Editor’s Note: The Green A-Team continues to expand like a hyper-adept extremophile over the turbulent digital seas with our newest addition, Shireen Qudosi.  Enjoy her delicious post!

As the saying has it, “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure.”  Yet with a little bit of creative thought, you can turn your trash into your treasure.

That’s exactly what has inspired a new wave of sustainability that goes beyond practicality and into decadence.

The idea of artistic living is a growing trend in an eco-friendly culture, which has already witnessed a significant growth in consumer interest when it comes to modular living and organic decor.  Even non-greenies are getting interested now that being green has brought with it a new level of stylish eccentricity.

And what comes more easily in this economy than an assortment of empty wine bottles after you’ve just thrown a smashing get-together?  With the preference being on sourcing cheap entertaining ideas, most people now see staying at home with a good meal and great wine as a viable alternative to spending money on restaurants and clubs.

If your home is the newest place to be seen, then ice maker machines are indispensable for cocktails while compact wine refrigerators are an inexpensive alternative to costly built-in wine cellars.

Wine Bottle Ideas:

There are a number of ways to reuse wine bottles. Among the more common ideas are reusing them as water pitchers, votive vases, torches, and flower bed liners. However, there are dozens of other smart options that are rarely explored.

Wine Bottle Cheese Boards – What could be quainter than using a cheese board made out of wine at you next cocktail.  Apparently that’s exactly what Vineyard Designs thought when they started offering their custom recycled wine glass boards.

Water Feeders – On a very hot day or when you’re away, fill the bottles of water and stick them into the pot or soil near your plant.  The water will slowly percolate from the bottle and into the soil.

Wine Bottle Chandeliers – In addition to the popular row lighting and pendant lighting, Changedminer (pictured) put together an interesting chandelier with wine bottles strung around it.   It’s a unique sustainable element in your home and it catches the light beautifully during the day and especially at sunset.

Rewined Recycled Glassware – Get uniquely hued wine bottle glassware made from orphaned bottles left behind at local restaurants and bars.

Wine Bottle Building Blocks – Rather than just one element, your entire home or venue can serve as a creatively designed showcase – a testimony of your creativity and commitment to sustainability.

Wine bottles can be used to create an interesting mosaic-styled wall piece.  The most gorgeous of these displays is just outside of Montreal at a place called Bottle Houses, Prince Edward Island.

PEI is known for its lush landscapes and pastoral living, which makes the wine bottle homes stand out that much more, offering a mixture of ingenious modern design paired with an idyllic setting; and the combination works brilliantly.

This theme of bottle wall art has been running strong from coast to coast. Javier’s, an upscale restaurant in Crystal Cove, features bottle-inspired wall art as a key feature in their eclectic setting.

Using wine bottles as building blocks shows creativity and ingenuity that can be carried to stylishly eccentric levels when used in restaurants. Morimoto’s Japanese Restaurant in New York has an entire wall created out of bottles.  The result is a dazzling spectacle that has the potential to launch a restaurant.  An alternative design is found at the Boa Steakhouse in Hollywood, where rows of bottles are lined along a clear wall.

Wine bottles go beyond just building blocks and have also become integral parts of a building’s thermal dynamics, providing a unit that’s not only appealing to the eye, but also meets our duty to our environment.  But if you’re not a wine drinker, you can ask local pubs and restaurants for their bottles, who I’m sure will be more than happy to give you their rubbish to turn into your own treasures.  The same ideas can also be achieved with beer, liquor, Pellegrino or other glass water bottles.

For more on wine bottle upcycling, check out some of the following links:

Wine bottle recycling is low – but some bottles getting lighter (Dr. Vino)

A trial project that uses recycled wine bottles filled with water to regulate a building’s internal temperatures (Media-Newswire)

Sleep it off inside a wine cask (Green Upgrader)

Wine Ideas brought to you by Air & Water, Inc.

Photos by Keith Watson, graciella06, aarn!, *~Dharmainfrisco~*, West County Camera,  changedminder.

Could the biggest risk to your health in a hospital really be the upholstery?

