Green Products

Though a bamboo towel might be a bit more expensive, there are several clear benefits it possesses over the common cotton towel.  First, bamboo fabric has the unique ability to absorb moisture and water more efficiently.  This is a natural quality of the bamboo from which the fabric is made, and compared to your standard cotton towel, will absorb more liquid and dry out faster because of its porous nature, and ability to breathe.  In addition to the obvious benefit, you can rest assured that bamboo towels were made through environmentally sound methods.  This means that the bamboo itself, the manner in which it was harvested, and the process in which it was made into fabric and dyed was natural, and throughout no chemicals or toxins were used. 

When you purchase a bamboo towel, you are not only receiving a more quality product, but helping the environment.  It’s a win-win situation.

In college, I had a friend whose bath towels smelled awful. I could tell they hadn’t been washed in weeks, maybe even months, and had all kinds of bacteria growing in them. He didn’t realize that leaving his warm, wet towels balled up in the closet caused them to grow microbes and, consequently, stink. “What’s the point of taking a shower if you dry off with disgusting towels?” I asked. He needed a few biology and hygiene lessons to get his act together, and he could have also benefitted from using bamboo bath towels.

Towels made from bamboo fibers are naturally hypo-allergenic, anti-microbial and odor resistant. Even if my friend didn’t wash his bamboo towels for a while, they would have been more hygienic and less smelly. On top of that, bamboo bath towels have the softness and silkiness of cashmere, yet are even more absorbent than cotton. They’re even durable enough to go in the washer and dryer – perfect for college kids, like my friend, who can’t be bothered with special washing instructions.

So I’ve been working on a TON of green projects lately that has taken my time away from blogging. But I need to!

I have been working on a few different websites, so for one if anyone has a green business and needs a website please get in touch with me. Anyways, here’s the one that I’ve been working on lately that I want to tell you about. It’s a real estate company that specializes in sustainable real estate! Eco-Realty International specializes in how to green your home for sale, buy a greener home, and is a complete consultant in these areas as well as an expert for buying and selling a green sustainable home.

Exciting, huh? Nancy Riehle is the broker, and she got started by investing in a home here in Spartanburg, SC that was in need of repair. Their repair option? Make it green! They put in Icynene spray foam insulation, used a tankless hot water heater, recycled/able carpet from Milliken, bamboo flooring, concrete countertops, geo-thermal heat pump, I mean everything, and the house sold for $100k MORE than any other house on the street! She had over 200 people at the open house! Green is in baby!

So, now she along with her agents would like to help others do the same thing. Maybe not as large of a return, but it will definitely help your home sell.

Besides, buying and living in a green home is the healthy, wealthy, and wise choice to make!

by Courtney Curtis,

There’s no doubt that the standards the USDA has imposed on organic cotton farmers has done our planet some good. After all, the whole concept of organic production is environmentally-centered. But, aside from the lessened eco-impact, is organic cotton any better for you?

Finding trendy clothes and stylish sheets certainly is a lot easier when you aren’t concerned with where they come from, right? Well, the value of shopping for organics is subjective to say the least, so check out these five ways organic cotton is grown differently, and decide for yourself if a little bit of tag-peeking is worth the difference:

1. It Starts with the Seeds

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If you think that conventional and organic cotton starts out the same way, I’m sorry to tell you you’re wrong. Actually, conventional cotton farmers don’t just start out with approximately 70% GMO, or genetically modified organism, seeds, but they also treat their seeds with fungicides and insecticides before planting. Organic farmers, however, use only untreated, non-GMO seeds for their cotton harvest.

2. Soil and Water: Where Cotton Grows Up

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Maybe the seeds are a little different, but they’re planted in the same earth and fed the same water, right? Wrong. Conventional cotton is planted in synthetic fertilizers, and there’s actually less soil because of a predominantly mono-crop culture. Incidentally, conventional cotton production requires intensive irrigation, adding wasteful water management to conventional cotton farming’s list of flaws.

Organic cotton farming, on the other hand, already has strong soil because of annual crop rotation, so no additional fertilizers are needed. The cotton crop also retains water more efficiently because of increased organic matter in the soil, which means organic farms play an important part in water conservation efforts.

3. Keeping the Weeds at Bay

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Weeds can certainly be a crop’s worst enemy, so there’s no question they have to either be removed or destroyed. The conventional method calls for inhibiting weed germination by treating the soil with herbicides, a method that often requires several treatments to be effective. Organic cotton farming, however, requires that weeds be eliminated physically, not chemically. Organically, weeds are controlled exclusively through cultivation and hand hoeing.

4. Proper Pest Control

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Because conventional cotton production readily uses insecticides as its primary method of pest control, it accounts for approximately 25% of insecticide usage worldwide. As if that wasn’t bad enough, the nine most common pesticides used to produce common cotton are highly toxic, and five are probable carcinogens. Additionally, aerial spraying is a frequent method of distributing the chemicals and potential drift can be lethal.

Organic cotton production, however, avoids pesticide use altogether. On organic cotton farms a balance between pests and their natural predators is created through the presence and maintenance of healthy soil. Organic farms also uses beneficial insects instead of insecticides to control pests.

5. From Harvesting to Your Home

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Before the cotton crop can be harvested it must defoliate or be defoliated, meaning the leaves must come off. In conventional cotton farming this is done almost entirely with, you guessed it, more chemicals. In organic cotton farming, however, chemical defoliation is not an option, and farmers rely mostly on the seasonal freeze for leaf removal. If the season proves to be unreliable, organic farmers might turn water management as a defoliation stimulant.