So you no longer want to be a scourge of everything we hold dear / friend to Saudi Arabia.  You want to throw away your SUV. But how is it done? A San Franciscan named Ryan Mickle raised the question for real on a web site this month, and little by little became a web phenom.

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Forbes.com has a good piece up about how not to get duped by greenwashing construction and home design brands. It describes in concise, user-friendly detail exactly why so may products that have green seals on them are harmful to the planet.

This makes Forbes greener, at the moment, than a whole lot of Web and print publications out there that have “green” in their titles. The problem with green-oriented sites is often that the editorial impulses encouraged by the publishing business—generally there is somebody like Meryl Streep in The Devil Wears Prada, and that person is generally saying, ‘get me some big beautiful pictures of things people can buy’—are inherently pretty un-green. The idea, as Forbes points out, is to go to the salvage yard, not the boutique, and to never replace anything when you don’t have to. You shouldn’t chuck your old linoleum floor in a landfill so you can install the green-friendly floor you saw on Greenoramatopiafuntime.com.

The Seattle Times has a good story about a mayoral proposal to impose fees on any business that distributes stuff in paper or plastic bags, and to ban Styrofoam containers. For every paper bag or plastic bag you put, say, groceries in, you get charged 20¢. Also, those plastic forks with which you enjoy your beef pho in front of Mad Men? Banned. Even that little plastic bucket of chili sauce is going to have to be replaced with something biodegradable.

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