Question: I’m about to start sending out resumes to apply for jobs and would like to use recycled paper. I looked on your site and you mentioned some online stores and westside stores. Do you know of any in the Pasadena area or nearby? I’d prefer to buy it in store and see it for myself if possible. Your help would be much appreciated. Thanks, Bo

Answer: Do people still use paper resumes these days? Isn’t that kind of, um, slow? Email it!

Okay okay — I realize that even if you email resumes, you want to take a spare copy or 2 to interviews in case your prospective boss is an idiot and didn’t look at the deets of your accomplishments yet. So — My 3-point advice:

One: I’ve never given a shit what sort of paper my resume’s printed on — and in fact most paper I’ve used has been kinda crappy — but I’ve never had trouble getting a job. Scented pink resumes might work if you’re an actor in Legally Blonde, but from my experience, employers are too harried to care ’bout that stuff.

Which is to say — Perhaps seeing the paper for yourself before buying is just not that important. I’m all for seeing before buying for other stuff — i.e. clothes and esp. shoes — but paper doesn’t make that list.

Two: With that in mind, you might try the 100% post-consumer content, acid-free 24-lb. bond, ENVIRONMENT® Recycled Writing Paper — or some of the other great recycled papers available online.

Three: If you must see and feel the paper first hand, first try Kelly Paper, which offers lotsa good recycled paper options. The Pasadena branch’s at 56 Waverly Dr.

If that doesn’t work out, both Office Depot and Staples offer recycled-content paper — but I have to say that products from other companies with comparable post-consumer content looks and feels better. I mean, I’m glad Office Depot and Staples got on the recycled bandwagon, but it’s like they picked the shittiest stuff, perhaps as a way to make consumers believe recycled paper is undesirable. If you have to resort to this option, please don’t assume that the quality of most recycled paper is the quality of their crap.

That said, I’ve definitely used Staples’ recycled paper for a resume before — and gotten hired. Which brings me back to point one –

Tags: paper, resume, pasadena

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Question: I have been trying to find some kind of environmental group to get involved in around the Glendale area, but can’t seem to find anything. I searched the web for quite a while, maybe I am just looking under the wrong topics or something. I would really appreciate if you know of anything or could give me any ideas. Thanks, Morgan

Answer: One day I’ll write a book titled “Why Glendale Happens to Good People.”

More seriously: While my knowledge of anything Glendale’s rather limited, I’ve still got some suggestions:

Get deep into Community Supported Agriculture: Tierra Miguel Foundation, which delivers to Glendale could supply you with all the fruits and veggies you need while also letting you get heavily involved in community agriculture, if you’re into that.

Find your farmers’ market: The Glendale Certified Farmers Market happens every Thursday from 9:30 am - 1:30 pm on the 100 block of N. Brand Blvd. Volunteer with the market organizers or work for one of the farmers’ booths.

Become a public transit advocate: Get to know the Glendale Bee Line — your local transportation system which seems rather skimpy, but on the upside, easy to get to know (cuz it’s so skimpy) — and work to — make it less skimpy. Start by emailing or calling in suggestions, then attending public meetings, and on up the line.

Love the river. The LA River runs through Glendale! So tour the LA River, and get involved with FoLAR.

Live the example: Need clothes? Even if you’re stuck in Glendale Galleria, organic cotton Patagonia clothes at Boarders Sports. Need books? Try Brand Books (231 N. Brand Blvd.), one of the best used bookstores ever. Want a dining out experience? Make reservations at Fresco Ristorante, which offers locally grown, grass-fed, free-range eats.

Glendale readers — Please help poor Morgan out with further suggestions in the comments.

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Question: I’ve been driving from Hollywood to Santa Monica to take a class put on by Sustainable Works. It’s a 6 week class and jam packed with good info.

My problem is that it takes 45 mins to get there and I’m having a hard time believing that there isn’t some organization or person doing similar good work in my neighborhood. Please steer me right. I want to connect up with them and guide my neighbors towards some green solutions.

Thanks, Conrad.

Answer: My short answer: Believe it — There is no other program like Sustainable Works’ 6-week program that gets LA-area people all set up to revamp their lives the green way.

The City of LA just doesn’t fund the type of intensive, hippie-ish, city-hacker-ish programs that Santa Monica does. Lucky for you, Sustainable Works needs bodies to keep its funding from the City of Santa Monica, and will thus take LA residents in –

Of course, LA proper does have lots of little wonderful things happening. Composting workshops, if you have a lil yard space. Art-meets-activism stuff at Farmlab. Critical Mass and Bicycle Kitchen.

Beyond those, I encourage you to check out my green calendar. Which is to say you could personally cobble together a personal program akin to Sustainable Works by trying out all these various workshops and events. It’d take a lot more time and work on your part, but may be even more rewarding for you in the end.

