Green Dry Cleaner in DUMBO, Cobble Hill

Recently I met with Ken Kinzer (above), a dry cleaner who has locations on Front Street in DUMBO and Court Street in Cobble Hill. After telling me about GreenEarth Cleaning, one of the methods he uses to dry clean — the other is wet cleaning, which simulates hand washing — I told him about a memory I have from when I was younger and got a sweater back from the cleaners. I smelled it, wanting to snuggle into my nice clean sweater, but I was immediately confronted by the most horrific chemical smell.

The smell was most likely perchloroethlyene (perc), a technically organic compound used by most dry cleaners. It's also a carcinogen. Kinzer's method, GreenEarth Cleaning uses silicone to clean clothes and it doesn't leave a smell.

“It’s safe for the clothes, it’s safe for the customer, it’s safe for the environment,” he said.

Read my story about Kinzer and his dry cleaning plants here.

Sustainable Designs at BKLYN DESIGNS in DUMBO this Weekend

This weekend, BKLYN DESIGNS will return to DUMBO for its eighth year. If it's anything like last year, many exhibitors will feature sustainable designs. A lot of buzz has been generated surrounding Red Hook-based Uhuru Design’s new Coney Island Line, created from wood reclaimed from the demolished Coney boardwalk.

Pieces in the line include the Cyclone Lounger (above), made to mimic the structure of the iconic ride; the Wonder Coffee Table, which also mimics the ride it’s named after; the Drop End Table (right), influenced by the Parachute Jump; and the Drum Lamp, which is inspired by concrete-filled oil cans around the Coney landscape.

Sustainable design blog Inhabitat.com will award the best green designs at the show with its second annual Editor’s Choice Awards. Will Uhuru get recognition for its innovative ways of saving pieces of Brooklyn’s history? (Last year, “Best in Show” went to Fort Greene-based designers Ecosystems, for the BADA table/chair.)

Photos courtesy of Uhuru Design

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Happy 15th, Recycle-A-Bicycle!

Recycle-A-Bicycle’s 15th Birthday Celebration is tonight at Superfine Restaurant, 126 Front St. in DUMBO from 6 to 9 p.m. Admission prices start at $20, all above $50 come with a Recycle-A-Bicycle T-shirt.

The celebration will include a benefit for the organization, which is a community-based bike shop and non-profit organization that provides educational/job training programs and encourages environmental stewardship and everyday bicycle use. The auction will feature twelve orange NY400 Batavus Bicycles (only 200 exist in the world) and bike-themed art.

Other bikes and biked themed objects such as bike jewelry, bike animal sculptures, bike chairs, bike lamps, and more will be for display and sale. All proceeds directly support Recycle-A-Bicycle’s youth and environmental programming.

In this past year alone, Recycle-A-Bicycle (RAB) has worked with more than 1,000 young people and collectively pedaled more than 10,000 miles. On average, RAB salvages 1,200 bicycles each year from the waste stream, diverting a total of 36,000 pounds of waste from NYC’s landfills.

Visit www.recycleabicycle.org for more information or to donate to the organization.

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Make Your Own Reusable Bags at Etsy Labs

Tonight, at the Etsy Open craft Night at Etsy Labs (55 Washington St., suite 512, in DUMBO), sew reusable bags with Bags for the People — a non-profit organization that provides the public with a sustainable alternative to plastic bags — and Katherine Bell, author of Quilting for Peace. Stop by anytime from 4 to 8 p.m. for the bag making tutorial. If you can’t make it, you can watch the tutorial online at 5 p.m. Here is more information on tonight's event.

Bags for the People and Etsy will team up again next weekend for the first annual Brooklyn Pie Bake-Off Benefit. On Sunday, Nov 22 from 1:30 to 4:30 p.m., at SPACECRAFT (355 Bedford Ave. in Williamsburg), sample homemade pies and home brewed beer from Brooklyn Brews. There is a $10 entrance fee that will go to support Bags for the People. This event is sponsored by Brooklyn Based and Etsy. For information on how to enter the bake-off, click here.

