The Essentia Blog

Traditional wrapping paper uses paper produced from non-sustainable sources.  Sustainably sourced wrapping paper from products like hemp make for a more eco-friendly holiday.  Eartheasy has a few good ideas on their page here and they ship to both the US and Canada.

If you would prefer just to recycle standard gift wrap, don’t use foil or very glossy wrapping paper as it may not be recyclable.

One feature of the Yuletide season is decorations.  On the tree, on the lawn, on the house, and at your work.  They’re always fun and festive and we all love decorating for Christmas.  There’s just one problem - it isn’t exactly a sustainable practice.  Between Thanksgiving and New Years, Americans toss out 900 million metric tons of garbage every week.  Here are a few tips for a greener Christmas - for more check this out.

Tree Me

A real or artificial tree depends on your preferences, but PVC free trees are expensive.  Best to buy from a local tree farm that practices sustainable farming - that way you are buying local and supporting agriculture.  If you don’t have tree farms near you, you may want to consider shelling out for the enviro-friendly artificial alternative for guilt-free years to come.  There are also tree recycling stations available in some cities - check with your town’s waste management department to see if you have one.

Old School Decorations

In olden days we made boughs for our trees from popcorn and other various materials.  Disney actually has an awesome page on decorations that you can make yourself.  A great way to get your family into the holiday spirit and if your kids hear that you are doing it to go eco, you’ll have some very eager little volunteers.

Don’t Buy New

I didn’t know it until researching this article but apparently some people toss out their decorations every year and get new ones.  In every single home I have been privy to Christmas decorating in, the same Christmas decorations are trotted out every year, only getting thrown out if they break or crack.  Consider the frugal example of myself and countless suburbanites everywhere if you are of the “decorations should be tossed” camp.  If you will be snubbed by all and sundry for using the same decorations from year to year, you may want to make some new friends.

Get the LED out

If you want to cut your energy costs and have pretty little sparkly lights everywhere, consider replacing your old Xmas lights with LED’s.  These are cheaply available at box stores everywhere and they save you a bundle on your hydro bill - particularly if you have “the Griswald house” every year.  You know who you are.

The National Organic Standards Board recently approved a move to allow farmed fish to be labelled “organic”.  In addition, the farmed fish may consume up to 25% wild fish as part of their diet rather than the 100% organic feed that other sectors are required to feed their animals.

Open-net pens used to keep the fish in also pollute the ocean with concentrated fish waste and disease, making a fish farm a less than ideal aquatic environment for the fish that may end up on an organic buyer’s plate.

The Organic Consumers Association is sponsoring a petition to protest these new laws.  Take a moment out of your day to head over there and sign it if you want to keep the organic label truly organic.  Let’s not forget that when one industry is allowed to slide, others will surely follow and pretty soon the organic label won’t have any meaning.

A $1 Billion dollar project is planned for San Francisco in order to install a charging grid for electric cars.  The company incentive funded project will be put in place by a company called “A Better Place” in partnership with Renault-Nissan.  They will distribute the cars under a subscription based program which will offer the cars at a discount and people who purchase them will subscribe to a certain number of miles.

Better Place hopes to expand the plan to Los Angeles, Sacramento, San Diego and the three highways connecting the Bay Area and the Los Angeles area.

Coffee is meant to be grown naturally in the shade of the rainforest canopy.  Coffee producers found that by cutting down the rainforest cover and letting the crops grow in full sun, they get more yield from the crop.  Since this wasn’t the natural habitat of the coffee plant, more fertilizers and pesticides were required to grow the coffee on what is commonly known as a “sun plantation”.  All of the major brands of coffee that are sold are grown on these sun plantations.

Cuba, curiously enough, is now the world’s foremost coffee producer due to the US trade embargo.  Being unable to purchase any of the chemicals that you need to make a sun plantation work, Cuban coffee producers cultivated the plants naturally by old-fashioned means.  Cuban coffee has been lauded as the world’s best, right alongside organic kona coffee.

You’ll also hear the term “bird-friendly” when you are looking at organic coffee. This term refers to the fact that the natural rainforest canopy is necessary to sustain several bird species.  When the canopy is removed for sun plantations, those species will die off.

Here are a few places that you can buy organic coffee online; bear in mind you can also buy it at Whole Foods and local health food stores:

- Jim’s Organic Coffee
- Shore Coffee (Cuban Coffee, ships to Canada only)

Here’s a great video about organic coffee farming.  Not the highest production value but it gets a few key points across, including how much money they make off of an organic coffee farm:

The whale hunt in Japan has always been a source of protests and controversy.  Japan claims that their “research hunts” provide valuable scientific information to the world, which Greenpeace counters as just not being the case.  You have to wonder how killing close to a thousand whales a year actually furthers any kind of research goal, but this is Japan’s excuse to the international community.  Check out this series on Animal Planet - makes it worth ordering the channel!

Earlier this year, the Center for Health, Environment, and Justice released a report entitled “Volatile Vinyl”.  It put forward the fact that PVC shower curtains offgass 108 different chemicals within the first 28 days of their installation, as well as other helpful facts about the harmful curtains.   They also continue to offgass months after installation.  What to replace them with?  If you are truly looking to go hardcore, choose organic cotton or hemp shower curtains, both of which are available at the following online retailers:

Gaiam - One of my favourites, Gaiam is mostly known for their Yoga videos but are also a huge purveyor of alternative energy solutions through their Real Goods unit.

Rawganique.com - Specializes in European Hemp shower curtains.

Simply installing fabric shower curtains may seem to solve the problem, but why compound the issue with using fabric that has been made from non-organically grown cotton or other forms of plastic?  Best to stick with the green and throw out that unnaturally bleached white.

Hoowhaaa. Montreal Gazette had a nice little piece on us Monday.

Just throwing it out there…. not all local newspapers send a photographer. One told us to take a picture and send it to them. lol. Some do phone interviews, some columnists visit us.

The Gazette is thorough. Paul Delean’s strolled into our office last week. Cool cat. Everything about him says “veteran columnist”. A photographer stopped by to take a picture as well.

Keep an eye out for us in the National Post next Monday.

So Jack was on CBC’s The Dragons Den last night.

A fraction of what was said was aired. It was a hell-of-a-lot more entertaining and heated live.

Here’s the Story.
Offering a portion of the business at a factory level was never an option. The dragons have a history of trying to tear holes in the value of a company. We also didn’t want to go in there asking for a few million.

So the “Dragon Bait” was a cool $350,000.

Jack started off a little nervous but ended up bagging Brett Wilson, the Dragon with more money than all the others COMBINED!

Traffic powered through our website last night and i’m a little overwhelmed with all the e-mail inquiries this morning. Thanks for all your support

Having this angel money will certainly do us good. We’re almost as popular in BC and California than we are in Quebec and we don’t have any locations there yet.

btw we’re having a Dragons Den discount on the Classic 8.

The first ever green billboard is going up in Times Square courtesy of Ricoh Americas Corp. The wind and sun powered sign will save $12,000 a month in energy costs. 16 wind turbines and 64 solar panels will give the sign the necessary power to avoid drawing energy from the grid.  A Ricoh spokesman says that the sign should work for four days without any sun or wind.