For a hilarious end to your weekend, watch GMretardation.com’s hilarious spoof of GM’s newest television ad campaign. Unfortunately gmretardation.com is no longer online, we’re guessing due to legal reasons. But that won’t stop you from laughing your tailpipe off.
While I respect my vegan friends and those who don’t wish to wear leather, those who do should know that they have a more eco-friendly choice than most. The company is called Bernardo Fashions, and their leather is derived from cattle that are being used for food, hides that would otherwise been discarded as trash. The company that the cattle come from are Hormal Foods. The company also recycles its waste, turning it into fertilizer.
Want more leather stuff that is just a bit more green than the standard stuff? Check these iPhone cases for the 3G.
Standard leather couches are a huge out of pocket investment to start with. Why not pay a little extra for a couch that looks awesome and is made from eco-friendly leather? EcoSelect’s designs are gorgeous.
Got any leather substitution or eco-friendly leather suggestions of your own? Post them in our comments section.
Loblaws, a popular Canadian grocery chain, has stepped back a bit from its environmentalist move to charge five cents for each plastic bag in Canada’s Atlantic provinces. They say that it has to do with “hard economic times” hitting in the East. It may have more to do with the competition; Sobeys is Loblaws main competitor in Atlantic Canada and they do not charge for bags.
The repeal of the charge does not sit well with environmentalists or the other Canadian customers of Loblaws, who think that if the chain is repealing the charge in Atlantic Canada that they should do so in the rest of the Canadian provinces. Some areas, such as Toronto, have laws in place that mandate that bags must carry a minimum charge. These regulatory measures would appear to be the only concrete way to keep such measures in place in light of a competitive economy.
Mark Butler of the Ecology Action Centre states in this piece on CBC:
“I really hope that the large retailers — Sobeys and Loblaws — would get together and come up with a common policy so they’re not competing with each other and they’re all charging five cents a bag”.
Plastic bags are never free. If you live in Atlantic Canada, call or write your MP to ask them to put legislation in place to charge for plastic bags just like the legislation in Toronto.
Want to drink a little wine, enjoy a bit of music, and learn more about going green? You can do it at the Think Green Music Festival in Napa Valley, California.
The festival will happen on July 10 of 2010 and while bands haven’t been announced yet, if you are planning your 2010 vacations you may want to visit Napa while it is going on. Keep on checking back to the Festival site to get updates on who’s playing.
The stage and food vendors will be supplied by solar power at the Think Green festival, and there will also be seminars about green topics going on throughout the weekend. You will of course also be able to enjoy Napa Valley wines throughout the whole event
Professor Robert Henry of the Bioenergy Research Institute at Southern Cross University in Lismore, Australia has published a study which states that biofuel crops can be grown without cutting into the territory of farming land. His findings were published in Plant Biotechnology.
In the article Henry argues that our dependance on oil can be significantly reduced by growing 100 million hectares of crops, an area the size of the province of Ontario, and only 6% of the world’s arable land. With advances in fuel efficiency technology, Henry fruther argues that this area could be reduced to 50 million hectares.
Henry is just completing a book titled Plant Resources for Food, Fuel and Conservation.
GreenLuxury was formed in 2007 to act as a social networking tool for those interested in organic luxury products. Users can share their favourite products and links on where to buy them. People who are interested in green style and products can recommend products to each other in a user-created environment; it is not a store.
Upcycled Skateboard Bags
Can you get a cooler purse? The answer is no.
Naturally Cuddly
This company makes natural fabric garments for the wee ones in your life.
Black’s Farm Wood
This company makes kitchen cabinets and other home renovation materials from reclaimed and reycled wood.
While the above ad wasn’t the first offensive ad I saw by the Corn Refiners Association, it is probably the most patronizing and misleading. In it, the actor is in effect calling the audiences “dufuses” for believing that high fructose corn syrup is bad for you.
The problem with ads like this is that the public really does know better in the age of the internet. While a strategy like this may have worked in the eighties, now I’m sure these ads encourage quite a bit of Googling on the subject. Once you do, you find out that there has been a huge backlash against the ads on YouTube and the rest of the blogosphere.
It is worth bringing up again because the Corn Refiners Association is still airing the ads, which must mean that they have some degree of efficacy. While we could blog about all of the reasons the ads are wrong, we found a video that does a great job:
While we’ve discussed organic milk, we’ve never gotten to organic butter. Obviously, organic butter is made with organic milk. Straus family creamery notes that their butter contains more butter fat than even European butters, and their butter has a European and unique taste. Horizon and Organic Meadow feature more conventional organic butters.
Organic Meadow (Canada)
This butter is produced in Ontario by an organic milk producer. Available in most greater Toronto area stores.
Horizon Dairy (US)
Horizon’s organic butter comes in various shapes and forms, just like regular butter.
Straus Family Creamery (US)
Organic dairy products serving the West Coast.
If you are anywhere near Washington DC, or plan to be in February, make sure to mark down February 9-11 on your calendar for the Third Annual Consumers Union Activist Summit. Brought to you by the same organization that publishes Consumer Reports magazine, the summit revolves around getting food safety and other consumer protection laws passed. The keynote speaker will be Eric Schlosser, author of Fast Food Nation.
Workshops include any topic you can think of, from Health Care Reform to Money Scams to How to Testify. For the low price of $100.00 for the weekend, can you go wrong? We think not.
Shuttles run from the nearby town into Google’s headquarters which are run on biodiesel, and employees can use company-owned bikes to get between buildings on campus. Google’s data centers use half the energy of comparable facilities, and Google is purchasing carbon offsets in order to reach their 2007 goal of becoming a carbon-neutral company. Other fun Google green facts: