Photo By Rawganique

Sleep soundly with a clean conscience by making the switch to organic bedding. Organic sheet sets may cost a little more than their department store counterparts, but they’re beneficial both to your health and to the environment. One of the most affordable and accessible eco-friendly options is organic cotton. Make sure the sheets use only 100% certified organic cotton and are sweatshop-free. To avoid exposure to excessive chemicals, you can opt for unbleached and undyed sheets in natural colours. Different weaves and thread counts can vastly change the feel of cotton sheets, so you may need to experiment to find the texture that’s right for you.

Rawganique offers some affordable options for organic cotton bedsheets. Using 100% undyed and unbleached organic cotton in a percale, sateen, jacquard, or flannel finish, their products are made in the USA or Europe and are sweatshop-free. If you’re looking to go higher end (and it’s always a sound sleep investment), Loop Organic is another option for organic cotton sheets. Certified by the Organic Trade Association, they offer hotel-quality organic bed linens with embroidered designs. You can even request fabric swatches to sample the feel of their organic cotton before buying.

Bamboo is becoming an increasingly popular option for eco-friendly bed linens because it’s so soft and absorbent. Organic bamboo bed sheets, such as these ones from Green Earth Bamboo, are great for people with skin allergies or night sweats. For those who have never tried bamboo sheets before, the company will also send sample swatches to help you decide on which sheet set feels right for you.

Photo by Martin Morris: Flickr

With the 2012 summer Olympics approaching, London is going for gold in greening up the future site of the games. According to the U.K.’s Environmental Agency, clean up of the massive area has now been completed and construction can begin.

Getting the site ready for use was no small feat, especially considering that much of the land was previously used for industry, chemical storage and factories, leaving the area polluted and contaminated. Working with the Olympic Delivery Authority and the London Development Agency, the Environmental Agency used five soil-washing machines to decontaminate two million tons of polluted soil. By scrubbing the soil, the agency was able to reuse as much as 95 percent of it onsite instead of having to truck out dirty soil and bring in clean soil to replace it, saving on costs while also reducing the environmental footprint.

The cleanup included removing concrete walls and invasive species from the River Lea in order to make it more habitable to local wildlife, and 110 acres of land was converted into woodlands, grasslands, ponds and reed beds. The wetlands will also provide a space for flood water to run off, thereby reducing the risk of flooding to 4,000 homes in the area.

Darren Johnson, Green Party member of the London Assembly, points out that still more could have been done for the environment. He would have preferred to see officials accept a bid from Nissan for an all-electric fleet of vehicles (BMW won the contract instead). The Games also fell short of its target to generate one-fifth of its power from renewable energy, ending up somewhere closer to only 11 percent.

Photo by John Loo: Flickr

Valentine’s Day is almost upon us, something the women of the world know and the men will only vaguely start to recollect as the sun goes down on February 13. For you guys and gals who have the gift of forethought, consider green and organic alternatives to the usual Valentine’s Day schlock.

Cocoa, the base ingredient for chocolate, is often grown in conditions unfair to the farmers and, in the case of Burkina Faso and other countries, even using child labour. If you would like to keep child labour out of your gift to your Valentine’s Day sweetie, look for the “Fair Trade” label for Valentine’s Day chocolates. If you want to step up your game, choose organic fair trade chocolates. While they may not come pre-wrapped in a heart-shaped box, they taste miles better than the cheap dreck that is passed for most commercial chocolate these days. When you get into the higher-end chocolate, you show your lady (or man) that you have taste and that you care about the environment. Bonus points for you!

For more tips, check out these handy tips from Environment Canada.

Photo by Arnold Gatilao: Flickr

Super Bowl concession stands will be serving up an organic and local option this year – white bean chili with vegetables from local, organic farmers. Centreplate, the largest concessions provider for the NFL, partnered with local certified USDA Organic farmers to provide a vegetarian chili option and two meat chili options made from locally raised meats. Green pork chili and red beef chili are the meat options. If you aren’t familiar with it, green pork chili is a Mexican-style chili made with pork, jalapeno peppers, and other Mexican-style ingredients. $2 will be donated from each bowl sold to Farm Aid.

