I was super green with envy when NYC got its yummy green guide — But thanks to Greenopia, Los Angeles now has its own green guide!
What’s Greenopia? It’s a self-named “urban dweller’s guide to green living” that launched today at Earth Day on the Promenade in Santa Monica.
The 140-page booklet’s basically a directory of about 800 local green (or greenish) businesses, ranked between 1 to 4 leaves, with 4 being the greenest.
Companies that offer natural, organic and sustainable alternatives to the goods are ranked for their use of locally produced organic ingredients, recycling practices, energy conservation, and toxicity levels, among other green criteria. The listings are far from comprehensive, but so far, I’ve found quite a few that I’d like to at least check out.
The woman behind it all: Gay, mother of 3 who quit her job in publishing, greened her home for her family, then decided she wanted to share the info.
Want one? For now, get them for $10 on the website. They’re supposed to be avaliable soon for $11.95 at LA-area Wild Oats, Trader Joe’s, Bodhi Tree Bookstore, Dutton’s, and others. The Greenopia website’s up too, and aims to become a local e-community and forum, but is still under development –
Hi, thanks so much for mentioning and visitng Greenopia! We’re still adding a lot of content and improving search capabilities this week. We’d love for people to post their questions about living green in LA in the forums, or post their reviews of the places in the guide.
Comment by Ivan Storck — April 17, 2006 @ 10:10 am
Hey Ivan! I’ll keep checking out Greenopia — and sending along suggestions about how you might make it more interactive :)
Comment by Siel — April 18, 2006 @ 7:22 pm
Hey Siel, there’s a sort of website companion to “The Big Green Apple” created by Ben Jervey (the author of the book) and some other people that graduated from Columbia a coupla years ago. That site is called eco-logic and I see that they have redesigned their site to cut down on the Flash (the old interface was a little sluggish because of that…). I don’t actually know Ben myself (although Aditi, my co-conspirator at cuenv, does), but Marvin and Gail, the other kids on his team at eco-logic, were some of the founding characters at the Columbia EWB chapter, and they’re stellar folks.
Comment by Six Silberman — April 19, 2006 @ 2:06 pm
Wow! eco-logic’s a super cute site :) I’ll have to send it to all my friends in NYC –
Flash. Ick.
Comment by Siel — April 19, 2006 @ 8:37 pm
Just so y’all know, eco-logic is restructuring a bit…improving, that is. As “cute” as it was, we weren’t totally satisfied with the functionality. We’re working on much more geo-referencing (by which I mean maps) and the design will be a little tighter.
Very cool to see this Greenopia. We should all form some sort of United Front of Green Urbanization.
Comment by ben — May 3, 2006 @ 6:29 am
please put me on your mailing list. thanx
Comment by Linda Ray Johnen — February 14, 2008 @ 5:21 pm