Environmental Choices: Businesses, Products & Services That Offer Better Choices For The Environment
Eco-Cycle Gives Green Diamond Tires a Test Drive
There’s a new all-season tire on the market, and Eco-Cycle wants you to know all about it. “Green Diamond Tires” are made of used premium tire casings, with new treads added and carbide granules mixed throughout the molten rubber. It’s the carbide granules, or “diamonds” which make these tires unique. The diamonds continuously wear to the surface, creating studded tire traction for superior handling and safety. The Green Diamond tire recycling process diverts unwanted tires from the landfill, and saves an estimated 3-7 gallons of oil!
Green Diamond Tire Co. provided former Eco-Cycle employee Nanci Bibb with a set of tires to evaluate last winter. Bibb commuted to and from work 25 miles each way, 5 days per week in her ’93 Jeep Cherokee. The roads up to her mountain home were often slick with ice and covered in snow, but the Green Diamond Tires proved to be winners.
“I do believe that they have the best grip of any tires I’ve ever had – I truly felt very safe and confident on the road,” Bibb reported. “I didn’t really have to do anything special with these tires, they did all the work.”
For more info visit www.greendiamondtire.com or contact local distributor Rich Gostenik at 303-808-7280.
Make Ex-Employee Junk Mail EcoLogical 
When an employee leaves your organization, his or her junk mail keeps showing up at an average of 15 pounds per year! Instead of tossing the unsolicited mail in the recycle bin, prevent the waste in the first place by signing up with EcoLogical Mail Coalition. It’s quick, easy and free. You tell EcoLogical which employees have left, EcoLogical flags outdated information on marketers’ mailing lists, and the marketers save money in avoided printing, addressing and posting costs. That’s why it’s free to you—the marketers pay for the service. Eco-Cycle, Boulder County, the City of Boulder and NCAR have already signed on. Join us and start saving trees today.
Clothes with a Conscience 
Feel like a Goddess in comfortable, classic, natural fiber clothing designed and produced locally by Goddess Gear. Using hemp, silk and tencel (a wood product) with no nasty chemical dyes, this line of clothing is preshrunk and can be machine washed and dried. Proprietor and designer Anna Elmore is proud of her all-natural materials and her local manufacturing partner – a great place and a neat shop with people making living wages. Find the new fall line at Small Circle Imports in Longmont and find discounted overstock on the specials page.
Reinventing the Wheel 
A flat tire on Graham Bergh’s bike got him thinking about inner tubes. He discovered that the average bike shop throws away about a thousand inner tubes a year and that there are seven thousand bike shops nationwide. He did the math and started designing recycled bike part art. Through his new company called Resource Revival, Bergh now sells clever and creative picture frames, clocks, key chains, tea light holders, bottle openers and much, much more—all made from recycled bicycle parts. Products can be purchased online or by calling 1-800-866-8823.
ONION: The Wolfgang Puck Disposable Instant Hot Latte 
Apparently making a cup a coffee at home or even purchasing one to go (using a refillable mug, of course) is just too much trouble for folks these days. At least that’s the way company OnTech sees it – that’s why they’ve invested a staggering $24 million into creating self-heating beverage containers. Wolfgang Puck Beverage Partners LLC is one of the first to utilize the OnTech packaging, with its disposable “instant hot latte” product.
The new self-heating cup, which is made up of plastic, calcium oxide and a foil membrane, is being touted by creators OnTech as a container which provides people “the ultimate in convenience – the opportunity to enjoy a hot beverage anytime and anywhere.”
Eco-Cycle is not a fan of this “convenient” self-heating coffee cup for obvious reasons: the excessive packaging, the energy and resources used to create each disposable cup, and the inability to recycle them. Let OnTech and Wolfgang Puck Beverage Partners LLC know how you feel about their products.
