Eco-friendly decorating alert: know these green terms for home design

Designer Jasper Morrison's Cork Family tables are true-blue GREEN furnishings.

Green, eco-friendly, organic, and sustainability are buzzwords featured in sales pitches and ads. "It's apparent that many people selling green or eco-friendly products have no clue as to what constitutes GREEN, eco-friendly, organic, and sustainability," author and green design expert DeAnna Radaj told me. "I actually had a heated discussion with a vendor who was advertising their product as natural fibers, yet they were selling leather. While leather is natural -- it’s an animal hide -- it's not a fiber. Think cotton when you're thinking fibers."

DeAnna is making it her one-woman effort to help educate homeowners and apartment dwellers to be more educated consumers when it comes to thinking and buying green for the home. Here are her helpful definitions of some of the big buzzwords in the green movement, all to help you make better buying decisions.

VEGAN: a product that is not derived from an animal and/or animal by-product. A vegan person is someone who eats and wears nothing derived from animals; this includes any dairy, meat, seafood, leather, silk, honey.

Examples of vegan products include faux leather and cotton fabrics for furnishings, and soy and palm wax candles. The Couchoid chairs on the right feature vegan upholstery, a "cow-friendly" leather lookalike fabric.

ORGANIC: of or relating to foodstuff grown or raised without synthetic fertilizers or pesticides or hormones; e.g., organic eggs, organic vegetables, and organic chicken. The term is also used to describe something simple and healthful and close to nature, as in an organic lifestyle.

You'll find organic fibers used in furniture and fabrics, like organic silk.

CRUELTY FREE: a product that doesn’t contain any part of an animal, eliminating material obtained from an animal by means of cruelty and/or anything made with child labor or in a sweatshop anywhere in the world.

Examples include veal or any other food obtained from animals raised or kept on factory farms, or any products made in a Third World sweatshop. Remember the Kathy Lee Gifford controversy about her clothing line made in Central America?

SOCIALLY RESPONSIBLE: products made in facilities that practice Fair Trade and are environmentally responsible. Products can also include products made from a labor force that is “disadvantaged,” i.e. women, mentally challenged, or workers in war-torn areas.

SUSTAINABLE: a product capable of being continued with minimal long-term effect on the environment. This is key in all aspects of the life cycle of any product.

Examples include anything (building materials, furniture, fabrics, upholstery, linens, etc.) made from bamboo, cork, soy, or organic cotton. The Cork Family tables by Jasper Morrison pictured above are great examples of sustainable furniture, as the cork bark stripped from trees will eventually grow back.

LIFE CYCLE: this refers to the notion of a fair, holistic assessment of a product from all perspectives, including taking into consideration the raw materials used in its production, all manufacturing processes, all distribution (including all intervening transportation steps necessary or caused by the product's existence), its use, and its disposal. The sum of all those steps, or phases, is the life cycle of the product.

An example of this holistic look at a product is the planting of soy beans, the subsequent care and harvesting of the soy, the transportation to the factory for processing (and all other transportation steps to get the product to warehouses and retailers and even shipping to a customer's home), and then the final processing procedure to make the soy beans into whatever the chosen product is; and then, how the product is or can be used, disposed of, or recycled and reused.

CRADLE-TO-GRAVE: this is the FULL life cycle assessment from manufacture (the cradle) to use phase and disposal phase (grave). This philosophy and focus of manufacturing on the environment has been focused on by designer/author William McDonough. Look for his books!

An example of this is a tree helps to produce paper, which is then recycled into low-energy production cellulose (fiberised paper) insulation, then the insulation is used as an energy-saving device in the ceiling of a home for 40 years, saving 2,000 times the fossil-fuel energy used in its production. After the 40 years of the insulation's use, the cellulose fibers are replaced and the old fibers are disposed of, possibly incinerated.

CRADLE-TO-GATE: this is an assessment of a PARTIAL product life cycle from manufacture (cradle) to the factory gate (before it’s transported to the consumer). The use and disposal phase of the product is omitted. CTG assessments are usually the basis for environmental product declarations in the products most people purchase for their homes.

FAIR TRADE: certified company and/or product the incorporates policies and standards that include a fair living wage for all factory employees, ample breaks, no obligation to work overtime without compensation, and a safe work environment with emergency protocols in place.

Examples of this include factories in many Third World countries.

CRADLE-TO-CRADLE: this is a specific assessment where the end-of-life disposal step for the product is a recycling process. From the recycling process originates a new, identical product or a completely different product.

Examples include glass bottles recycled to make more glass bottles OR old blue jeans recycled into insulation OR plastic milk jugs recycled into carpeting OR old rubber flip flops recycled into welcome mats.

GREEN WASHING: this is the dissemination of misleading information by an organization to conceal its abuse of the environment in order to present a positive public image. DeAnna warns that green washing is running rampant now as everyone is trying to jump on the green and environmentally-friendly product bandwagon. Do your homework, don't be fooled, and buy green.