One cool thing ’bout Hollywood: You got subway. This means that if you decide you wanna do stuff downtown — or even in Pasadena, a city that’s been making some real green strides — you’re just a short subway ride away.

Riding the train’s a good way to connect up with your neighbors, btw. Other ways to connect with eco-neighbors: Go to green restaurants, like M Cafe de Chaya, Real Food Daily, Sante La Brea, Lou on Vine and Ammo. Better yet, start a Hollywood Green Drinks at your fave bar and I promise I’ll try to make it.

The subway’s really the one main thing Hollywood has over Santa Monica — which undoubtedly, you’ve noticed, since you’re having to drive 45 mins to get to the Sustainable Works stuff. Are you using it?

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Question: Is this true??! — Zach

— Forwarded message —
I just found out that plastic bottles don’t get recycled if you leave the cap on! They end up getting thrown out of the recycling process. So, remove the caps! Just when we thought we knew ‘everything’… Pass this along to anyone you know that recycles (which is hopefully, everyone)! — Jessica

Answer: No, but removing the caps is still a good idea.

To get an answer for you, I called the Bureau of Sanitation. A woman called Wanda answered, who waffled a bit then said a capped bottle “probably gets recycled.”

Hmmm…. So I asked Wanda who might know for sure, and she gave me the number to a public recycling center — Bestway Recycling in Los Angeles.

I called and posed the same Q to a woman there, who put me on hold while she investigated. She came back to say “It doesn’t matter if it has the cap or doesn’t. It still gets recycled.”

So if you’ve tossed bottles into the blue bin with caps on, don’t despair. That said, quit putting the caps back on. The caps’re made of a different plastic than the bottles, and generally cause problems, as summarized here by some people at Harvard recycling:

Removal of the cap allows for evaporation and prevents retention of residual liquid. Extra liquid causes a number of problems: it adds weight, which adds to the energy (and fossil fuel emissions) necessary to transport the recyclables; it creates a mess and causes injuries in the recycling plant.

This extra liquid bit probably adds to the 25%+ of blue bin contents that get thrown out because recyclables aren’t properly cleaned out. As Alex Helou, division manager for the Bureau of Sanitation, said to the LA Times, “You don’t have to wash the bottles and products, but just make sure they aren’t dirty or soiled,” said. “Everything has to be clean to process at recycling or it’ll be tossed.”

Meaning the dirtier the bottle you toss into the blue bin, the lower the chances your bottle’ll get recycled properly.

So don’t make a habit of throwing half-full, capped bottles of Coke into a blue bin. Make things easier for the recyclers by taking the cap off and giving the bottle a quick rinse if necessary, before throwing it in the blue bin.

Better yet, try to ditch — or cut down on — the Coke habit –

Also, I’d recommend all people to refrain from sending on scary messages like Jessica did to would-be eco compatriots unless they’ve actually verified that the info they’re sending on is accurate. Be vigilant about NOT sending on faux-eco-info that could potentially make people give up on recycling or other green activities for no good reason.

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Question: It’s back to school and I was looking for recycled notebooks the other day in Staples — to no avail. Do you know anywhere in the Santa Monica area to get recycled paper / notebooks?? Thanks -Caitlin

Answer: Little did Staples and Office Depot know that by saying no to the eco-friendly office supplies company Sustainable Group back in the day, they lost a whole niche of customers like you.

Which is to say: Head over to Whole Foods. I know — they usually don’t have notebooks and stuff, but they do now. Pictorial proof comes from my visit to the Santa Monica store yesterday — where I discovered at the checkout line I’d forgotten my wallet and had to run home and back in the heat wave to buy bread and wine –

Back to the notebooks: Whole Foods gives you 2 options:

* New Leaf notebooks. These’re high post-consumer content recycled paper notebooks, including the new Rewrite from Sustainable Group. New Leaf’s basically providing branding for the Sustainable Group products sold at Whole Foods — which includes not just notebooks but also the Rebinder, the Repocket, the Resleeve, and others.

* Harvest Collection notebooks. These’re tree-free notebooks — meaning the paper’s made out of tropical fibers in Costa Rica under sustainable, fair trade guidelines.

Office Depot’s recently made a new green page to attract green consumers — without actually carrying super green stuff like the notebooks mentioned here. If Office Depot and Staples lose enough biz to Whole Foods, maybe they’ll go crawling back to Sustainable Group –

Tags: wholefoods, sustainablegroup, officesupplies, notebook, staples, officedepot

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Question: I became really intrigued in your 30 books in 30 days challenge. It seems like something I’d like to try myself, but I’ve always been a very slow reader, and I also have to keep up with a ton of newspapers and magazines for my work.

