eco-friendly furniture

When I realized several days ago that I hadn't been spending enough time on one of my favorite green trend blogs, Keetsa, I returned to see rumblings about a Keetsa-developed and retailed eco-friendly mattress, made out of "Green Tea Memory Foam!"

Check it out, here's what they say about the mattresses in their Store Preview:

" These are great mattresses. They all come with “Green Tea Memory Foam”, which has Green Tea extracts to keep the mattress smelling fresh and you can benefit from Green Tea extracts. There’s also “NanoSilver” technology which kills bacteria. The best feature is that all the mattresses have cedar oil which keep spiders, moths, and other bugs away.

How are our mattresses eco-friendly?

First, we use 100% recycled steel for the springs and more than 75% of all the mattresses are made from recycled or recycle-able materials. Cool huh?

Another way we plan to cut the carbon footprint is by having all these mattressed compressed into a box. We invented a new way of compressing the spring coils at the factory so it fits in a box.

So we can ship directly from our central warehouses in LA and Chicago instead of having the traditional mattress stores ship to their retail stores first then ships it to the customer via an inefficient mattress truck.

Well, we haven’t officially opened yet, but we have been selling 5 to 11 mattresses a day!

Come by our store and hang out if you need a mattress or want to chat with us about eco-friendly products."

They have several lines, and assuming they are comfortable, prices seem quite reasonable -- one of the lines' queens was $499. Their initial store is South of Market in San Francisco (happens to be just a couple of blocks from my office). I couldn't find an exact opening date, but based on how far along they look in this video it looks imminent. Congrats Keetsa!

Cross-posted from my site. Enjoy.

Western Heritage Furniture

With so much attention on "green building", it's odd to me that more people aren't focusing an equal amount of energy into their interior furnishing choices. We hear about paint, flooring options and adhesives; though there hasn't been a big hurrah over the places where we hang out the most at home -on our furniture.

The beginning of that "shift" took place just last week when the Las Vegas World Market Center's furniture tradeshow introduced the "Living Green Pavilion." The Pavilion was co-sponsored by the Sustainable Furniture Council and Channel Logic, Inc.

Josh Dorfman, "The Lazy Environmentalist" and Founder/CEO of Vivavi was on hand as the fabulous host of the party on Wednesday afternoon in the Greenhouse Gallery. He is both interesting and charming, and in my opinion far from lazy (though the story of how his book came to be cracked me up.)

I was on hand to answer questions in Western Heritage Furniture's satellite booth in the Green Pavilion. People loved that the furniture is made using reclaimed (mostly barn) wood from the U.S., is hand-made in Jerome, AZ and has available upgrade options for no/low VOC sealants and substrates such as wheatboard or formaldehyde-free MDF.

Western Heritage Furniture in Jerome, AZ

I hung out with the lovely Mr. John Stein from Keiri/Organo who shared some pasta with me on a borrowed table, and admired Zola's wonderful upholstered eco-friendly furniture. The fun and funny Mark Gruman, one the Sustainable Furniture Guru's kept me entertained and thirst quenched by bringing me coffee or cocktails depending on the hour.

I am happy to have been part of the very first Living Green Pavilion as I see it only going up (and big) from here. It's about time!

And remember - what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas. Shhhhh...