect of “green” production that they’ve missed. All their products are hand-sewn. The cloth is all organically-grown cotton. Coloured fabrics are either colour-grown or hand-dyed with fiber reactive dyes. Production is all local, along the Sunshine Coast in British Columbia, Canada. It’s still at heart a small family business. Their practices are transparent. Their website links to “green” information, resources, and even competitors. And the family itself is a homesteading, homeschooling, compost toileting role model, that truly walks the walk. They are proof positive that sustainable and ethical business practices can be successful.
Our business truly reflects our lives and enhances the lives of our environmentally conscious customers around the world who purchase our natural based products.
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Last year, Häagen-Dazs announced it would invest a quarter of a million dollars into research on “Colony Collapse Disorder” — the mysterious ongoing disappearance of millions of honeybees in North America and Europe. Is this mere corporate greenwashing, or does the premium ice cream icon deserve our affection (and our business)?Häagen-Dazs has a vested interest in preserving and rescuing honeybees, since nearly 40% of their flavours rely on fruits and nuts pollinated by bees. But we shouldn’t dismiss this as mere self-serving business interests. If anything, we should wonder why this sort of investment is not much more common.
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I think one of the nicest gifts you can give a child is a musical instrument. Music is good for the soul, and if you chose the right instrument, your child will make beautiful sounds instead of irritating noise.
The Suling Flute from Down to Earth Toys, a site featuring great natural toys, is beautiful and easy to play. Made from bamboo with a clever reed design, this flute plays all the notes on the scale. My family’s experience with the flute match Down to Earth’s product description (only we had two sets of hands vying for a turn):
When we pulled this flute out of the box, we were amazed at the beautiful rich sound it produced (not like the sound of the recorders we used to play in grade school). My husband could not put it down, and our son reached up to try to pull it out of our hands (of course he got a turn too).
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Kids love bananas! In fact, after trying Whole Grain Rice Cereal, I fed both of my children organic bananas as their second food. I grew up on bananas, and my family loves banana bread; however, after reading Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life (P.S.) I can’t buy a banana without a huge pang of environmental guilt.
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I live at 40° latitude, certainly not the climate bananas grow in. Bananas grow in humid tropical regions and need 10 – 15 months of frost-free conditions to produce a flower. Banana plants stop growing in temperatures drops below 53° F.
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Update: The pregnant woman was injured; she did not miscarry as stated in early reports of the incident.
I’ve never understood what would move someone to get up early and be at a store at 5:00 am on the day after Thanksgiving. The crowds, the hassle, and the grotesqueness of over-consuming is enough to make me stay away from any store on Black Friday. Apparently, I am not alone, as today is also Buy Nothing Day.
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Today is Buy Nothing Day:
Suddenly, we ran out of money and, to avoid collapse, we quickly pumped liquidity back into the system. But behind our financial crisis a much more ominous crisis looms: we are running out of nature… fish, forests, fresh water, minerals, soil. What are we going to do when supplies of these vital resources run low?
There’s only one way to avoid the collapse of this human experiment of ours on Planet Earth: we have to consume less.
It will take a massive mindshift. You can start the ball rolling by buying nothing on November 28th. Then celebrate Christmas differently this year, and make a New Year’s resolution to change your lifestyle in 2009.
It’s now or never!
Tragically, two souls have been lost already on this Black Friday. When the doors opened at a Long Island Wal-Mart at 5:00 am, a worker was trampled to death and a woman miscarried. The worker was an overnight stock clerk who was trying to hold back the unruly crowd of shoppers. Even as the man was trampled and gasping for air, shoppers continued to rush over and around him. A pregnant woman was also knocked down. When the paramedics arrived, they told her there was nothing they could do for the baby that was already gone. Sadly, shoppers just kept entering the store without paying attention to the dead man on the ground and the pregnant woman who lost her baby. [read the full article...]
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Editor’s note: The following post was originally published on Green and Clean Mom. “Green & Clean Mom can inspire you to try a little harder, be a catalyst for change and to offer you some new tips and news on how to be the green, sexy and sassy mom…I know you are!”
Yesterday afternoon my phone rang, just as my daughter was waking up from her nap. A magazine reporter was on the line, we had a scheduled phone interview. Was it that time of day, already? Most of the questions were the usual interview questions about BPA, toxic products, mommy bloggers and my story of how I started going green and why. Then there was the question that stumped me.
“How do you deal with greenwashing?” [read the full article...]
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itzy ritzy, a company well known for car seat and shopping cart covers, has unveiled an eco-friendly baby bamboo line.
Baby Bamboo fabric is made with no harsh chemicals that can irritate tender skin. It is naturally anti-bacterial, anti-microbial and deodorizing, as its own natural ingredient, Bamboo Kun, prevents bacteria growth and it even has an inherent UV protection factor.
My only critique of itzy ritzy’s new line is the packaging, at least for the Bitzy™ Eco-Friendly Burp Cloths & Wash Cloth which comes in a rather large plastic tube for the size of the cloths. Sure, it’s a unique package, but it is not very eco-friendly. The company recommends you reuse it for crayons, legos, etc., but my four-year-old son cannot open and close the lid without assistance. The plastic is flimsy, so I don’t know how long it would hold up under reuse; however I like the handle. Reusuable or not, the packaging should be recyclable.
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