Green Magazine’s Holiday Gift Guide

Want to go green this holiday season?
Check out these picks from Green Magazine.

People Towels

PeopleTowels, producers of reusable personal hand towels, the eco-friendly, on-the-go alternative to paper towels and electric air dryers, is supporting The Nature Conservancy to refocus Cyber Monday, November 29, to ‘Green Gift Monday.’ The goal is to encourage online consumers, who spend nearly $890m on Cyber Monday, to give responsibly manufactured gifts from companies that donate to and support environmental organizations. A member of 1% for the Planet, PeopleTowels is offering free shipping for all orders on www.peopletowels.com from November 29 to December 5. PeopleTowels promotes the sustainable eco-habit, B.Y.O.Towel, to curb wasteful paper towel usage in public facilities and are made from 100% organic Fair Trade cotton in patent-pending fabric that is absorbent, yet quick-dry. Pictured here is one of PeopleTowel’s 3-pack gift sets which sell for $17.99.

Wine Cork Flashdrives

A great gift for your wine-loving geek who needs another gadget for his or her computer life. smediaart.com sells these handmade USB flash drives in 1GB to 8 GB sizes, starting at $54. Each recycled cork is unique.

Wine Bottle Platters

These repurposed bottles have been flattened to create platters. Each slumped wine bottle cheese plater is made in the USA from an actual wine bottle. A food-grade stainless steel hanging loop is melted into the bottle during slumping so they can be hung as decorative wall art or in a window when not in use. Each platter comes with a pewter cheese spreader, a raffia-tied tag describing how it was made and a sheer organza bag. Available from olivebarn.com for $15.

Beautiful, Functional, and Small

Inspirational is the perfect word for this book of self-sufficient and small houses built by innovative architects around the world. Each case history is illustrated with gorgeous photographs and describes the challenges confronting the designer and the solutions such as taking advantage of high ceilings to make multiple levels, using collapsible furniture and sliding doors to maximize space. Beginning with the smallest house (the 70-square-foot Watershed in Wren, Oregon) and moving through the world to the largest of the Small Eco Houses (the Hof Residence in Iceland at 3,165 square feet), authors Cristina Paredes Benítez and Àlex Sánchez Vidiella give us loads to think and dream about. Small Eco Houses, Living Green in Style is 400 pages and $35.

Green Your Laptop

Buy a $16 Powered Green Energy Seal emblem for your laptop and support renewable energy. This energy offset helps stop up to 1,500 pounds of CO2 and other pollution. Or it’s similar to not driving a car for 1,700 miles. It’s good for a seven-year laptop lifetime or a three-year desktop computer lifetime. The emblem and its packaging are made from recycled materials

Tossed and Found

With 45 refreshingly funky projects, Tossed and Found teaches the reader to get creative and imaginative with garden-variety cast-offs. What some view as refuse, Linda and John Meyers see as raw material. They have perfected a design strategy that will save you money, provide hours of DIY fun, and provide inspiration to turn your own “trash” into “treasures.” Learn how to transform objects once destined to clog landfills into beautiful, sophisticated and radically original objets d’art—such as an old basketball hoop into a clever wall-mounted table. This hardcover book is $27.50.

Empower a Child

The One Laptop Per Child wants to give every child who would otherwise have little or no access to education their very own connected XO laptop computer. For $199 you can give a laptop to a child in the developing world, and if you donate in someone’s name, they will receive a card honoring the donation. The non-profit, founded by MIT professor Nicholas Negroponte, is currently working on the next generation of the hundred-dollar computer, the XO-3, which is targeted for release in 2012.

Reclaimed Marine Rope Door Mat

To protect endangered North Atlantic Right Whales from entanglement, Maine lobstermen are trading in their traditional float ropes for heavier sinking ropes. The colorful float ropes have been reclaimed and woven into these rugged, easy-to-clean outdoor mats. Made in the USA; $58. Available from Gaiam.

Great Tees for Our Seas

This year, Earth Day also marks the one-year anniversary of the Gulf Coast oil spill. Celebrate the first while supporting the clean-up of the latter with Earth Creations’ Gulf Coast “Green Tees for Our Seas” tee-shirt fundraiser. The Alabama-based organic, clay-dyed clothing company is donating fifty percent of all proceeds from their special young-artist-designed fundraiser tee to the Alabama Weeks Bay Foundation ($18 and $25; available until April 22, 2011, at www.earthcreations.net). Designed by 15-year-old contest winner Carmen, a 10th grade special needs art student from Charlottesville High School in Virginia, the fundraiser tee-shirt features an oil-splattered dolphin in mid-jump with the words “Please Save Me!” and was selected by online voters from among several other unique artist entries.

Posted by GreenMag on Monday, November 29th, 2010. Filed under Living Green. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry