Think Chair designed by Glen Oliver Low for Steelcase $769.00 (varies options and pricing)
from Unica home.com

If you want the absolute best Green office/work chair then consider not buying anything and just go to the thrift store or fix up an older chair. They won’t result in any new pollution from manufacture, probably won’t off-gas any toxic crap and will keep one more thing out of the landfill a little while longer. The more people get serious about reusing stuff the better. However, you might be in the position to want your business and/or persona to put out a more “professional, stylish, successful and contemporary” aura as well as being a comfy chair that is also eco-friendly. If so, then you might want to consider the “Think” chair by Steelcase.

An ergonomically design-based chair that is also has some serious green cred. This “Think” chair has up to 37% recycled content and is 99% recyclable. Weighs 32 pounds which saves energy in shipping and the energy used in manufacturing this chair is reported to be much less than as similar chairs. Also the chair is shipped fully assembled to reduce packaging and they manufacture these chairs closer to their markets in Europe and North America to reduce shipping and energy use. While this chair is designed to make recycling simple, I doubt you’ll need to anytime soon due to it being built exceptionally well and generally cool and comfortable chair to keep around. The chair has won varies certifications, labels and declarations on its green design, see Steelcase’s website for more info.

Earth Drive 4 Gig drive 34.99 at Costco

Now that almost everyone is using the USB flash drives to transfer and store their files we are facing the same issue that we have with CD’s and floppies - they get thrown out eventually. Our landfills are already overflowing with electronic junk so it’s a great idea that ATP has come up with a fully recyclable USB flash drive, called the EarthDrive. What makes the EarthDrive so special is that it is made from bio-recycled materials and is completely shockproof, waterproof and dustproof. You might freak out when you see their inflated prices (Costco sells the 8 Gig drive for 60.00) but the bite out of your wallet is less painful when you hear that ATP donates a portion of all their proceeds to planting trees all around the world. (hopefully not too near the Arctic circle.)

CAN-RAM Aluminum Can Crusher $17.50 from Conserv-a-Store

Yesterday I looked at the BigBelly trash compactor bin, here is another trash crushing device, the CAN-RAN, this time its priced for average people serious about their recycling and not just crushing beer cans in their hands to impress onlookers with how high their testosterone levels are.

You could use it to save space in your recycling bin by crushing used cans to a third of their normal size. If you are industrious you could bring the volumes of crushed cans to your handy aluminum scrap facility and they will reward in silver coin. Being green doesn’t stop you from being mean, so you could use it to piss off homeless people rooting through your bin for cans on recycle pick up days.

Seriously though, this could be handy for the family who uses way more aluminum cans than is good for them.

Seventh Generation Brown Paper Towels 30 rolls $54.95 at amazon.com

I was in a BJ’s (giant box store) yesterday and stopped to consider their display of paper products. They have an enormous display of various brands of huge packs of 30 or so rolls of paper towels for ridiculously cheap prices. Needless to say it’s a popular item as busy people are lured by the convenience of using paper towels. Almost every cleaning task imaginable is now commonly used with paper products; from drying your hands, wiping the counter, floor, windows and pretty much anything else. As they are so cheap, many people mindlessly use them for everything and then just toss it.

It wasn’t that long ago you that people didn’t use paper towels, they used linens in the kitchen. They used a cloth for washing the dishes and yet another for wiping up counters. A hand towel in the kitchen for drying your freshly washed hands. Old rags could be used in a mop head. Cloth napkins. Newspapers for washing windows. All of them washed and reused time after time. It worked just fine for centuries.
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Bag-E-Wash from Bag-E-Wash.com $9.99

Plastic food baggies are both a godsend and a curse. They make storing leftovers a snap but with this convenience comes the guilt over throwing out yet another perfectly good bag as you are too busy to bother with washing and drying it.

Thankfully some creative folks came up with the Bag-E-Wash, a plastic dishwasher attachment that lets you easily wash and dry the bags. Bag-E-Wash can take a single use bag and have it work for you anywhere from 25 to 50 more times. Since you can now reuse the bags you not only save money but you are doing your part to help keep yet one more plastic bag from an early grave in the landfill - where they will sit for a thousand years or so before biodegrading.

You may think, who cares, its only a one lousy plastic bag but when you have millions of people thinking the same way it adds up quickly. There are already trillions of various kinds of plastic bags in landfills and many plastic bags fly away in the wind after they are discarded—getting caught in fences, trees, sewers, even the throats of birds, fish, and other animals. While seemingly insignificant, if we all start to change the little simple ways we live to be more eco-friendly it will inspire others around you to do likewise.

Razor Saver $12.00 at Sustainable Village

Save money on your razor blades and save a little space in the landfill while you are at it. This handy gadget sharpens your razor blades and will significantly prolong your razor blades lifespan. Their website claims you can “get 75-130 or more shaves from any regular or disposable razor blade, men’s or women’s, single or double.” Not clear if it will sharpen anything more than a double blade. They say you will use 75% less razors in a year with using this device.

Excel AC Composting Toilet $1549 from The Natural Home.com

Greater attention is increasingly being given to drought and water shortages around the world. As global warming worsens this is predicted to become a much more serious problem for millions of people around the world. Here in the US the Southwest already has serious problems with a lack of water.

As water shortages worsen, people’s attitudes on water use will hopefully change. One attitude needing change is the reluctance to consider green alternatives to the typical flush toilet in specific and about our relation to human waste in general. The low-flow toilets were initially met with skepticism by many but now has become commonplace. In time people may grow to accept the composting toilets as well.

Composting toilets use little or no water and processes toilet waste for reuse as valuable compost. They work with the same natural composting principles as when bears poop in the woods…
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Archy Plastic Bag Dryer $22.50 at conservastore.com

Do you wash your plastic bags? If so, they are already reserving you one of the better clouds in heaven! But while you are still here on earth, perhaps you can make your life a little easier by using this bag dryer. If you have tried drying your bags by hanging them over the faucet or perhaps over the edge of the sink anchored by a coffee mug - all rather annoying.

This contraption allows you to easily dry a wide range of reusable plastics like freezer bags and sandwich bags as well as socks, rubber gloves, dish towels and all kinds of smaller cloth items. By reusing your plastic bags and recycling you will help reduce the amount of plastic in our landfills.

Speaking of plastic bag trash. On a very unrelated matter - I just found this very cool art photo blog site, gutter envy, who has some absolutely wonderful photos of wet trash (many of which have plastic bags in the photos)

Hurricane CD clock from recyclingcds.com £5.99 or $11.63 US Many more amazing styles of CD clocks and be found here.

Have you a million old CDs of old software, work projects, aol disks, junk mail CDs, realtor CDs, CDs with god know what is on it? What can you do with the DVDs and CDs when you finally tackle this hidden pile of junk? You can’t just dump them all in the trash where they will last for hundreds of years slowly leeching nasty chemicals and you aren’t able to put them in with your usual recycling. So what to do?

You may not be aware but for a fee CDs and DVDs can be recycled for continued use as a CD or DVD through such places as Green Disc.com who will recycle and or reuse your computer related waste for a fee. They seem to specialize in recycling all forms of electronic media and their cases: diskettes, zip disks, CDs, DVDs, video tape, game cartridges, DAT, and virtually all other type of computer tapes. Further information can be found here.

Creative and industrious types will find wonderful new lives for their cds as lamps such as this awesome CD Lamp made by Chad shown here. Here is a site that shows exactly how to make similar CD lamps.
Here is another link that discusses a variety of ways you can reuse your CDs in creative ways - some even practical enough to actually do!

Back in 2004 a California lawmaker introduced a bill that would require companies like AOL to include a self-addressed envelope with the CD so if you didn’t want it you could just mail it back - seems like a great idea to me! Here is a c|net link to an article about this.

A complaint occasionally heard about wind turbines is that they produce low-frequency sounds that are disturbing to some people. According to an ariticle in The British Wind Energy Association this is just a myth, but what if you like the sounds that wind can make? An amazing range of artistry and invention exists in the world of wind music making. There is often an eerie quality to the sound, reminiscent of science fiction movies. I like to imagine these wind sounds are the music from the earth gaia herself.

The Plastorgan shown in the above photo fascinates me the most because it’s free, keeps some plastic bottles out of the landfill, encourages people to unleash hidden talent, and makes for more interesting neighborhoods. All you need to do is make one slit of a certain size in the side of a plastic bottle, paint it with a cool design, put the cap on the bottle and glue or somehow fasten the cap to a bamboo pole and stick the pole in your garden or yard - the more the better, with all different sizes of bottles and slits to create a wide range of tones and timbres. Check out the sound of the above grouping here. You can see more samples and info on how to build your own plastic bottle wind organ as well as other kinds of wind organs and harps here. Here is another link in which a few people share their experiences with these plastic wind organs.

If you want something a bit more sophisticated than plastic bottles then your options are wide open. There are many resources available from extremely expensive wind sound sculpture to affordable garden wind harps.

One site, mohicanwindharps.com offers a number of reasonably priced contemporary wind harps as well as the traditional Aeolian Harp, one of the oldest known musical instruments made by the ancient Greeks. You can listen to the sound one of these harps makes here.
more links on wind harps here.
appalachian heritage alliance.org
soundscapes international.com