Bamboo rugs are a wonderful way to add organic elegance to your living room, office, bedroom, kitchen, pool house, or tree fort. They’re easy to clean, and come in a variety of shades — chocolate, ebony, grassy green, and bright crimson, among others — to fit any decorating scheme.
But these rugs needn’t live within the confines of four walls and a ceiling! Because Anji Mountain Moso bamboo is so durable, you can use these rugs in other places, too.
Sure, you recycle paper, plastic, and aluminum. You try to reuse where you can, and reduce the amount you purchase to begin. But eventually your TV will stop working or you’ll wonder why you needed the Twilight DVD box set, and you’ll need to get rid of things you can’t just stick in one of the usual bins. What’s a modern environment-conscious consumer to do? Here are a few ways to dispose of some common household items you might have thought non-recyclable.
Farmed wood is an example of socially responsible forestry. Another way we can minimize our impact on the environment while still taking advantage of useful and essential natural materials such as hardwood lumber include utilizing found wood that’s been recycled, for example, from abandoned buildings. We can also make sure no natural resource goes to waste by uprooting the stumps of wild trees. But recycled and found wood is in limited supply. To meet our society’s demand for lumber, we need to cut down forests’ worth of fully-grown trees.
Happy Mother’s Day! Almost.
What’s that? You haven’t a gift for the woman who brought you into the world quite yet? Tsk! We’ll help you out there in just a second, but first: a history.
The event we call Mother’s Day came to be with the persistence of one woman at the turn of the last century who never actually became a mother herself. And Anna Jarvis was very particular about punctuation. She rejected the idea of a “Mothers’ Day” — plural possessive — because she envisioned many individual celebrations for each person’s own mother, rather than an overarching celebration of motherhood itself.
May is the month of mothers, maracas, and monsoon-like weather patterns — but it’s also a time of nature’s renewal. What better way to appreciate the delicate blossoms flourishing all around you, symbols of new, fresh beginnings and a reminder to all humanity of the eternally cyclical nature of life, than to clip a couple and bring them inside?
Where will you place them, you ask? To fill a regular vase it seems you’d need to slaughter an entire flower bed. But lo — let us direct your attention to the adorable set of five pear-shaped vases pictured below. Perfectly sized for displaying a single flower bud, some grass, or maybe a cool leaf you found while out on your walk, these vases solve all of your problems!
Gardening seems like an eco-friendly no-brainer. After all, you are keeping plants alive while they, in return, soak up more of the carbon you produce and provide you with fresher air. It’s a beautiful symbiotic relationship — as long as you’re gardening green. Here are a few tips to start!
At age 22, Beth Doane founded Andira International, a company that focused on importing and distributing luxury European brands to markets in the United States. But despite her success, the experience changed her perception of the apparel industry, she explained in a recent interview with National Geographic.
Click to read more!
Everyone knows plastic in landfills is bad for the environment. Left to its own devices, a plastic bagmight not decay for 500 to 1,000 years. But Mother Nature, as it turns out, may be able to provide her own solution to one of its larger challenges — with a particular species of fungi native to the jungles of South America that feeds on polyester polyurethane.
The Monkey Pod tree goes by different names — Acacia, Rain Tree — but villagers in Chiang Mai, Thailand might call it a staple of the community. Wood carving is a skill passed down from generation to generation in this region, located near northern Thailand’s largest metropolis. But carving is not a full-time job — between family members and close friends in this agricultural society, gathering together to carve furniture is a way to pass the time between rice harvests.
