Now that most of us are spending far more time at home, many of our apartments are getting old fast. If you’re looking to add something new to your home right now, consider making your purchase at a brand founded by a Black entrepreneur. Whether your walls need a fresh coat of paint, your old couch is due for an upgrade, or you’re looking for a new set of plates and glasses for the day you’re allowed to host a dinner party again, these Black-owned brands have got all your home decor needs covered. 

Harlem Toile

Drawing on the eighteenth century french toile tradition, which depicted rural scenes in wallpaper patterns, Sheila Bridges created a gorgeous, subversive wall covering featuring images which, in Bridges' words, "lampoon some of the stereotypes deeply woven into the African American experience." Her design is critically acclaimed, housed in the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum’s wallpaper collection and often exhibited in museums worldwide, from The Studio Museum in Harlem to the Musee De La Toile De Jouy in France. The design was originally only available as wallpaper, but is now sold on bedding, ceramics, and glassware. 

Jungalow

Justina Blakeney started Junglaow as a blog, but her eye for aesthetics quickly led to the site’s evolution into a lifestyle brand. The online boutique sells basically everything you could possibly need to decorate a home: bedding, bath accessories, planters, glassware, plates, rugs, light fixtures, and more, from Jungalow’s in house line and carefully chosen outside brands. The website also curates a selection of prints by womxn artists. The company prioritizes sustainability by shipping in pre-used boxes, and working with vendors and suppliers that use natural, recycled, and compostable materials. For every purchase made at Jungalow, the company plants at least two trees.

Mitchell Black

Mitchell Black is a Chicago-based wallpaper brand offering permanent and removable versions of their vibrant, colorful designs. Their ‘Bohemian Bungalow’ collection offers a variety of nature-inspired patterns: ferns in deep indigo, a lotus pattern in metallic gold, and an art deco take on palm fronds. The brand also sells photographic wallpapers: bright and invigorating coastal images like ocean swimmers and beach umbrellas from a bird’s eye view. 

Clare

Nicole Gibbons thought paint shopping was a hassle-filled, overly long process, so she decided to create Clare as a one-stop shop for indoor paint, with a pared-down collection of 56 colors you can order online. The website offers an interactive feature called Color Genius that suggests colors based on your furniture and space. Their swatches are peel and stick, so you can easily imagine the colors on your walls, and don’t have to deal with paint chips. To top it all off, Clare paints are sustainable, free of toxic carbon-based solvents and manufactured through a Greenguard Gold certified process, which means they meet rigorous standards for emissions. 

Sabai

Caitlin Ellen and Phantila Phataraprasit couldn’t find a chic, eco-conscious couch at an affordable price, so they made their own, founding a company to offer other people the furniture they’d been dreaming of. Sabai couches and pillows are sustainable, affordable, customizable, and of course, beautiful. Made of fabrics that come from natural fibers and recycled water bottles and manufactured in High Point, North Carolina, their sofas are not just sustainable, but also easy to assemble, stain-resistant, and soft.

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Picking up an iced coffee on the way to work, school, or wherever we were going was a beloved part of many of our pre-quarantine routines. However, that habit was never good for the environment, and now it’s also potentially hazardous to our and others’ health. With that in mind, we’ve been learning how to make our own cold brew at home during quarantine.

We’ve all heard the statistics about plastic straws in the ocean, but the straws aren’t even the worst part. Most takeout iced coffee cups aren’t even recyclable, because they’re made of polypropylene, a material most recycling programs don’t accept. So basically, making iced coffee at home keeps you and others safe from COVID-19, and helps shrink your environmental footprint. 

It also couldn’t be easier. All you have to do is measure out 1 cup of coarsely ground coffee, mix it with four cups of cold water in a large jar, stir, and put it in the fridge overnight (anywhere from 12-24 hours). When you’re ready to drink, filter out the grounds using a coffee filter or a french press! 

We like these compostable coffee filters from Public Goods, or these reusable cotton ones from Thrive. The jar options are endless. We used the jar our favorite Bloody Mary mix came in, but you can use a mason jar, or any other empty glass glass container that seals shut tightly. 

Pour over ice, add your favorite milk or non-dairy substitute, and drink! If the straw is essential to your iced coffee experience, try a stainless steel version. We love these from Onyx. They curve at the right angle, and they’re dishwasher safe. Continue reading

 

Last week, I spoke to Sabai's founders about how they started their company, why they wanted to make couches, and what it's like to be young women working in two male-dominated sectors: the startup space and the furniture industry. 

 

Q: So, how did you two meet?

Phantila Phataprasit: We met in college, first as friends and then as colleagues – our first business venture together actually came before Sabai, when we were still in school.

Caitlin Ellen: In college, we worked together to found Columbia University’s first credit union. We wanted to give students a better way to bank, a system that actually had their best interests at heart, so we helped establish a student-run credit union that also helped students learn financial literacy. We already had a personal rapport, but we really built our professional rapport during that project.

Q: Why couches? You two definitely seem destined to be business partners in something, but what drew you towards making furniture?   

Caitlin: During our senior year of college, we lived together and really started trying to incorporate sustainability into our daily lives. We learned how to compost, and joined CSA, and planned to bring this climate-oriented mindset into our post-college lives.

Phantila: So, when we started trying to furnish our first apartments, we realized there weren’t really any affordable, sustainable furniture options on the market, especially in the couch space. We wanted to bring our values into our purchasing decisions, but that option just wasn’t there. So, we decided to create it, and we set out to figure out what a sustainable furniture company that produced pieces at a reasonable price point might look like.

Q: How do you see Sabai becoming even more climate-conscious in the future? Do you guys have any plans to reduce your company’s environmental impact even more?

Phantila: That’s one of our top priorities – one of the reasons we were inspired to start this company was that we kept seeing abandoned furniture on curbs. People throw away so much furniture in this city! And we wanted to figure out how to build something that would last longer, and create less waste.

Caitlin: 80% of the furniture in this country ends up in landfills. With that in mind, we are looking for ways to make the end of a Sabai couch’s life more sustainable, ways to keep them out of landfills. We’ve focused so much on keeping the production side sustainable (you’ll read more about that soon, in an interview with our factory owners), so now we’re turning toward the other end – we’re looking at a buy-back option that could close the production loop entirely, and a repair-don’t-replace program.

Q: Lastly – can you two talk a little bit about your experience as young women in the startup and furniture spaces?

Caitlin: Well, we get called girls a lot. It’s just harder to be taken seriously when you are entering these male-dominated spaces as a woman, especially a young one.

Phantila: The furniture industry has established its systems over centuries, so it’s a really traditional, aging industry. We’ve come up a lot of men who don’t trust us to know what we’re talking about, or don’t take us seriously, but we’ve also met so many deeply kind, open people in the industry who are excited to get new perspectives and want to modernize their industry.

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Every day seems to bring more news about COVID-19’s spread across the globe. Bogged down by constant coronavirus coverage, we risk forgetting about other urgent crises facing our planet, most importantly, climate change. In between the next two shows you binge watch this quarantine, give yourself a refresher course on climate change, sustainable solutions, and our planet’s history with one (or all!) of these climate-focused documentaries.

1. Our Planet

Released on Netflix last April, this British docu-series focuses on the way climate change affects animal life across the globe. David Attenborough narrates in a soothing British accent, taking you from coastal aquatic ecosystems to rainforests and deserts, documenting how all these spaces are under siege from encroaching human-induced climate change. This series basically combines a national geographic style tour of the world’s natural wonders with eloquent, lucid scientific explanations of how we got here.

2. Sustainable

This documentary will change the way you think about your next meal. It’s a deep dive into the American food system, following the trail of devastation big agribusiness has left in its wake by telling the story of a seventh-generation, independent farmer in Illinois. You’ll learn how large agriculture corporations’ farming practices degrade our soil, waste massive amounts of water, and overuse pesticides, but also how we can build a better food system to replace this one. 

3. True North

This series comes from the progressive news organization The Young Turks, and follows three journalists as they embark on a trip to the arctic to see how climate change is affecting local native live, arctic wildlife, and deep north ecosystems overall. They draw connections between the north pole’s ecosystem and weather patterns all over the world, and tell their stories in an honest, inspiring voice. The episodes clock in at less than twenty minutes each, and you can watch them on youtube. 

4. The True Cost

After you watch this 2015 documentary about the fast-fashion industry, you’ll never be able to shop online at Zara the same way again. In addition to revealing how exploitative the industry is for garment workers, the film also reveals all the hidden climate costs of fast fashion, from the way factories foster river and soil pollution, contaminate crops, spread disease, and contribute to greenhouse gas emissions. 

5. 2040

If all those movies are starting to make you pessimistic, finish off your film syllabus with 2040, an Australian documentary that came out last year. Filmmaker Damon Gameau imagines the world he hopes his young daughter can inherit twenty years from now, and it’s a much healthier, happier one than we currently live in. He looks at technologies like renewable energy sources and potential futuristic mass transit solutions, and remains optimistic even as he lays out how difficult our journey to this future will be.

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During quarantine, it’s easy to feel powerless to help the small businesses that you used to patronize in daily life. We all have favorite restaurants, cafes and bars we miss, and many of the entrepreneurs behind them will struggle to reopen storefronts when all this is over while many of their employees are struggling to buy essentials in the meantime. In addition, many of the wholesalers and farmers that supply our favorite spots are losing business too. While the coronavirus has broken a lot of American food chains, there are ways you can help mend its holes from your couch. We pulled together four ways to support farmers, restaurateurs, food service workers, and wholesalers during this crisis. 

1. Buy Produce From A CSA

Community Supported Agriculture programs are a great way to support farmers in your region who have lost business during this crisis. Here’s how they work: you sign up to pay a monthly fee to a farm, and you periodically receive an assortment of fresh produce. In New York, the City Greenmarkets are partnering with the app Fellow Farmer so you can sign up online, pre pay, and coordinate contactless delivery. Modern Farmer published a list of CSAs in every state, which you can check out here. When you want to choose your own specific produce, OurHarvest allows you to shop from an online array of locally-sourced groceries, and OurHarvest will donate a meal to a local food pantry for every order over $25. 

2. Buy Ingredients From Restaurant Wholesalers

Companies that normally source niche, gourmet ingredients and sell directly to restaurants are hurting right now, with restaurants closed. During quarantine, you can buy restaurant-quality ingredients in bulk to cook with. Not only are you supporting a struggling business, but you also get access to the types of ingredients that are usually hard to find for a non-chef. In New York, two options offering home delivery right now are Baldor and Natoora.

3. Tip Your Out of Work Servers & Bartenders

Huge numbers of restaurateurs have created GoFundMe campaigns to support the staff they laid off or furloughed because of COVID. Use GoFundMe’s search function to look up your favorite closed restaurants, bars, and cafes to see if they’ve set one up, and you can donate directly to the people who used to work in your favorite spots. If a business hasn’t set one of these up, you can donate to one of the funds for out of work food workers – the Restaurant Workers Community Foundation’s Emergency COVID-19 Relief Fund is a great option.

4. Buy Gift Cards & Dining Bonds

See if your favorite places are selling gift cards online. Many are, and plan to put the money towards reopening in the future. Buy one now and start imagining your first restaurant meal post-quarantine. Hundreds of restaurants have also joined Dining Bonds, which is a program that sell gift cards at 25% off, so you are making an investment that pays off in free food. Check out participating restaurants here.

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Half of the world’s governments have officially told their populations to stay home. Now that most Americans are weeks into their quarantine, many of us are starting to look for new cultural production to distract from despair during this time. Needing a break from the constant glut of COVID content is completely reasonable, and can be an opportunity to bulk up on your climate knowledge, or escape into a novel that takes ecological concerns seriously, weaving them into engrossing narratives. Here are five books, a mix of fiction and nonfiction, that address our climate crisis.  

Jenny Offill, Weather

Set in the present day, Jenny Offill’s novel depicts both the dailiness and the existential dread of living while the planet probably dies. The novel follows a Brooklyn mother as she takes a gig job answering letters to a climate change podcast, while simultaneously parenting her child and interacting with friends and family. Offill’s writing is fragmentary, sometimes dreamy, and always engrossing. 

Claire Vaye Watkins, Gold Fame Citrus

Opening in a Los Angeles that hasn’t felt rain in years, this 2015 novel follows a former model squatting in a Laurel Canyon home its starlet owner abandoned years ago. With California beset by world-historical draught, this protagonist attempts to travel East, where water still falls, but must navigate the ever-encroaching desert sands and the dangerous, dessicated landscape to get there. 

Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood

Atwood is a master of dystopia, and her plausible yet terrifying futures usually turn on some form of ecological catastrophe. In The Year of the Flood, a religious sect called God’s Gardeners believe a “waterless flood” will destroy humanity and the planet they live on, so they devote their lives to vegetarianism and saving all the human and animal life they can. This book is the second in a trilogy, which can be read on its own or as part of the series, which includes an earlier climate crisis in the first book. 

Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate 

This 2014 book catalyzed a lot of leftists’ environmental awakening, and it’s essential reading now whether you’re just picking it up or returning for a reread. Years before any politicians were promoting a Green New Deal, Klein was calling for a Marshall Plan for the environment. In this book, she lays out the impending climate calamity in stark detail and clear prose, as riveting as it is terrifying. She deftly reveals that capitalism is inextricable from ecological death, showing the many ways polluters and capitalist governments are currently working together to prevent progressive a progressive restructuring of the international economy, which is the only real way we have a chance to save the planet. Still, she never gives up hope, charting the course activists and organizers are currently forging to a re-oriented, livable future. 

Naomi Klein, On Fire: The Burning Case for a Green New Deal

On Fire brings together an assortment of Klein’s writing over the past decade, placing new essays alongside old ones to spotlight the burning urgency of a Green New Deal. Published just last year, Klein addresses a wide array of climate contingencies and interrelated crises, connecting the dots between different countries’ struggles to address climate change and highlighting the need for collective action. She writes about the various labor sectors, like health and education, that should be considered green jobs even if their ecological role is opaque at first, demonstrating the way most roads lead back to the climate in our current moment.  Continue reading

One in four Americans is currently living under a “shelter in place order,” directed by their state officials not to leave their homes if possible. The governors of California, Connecticut, Illinois, New Jersey and New York all passed similar orders last week, so 25% of Americans, including me and maybe you, have been adjusting to a sudden, extreme, and indefinite lifestyle change. Celebrities are staying home and recording a cappella videos, fully grown adults are learning Tiktok dances, and workplaces and schools have been replaced by virtual chatrooms. 

This atmosphere is disorienting and ominous; people are rightly afraid of themselves or their loved ones falling ill. But lost in the virtual noise of case counts and virus maps and twitter threads is one positive effect of this tear in the fabric of society: a dramatic decrease in greenhouse gas emissions.

Satellites that sense chemical emissions in the air are showing sharp declines in atmospheric pollution over cities that have ordered their citizens to stay home. Los Angeles, which is normally one of America’s smoggiest cities, recorded starkly cleaner air readings over the past two weeks than the same two weeks last year. In the Bay Area, the number of vehicles crossing the Bay Bridge from San Francisco to Oakland went down by forty percent in just the last two weeks, and is likely to fall further. 

It’s not just the reduction of cars on the road that’s cutting emissions down. The mass closure of restaurants, bars, and stores have sharply reduced electricity use in cities as well. Columbia University researchers reported that carbon monoxide emissions decreased over 50% in the last week. 

Obviously, enforced social isolation is not the solution to climate change, and this positive byproduct of the pandemic might soon be counteracted by increased production of supplies to combat the virus, or mass movement of people in its wake. However, we can still take lessons away from this moment. Despite many conservative politicians’ claims, it is possible to rapidly cut down our greenhouse gas emissions, and people are capable of making massive sacrifices to save the lives of people they don’t know. Remembering these facts will be essential to making the radical societal changes necessary to combat climate change in the future. 

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If you live in any major US city, your local pharmacies might be running low on hand sanitizer by now. Don’t panic! Instead, make your own. Homemade sanitizer has the extra benefit of potentially including lotion, so your hands might not get as dry and cracked as they tend to with traditional hand sanitizer. 

The most essential ingredient is rubbing alcohol, preferably 99% isopropyl. You can find this in the wound care section of your local pharmacy. 91% alcohol works too, but your final mixture needs at least 60% alcohol once its mixed with the other ingredients, so don’t go lower than that. 

Pour ⅔ of a cup of your rubbing alcohol in a mixing bowl, and then add ⅓ cup of aloe vera gel. The gel, which is mostly used to relieve painful sunburns, is probably not sold out at your pharmacy, so you should be able to purchase some easily. 

You can mix the two and be done after just these steps. Then, transfer it into a clean pump bottle. You can thank science writer Anna Helmenstine for giving us this recipe. 

But if you want to get fancy and add some nice scents or moisturizing properties to your sanitizer, don’t stop there. You can add 8 to 10 drops of your favorite essential oil to scent the mixture. If you want your sanitizer to do double duty as a hand moisturizer, add 1 tablespoon of whatever hand lotion you use regularly and 1 tablespoon of vegetable glycerin. 

It's really that easy, and it's a great way to spend extra time at home if your office or school asks you to work remotely. 

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Picture the cabinet under your sink. If you’re like me, it’s filled with rarely used cleaning supplies that each supposedly have a very specific purpose despite mostly being two syllable words ending in x, from Clorox to Ajax to Windex. This genre of cleaning product is usually rife with synthetic chemicals and pollutants that end up damaging our water supply, not to mention having deleterious effects on your health if you inhale too much of them while cleaning. 

Luckily, there are a few common cooking supplies you probably already have at home that can double as cleaning supplies. Making the switch will not only get rid of harmful chemicals, but will also decrease the amount of plastic waste you create, since you’ll be able to stop buying cleaning materials in disposable plastic bottles. 

White Vinegar

White vinegar can accomplish a shocking array of cleaning feats. It can deodorize, remove stains, and cut right through built up grease. It’s also a natural disinfectant, so you can just put it in a spray bottle and use it to clean your bath and countertops. You can use it to clean your dishwasher by placing two cups of vinegar in an empty dishwasher and run the cycle once. If you have a mildewy showerhead, fill a plastic bag with white vinegar and put it over your showerhead, tied so the head is fully engulfed, and leave it on for a couple hours.

Baking Soda

Your toilet cleaner can be replaced by baking soda and vinegar. Leave a cup of baking soda soaking in the toilet for an hour, follow it with a cup of white vinegar, and flush. You can also make an oven cleaning paste by combining baking soda with water. Once you’ve mixed equal amounts of baking soda and water into a paste, coat the inside of your oven with it and leave it there when you go to bed. In the morning, scrub it off. 

Salt

De-griming cooking surfaces that have gotten covered in mysterious gunk is never a fun task, but it is one that does not have to require multiple different cleaners and a wad of steel wool. Cover your stovetop or pan with coarse salt, and then scrub it off with a wet sponge. 

Lemons

Next time you squeeze lemon juice onto something your cooking, save the squeezed halves you would normally throw away, and you can use them to scrub wooden cutting boards and baking sheets. You can also throw the discarded lemons into a big pot with water, and soak any white fabrics you want brightened. Mixed with olive oil, lemon juice can become a natural wood polish.

 

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For this edition of our sustainable events roundup, we’re taking a little break from our own backyard and scoping out the sustainability scene on the west coast. If you live in LA, or are heading there for a break from the dreary east coast winter, check out one of these environmentally-focused events coming up in the next couple months. 

Sunrise Movement Super Tuesday Circus

Sunrise Movement, the youth-led coalition organizing for radical action on climate change, is hosting a Super Tuesday circus. The event has no entry fee, but you need an ‘I voted’ sticker to get in. There will be standup comedy, DJ sets, and other circus-inspired entertainment. The event runs from 7:30 to 10:30 at The Virgil on March 3rd, and you can register here. 

Lecture: The Human Right to Water in LA

This talk at UCLA’s Luskin School of Public Affairs will get you up to speed on LA’s complex water dynamics, from the latest technological innovations to the politics to the inequities riddling the system. Speakers include the director of the UCLA Water Resources Group, Urban Planning professors, and government representatives. The event is free and open to the public, and you can register here.

Green Dreams Art Walk

On March 7th, Mar Vista and the Disability Community Resource Center will be hitting the streets of Venice to celebrate art, music, and sustainability. The Music and Art walk will center local musicians, restaurateurs, small business owners, and community leaders. It starts on the corner of Venice Boulevard and Inglewood Boulevard and stretches to Lyceum Avenue. Head over anytime in the afternoon, from 4-10 PM.

People, Planet, Plate

On March 25th, Santa Monica’s Historic Woman’s Club is hosting a celebration of the city’s sustainable food infrastructure, from local farms to eco-conscious restaurants. The evening will include cooking demonstrations, free food from local establishments, and interactive panels about how to make food choices in your daily life that decrease harm to the planet and improve your health. The event is free but you can register here. 

Sustainable Living Fair

The North Orange and Southeast LA county chapters of the Citizens’ Climate Lobby are throwing a daylong sustainable living fair on March 28th. The all-day event promises to be full of hot tips on how to reduce your impact on the environment every day, from composting how-tos to panel discussions on plastics and vegan cooking demonstrations. Solar panel vendors will be on site for anyone considering adding solar energy to their home, and there will also be live music and activities for kids. The event is free, but you can register here.

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