Eco-Chick · The modern girl's guide to living green & fabulous.

Ani Phyo’s Healthfully Decadent Raw Coconut Kream Recipe

Dessert has always been my favorite part of any meal (though I do love apps!) and while I’ve managed to tame my sweet tooth in the last few years, I’ve by no means eliminated it. (By tame I mean I can get my sweet-happys from maple syrup, honey, and desserts made with fruit and less sugar.) Frankly, I’d rather carry around an extra five pounds than skip desserts, in all their toothsome glory. But I try to concoct or uncover desserts that are healthy as well as tasty. Just because it’s dessert doesn’t mean that it has to be a nutrition wasteland!

So stumbling upon Ani Phyo’s wonderful raw dessert cookbook (with 85 recipes!) was a coup. As you may already know, raw foods retain all sorts of wonderful enzymes, vitamins and minerals, plus are less ‘predigested’ (I know it’s a bit gross, but that’s basically what cooking is; partial digestion of food before you eat it). That means your body has to work a bit harder to digest, which makes you feel full longer and is actually really good for your gut. All of which means you get more nutrition and eat less when you go raw. While I’m not a raw foodist by any means, I’m going on my 19th year of vegetarianism and love the way whole foods that are minimally processed taste and make me feel. And the more I’ve read about the benefits of raw, the more I try to incorporate it into my diet.
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Best Office Air Cleaners: Get Your Indoor Plant On

If your office environment is anything like mine, chances are you’re surrounded by rows and rows of cubical farms (covered in hideous synthetic fabric pattern!), with circulated air and very little natural light. Although its not something you think about all the time, the air quality of most offices is pretty poor, and this can make you feel less than optimal after being there 8+ hours a day.

So in order to brighten your spirits (help you forget you’re at work) as well as improve the air quality around you get some plants!

Although virtually all plants will help some to improve indoor air quality, some are better than others for absorbing common pollutants. In a study done by NASA and the Associated Landscape Contractors of America (ALCA) in the 80′s it was found that:

:: English ivy, gerbera daisies, pot mums, peace lily, bamboo palm, and Mother-in-law’s Tongue are the best plants for treating air contaminated with Benzene

:: Peace lily, gerbera daisy, and bamboo palms are very effective in treating Trichloroethylene

:: bamboo palm, Mother-in-law’s tongue, dracaena warneckei, peace lily, dracaena marginata, golden pathos, and green spider plant work well for filtering Formaldehyde

And last year the Peace Lily, which made all 3 above lists was voted the Office Plant of the Year in The Netherlands! So instead of putting another tchotchky on your desk, start a cubicle garden!

For more info on plants in the workplace visit the Healthy Plants in the Workplace information campaign and the Plants at Work information campaign.

Nature Kids, Hot Water Woes, and Pellet Stoves

I want my child to connect with nature, but how can a suburban park be designed to both protect visitors from Lyme disease–carrying ticks and restore the natural ecosystem?
—Lena Crandall, Scarsdale, NY

The funny thing about wildlife (even the kind that finds its way into parks and playgrounds in developed areas) is that it’s wild and therefore not completely controllable. In order to eliminate Lyme disease–carrying ticks, you would have to ban all warm-blooded animals and pave over the greenery. Still, you wouldn’t be creating an optimal environment for children. “In a matter of a few decades kids’ interactions with nature have been reduced significantly compared with all of human history,” says Richard Louv, author of Last Child in the Woods. “A new body of evidence suggests getting kids out-
side, which engages all the senses, leads to a longer attention span, increases in cognitive development, and [reduces] stress.”

So unless you want your child to grow up playing in a parking lot, the best way to avoid deer ticks is prevention. “You can’t really prevent ticks from being in outdoor areas, but you can be proactive about your own actions,” says Beth Herr, pro-
gram director at New York’s Westchester County Parks Department. (New York had more cases of Lyme disease in 2006 than any other state.) “Be sure that you tuck your pants into your socks, wear light-colored clothing, and check yourself and your child for ticks right after using outdoor facilities.”
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I’m considering buying a tankless water heater. With all their great energy-saving features, why haven’t these systems caught on?
—Louis Weiss, Berkeley, CA

Whoever invented the storage water heaters most of us have in our homes today must have been thinking of how best to waste energy instead of save it. Think about it: Conventional systems keep water warmed to skin-scrubbing temps 24/7 even though hot water is needed for only an hour or two a day. Tankless (or demand) types do just the opposite: Water is heated instantly when you turn on the shower. Since roughly 13 percent of a home’s energy is used for this purpose, making the switch to a tankless kind could save an average of about $180 a year, and also help reduce your family’s carbon footprint.

If you choose a natural gas–burning model, it will use about 30 percent less energy than an electric one, and you can up the efficiency even more by picking a unit with an intermittent ignition rather than a constantly burning pilot light. (Two companies that sell such models are Bosch and Takagi.)