You may not realize it but that comfy lounge chair you’ve been sitting on in the hotel lobby might be slowly contaminating your environment.

Until recently, the commercial textile industry has focused so much on resolving safety issues that they’ve failed to realize the tragic flaw in their best intentions. What’s emerged is a market demand for sustainable fabrics driven by consumers cautious of the effects of PVC.

Carol Derby, Director of Environmental Strategy for Designtex.

By substituting something that is water-based polyurethane on chief value, recycled polyester backing you’ve gone the next step towards sustainability.

Designtex plans to release their “holy grail” of sustainable textiles for commercial applications this year and continues to surprise the industry with recycled fabrics made from unlikely materials, including audio cassette tape that, with a modified walkman, you can actually hear.

For more on sustainable textiles and the full interview with Carol Derby, click here.

Photo by Brintam.

Carol Derby is the Director of Environmental Strategy for Deisngtex, a company championing the movement toward the use and reuse of sustainable materials in commercial interiors.   Under Carol’s direction, Designtex seeks to instill the potential for a closed loop system in its products.  Early in the lifecycle of every material, there are opportunities to infuse environmental qualities, that by design, challenge each subsequent stage to preserve and amplify those qualities.  This is the main focus of Carol’s work and what she calls Environmental Design.

GA: Are there any FTC regulations for sustainable fabrics?

CD: The FTC is actually working on their Green Guide update right now and I’ve attended a meeting where they were gathering all of the people who might fit into that lexicon so it’s a pretty diverse thing they’re trying to get their arms around because the Green Guides have to do with every green material in the world, not just textiles.  But there is a category there that they’re trying to fine tune everything from what does it mean to be organic, what does recycled really mean, they’re really looking to protect the consumer.

GA: Can you explain the pros and the cons to say natural fibers versus synthetics and I may be oversimplifying it, I mean, I know you make fabrics out of audio tape.

CD: I think in the cradle to cradle model, they both can be celebrated as truly green materials.  I’ve sometimes done this as a little workshop in a presentation to take a mechanical pencil, for instance, and a wood pencil and kind of go through what went into the manufacture of both of those things, where are they going at the end of their life, and it usually ends up being this sort of counter intuitive think.  I mean, the mechanical pencil is so superior to the wood pencil because you can take that thing apart and technically you could refill it forever and the wood pencil suffers from certain things, what’s in that paint anyway and look how many pounds per pressure were involved in getting that graphite to that stage of fineness.  When you put the two things side by side in a very very loose life cycle analysis, you start to see that maybe this assumption that we make about natural materials being always the better material aren’t necessarily so.  I mean, manufacturing is manufacturing and how thoughtful you make it is what really constitutes sustainability.

GA: What are some programs at work here with Designtex that are on a local scale or a global scale?

CD: We are starting to look at this as a much broader responsibility and to track our footprint as best we can so we’re in the early stages of that but we are reclaiming samples from libraries, we’ve put word out there that those things can come back and we’re getting about a 20% return on samples these days.

GA: What happens when they come back?

CD: They go back into stock to be sent out on the next request so it keeps them from landfill.  And some of the other things that we’re doing have to do with looking at our operations.  We design but we also distribute so one of our heaviest footprints comes through out distribution arm so just trying to look at who are we using, what are their fleets like, are there hybrids in those fleets, how much time do those trucks spend idling.  We were glad to learn that one of the biggest truckers that we use is part of the EPA’s SmartWay Program.  So, we’re starting to starting to really spread the whole thing out and see that there are things that we can do on the distribution side.  We have a product that goes out there and we need to be responsible for that product but we also need to be responsible for how we get the product out there.

GA: What is your history with bags made from bottles and the 2008 TED Conference?

CD: We had an opportunity working with a company called Rikshaw to develop fabrics for TED and we had just developed, actually the fabric that’s in this conference room is part of that collection, a group of fabrics that were made from PET plastic bottles, 100% post consumer polyester and it was really the first time that that kind of material was able to be reclaimed and used at this level of value, of this type of quality because prior to that the extrusion of those types of yarns was clunky, there was a lot of stuff to work out.  We typically could get a certain type of construction but we couldn’t get a refined yarn dyed-jacquard, that these are.  So, it was an opportunity, TED was an opportunity to really show off that quality and that new technology that made it possible to have 100% post-consumer polyester in bags.

