Great Gift idea: While buying heirloom tomatoes this weekend, at Tomatomania, we met a lovely neighbor, Connor, who makes really lovely garden boxes on wheels.

We all live in the still wild hills between downtown LA and Pasadena and gophers are very previlent. (Since they live in the ground, you never really notice them unless you plant a garden.) Gophers love those juicy garden roots.

Boxed gardens are great for apartment dwellers, or if you have to move your garden to follow the shade or sun. Or, if gophers eat your plants!

City Council unanimously approves Reyes’ motion to ban plastic bags in Los Angeles
As Los Angeles residents, we have been whining, fighting, and writing letters to City Council and waiting for news on this new proposal, long in the making. Today’s news has everyone hoarding their plastic bags for the day we have to leave the city to get one. San Francisco has already been on track with this and more large cities are sure to follow.

Ed P. Reyes’ motion to ban polystyrene food containers in all City facilities beginning July 1, 2009 was unanimously approved by the City Council today.

What kind of environmentally responsible bloggers would we be if we didn’t include this hot new music video from The Abe Lincoln Story on an occasion like this?

The City Council, by a 13-0 vote, also approved an amendment introduced by Reyes today that bans plastic bags by July 1, 2010, if the State has not imposed a fee of at least 25 cents by then.
“Plastic bags have been the graffiti of the L.A. River for decades,” said Reyes, who chairs the L.A. River Ad Hoc Committee.

The plan requires officials to replace food containers made of polystyrene — commonly known by the brand Styrofoam — at city-owned facilities such as Los Angeles International Airport (LAX), public libraries, the Convention Center and City-sponsored events.

“We’ve gotten to a point where we need to act as a city, where we can have real results. We’re trying to do it in a way where we can educate and inform the public of what we’re doing,” Reyes said. `”It’s going to take time to change.”

After the citywide ban of plastic bags July 2010, consumers will have to use their own canvas bags or pay 25 cents for a paper, compostable or biodegradable bag. Of that fee, 3 percent would go to the retailer, 3 percent will go to the state, and the rest of the money will go back to the city to fund an education campaign.

The plastic bag and polystyrene bans complement the ongoing Los Angeles River Revitalization Master Plan, spearheaded by Reyes, which proposes transforming 32 miles of the concrete-lined River into a greenbelt linking communities.

Read and listen to more coverage on this issue at Uprising Radio.

So here we are getting ready to launch the brand new Invitesite. Almost a year of work. The new site is all custom coded by Alex, and we’ll be able to offer loads of new designs for your Green Wedding pleasure . Lots of new letterpress decorated designs coming too. (We just rebuilt a lovely large press with sturdy bearings and a large bed.) So, with our inventory of 7 large presses we’ll be able to execute some fine designs. Scott and I are looking forward to an extremely creative year. YIPEEEE!!!

Invitesite’s eco wedding invitations are featured in the upcoming local ABC News feature on Green Weddings. Great stuff and good suggestions.

Yipee,  a group of local green wedding vendors will be exhibiting at the upcoming Los Feliz Street Fair, Sunday June 8th, 11 am – 8pm. We will be located in the “Green Scene” Eco Showcase. 
Our group includes Angelica from Angelique Events and GreenWeddings.net. Cake, signature drinks and some neat giveaways are in the offing… Invitesite will be showing some of our fabulous new eco wedding invitations.

Will update more today — looks like some fabulous bands will be playing.

The Union of Concerned Scientists has a great monthly newsletter, “Green Tips.”  This month, the subject is roses.

Flowers sold in the United States are generally grown on large farms and treated with massive amounts of pesticide; this not only endangers the health of farm workers, but also pollutes local air and water supplies.

In addition, many flowers are imported from Asia and Central and South America, where environmental regulations are often less stringent. For example, the International Labor Rights Fund and the U.S. Labor Education in the Americas Project (LEAP) have found that 20 percent of the chemicals applied to flowers in Colombia, a top exporter, are restricted or banned in the United States and Europe. Transporting these flowers to U.S. stores magnifies their environmental impact, as trucks and airplanes (including the needed refrigeration) contribute to air pollution and global warming.

Sign up for their newsletter — it’s great to get the real deal about eco these days!

A great article by David Roberts in Fast Company, October 2007 (a bit behind on my reading, thank you treadmill!)  A lot of us, um, old players in the green space are all a bit perplexed as how to handle all the marketing ho-ha this past year or so.  Many of us paid our dues back when green was not the new black. When green was more like geeky and …. earnest.  (Earnest was NOT a good thing to be in the ’90′s!) Roberts writes:

Being both commercially ambitious and environmentally conscious once put you in an ostracized and lonely niche–the math club of our civic high school. Now things have gotten all…weird. Titans of commerce are eagerly trying to establish their green bona fides. This has the eco-business nerds somewhat discomfited. Every outsider knows that when the popular kids start making nice, it’s time to watch your back. There’s a wedgie coming. This is why every new green corporate initiative gets scrutinized so closely for its true intentions. When a CEO says, “We’ve figured out a way to make money by going green,” those who were green before green was cool are instinctively inclined to suspect deception. Is it green or greenwashing?    

Roberts suggests that industry specific standards should be created.

It may strike some as uncomfortably close to activismWhole Foods…    Read the entire article here. 

 

 

For SoCal green weddings, consider Angelique Weddings, a local green weddings expert. Lush lush lush. This is what Green Weddings can look like:

Today’s Daily Candy LA features a new Taxi Service starting up. Airport service — and other scheduled transport.

Maybe smooth low carbon rides for Weddings too?

Hybrid Rides for Your Green Wedding

The company is a new launch: Econation.com

Hopefully, they will offer some bio diesel converted limos in the near future.

Blue Breeze Eco Wedding Invitation

InviteSite is a green business, so customers sometimes ask if we print with soy inks. Common printers inks are either rubber or oil based and soy was invented decades ago as an attempt at an environmental substitute for these. The idea was to replace petroleum based oil with soy based oil.

This does not work very well, and over the years formulations were adjusted until some printers could tolerate working with ink that was perhaps 20% soy mixed with petroleum base.

We have done our own experiments with soy and found that traditonal oil based inks are much more reliable in all types of temperatures and weather. Because of this, we consider traditional ink formulations to be more environmentally friendly than soy. This is because when you try to work with an ink that does not work well consistently, you waste paper, plus you waste energy and time.

This may seem minor, and some people would encourage us to continue to learn to work with soy until we are experts, but recent increases in soy production have been having a detrimental effect on our environment to the point that we even doubt that soy is greener to produce than petroleum. Because of the increased demand for soy, rain forests are being cleared to make way for more soy production. The problem became so pronounced that groups like Greenpeace are forging deals with large grocers and distributors like McDonalds that they will not purchase soy from farms that are using new land cleared of rain forest.

Our invitations, printed on treefree papers with linseed oil inks, are the best choice you can make for any number of reasons, including beauty, archival longevity, and environmental sustainablity.