Realcycle

Ever since my tutorial was published in apartment therapy I've been spending a lot more time on this site. It usually start with me checking to see if I'm on the lead and then pressing some beautiful images to see what that's all about.

The site is really cool on a whole, and have a lot of beautiful photos of all stuff related to home in different categories (apartments, children, kitchen, home-office and green) the photos are always beautiful and it's a nice calm way to pass some time in the morning or evening when my brain just needs a break.

However, I just completed one of those tours and feel like screaming at someone. I know what I'm going to say isn't new or original, but I'm a little pissed off, so I'm going to say it here.

When the green trend started, a lot of advertisers and people in marketing felt baffled by it, how can you make money of a trend that calls for shopping less, and not replacing everything you own every 6 month?! There were a lot of different approaches to this, most of which basically preach to maintaining the same wasteful lifestyle but having a green marker or stamp on everything so you can feel benevolent and hip while still not changing or damaging your life style. I feel that the re-nest part of Apartment therapy is very much in this spirit. There are a lot of seemingly cool stuff that looks beautiful but that is portrayed as ecological while in fact, not only isn't but probably damaging to the environment more then just keeping to your regular life style.

From this morning, 2 entries really bummed me out, one was a review of a designer that uses other object such as a shopping cart, a bathtub and a washing machine drum to make really awesome looking furniture, good design?! for sure. Ecological?! not at all! cause first of all, the shopping cart and bathtub and washing machine drum are new and so what's the difference between making a chair our of wood then out of a brand new shopping cart?! and second of all, he ship those things across the world from England, in a special delivery.
If you like this design so much you have to have it, go for it, if you are trying to be more ecological, just stick to the chair you have for the next 10 years or so, and when it breaks beyond repair, go on craigslist in your area, or a thrift shop to buy a second hand chair, or find a manufacturare in your area, or damn - even Ikea which sends 10,000 chairs at once. All those options are more ecologically valid then having a special sofa made out of a bathtub and send across the glob!

The second thing that grated my nerves was a 10 things to do with a pillow case article. Again, getting something new and modifing it might be great fun and yeild great results, but isn't ecological at all. The notion of putting handles or cutting holes in a pillow case to preduce a shopping bag or a grament bag is to me, very silly. Also, if you are so incline as to make your own bags, a trip to a fabric store will yild more materialst for bags without all the special packaging material that comes with buying one pillow case.
How about this for an idea?! buy a pillow case and use it... as a pillow case, use it for as long as it last, own just one of those per person in the family instead of hording them in a bulking cabinet.
If you want to be extra green about it, you can take the shopping bag the case came in and re-use that as a shopping bag or a garbage bag.

Yes, it's a lot less attractive and would not take beautiful pictures to put on cool design website, but if you do want to go green, and make that a priority in your life, it means, sometime, not living in a magazine but in reality.