You will also save water. “You don’t need to run the shower waiting for the hot water, which wastes an average of five gallons every time you do it,” says Claudia Chandler, assis-
tant executive director for the California Energy Commission.

So why haven’t these caught on? Tankless heaters supply two to five gallons of water a minute, which might not be enough when you want to take a shower and run the dishwasher at the same time. A simple solution is to just add another unit. You will never run out of water completely, as with other heaters. While a tankless unit might be more expensive up front, you will save so much on your electricity bill it could pay for itself in as little as two years. You might also enjoy a windfall come April 15. The federal government and many states (see Energy Star and DSIRE) now offer rebates and tax deductions for energy-efficient appliances, including a $300 credit for certain tankless water heaters installed between January 1, 2007, and December 31, 2007.
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I might start heating my home with wood pellets. Is this a sustainable resource?
—Jon Bradford, Lancaster, PA

What could be cozier than the smell of wood smoke drifting over a snowy landscape? Until the early 1900s, 90 percent of Americans heated their homes with wooden logs, which are a renewable resource, since trees can be planted to replace those cut for fuel. When fossil fuels became cheaper and more widely available, many people switched from the messy fires that needed constant stoking to furnaces that burned oil or natural gas (which are both finite, nonrenewable fuels).

Concerns about global warming, rising fuel prices, and ground-level air pollution have led some homeowners to rethink how they heat their homes, and wood is slowly making a comeback. Unfortunately, traditional wood stoves and fireplaces contribute to local air pollution, since they produce particulates (few older stoves have an air smoke filter), and they can be high maintenance to keep going. Stoves that run on pellets instead of logs are cleaner and require less upkeep (picture a bag of half-inch-long pellets instead of logs).

The fuel for these stoves is also sustainable, as most pellets are made of compacted sawdust, waste paper, and bark, all by-products of the paper, agriculture, or lumber industries. Sawdust wood pellets produce the least amount of ash. Some stoves can also burn other biofuels, including soybeans, corn kernels, nutshells, barley, and cherry pits, that might otherwise end up in landfills. But make sure your stove can handle alternative fuels before trying them.

You might also have an energy auditor or certified provider come check out your house to see what size stove you need based on the area you want to heat and how well it is insu-
lated. Most pellet stoves do need to be plugged in to run their fans and controls; you can expect to use about $9 worth of electricity per month. Setup for a pellet stove is faster than for a wood stove, and about half the price. Although a pellet stove costs considerably more than a wood stove ($1,700 to $3,000 compared with $400 to $700), the pellet stove could pay for itself in as little as four years.

From my column “Green Guru” at Audubon Magazine.

EVO's Big-Tent Green Shopping Revolution

Last week, EVO, the get-everything-green-in-one-place site launched, and it’s pretty awesome. They have a ‘Green Rating System’ for each one of their products that works like this:

Simply put, how green a product is depends on what it’s made from, how it’s produced, the distance it travels to reach the consumer, and what type of energy is used to power it. EVO has created a simple rating system to help you see the “Green Attributes” of every item listed on the site. Next to each product you’ll see 1 to 5 leaves. The more green leaves a given product has, the greener it is. EVO only features products that have a minimum of one Green Attribute.

I got a chance to do an interview with Dan Siegel, one of the founders of the company, here’s the low-down:

Me: Why a Green Shopping Mall?
Dan: My partner and I put our heads together, thinking, there’s got to be a simple way for busy people to find the Earth-friendly products they are looking for online. We took the conventional wisdom from Shopzilla and Amazon but looked at it for green, and thought, what can we build that will enable green shoppers to find what they need?

Me: And how did you find all the stuff that’s on the site? It says on the homepage over 100,000 products have been rated? Did you appropriate a bunch of elves from Santa’s workshop to go through all that stuff or what?

Dan: the first piece of the site we built was a way to leverage technology to scour the web. We got it two ways: data feeds through partners, like Target and Nordstrom, with whom we’ve created relationships. The other piece is we’ve built a crawler that can go onto the pages of smaller green sellers and can pull in product data from these sites. Then we put it through our filter.

We see green attributes and match them with other attributes. We look at everything, from labels like all-natural, to biodgradable, to chemical free, Fair Trade, LEED certified, and more. It’s a massive database of attributes. And then there’s three tiers to determine the greenness. The first is the technology, which I’ve mentioned, the second is people, who work for us and check products, and the third is the community, inviting , everyone out there to look for themselves to give recommendations and experiences of products.

Me: So how’re you going to keep it honest? What’s going to prevent a company from ‘greenwashing’ their info about a product and putting up lots of nice comments about themselves to fool your system? Shockingly (hah, hah) stuff like that has been known to happen online.

Dan: There’s fraud detection built in. So if a product was made in China, which might give it a negative point, but then let’s say a company resubmits their data without that information, they’ll actually get a worse score for not including that data. That’s just one of several ways we’ll keep people from gaming the system.

Me: What’s your end goal with this project?