Pictured above is Glenn Robinson, one of the founders of Bags for the People, sewing bags at the Green Brooklyn... Green City fair in September.

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Eco-Awareness at Last Weekend's DUMBO Art Festival

This past weekend saw the 13th annual D.U.M.B.O Art Under the Bridge Festival, a neighborhood-wide event where art appears indoors and out. Eagle writer Mary Frost attended the festivities and reported on some of its eco-conscious works. Below are some green highlights from her piece, which you can read in its entirety here.

The Experience of Green (above) is a gallery-sized installation by Wade Kavanaugh and Stephen B. Nguyen, which will be at DUMBO Arts Center (DAC) through November 29. It represents old growth trees made from massive amounts of red kraft paper. “If you stare at it long enough, you see green,” said Breda Kennedy, DAC executive director. “The artists’ intent is to heighten awareness of the environment.”

At Smack Mellon, Ellen Driscoll’s awe-inspiring work FASTFORWARDFOSSIL: Part 2, which will run until November 8, (above) comments on oil and water consumption. The sculptural installation comprises 2600 #2 water bottles transformed into a 28- foot, time-spanning landscape.

Waste Management (above), a street installation made of discarded cardboard cartons by Ian Trask, “grafts material waste and unused urban space, emphasizing the accumulated magnitude of what we throw away,” according to the artist’s explanation.

Photos by Mary Frost

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New From DUMBO-Based Dynomighty Design

DUMBO-based company Dynomighty Design has released its popular — and 100 percent recyclable — Mighty Wallet in seven new patterns, such as an old postcard, a diner menu, or a world map. Also just released is the design pictured here, with a helpful (and sometimes much-needed) reminder.
Check out Dynomighty's web site here.

Image courtesy of Dynomighty Design

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Green Buildings Honored at Building Brooklyn Awards

At last night's Building Brooklyn Awards, held by the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce, two eco-friendly projects were honored. Galapagos Art Space, a DUMBO venue on track to LEED Certifcation, received the arts and culture award. Pictured here are Galapagos director Robert Elmes (left) with Tony Daniels of Cycle Architecture, the LEED-accredited architect who designed the space. The Perry Building at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, received the National Grid Award, honored as Brooklyn’s first multi-tenanted green building.

Click here for Eagle writer Linda Collins' full report on the event.

Photo by Jennifer MacFarlane

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Climate Change Exhibit Extended in DUMBO, and Other News

The photography show, Visualizing Climate Change, at DUMBO's Henry Gregg Gallery, has been extended until July 31st. It is a showcase of work from photo agency GHG Photos. For more information go to www.henrygregggallery.com.

Joshua Wolfe, founder of GHG Photos will receive the 2009 Ansel Adams Award. The “award honors an individual who has made superlative use of still photography to further a conservation cause.” Josh will be the third GHG member to win the award. Steve Kazlowski was last year’s recipient and Gary Braasch won in 2006. This is coming on the heels of his recently published book Climate Change: Picturing the Science, that was co-authored with Gavin Schmidt. For more information on the book and reviews go to www.picturingclimatechange.com.

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DUMBO Photo Exhibit Grapples With How to Portray Climate Change

The term “climate change” is used often these days, in conjunction with “global warming” and “extreme weather.” Sure, we know that the earth is hotter today than it has been in the past four hundred years, the polar ice caps are melting and sea levels are rising. But what does it all actually look like? Most of us don’t have the means or ability to see the effects of climate change, we usually just hear about it.

The current photography exhibition at the Henry Gregg Gallery in DUMBO, entitled “Visualizing Climate Change,” brings powerful images from around the world to Brooklyn. Work of photographers Gary Braasch, Ashley Cooper, Benjamin Drummond, Peter Essick, Steve Kazlowski and Joshua Wolfe is on display, with subjects ranging from polar bears, to glaciers, to forest fires.

Brooklyn-based photographer Wolfe explained that, as members of GHG (which stands for greenhouse gas) Photos, these photographers deal with the basic question of: “How do you portray something that’s happening as gradually as climate change?”

