Forever Bamboo

This year as you resolve to “go green,” “do your part for the environment” or “reduce your carbon footprint” try something a little different: making simplified and realistic eco-friendly goals for yourself. As with any resolution, going green requires dedication, sacrifice and creativity. In 2012, don’t let your green resolution go the way of so many before it and make it a tangible goal rather than an abstract ideal.

First of all, make your green goal specific. Rather than state that you will “go green” this year, decide to start composting or reduce your carbon footprint by cutting the miles that you drive each week. By making your resolution specific, it becomes achievable. If you want to make major changes, decide what you want your ultimate outcome to be. Commit to living a green lifestyle by resolving to replace all appliances with eco-friendly ones or to create zero waste by the end of the year.

Once your goal is specific, come up with a game plan. Break the resolution up into manageable chunks. For instance, if you are reducing your carbon footprint, calculate how many miles a week your drive and figure out where you can make cuts. Then incorporate small changes into your everyday life based on a specific timeline. Or start reducing waste by building a compost pile in the backyard and getting the whole family on board. Once this becomes part of everyone’s daily life, make the next change like cutting back on plastic consumption from packaging and disposable utensils.

Last, remember that making real changes takes time, effort and commitment. Our resolutions will be “two steps forward, one step back” processes, but if we really want to make a difference, the inevitable steps backward will not deter us. Reward yourself for your success and work through your setbacks and hopefully 2012 will be a greener year for everyone.

Decorations, guests, presents, eggnog and December 25th have all come and gone and now we are just left with the holiday memories, leftovers and general debris. We know to save our bows and wrapping paper for next year, to keep boxes and packaging for future presents and to reuse what we can for other creative projects. If you have an artificial tree, you’re beginning to think of taking off the tinsel and ornaments and packing it safely away for next year. But if you bought a tree from the lot, you may be a little lost as to what to do with it.

Placing your tree on the side of the road and crossing your fingers is not the best way to go. Earth 911 has put together the most comprehensive list to date of local recycling centers, reaching out to every city in America with a population of over 30,000. Remember, that just because someone hauls your Christmas tree away, does NOT mean it has been properly recycled; it may still end up in a landfill.

Many cities have curb-side pick-up options, but most have size and condition requirements (all trees must be void of lights, ornaments, tinsel, etc). In other cases, local volunteer organizations, such as the boy scouts, will pick up trees for a small donation. If all else fails, you can cut up the tree yourself and place It in your organic waste trash bin.

Other ideas on how to keep your tree out of a landfill include placing it in your backyard as a bird feeder/refuge, using small branches in your fish tank or aquarium as fish habitats and feeding areas or chipping it yourself and turning it into mulch for your garden.

Just remember that whatever you decide to do with your tree, make sure to do your research to keep it out of a landfill and be timely about it. Most recycling programs and centers only operate through the first weeks of January. After that, you may be subject to higher fees, shorter operating hours or shutdowns all together.

This time of year we are all looking for ways to save time and money so that we can spend those precious commodities on our friends and family. However, for a lot of us, there won’t be enough of either to satisfy everyone. So as we approach the season of gift giving, party attending and endless amounts of over eating, over spending and being overly tired, we offer these simple, fun and, best of all, eco-friendly gift options for those special people in your life.

A virtually waste-free gift and everyone’s favorite is the gift certificate to a restaurant, spa or retailer. This gift not only allows the giftee to purchase what she wants without the stigma of thoughtless cash but a gift certificate to a nail salon, masseuse, day spa or any other service helps other Americans stay employed. Image that! A gift that is sure to satisfy, is eco-friendly and keeps fellow Americans employed; is there anything better?

A baking extravaganza for the ages is a great way to show everyone on your list that you care. Baking is a fun activity to do solo, but can also lay the foundation for a new holiday tradition with a certain friend or family member. Additionally, you can make enough cookies, fudge and candy to give to everyone; bring a plate of cookies to the office, give a small tray to each of your friends or ship them to anyone around the globe for a taste of home. Even if your baking isn’t on par with Betty Crocker, the waste is biodegradable for carbon-free lifecycle.

Spend time with the one you love. Suggest to a close friend, significant other or family member that you spend the day together at a theme park, go to dinner or just go to happy hour together. This way, you can both stay within the confines of your respective budgets, you don’t have to participate in the awkward gift exchange and there is no garbage to throw away afterwards.

Regift! As long as you don’t regift to the same person or within the same social circle, there is no reason why that second toaster needs to sit in your garage any longer. This gift is of zero cost to you and it saves the refuse from a new gift from a landfill.

Got a friend or co-worker with a dreary office or cubicle? Add a little life to their work situation with a living plant or flower. It will give them something to take care of at work and can do wonders for a world surrounded by concrete. When the plant gets too big for a desk or workspace, it can be planted outside for everyone to enjoy.

So this holiday season, as you’re racking your brain for the perfect gift for everyone on your list, remember the true meaning of Christmas – giving thanks for your blessings. Christmas is not about how much “stuff” you get or how much it cost, but about the meaning behind it and its value as an expression how important someone is in your life. Making a scrapbook, cooking dinner or simply spending time together are gifts that anyone will appreciate.