GA: Now that we’re sitting here with this audio tape fabric, it’s this similar to how you would take a plastic bottle and, I mean, would you sort of stretch it out into thin strands and then weave it?  What’s the process?  I’m curious.

CD: The plastic from the bottles, when it’s reclaimed, is called bottle flake and it’s really no different from the resin that went into making the bottle initially.  It’s graded a little bit cloudier than the bright clear plastic resin that went into the bottle but that resin can either be formed into a bottle or extruded as fiber.  So, you’re not seeing plastic in these fabrics, you’re seeing fiber that doesn’t even look synthetic really because what happens is, through extruding really fine filaments and air-entangling them, you get a yarn.

GA: Can you comment on your “audible fabric” art installation?

CD: Well, the “audible fabric” is called “sonic fabric.”  It’s really the work of Alyce Santoro, who came to us with this concept.  She had developed this idea based on payer flags.  Even from the idea of prayers being released by the wind, prior to that she had had these experiences sailing as a kid where she always imagined that the audio tape that she tied to determine the direction of the wind, would actually play that music into the wind, so there was all this rich context for her artwork.  She wanted to commercialize this fabric and we weren’t sure we had anything durable that would work for our commercial markets but we were able to come up with a construction that met the requirements for durability and happily preserved the sound that Alice had recorded on the tape.  I think there are seven tracks in all layered into the tape and the tape is reclaimed tape, or repurposed tape, that Alice located sitting in spools and warehouses unused, the audio tape market being what it is these days.  That sound, then, was not greatly deteriorated by weaving which was a really happy circumstance.  It is distorted sound and when you play it, which you can by doctoring up a walkman and turing the head to the outside, you get something that sounds kind of like whale sounds or very atmospheric whoops and bleeps but it’s all there.

GA: We’d seen some of the new line of these fabrics that are 30% polyester, 30% polyurethane.  Now, those don’t sound like too green of a material.  Can you explain how they’re either reclaimed or reprocessed, if you know anything about that?

CD: Sure.  They are along a green continuum.  We’re always starting with what are the best possible raw materials you could choose to give you the kind of performance you’re after.  So, those are extreme performance fabrics, they’re 70% recycled polyester and 30% polyurethane and while the combination of those things alone, I agree, we wouldn’t normally say, “Well, that right there, that’s the recipe for a green fabric.”  What it does do is replace material that we would not consider green, which is vinyl or PVC.  So, by achieving the same performance without using PVC which has some downsides to it both on the manufacturing side and at the end of its life, real disposal problems for PVC.  By substituting something that is water-based polyurethane on chief-value recycled polyester backing, you’ve gone the next step.  It’s an incremental step towards sustainability.  We’ve started to get much more cautious about using that word, “sustainable” or “sustainability,” because there are very few things that achieve that and that would be one of them and I would say is only taking the next step in that direction but it’s a big step.

Photos courtesy of Designtex.

New York, NY – All caught up in the Green grift, the Go Green Expo sprawled organically like a 250-headed pipe-and-draped green dragon, uncoiling it’s spiny tendrils all throughout the second floor of the 6th Avenue Hilton this past weekend.

On the surface what appeared a typical hot, flat, and crowded consumer expo quickly transformed into a seething den of snake oil shills, mad scientists, resourceful designers, greenwashers, environmental activists, TV personalities, and marketing gurus.

Appearing somewhat discheveled and a little crazed from the three days of eco-hucksterism, Cheif Organizer, Bradford Rand, took a moment amid the half eaten sandwiches and Marial Hemmingway cookies in the VIP lounge to speak with us.