Environmental watchdog group Waterkeeper Alliance filed a lawsuit yesterday against Taylor Energy Co. in order to get some answers out of the company over a 2004 oil spill off the coast of Louisiana, which Waterkeeper Alliance says is still ongoing.

The group claims that anywhere from 100 to 400 gallons of oil are flowing into the Gulf of Mexico each day, after 2004′s Hurricane Ivan caused an underwater landslide that damaged an offshore platform and 28 oil wells. The New York-based watchdog group is accusing the company of violating the Clean Water Act and Resource Conservation Recovery Act and is accordingly suing for up to $37,500 per day in civil penalties.

The real concern, however, is that Taylor Energy refuses to answer even basic questions as to what they’re doing to clean up and stop the spill, which according to Waterkeeper Alliance, has now been ongoing for seven years. The group has used satellite imagery and oil slick analysis to calculate that the oil is leaking hundreds of gallons each day. The Coast Guard, on the other hand, insists that the site is only leaking an average of 7.5 gallons a day and that the oil sheens are minimal and too thin to require offshore repairs.

True, even by Waterkeeper Alliance’s calculations, the spill is small when compared to 2010′s infamous BP oil spill, which dumped about 2.35 million gallons a day into the Gulf. But if Taylor Energy is this bad at plugging a small leak when it’s in shallow water and only 11 miles from shore, the group is concerned about what would happen if another, larger leak occurred in a deep-water environment.

Image Source: IRRI Images, Flickr

Greenpeace is celebrating a victory in China as the efforts of hundreds of campaigners and supporters have convinced the Chinese government to suspend commercialization of genetically engineered (GE) rice. It has been a long slog since the organization first caught wind that some Chinese scientists were applying to commercialize at least four strains of GE rice back in 2004. In 2008, the country’s Ministry of Agriculture okayed the use of GE rice and corn without telling anyone. It wasn’t until the end of 2009 that the government even announced that two strains of GE rice had already been approved.

But not everyone was aboard the GE bandwagon. Some Chinese politicians began to point out the risks of genetically engineered rice, and several prominent celebrities spoke out against the plan. Building upon the groundswell, Greenpeace began an anti-GE campaign that included exposing American retail giant Wal-Mart for selling GE rice in China. Chinese citizens got on board and began contacting stores and companies asking them to become GE-free.

Following a successful media campaign, Cofco and Yihai Kerry, two large Chinese companies pledged to go non-GE, as did several supermarkets. The hard work really paid off though in September 2011, when an inside source at the Ministry of Agriculture was quoted saying that the country had finally suspended the commercialization of GE rice.

Greenpeace activists took over the Romanian environment minister’s office in Bucharest yesterday, in protest of a controversial Canadian-backed gold mine planned for a small Carpathian town. Around 20 Greenpeace members dressed in bright yellow jackets occupied Laszlo Borbely’s office for almost five hours before leaving peacefully, with some of their members even going so far as to chain themselves to the radiator. Meanwhile, in the cities of Warsaw, Vienna, Budapest and Sofia, more Greenpeace activists paid a visit to Romanian embassies, leaving barrels or coffins of dead fish as a grim reminder of the environmental risks of the project.

The group joins concerned Romanian citizens who are also protesting the proposed gold mine, which plans to use cyanide to extract up to 300 tonnes of gold and 1,500 tonnes of silver. While the mine will bring much-needed jobs to the area, the cyanide could cause terrible environmental damage, and the construction of the mine will also threaten the Roman-era historical sites nearby.

The project, valued at $7.5 million, has been spearheaded by Rosia Montana Gold Corporation, which is majority-owned by the Canadian company Gabriel Resources Ltd. The company has already been given a permit from the culture ministry, but now needs the go-ahead from the environmental ministry in order to proceed. Environmental minister Borbely has said that he will not endorse the project unless convinced it was safe for the environment.