The holiday season is a time for us to remember how much our friends and family mean to us. We take the time to catch up with the important people in our lives, whether by organizing special dinners, writing Christmas cards or exchanging gifts. This year though, take the time to be thankful for the planet that provides us with food to eat, water to drink and air to breathe. Here are some ideas for Christmas decorating that are fun for the whole family and don’t waste our finite resources.
Christmas Trees may seem like a waste of resources. However, there are ways to make your tree an eco-statement, rather than an eco-disaster. By purchasing a real tree from a small-scale sustainable grower you are actually helping the environment offset carbon emissions. Christmas trees transform carbon into oxygen while they grow and can continue to do so if you replant the tree after Christmas. In fact, returning your Christmas tree to the Earth in your backyard could become your new post-holiday family tradition.

Replace tinsel. Hanging chains made of brightly colored paper scraps is not only a fun family activity that evokes memories of more traditional Christmases, it is also unique way to decorate your home and recycle old paper. Popcorn and cranberry string are also perfect garland substitutes that can be placed in the compost pile after Christmas. String together beads or buttons for interesting tree accoutrements rather than non-biodegradeable tinsel.

Use old scraps of material to create bows for decorations or for present toppers. Instead of throwing out those sequined pants from the 80s or that beautiful prom dress that fit you in high school, cut it up and refashion it into something new. Cut shiny, sparkley or bright fabric into strips to tie up gifts, to decorate chair backs or to tie on the tree.

Convert to LED. These days LED lights use 80-90% less electricity than their counterparts and are becoming more affordable. By absorbing the one time cost of switching over, not only will you save money on your electricity bill during the holidays, but you will also be doing your part to conserve energy. LED lights now come in most colors and styles, so your holiday spirit will shine just as bright but at a fraction of the cost.

Happy Thanksgiving Forever Bamboo Readers! We would like to take this opportunity to thank you for reading our blog and allowing us to be a part of your life. We would also like to remind you to give thanks for the people (or pets) in your life that make you feel special and needed. This is the perfect time of year to take stalk of all the beautiful and wonderful things in your day to day life that make it enjoyable and worth getting up in the morning for.
We want your holiday to be as magical and special as you are so please be safe this weekend. As you brave the traffic, the shoppers and the weather, remember we are all out for the same common goal: to have the best holiday season possible. So take care when you jump behind the wheel of a car or get in line for one of those 4 am sales and take a deep breath before you lose your top. When you think the stress that inevitable comes with the holidays might make your lose your cool just remember one of the many things there are to be thankful for.

Cheers to the little things….HAPPY THANKSGIVING!!

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.

Have you adopted our society’s new values? Have you adapted to the values of the Green Revolution? Perhaps you have started recycling more diligently, started biking to work or even started your own compost pile outside. But what is being done on the corporate scale? What are the people whom we look up to doing to help? Should our idols be more than just talented individuals? Sports in America are becoming ever more omnipresent and it is time for our largest institutions to start taking responsibility for their environmentally unfriendly practices. How green is your favorite sport?
The NBA jumped on the green bandwagon in 2009 when it created Green Week that takes place around the first week of April. Green Week includes in-game announcements about eco-events, reminders to recycle and other eco-friendly tips and information. Green Week a products of NBA Green: the brain child of NBA Cares, a division of the NBA dedicated to involving players and organizations in community service projects to enhance the areas in which they operate. NBA Cares has been active in local communities for years and Green Week is an extension of those values and priorities.

Individual efforts are being made by NBA teams as well. In fact, the New Jersey Nets have become the first carbon neutral team by increasing energy and water efficiency, increasing recycling, improving environmental conditions indoors and using only recycled paper and green cleaning products. The New Jersey example has inspired teams in Portland, Miami and Orlando to reduce their carbon footprints as well. Additionally, the NBA season tipped off with every player on all 30 teams outfitted in Adidas’ Revolution 30 uniforms – uniforms made from 60% recycled materials.
Along with the NBA, the NFL has made strides towards carbon neutralization. In 2007, the Detroit Lions played the Green Bay Packers in the league’s first carbon neutral game. And this past opening day featured a "Solar Bowl" between the Washington Redskins and the Arizona Cardinals in the partially solar powered FedEx Field. The ‘Skins stadium features 8,000 solar panels that double as a shaded parking venue in a portion of its parking lot. The panels provide 100% of the Field's power on non-game days and 20% of power at kickoff. With the solar panels, the Redskins stadium is also home to 10 electric car charging stations to encourage fans to drive green.

A newcomer to the green scene is another of America’s most popular sports: NASCAR. Nascar’s new green agenda includes increased recycling of used fuel, oil filters, fluorescent light bulbs, and metal shavings. The organization hopes that increased awareness will not only attract fans but also eco-conscious advertisers to the sport. Some motorways have installed solar panels while other have started planting trees and using sheep as infield lawnmowers. However, perhaps Nascar’s most compelling initiative has been promoting Sunoco Green E 15 ethanol blend as its official gasoline. With the proliferation of racing fans in rural America, hopefully the green trend will spread beyond its current urban roots.