apartment therapy changing the world, one room at a time

gotta love the extendable paparazzi shield.

Wool is not environmentally friendly. Anything that's produced from an animal uses considerable more energy to produce than any plant products. Plus, most any wool production, with the exception of some small family farms, is incredibly cruel to the animals. Organic wool doesn't mean the cruel practices are eliminated. It's great that the bloggers here want to try to showcase some earth-friendly items, but please do some research on the issues instead of just trusting the manufacturers' (often meaningless) labels.

it's real cute

eeka, wool can be produced without cruelty, and were we to shut down all livestock agriculture (and gain environmental benefits from it), we'd have to put to death 1.3 billion cows, 24 billion chickens, 1 billion pigs, 1 billion sheep, etc... Without doing this, they'd just keep on eating from pasture land, displacing other species as they began to radiate out from their current confined locations, and breed in an uncontrolled fashion.

Mind you, this will barely affect climate change. The carbon in their bodies would still be released into the atmosphere, as they rot; animals act as a form of carbon sequestration for a time, just as plants do. Those plants, if not consumed by the animals and their carbon stored in their bodies or passed out as methane, would end up being released as the plants died and decayed.

The carbon cycle is inexorable and most of the carbon in it "natural", other than fossil fuels. Therein lies the only climate change benefit to this mass slaughter that is the implicit result of your position; we'd no longer burn fossil fuels to manage these animals. All other climate change effects are inherent to the carbon cycle.

Now there are environmental costs to livestock agriculture other than climate change, and indeed killing all of these animals would help alleviate the over-nitrogenation of our water table and soil, and in the case of intracoastal waterways, help prevent algal blooms that choke out marine life.

So there are environmental benefits - so long as we slaughter all these animals. If we don't, they continue to defecate, releasing bacteria and nitrogen into our water supply and soil, perpetrating the same damage alive and free that they would alive and imprisoned - and free they'd collapse adjacent ecosystems as invasive species, as I described earlier.

So there is your choice; keep these billions of animals alive, in which case we may as well keep them imprisoned, to prevent cascade damage to currently-intact ecosystems, or kill them all, in which case we get some benefits to soil fertility and fisheries populations, as well as some lessened demand for fossil fuels (not much, and the resulting decrease in price may re-incentivise fossil fuel use, to the degree it would occur).

WARNING - I just paid the $650 for this 'green' edition - and it is far from ORGANIC.

The mattress pad is made of polyether foam - and it smells horrible and gave me a headache when I sniffed it!!!!

Shame on Orbit for marketing this bassinet as 'green' and 'organic'. They just took a nasty toxic smelling cheap foam mattress and covered it with organic cotton so they can charge $450 more.

I am going to demand my money back - cause if I get a head ache from 1 big sniff, I certainly do not want my baby sleeping on it.

This is the worst most deceptive marketing I have ever seen, and I am personally extremely offended with this company by trying to pull the wool over the eyes of parents who are trying to buy organic natural and safe products.