My question is: do you find that reading a book a day keeps you from other daily activities, like writing, going out, etc? Do you find it easy to read a lot of books and periodicals? Or are you a naturally fast reader and the challenge is something very doable?

Just curious. Keep up the great work. Diana

Answer: I’m really a rather slow reader, though I may think that cuz my sis is an exceptionally fast one. However, I’m of the opinion one tends to enjoy books more if one slowly savors them. Which may explain why my sis is a fast-reading medical doctor and I’m a slow reading grad student….

But to answer your Qs: No, reading didn’t keep me from other activities — mainly because I AM a full-time graduate student, on summer vacation no less. It’s a lot easier to curl up on the couch with a book for a few hours in the afternoon before heading out for happy hour at 5 if you don’t have to, you know, work.

Theoretically, reading is a big chunk of my work and I really should’ve been reading at this rate for the last 6 yrs….

Still, I think the challenge is doable for people who put in full days at the office. Thus, a few tips:

1. Save The Tale of Genji for another day, and stick to the short books — Brokeback Mountain, for ex, can be read in under an hour, and most books by John Steinbeck under two.

2. Turn off the TV.

3. Use a feed reader as much as possible to read your newspapers and mags, saving yrself a lil more time for book reading.

4. Carry your current read with you everywhere you go, and sneak in a few pages every time you’re stuck in a line, waiting for an event to start, etc.

5. Revise the goal to fit your lifestyle and reading tastes. A 10 books in 30 days goal is nothing to scoff at — It’s still a book every 3 days!

Happy reading :)

Tags: read, reading

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Question: I was wondering if you can tell me where to recycle. I live in Los Feliz and I have no idea where to take my stuff. I just moved into this new place and it’s pretty clear that the people I rent from do not recycle. Let me know if you have a chance. Thanks — Jonathan

Answer: Good thing you didn’t move here earlier, or you really may’ve had to lug your recyclables around. But lucky you — Just a couple months ago, Los Angeles apartment-dwellers finally got their own recycling service. Since April 2007, the City of Los Angeles offers free recycling services to all multifamily residences, including apartments, condos, town homes, and mobile home parks.

The trick: The service is free, but you gotta ask for it. Either the tenant or the owner of the residence has to sign up. In this scenario, I’m guessing that’ll be you, the tenant.

So: Contact the Bureau of Sanitation by calling 866.933.1101, or email SRCRD@san.lacity.org. Have your contact info — as well as your building owner, property manager, or condo association’s contact info — handy. Tell them you want blue bins.

Once you sign up, you’ll get blue recycling bins and free weekly recycling service pickup once a week.

While you wait for that service to start up — or in case your blue bin quest somehow gets derailed — I would suggest making friends with your nearest blue-binned neighbor. Ask if you might share their bin on trash day. That’s the arrangement I had with my neighbors across the street when I lived in West LA. Downside: You’ll need to store your recyclables until trash day, then hurriedly haul it out when your neighbor rolls her / his blue bin out into the street. Upside: You might make a new friend :)

If all fails, you can recycle stuff with CRV value (bottles and cans) all over the place — Just plug in your zip here, then pick one, hopefully in walking distance. Used grocery bags can be recycled at Sa-Von or Albertson’s, but really, opt for reuseable bags.

But do first try to get your blue bin, and let me know how that works out –

(Blue bins photo by Clydehouse)

Tags: recycle, losangeles, losfeliz

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Question: So, I want to buy some new underwear (cute, simple) and I am wondering if you have any green, yet affordable suggestions. I checked out American Apparel but it’s like $8 for one pair!!

Thanks! Caitlin

Answer: I was hoping you meant bras, because I’d already put together a post about them. But on to panties –

First, a bit of bad news, sort of: $8 for a good pair of eco-undies is actually in the low price range. I mean, look at Victoria’s Secret prices for comparison issues. Even their cheapest, gaudy, not eco-friendly, prison labor stuff costs $5 a pair on their website. And anything at Nordie’s will run you more than $8 a pair, eco or not.

Certainly, if you were buying undies in bulk at Kmart or Walmart, you’ll be in for a bit of sticker shock — but the fact that you’re searching for green undies makes me think you no longer want to be associated with companies like those…. You deserve nice eco-friendly undies, even if they cost a few bucks more –

But back to basics: I did find you some slightly less expensive undies from Gaiam (left). Pick from the organic cotton hip hugger, high cut, or brief styles: $19 for a 3-pack.

You can also get fair trade, organic hip huggers from Global Girlfriend for $8 a pair.

Or opt for bamboo undies. Pick from the low rise bikini (right), high leg brief, or g-string: $24 for a 3-pack.

