Monthly Archives: October 2011

Happy Halloween Forever Bamboo Readers! Could we ask for anything more than a holiday that celebrates candy, dressing up and scaring people?! Whether you are doing the tricking, the treating or both, we hope you have a delicious holiday.

As always, we want your celebrations to be just as safe as they are enjoyable and memorable. Protect your children and pets with a few simple tips. Keep all pets indoors tonight – especially black cats and dogs. With all the superstition surrounding the color black on this holiday, you don’t want to risk some foul play with your animals. If you’re taking the kids trick-or-treating, make sure you have a plan to stay in well-lit, high foot traffic areas. Keep the kids in sight and double check that they know your rules before approaching any houses. This year especially, the LAPD is strongly urging parents to investigate all candy collected from trick-or-treating. Police have recently seized candy, cookies, cereal and soda that had been laced with marijuana without clearly discernable markings. So when you’re checking out your kids new candy stash, throw out anything with tears or holes in the packaging as well as anything with questionable ingredients or brands you aren’t familiar with.

So whether you are tricking, treating or both tonight, keep your loved ones safe this Halloween. A little extra vigilance is nothing in return for a regret-free Halloween.

We spend a lot of time and energy in this blog and in our lives talking about “going green.” We give advice on how to change little things in our everyday lives in order to be a little more eco-friendly, but we also discuss being healthy, living well and the latest and greatest developments in bamboo gadgets. However, I have been thinking recently about what “going green” really means and if it is really enough just to turn off the lights and recycle.

The next step towards a truly eco-friendly lifestyle is to start making the inconvenient changes. Perhaps it takes longer and costs more to take public transit to work, but can one claim to be “eco-conscious” while driving a fossil-fuel hungry automobile hundreds of miles a week? Perhaps buying natural food from the farmers market is inconvenient and requires planning but can you call yourself part of the Green Revolution if you still support carbon heavy food production like those of fast food establishments?
When was the last time you took a carbon-neutral route to work? Or went a day without electricity? Or have forgone a cell phone upgrade because you didn’t really need it?

The problem with our society is that we are so conditioned to value consumption and excess; we are taught not that “less is more” but that “more is more.” We continually purchase “made to break” electronic devices, throw things out instead of fixing them and are satisfied with environmentally unfriendly solutions to boredom rather than getting outside and enjoying this same environment. Unfortunately, this mentality is not congruent with an eco-friendly lifestyle. In order to be truly “green,” we have to change our mindset and our lifestyle drastically. Though we are taking steps in the right direction, until we make the big and inconvenient changes, our impact will remain negligible.
At Forever Bamboo, we want to know what changes you have made in your life to make a difference. Hopefully, your practices can serve as inspiration to others and together we can achieve the real impact we want and need to preserve our planet for future generations.

Please post your thoughts, ideas and opinions on this page. Together we can make a difference.

Forever Bamboo truly believes in the products we sell on our site and as our name suggests, Bamboo is the primary material used in our products. We have been on the bamboo bandwagon for years now and have seen its uses evolve from the backdrop of island-inspired bars and restaurants to the innovative textiles and electronics of today. With the so-called “Green Revolution” upon us, we have witnessed the expansion of bamboo uses as well as the proliferation of electric cars; it was only a matter of time until the two collided to produce a truly green vehicle.
Greg “Gadget” Abbott, an avid electric car builder, builds electric cars from kits that utilize a fiberglass frame. Perhaps inspired by the bamboo surfboards being debuted in Hawaii, he envisaged a lightweight electric car with a frame of bamboo. A typical electric car requires a heavy battery that can weigh up to 200 pounds; “Gadget” imagined that a bamboo frame would offset this weight and thus make the car simultaneously more efficient and eco-friendly.

The bamboo surfboards of Hawaii claim to be twice as strong as fiberglass and 15% lighter. They exhibit more control and speed in turns and are constructed entirely from woven bamboo composite, considered to be one of the greenest building materials on earth. For all these reasons, it is time to consider bamboo a plausible replacement for fiberglass and steel across the manufacturing sector.

As technology improves, imagination expands and the need to go green becomes more apparent, bamboo will undoubtedly start playing a more vital role in our economy. A carbon-free vehicle would be a giant step towards a sustainable economy, especially since automobiles are such a driving force in the American lifestyle.

Reading this blog, you are taking the first step to doing your part to reduce your carbon footprint.  Perhaps you haven’t fully committed to a waste-free lifestyle, but you are on your way.  Here is another simple switch you can make to help green your life: clean green.  It is becoming easier to find cleaning products that use non-toxic, plant-based ingredients that work just as well as their toxic counterparts.  However, most of these green cleaners are still sold in bottles made from virgin plastic.  Step up your eco-friendly game by buying a green cleaner made not only from recycled plastic, but from plastic recovered from our oceans.  Method recently introduced a bottle consisting of 25% ocean recovered plastic.

While all of Method’s sleek and modern looking bottles are made of 100% post consumer recycled plastic, the new ones will include plastic elements recovered from the beaches of Hawaii and California.  Beach cleanups provided the plastic used to develop the new recycling method as ocean recovered plastics are more difficult to upcycle than land recovered plastic.  Method revealed its new process preceding International Coastal Cleanup Day, from which it intends to receive more plastics for use in its bottles.  Each bottle of Method cleaning supplies purchased will remove 10 grams of plastic from the ocean.

Image: Treehugger.com

Over the past 10 years Method has grown from a small, San Francisco based, eco-friendly start up to a national brand carried by major retailers.  The company’s commitment to sustainability and shaking up business as usual has made it a model for other eco-startups and an inspiration to small businesses everywhere.  This is in part due to its authenticity.  Post-recession Americans are finicky about spending money, causing the slightly more expensive green options of major brands to drop in popularity.  Though, since Method’s branding and production process has proven trustworthy and authentic, the public has continued to believe in their eco-chic cleaning line.

So next time you find yourself in need of laundry detergent, soap, cleaning wipes, spray cleaners or hand sanitizers check out Method’s eco-friendly options.  Not only do they offer the cleansing properties of other toxic cleaners, they smell good, look good and now, help clean up the mess that is our Pacific Ocean.