Why Go Green Redux

Seattle's fashion community is a little greener thanks to the great insights from our illustrious panel of design professionals at last Thursday's seminar. The event welcomed a great mix of fashion, beauty, interiors, education and sustainable living professionals from around the city.

Our gracious hostess, Sandy Campbell, swung wide the doors of One Earth One Design, her home interiors and consulting business on the edge of Shoreline. Among the panelists was Rebecca Luke, owner of Les Egoistes and co-founder of the Sustainable Style Foundation (SSF).

Rebecca shared a fabulous new program sponsored by SSF called SSFtags. Read below to learn more about this sustainability seal of approval that's great for both businesses and consumers.

Rebecca made a great point last Thursday too when she encouraged trade members in the audience not to get too hung up on being 100% sustainable or green in your business, but rather take smart steps to do the best you can. The truth is that many industries including fashion and beauty aren't tooled up to support all the 'green' decisions we'd like to make, but if over time we all ask for it, so it will be.

SSFtags
The mission of SSF is to educate, support and inspire people from all walks of life to make more sustainable personal lifestyle choices at home, at work and at play. SSFtags is a consumer- and producer-friendly awareness program with an internationally recognized logo that indicates that a product, service, event, project, company or organization, etc. has incorporated sustainability into their efforts in some way.

Nice work SSF!

Green Houses Make Great Homes

My friend Sloan Ritchie has just listed his new townhome development by Cascade Built. Sloan's tag line is good living tm and it is. He has used LEED prescribed green building guidelines to create incredibly well designed and stylish living.

LEED is the U.S. Green Building Council's Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design program. The organization is made up of building industry leaders who believe that green design and manufacturing is critical to happy and healthy living. Their members and supporters also realize that it can be good for the bottom line as green building resources begin to drop in price and are competitive to the big box retailers' pricing and selection.

Here's a great article on the real versus perceived costs of going green in construction projects from industry resource Building.com.

Kudos to Sloan, Cascade Built and all those LEEDers out there!