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Sunnier days mean more time spent outdoors. If your hiking, biking, walking, and general outdoorsyness kicks into gear in the summer, you may be thinking about replacing your athletic shoes.
Before you toss the old ones in the trash, consider recycling them instead! (You can always donate an old pair, but let’s face it: if you don’t no longer want them, it’s a good bet no one else will either.)
Nike’s Reuse-A-Shoe Program lets you drop old sneaks of any brand at certain Nike stores (here in L.A., the Niketown on Wilshire is a drop off location) and they’ll grind em up and make something new out of them. It’s a closed loop system where you use your shoes for playing and then send them on to be recreated into a playing surface like a playground or basketball court for kids. Pretty cool right?
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Since it’s summertime, that means yard sales. Not only can you save money, meet your neighbors, and hunt for hidden treasures at garage and yard sales, you get to be green to boot. By buying used furniture and household items (or other funky vintage finds), you’re reusing and recycling. Besides, it’s always new to you!
We really like this cool new web tool to find yard sales near you:
The Yard Sale Treasure Map [via Renest] culls Craigslit and newspaper listings to create a complete show of all the sales in your area (no more following from sign to sign). Plus, it’ll even figure out an efficient itinerary of all your stops.
Happy hunting!
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With the new water ordinance in place in Los Angeles, we’re all getting seriously creative about saving H2O around our homes. (Check out our previous post on what and what not to do with water as of June 09.)
One tool to help you water wisely in your garden? The Weed-Free Garden Watering Blanket. It’s a tricky tool that can save you 75% of your current water use while letting you water, weed, and feed your green all at the same time.
In a nutshell, it’s a blanket that comes with built-in drip irrigation. The blanket’s special weave blocks weeds from growing and the watering system is super efficient. Plus, the kit comes with organic fertilizer so your plants will not only be less weedy and water-needy, but healthier and more bountiful as well. (Full instructions come with the product.)
You can get on in our store or at All Shades of Green online.
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We want to recommend the eco-food doc. playing now: Food Inc.
It’s a behind the scenes look at the true face of our food system in which a handful of players control a whole lot of products and our people, animals, and planet are not put first.
But don’t worry: there are solutions to be had from folks like Michael Pollan, Eric Schlosser (of Fast Food Nation), and small family farmer, Joel Salatin, as well as from other farmers and a woman turned food advocate whose son died from eating an Ecoli-laden hamburger.
It’s an important movie for eaters everywhere and it inspired both applause from me when I saw it and further steps when I left the theater to eat whole, sustainable, healthy, humane food.
And if you eat meat anddairy, check out the Eat Wild directory where you can locate local, sustainably-raised animal products raised on pasture in your neck of the woods.
In L.A., we’ve got Lindner Bison and Kendor Farm’s free-range chicken and eggs right at the Hollywood Farmers’ Market.
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with Randi Ragan, owner of GreenBliss Ecospa
Thursday, June 25th
6:00 p.m. to 8:30 p.m.
20.00 admission
Pamper yourself while learning
about which cosmetics to use and which to avoid.