Choose Your Level of Green Construction To a lot of people, building green means costly, complicated, and confusing, but it is getting easier as designers and builders find simpler ways of doing things. Structures NW llc of Vancouver, using their 10 plus years of experience building with Structural Insulated Panels (SIPs), has come up with a unique system that makes building green simpler. They created a three level system of pre-designed green construction templates that fit the Northwest climate zone; Green, Greener and Greenest. Green uses a 6” SIP wall that provides a true R-21.7 whole wall R-Value as determined by the Oak Ridge National Labratory. Combined with a 10”…
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Cradle to Cradle Carpeting
What exactly does this mean? : You purchase EcoWorx carpet tiles or broadloom from a local dealer. When the carpeting has outlived its useful life, it is removed and returned to the dealer.
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Vancouver Water Resources Education Center
If you haven’t been to this hidden jewel at 4600 SE Columbia Way in Vancouver, put it on your list and visit. It opened its doors in February 1996, in concert with a new, innovative and advanced Marine Park Water Reclamation Facility, but many people have yet to discover it. Their mission: Teach people of all ages how to better care for and make wise decisions about water. They do this with interactive exhibits, aquaria swimming with fish, classroom laboratory, toddler-friendly Puddles Place, inspiring White Sturgeon gallery, natural gardens, wildlife-friendly wetlands and more! Inside and outside, the Water Center is brimming with things for visitors of all ages to do…
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Fair Trade 101
Depending on your perspective, the choices you make as a consumer simply impact yourself, or they impact the lives of hundreds or even thousands of other, mostly impoverished people. The fair trade industry believes the latter is true. It has been harnessing the positive purchasing power of consumers for decades. Fair trade reduces global poverty by improving the social and economic status of marginalized global artisans and agricultural producers by facilitating direct trading relationships that pay a fair price. The growth of fair trade over the last 20 years shows that Americans and the world believe in the fair trade model. In 2011, fair trade sales topped $1.4 billion in…
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Modern Earthen Floors
Earthen floors are ancient. They were the predominant floor from the time people first built homes until the mid 1300s, and are still found today in many parts of the world.
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Time Flies
A Five Year Trend Towards Renewables They say that time flies when you’re having fun. If that’s true, then we’re having a ball, because it seems like only yesterday that the first issue of our Green Living Journal hit the streets of Portland in 2008. That’s right, we are five years old, we have published 360,000 copies of our Journal, and we are optimistic about the future because of the changes that have taken place in those five years. Optimistic? How can we, or anyone else, be optimistic, given the present state of affairs? With civilization on the brink of collapse, are we not all in the proverbial handbasket? Where…