“For me, a lot of it is trying to explain through images not just that climate change is all extreme weather all the time and a polar bear,” Wolfe explained. “There’s more depth to it, the issue is more complex, there are a lot of factors going into it.

“Any of us working individually can’t create such a complete or such a nuanced picture of climate change,” he continued. “Our goal is to present people with what’s going on, to give a more complete picture.”

On one wall of the gallery is a photo by Wolfe of an oil pump in the foreground and a group of wind turbines in the background (above). Another by Kazlowski — whom Wolfe calls “the best polar bear photographer in the world” — is a member of the threatened species swimming in the Beaufort Sea in the Arctic Ocean. Yet another by Cooper shows a man knee deep in water in his South Yorkshire kitchen, searching for food after floods in the summer of 2007.

Hanging on another wall of the gallery is a series of before and after photos of glaciers, taken by Wolfe and Braasch, portraying the stark decrease in glacier size over the years.

Using photography as the medium to portray climate change was challenging, says Wolfe. “If you look at photojournalism, we really thrive on an event. We thrive on a conflict. We know how to do wars, we know how to do protests, to a lesser extent, we know how to do celebrities,” he said. “Gradual, decade-long, century-long, year long changes aren’t things that photojournalism is necessarily comfortable with.”

Adding to the difficulty, Wolfe says, is that in some cases it’s hard to tell if something like extreme weather is climate change or not. “With hurricanes or forest fires or droughts, is this just noise in the system or is this definitively climate change?” he asked, which is the reason for pairing before and after photos of glaciers, or juxtaposing a picture of a forest fire in Greece with a satellite image of more fires ravaging the country.

Collaboration with Henry Gregg Gallery director André Martinez-Reed gives the show a different perspective: “He’s relating to the images in a different way than I do,” Wolfe said. “André mixed them up to make a layered and more nuanced story.”

“Each individual show has its own spirit, its own energy,” said Martinez-Reed. “With Visualizing Climate Change, it gives people a chance to experience something that’s going on in the world that probably they wouldn’t normally have an opportunity to experience.”

“We have this unique experience to view a lot of the things going on with climate change that the average person can’t see,” Wolfe said. “We’re changing the way people look at things around them.”

Visualizing Climate Change will be on view at the Henry Gregg Gallery at 111 Front St., Suite 226, in DUMBO through June 21. The exhibit is also on view at the Port Authority building at the corner of 42nd St and 8th Ave in Manhattan. Wolfe will be speaking at this Thursday’s Nerd Nite at Galapagos Art Space in DUMBO about climate change.

Photo above by Joshua Wolfe, courtesy of GHG Photos

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A California Native Crafts Sustainable Furniture in DUMBO

Bruce Marsh (above) started building furniture years ago when he wanted, but couldn’t afford, luxury pieces. He fondly recalls the first piece of high-end wood he ever bought, from a lumberyard in Berkeley.

“Sitting on the floor was this piece of mahogany,” he said. “It was absolutely the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.”

Marsh purchased the wood shortly after and brought it home. “I put it in the middle of my living room. It became my coffee table — for about six months before I actually did anything with it,” he noted. “During that process, literally a day didn’t go by where I didn’t imagine or reconfigure that piece of wood into a hundred different things. When I finally did decide to make it into something, it became a table.”

Now, after what started out as a hobby became a business, that first table sits in Marsh’s DUMBO workshop.

Bruce Marsh Designs was established in 2006. At the same time, Marsh founded Moderntots, an “online retailer of modern design products for children.” But a year ago Marsh sold Moderntots to his business partner and “that’s when I really truly started getting serious about this business,” he added. “Now I’m totally in this.”

Marsh’s line of hardwood furniture is handcrafted and made-to-order. He’s designed tables, chairs, beds, bookshelves, even sushi plates. At this month’s BKLYN DESIGNS show, Marsh debuted a day bed made from rope strung across a wood frame (pictured above).