A: I was inspired by Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth a couple of years back and we did a show in New York.  Then we went and did a show in Los Angeles which was really amazing, over 10,000 people, 300 booths. And then we did a show in Philadelphia, we’re back in New York, and now we’re gonna take the show on the road.  We’re looking at Miami, Minneapolis, we have Atlanta coming up in June, and Charlotte, North Carolina, perhaps Houston, Texas. Just any major city that we think might be a good fit for Go Green Expo and it’s exhibitors, we will take the show to.

Q: Do you have an event background?

A: Sure, I’ve been doing trade shows, job fairs, luxury events, and charity fundraisers for 15 years, I’ve done about 700 of them, and there was never a big eco-friendly trade show here in New York City until we decided to do one after we saw Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth.  And now there’s a lot of green shows all over the place, which is a good thing, it just kind of goes to show you that the public as well as business are now taking into account, the environment when they make purchases.

Q: Is it hard to sell green?

A: No.  It’s not hard to sell green at all.  Not these days.  Especially because prices have come down, that is, light bulbs, hybrid cars, eco fashion, eco baby products, even solar panels, by just simple economics, when you make more of something, the price goes down.  So now that we’re mass producing hybrid cars and solar panels and all the other products that I mentioned, the prices are starting to come down so they may be just a little bit more than the standard toxic or gas-guzzling car but they’re coming down.  That makes it available to everyone now to go green.

Q: Do you think people are sort of getting wise to greenwashing?

A: That’s a tough question because large corporations or even small corporations for that matter, you know, you could always kind of fool the public but it usually doesn’t last.

Q: I think there’s a different definition of sustainability on different people’s bottom line.

A: Just an example of greenwashing like “clean coal.”  That’s an oxymoron.  You’re still putting pollutants into the air, you’re still chopping the tops of mountains off.  You know, that is not, at least at this point with our technology, it’s not clean, it’s far from clean.  Solar is clean.  Water energy is clean.  Geothermal and wind power are clean sources of energy and if we dedicated as much as we spend on foreign oil, we could upgrade our grid, and we could be off of foreign oil within about 5 years, and also, at the same time, not only be self-sustaining but a cleaner environment.  So, the benefits are not just economic but they’re health.  I mean, the life expectancy of a coal miner is I’m sure much less than the operator of a wind turbine.

Q: Our guest has been Bradford Rand, Organizer of the Go Green Expo.  Visit GoGreenExpo.com.

A: Yes, you can see all the speakers and all the products if you can’t make it to the show.  Visit the website and see the products for yourself.  Of course, it’s always recommended to do your own research before you buy anything because there is always a more earth-friendly alternative than what you think is out there.

Q: What’s the next city and date?

A: At the end of June we’re gonna be in Atlanta, Georgia at the Cobb Galleria Center.

Check back all week for a steady stream of sound bytes from the exhibitors themselves as part of our special Earth Day Week Live Blogging Special!

Photo of Mr. Rand courtesy of Organic Works.

Wondering what house to build when you start that utopian community you and your friends have been planning since the economy imploded?

Why not build a weeHouse?  Alchemy Architects are the sustainable brains behind this elegant solution to the house that stands on it’s own both structurally and energetically.

First produced in 2003, the weeHouse with it’s painted rust finish looks something like a wooden shipping container with large windows cut out.  Ranging from one box studios to 4 box not-so-wee’s, predesigned standards are arranged in various ways, offering a host of sustainable sidings and interiors that best suit your tastes and budget.

Each weeHouse is designed with lighting and appliance features that are highly energy efficient. Renewable energy sources are available to take you even further from the grid.  WeeHomeowners can choose between solar or wind kits or, preferably, a combination of the the two which can provide up to 150 kilowatt hours per week provided there’s at least a light breeze averaging around 12mph.

All told, the price tag for the weeHouse studio module with full solar and wind energy kits stays around $100,000.   For more sustainable dwellings check out some of the following links:

Sustainable and recyclable house made from loofas (Inhabitat)

How to make sustainable housing happen (Treehugger)

A sustainable solution to affordible and sustainable housing (World Architecture News)

FabPrefab (Modernist Prefab Dwellings)

Have a look at these existing weeHouses already built and making people happy:

Photos by Ants Colony!