Prepare to find some great articles that contain tips on living the green lifestyle. Discover how choosing your food carefully, decorating your home in style, or simply learning more about conservation can truly change the world. Read the short descriptions below and click the title to get more info.

LIFESTYLE:

Pros and Cons: Ethanol

Whether you are for or against the use of ethanol as a replacement fuel, this blog lists the pros and cons of prices, production, benefits, etc.

Dig Deeper to Cut Back on Water

There is a lot you can be doing as an individual to save water, aside from the ways you already knew. Find out what you can do to cut back on water usage, including:
- Going vegetarian
- Greywater recovery
- Incorporating green design into your house
- Choosing a living location that doesn’t use up natural resources

Less is the New More: Mainstream Media Edition

Consuming less is part of the green lifestyle. This includes the size of the home we live in. But just because you live in a small dwelling, doesn’t mean it can’t look fantastic!

DESIGN:

Designer Spotlight: Viesso Furniture

Affordable, modern and green, Viesso Furniture uses natural latex or feather/down filling instead of polyurethane for cushions and wood certified by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC). They also use bamboo, recycled steel springs, recycled stainless steel legs, and water-based stains and glues, helping to reduce inside air pollution.

Designer Spotlight: Team 7

Commenting on the sleek style and green efforts of Team 7, this blog will introduce you to furniture that provides aesthetic elegance, as well as green craftsmanship. Team 7 has earned the Austrian Ecological Quality Certification for their ecologically-friendly production practices.

Designer Spotlight: Molo Design

Using mostly paper and textiles as their medium, Molo Designs creates aesthetically pleasing and functional pieces of furniture to accentuate your home decor. The products themselves are 100% recyclable, and recycled materials are used to make the products.

GREEN PRODUCTS:

Fold ‘N Go with Folding Bicycles

To get to where we want to be (in the environmental and physical sense), bikes offer an eco-friendly form of transportation. Since typical bikes are often bulky and hard to deal with once indoors, this blog offers different models of the folding bike.

Dig in a Little Deeper: 100 Mile Diet

People are doing the 100 Mile Diet, which calls for people to only retrieve food from the 100 mile radius around their home. This blog provides tips to maintain this diet, and gives suggestions of where to go while on the 100 Mile Diet.

Walking the Recycling Walk: Where to Get this Stuff

Recycling is more than you think. This blog explains the everyday uses of recycled material, and how you can get in on it by purchasing:
- Clothing
- Bags
- Interior design

Thanks for joining us on the GREEN BLOG and if there are topics that you want to see covered in future blog posts, please take this opportunity to post a comment on this blog post.

The furniture and interiors TreeHugger often encounters that offer sleek, modern designs combined with green materials and production also often comes with a big price tag. This can be discouraging for those of us who want to live green and look good, too; for some, it also perpetuates the stereotype that green stuff is astronomically expensive, which is not always the case. Custom furniture company Viesso [www.viesso.com] seems to have found a good balance: all of their products, including chairs, sofas, tables, beds, benches, accessories and more, are customizable, and each different option (upholstery, cushions, frame, etc.) has several green choices, allowing customers to be as green as they want to.

They’ve got all the right materials options to make any discerning TreeHugger happy: fabric and textiles from Maharam [www.maharam.com] and Knoll [www.knoll.com], natural latex or feather/down filling instead of polyurethane for cushions and wood certified by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC). They also feature bamboo, recycled steel springs and recycled stainless steel legs, finished off with water-based stains and glues, to help keep indoor air pollution down. The “Rondi” chair, pictured above, is one of our favorite designs.

While it’s true that these green options do come at a bit of a premium, this TreeHugger was able to put together a great looking 96″ sofa for about $2300, which is a reasonable deal for a big piece of custom furniture, green or otherwise. Viesso is thinking about going 100% green [www.viesso.com], but, in the meantime, we’re glad to see that they offer the option for those of us who care. Each piece, customizable right on their website (which is an ingenious system, we think), usually takes about three weeks to ship after your custom design is submitted; those in need of instant gratification can cruise their selection of floor models [www.viesso.com].