He characterizes his aesthetic as modern with Asian and Scandinavian influences. “I believe strongly in the beauty of the woods,” he explained. “I don’t need to carve intricate things into them to show somebody how beautiful they really are — simplicity is my goal.”

And with all his designs, Marsh keeps the environment in mind.

“I grew up in California. The California attitude to recycling is very different than the East Coast. We were doing it as kids, years ago,” he said. “I do this business with a very strong, eco/green mentality.”

The many factors that characterize his business as sustainable include rags instead of paper towels, water-based adhesives, low-VOC (volatile organic compound) or water-based finishes, no stains or veneers, and all stainless steel hardware.

More importantly, Marsh said all of the wood he uses is certified and comes from managed forests. Two months ago he stopped using imported wood. “There are so many beautiful woods in North America, why are we wasting all this fuel and emitting so much carbon into the air to ship these things halfway around the world?”

Instead, his woods come from within a 250-mile radius around his workshop, and he only orders as much as he needs. “I order exactly the amount of wood I need for the week’s projects that are beginning,” he explained.

Marsh’s designs are also long lasting. “Several pieces from the beginning of when I started making furniture — that are 10 or 12 years old — only show signs of normal wear, no signs of falling apart or degradation,” he said. “I have no idea how long they will last I’m not old enough to find out.”

Luxury Items With A Personal Touch

Since Marsh runs a small business (he only has two employees), he’s able to get to know some of his clients. “I pretty much meet every single one of my customers,” he said. “If you call for customer service, that’s me. It’s very personal, there’s a sense of flexibility and camaraderie and friendship.”

Many clients send Marsh pictures of his pieces in their homes, and occasionally, he delivers the furniture in person, which he likes because he gets to see the homes himself.

The idea of community and friendship is one of the reasons why Marsh loves Brooklyn. “My Brooklyn is DUMBO,” he says. Not only does he have his workshop there, he has also lived in the neighborhood. “It’s a small town, everybody knows everybody.”

As a photographer, Marsh loves DUMBO for another reason. “My absolute favorite thing is the view when you’re down by Brooklyn Bridge Park,” he says. “One of the best views of New York City, it’s absolutely gorgeous.”

Photo by Don Evans

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Sustainable Designs At BKLYN DESIGNS

The Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce is presenting its seventh annual BKLYN DESIGNS show this weekend, with tours and exhibits spread out over three days. Among the exhibits was one at St. Ann’s Warehouse, where designers presented their new creations, many of them sustainable.

Here are some highlights:

Jason Horvath and Bill Hilgendorf of Uhuru Design (pictured above with event organizer Karen Auster) launched their new furniture designs: a stitched table, standard chairs and metal stoolens (actual name). Their creations are made using sustainable materials. “For these particular chairs, we got the backs from old chair factories,” Horvath said.

Representatives from sustainable design firm Ecosystems showcased two of their new items: a table that can convert to a chair and a line of hardware that can be used to put many different types of furniture together. “We’re excited about our new table and hardware systems,” said Innovation Director Matt Tyson. “We love it here [at Bklyn Designs].”

Marc Vecchiarelli, of VEXELL, displayed the company’s GREEN ON GREEN line of outdoor furniture, made of eco-friendly materials. The top of the table, for instance, is made with “water permeable design” materials, he said. “Instead of metal grates, you put this down and it filters all the water and debris. It’s an all natural type product.”

Design firm From the Source has locations in Indonesia and the United States, creating furniture from reclaimed, vintage, salvaged or plantation-grown hardwoods. “We work with about 50 different villages [on the island of Java],” said Design Director Penny Emmet. “There’s so much beauty in the grain and color of the wood that we’re working with.”

Hugh Hayden designed a chair made completely of tennis balls that would have been thrown out had he not reclaimed them. “It’s made from tennis balls from Columbia University tennis center. A lot of these private tennis clubs or universities prefer to use very fresh or bouncy tennis balls.” he explained. “It’s giving them a second life.”

Design students from Pratt were also at St. