drive a Prius. They think, ‘I’ve got it covered,’” Kawar said. “But the reality is there are a ton of other things we spend a lot of money on every day and we don’t even think twice about whether or not they could have possibly gone green.
“That’s the name of the game — voting with your dollars.”
The idea for the guide came from founder Gay Browne, who, along with her husband Tony, tried to build the first green home in their neighborhood in the Pacific Palisades. That was in 1994, when building with sustainable and recycled materials was much harder and more expensive than it is today.
“It took almost three years to create a home that was as healthy and green as we could build,” Browne writes in the guide’s introduction.
As her family expanded, Browne began looking at other ways to be green, from changing the types of foods her family ate to the types of cleaning products they used.
“I wanted to be as conscious in these choices as I had been in the choices I made for the building materials in my home,” Browne said. “It was not an easy task. There was no place for me to go to find answers to my questions and no single source to supply the names of green businesses.”
This inspired her to create Greenopia. The guide, which is printed on recycled paper with soy inks, includes hundreds of businesses, each one reviewed by experts in the field of sustainability. The businesses include everything from dry cleaners and raw food restaurants to recycled clothing boutiques, homeopathic pharmacies and hardwood stores carrying non-toxic paints and natural fiber carpets.
No business could pay to be included in the guide and there is no advertising. Each company is rated on a scale of one to four, with four being the most sustainable. Green leaves placed alongside the listings indicate a businesses’ overall commitment to being green.
“We didn’t want to be snobby and exclusionary and leave people out just because they weren’t 100 percent,” Kawar said. “A lot of businesses out there are really trying their best to carry a lot of this kind of stuff, but right now, there just isn’t a demand for it so they have to make ends meet.
“We recognize that but want to encourage them for making the effort and, hopefully, this will motivate more people to go out and buy these (green) products.”
So far, being mentioned in the guide has helped many businesses, including Royal Cleaners on 26th Street, a high-end couture cleaner that uses compressed carbon dioxide to clean clothes instead of PERC, a chemical solvent that causes liver and kidney damage to those who are repeatedly exposed to it. PERC, or Perchloroethylene, is widely used in the dry cleaning industry and is considered a toxic air contaminant by the South Coast Air Quality Management District.
Robert Smerling, co-owner of Royal Cleaners and one of the leading advocates working to ban the use of PERC, said his sales have increased thanks to Greenopia’s exposure.
“We get a lot of clients from that,” Smerling said. “I love it. It’s a good, useful tool. My wife uses it now as a guide for pretty much everything she buys.”
In addition to using carbon dioxide that is recycled from other sources, Smerling uses recycled plastics and is in the process of replacing all of his metal hangers with bamboo.
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on July 11, 2007. Read the original PDF.