You can also get basic organic cotton panties from Cottonfield ($12 a pair for the bikini style) or Clean Undies, ($14.50 a pair for a variety of styles), or Decent Exposures ($11 per pair and up), or Peaceful Valley ($12.50 a pair) but these brands don’t seem any cuter than the less expensive ones I already mentioned to merit the higher price.

A couple organic cotton blends look sleeker than the above panties. I’d like to try Blue Canoe’s low cut bikini (left; boy shorts, panty, high cut panty, and thong styles’re also avaliable), but they’re $17 a pair.

My other pick’s Gaiam’s organic cotton Silver Linings Bikini (right, also in thong and high-cut brief), but those run from $16-19 each.

Patagonia offers a unique product — undies from recycled polyester (left). But this Active Low-Rise Thong costs $18 a pair.

If you wanna go high-end for some special occasion, you can check out Ciel Ltd’s boy short (right), made with Peruvian organic cotton with french lace and lycra. $45 a pair.

So in conclusion: I actually need some plain basic undies too, and this is my action plan: Get a bamboo 3-pack (I wear low-rise bikini undies almost exclusively, so Gaiam’s 3-packs are out) and see how I like them. If I do like ‘em, cool. If I don’t, I’ll move down the list….

Tags: underwear, panty, thong, bikini

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Question: What is more eco-friendly: recycling clothing fabrics to create a new fashion item, or buying something new that’s organic? Maybe I’ve asked you this before. I have an idea for making a particular style of clothes, but I’m not fluently knowledgeable about the fashion world.

Thanks again and keep it coming!
Trudy

Answer: Hey Trudy! The quick answer: Reusing / recycling beats out buying new stuff pretty much all the time. The reason: New stuff inevitably takes more energy to produce — water, fuel, etc. — than reused and refashioned stuff. As Umbra at Grist points out:

All textiles, as currently manufactured, require large volumes of water throughout the manufacturing process. Spinning, dyeing, weaving, scouring, sizing — all involve flushing the threads or fabric with water at one point or another, and often that water comes away contaminated with chemicals used earlier in the process.

Granted, you’ll be doing away with the chemicals if you stick to organic clothes — but these new clothes will still take tons of energy to produce.

Besides, opting out of the excesses of consumer culture’s the new hip thing :P Of course, sometimes new stuff’s necessary! Used undies are generally not a good idea, for ex. But I always suggest that people try to get their clothing items used FIRST, then if that’s not possible, going for organic.

You asked specifically about making new fashion out of old clothes — which makes me think you might be interested in Armour Sans Anguish, a cute girly company that makes sexy new refashioned fashion. Check out their Golden Shirt Dress to the right, avaliable at my friend Summer’s store BTC Elements.

Best thing about remade fashions: Your outfit’ll be envied, but no one’ll be able to copy that unique style.

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A weekly series, in which I tackle a Q from a reader looking for green advice.

Question: I live in Washington DC now and I am looking to move back to Los Angeles. I know of some environmental job focused list serves for work here but I’m having trouble finding things for Los Angeles. Are you aware of any?

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, Peggy

Answer: Hey Peggy — You’re sort of asking at a good time, because I’m sort of looking for a job myself, and have gotten some great suggestions. I say sort of because I haven’t been looking v. hard, and because I’m only looking for a summer job, but anyway –

So — Finding an environmental job in LA: I don’t know about listservs, but try these job websites. They have listings nationwide, but include many specific to Los Angeles:

Idealist. Nonprofit job listings. You can search by city — and have relevant results emailed to you as they come up.

Opportunity Knocks. More nonprofit job listings.

Treehugger’s job board. This enviro-oriented site’s job board’s not v. robust yet — I’m getting 16 listings for all of California — but worth a look.

Less specific, but still useful, are the Craigslist job listings. Craigslist will make your move easier in general, from finding an apartment to pre-loved furniture.

I’d also suggest contact enviro-organizations in the LA area that share your values to see if they have any appropriate openings. It seems to me that the nonprofits around me are always hiring — so direct investigation’s definitely worth a try.

Lastly — I’m not sure how familiar you are with the LA area, but what we generally consider a single city here actually includes a number of different cities, including Beverly Hills, Culver City, Santa Monica, and West Hollywood. Your best bet might be to plug in a central zip code, like 90036, in the search box (if that option’s avaliable), and search within a 10 mile radius –

Hope that gets you started :) Readers — If you know of additional resources for Peggy, pls weigh in –

Update, 10/5/07: MonsterTRAK’s intro’d green careers.

Update, 2/17/08: I wrote an updated version of this solution on Emerald City.

Tags: jobs, losangeles

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