Dan: Our goal is that anytime anyone shops they would find what the green rating is on that product. The traditional way economists understand consumer behavior is that we all look at three important things: price, quality and convenience. The Internet has taken convenience out of the equation, so what we’re attempting to do is offer an another rating consideration when you buy something. We want to encourage people to buy stuff that has highest green rating. Green should be the new attribute for shopping decisions.

Me: What was it that made you personally want to get involved in starting EVO? Are you an old-school Treehugger or a latter-day, post-Inconvenient Truth Greenie?

Dan: I’ve always been interested in entrepreneurship but also interested in leveraging business for social change. There are these massive and aggregated markets, that are growing and mainstream. I had a personal frustration, as an outdoors person with two kids, I was always looking for green stuff online and it was hard to find. I figured someone with less passion and interest might just give up or not even bother looking for it.

Me: So where’s the cash coming from for this site? Is there some big-box store or mega-corp behind all this?

Dan: EVO is personally funded, and there’s no advertising. I’ve put a lot of my own money, and the last three years of my time into building this thing. And it’s all funded through friends and family. That’s why we’re really hoping to get the word out and get people to join the community. For everyone who joins, we’ll plant a tree!

Me: Sounds like a great place to do holiday shopping. I know I have barely started mine. Anything else you want Eco Chick readers to know about?

Dan: I really want people to feel comfortable on the site. And we are looking for information and submissions of new products, so send them over to us! You can email me directly with suggestions and ideas at dan (at) evo (dot) com.

A Bottle of No Thanks, Please

Bottled water is so easy.  It’s water, in a bottle, genius!  I remember when it was chic and served in the finest restaurants.  Then one morning I woke up and my mother told me we were getting a water bottle for the house.  No longer was the tap good enough.  After another five years or so she didn’t want to wait for the Poland Spring man to deliver our weekly allotment of water, so there it was: bottles upon shimmering bottles in our refrigerator.  People come to our office for a meeting or you head off to a job interview and what to they offer?  A bottle of water.  It’s like an angel on your shoulder wishing you the safest and most comforting taste of pure H2O.

Never once did I ask myself, “What’s wrong with bottled water?”  Not until I realized how many bottles collected into my recycling bin.  Trash is a funny thing, one moment it’s in your kitchen and the next it vanishes.  Presumably we trust that our trash goes…Well, I don’t really know where I thought my trash went.

I recently read the book, The World Without Us, which contained an entire chapter dedicated to the evils of plastic.  It turns out that all the plastic we use and love, (hey I have to admit that it’s nice when you can drop a bottle without it shattering all over the floor), ends up in our oceans, and takes about a gajillion years to decompose (maybe I’m exaggerating, but I doubt it).  The impact it has on the fish, mollusks, birds and plant life of the sea is completely shocking and promises to change the ecosystem as we know it.  There really is no known half-life for plastic.  It breaks into little pellets sure, but how does it react with the natural world, and what does it become as it degenerates? 

One of the big offenders is the bottled water industry.  We’ve become as addicted to bottled water in recent years as stockbrokers in the 80s were to cocaine.  In fact every restaurant I enter now offers bottled water both flat and sparkling, and then almost disdainfully, they mention that tap is available too.  They make you feel like an idiot if you order the tap water.  They make you feel cheap, plebian.  I always answer, Los Angeles’ finest. 

Tap water was important when I was a kid, not just to stay hydrated, but because the water supply contained fluoride.  Many bottled waters don’t contain fluoride and this is leading to children with unhealthy teeth.  The reason being…You guessed it, bottled water.  Fluoridated water is free from our taps, and makes your kids’ teeth happy. Most bottled water does not contain fluoride. 

Lewis Black, the comedian, sums this entire bottled water thing up quite hysterically by saying we’ve sullied even our most ample and free resource.  About 70% of the planet is covered in ocean and 2% of the earth’s water is fresh water.  To put that in perspective, there are roughly 326 million trillion gallons of water on planet earth and 2% is fresh.  That’s a lot of fresh water.  And somehow we’ve agreed to pay our hard earned money for this gift of nature.

And, upon agreeing to buy this water we’ve also created a cost that nature must pay…We pitch in 38 billion bottles of water a year, roughly $1 billion worth of plastic.

But, enough with the depressing stuff.  On with the progress!

There are restaurants rebelling against these industries and while blindly voting with your dollar is not advised, supporting the fight is.  In San Francisco, there is a new trend: high end restaurants serving carafes of filtered tap water.  In some cases they even carbonate the water themselves.Glass carafes served into glasses of water equals much less waste. So we applaud these restaurants and suggest that you demand the same from your restaurant in your neighborhood.

So, find out what restaurants in your area do this.  If your favorite one doesn’t, then urge them to.  We can make a change, I think.  We just have to want to.  And if anyone tells you bottled water is better, tell them they’re wrong.  Free, clean, healthy water is a privilege.  In some countries it’s impossible to find.  Save the money you spend on water to buy something that can actually help you save those pure, crystalline springs they harvest all that clean crisp water from.