If given the green light, the Rosia Montana Gold Corporation will create four quarries, which will destroy four mountaintops and three local villages. Still, even as hundreds gathered in Bucharest to protest the mine, an equal number rallied in Rosia Montana in support of the project and the jobs it would bring to the area.

Students at the Endeavour Centre, a not-for-profit sustainable building school in Peterborough, Ontario, are currently undertaking a five-month-long project to build what they call “Canada’s Greenest Home.” The project is part of the school’s Sustainable New Construction: Building a New Future program, and students will be working on-site with a team of instructors to create the two-storey home that they hope will meet with the stringent Living Building Challenge certification from the International Living Future Institute.

The hands-on work will also be supplemented with in-class lessons on building science theory and knowledge of construction business. Along the way, staff and students at the Centre will be blogging about the experience of building Canada’s Greenest Home on their official website.

When completed, the home will boast net-zero energy, producing as much power as it uses. It will also recycle and treat rainwater and greywater, as well as use composting toilets to turn waste into useful compost. The home will be built with locally-harvested materials, and will use straw bale wall panels for their great insulating value and small environmental footprint. The fully-accessible design will be completed with non-toxic interior finishes, and a full ventilation system.

Once finished, the school plans to sell the home on the open market, with the sale price helping to offset tuition costs for the students. Chris Magwood, Executive Director of The Endeavour Centre, hopes that “the sale of this house on the open market will be an indication to other builders that there are buyers hungry for this level of environmental performance in a new home purchase,” he explained in a statement.

“We hope to generate a lot of interest in Canada’s Greenest Home,” added Magwood. “A lot of people think we’re far from being able to live lightly and comfortably on the planet. We’d like this project to show that it’s a goal well within reach.”

Not all organic mattresses are created equal. Thanks to a policy memorandum from the USDA’s National Organic Program (NOP) as well as the Global Organic Textile Standard (GOTS), organic mattress manufacturers and sellers have a number of requirements to meet before they can truly label their products as “organic.”

So how does a consumer know if they’re truly getting an organic mattress? According to the NOP memorandum, raw materials, such as the natural fibres that go into textiles, are covered by the NOP crop and livestock production standards. These standards cover fibres like cotton, wool, hemp and flax. The standards require that fibres are grown without the use of synthetic fertilizers or toxic pesticides and that they are not genetically engineered.

The NOP standards do not, however, cover the post-harvesting processing of non-food items, which means that mattresses cannot qualify to be fully NOP-certified. This is where GOTS comes in, explains the Organic Trade Association. A strict international standard which manufacturers may voluntarily choose to comply with, GOTS covers the certification of post-harvest processing of home textiles and apparel.

In order to become GOTS-certified, these items must be made without the use of genetic engineering, hazardous chemical or heavy metals; the companies must comply with strict wastewater policies; and the manufacturing process must provide employees with a living wage and be free from child labour. Our Essentia mattress cover is GOTS-certified.

To determine whether a mattress is fully GOTS-certified, consumers should check the label: it should show the GOTS seal, the label grade, a reference to GOTS and a license number or name of the certified manufacturer. To confirm that everything is in order, consumers can then plug this information into the GOTS public database.

Downtown LeRoy photo by Bev Sykes: Flickr

A group of girls in LeRoy, NY have been diagnosed with mass hysteria. All share common symptoms like facial tics, and one girl is even being homeschooled because she doesn’t want to go out in public with her symptoms. Environmental activist Erin Brokovich’s team met resistance when they tried to test the school grounds for environmental factors. If there wasn’t a problem, why did the school actively bar them from taking samples? We’re sure parents who send their kids to the school want to know.

Brockovich has pointed to a 70′s train spill of several toxins and chemicals near the school site as a potential cause of the girl’s symptoms. Since we’re long past the Salem witch trials, it stands to reason that the girl’s symptoms have a scientific explanation. We’ll keep you posted as the story develops.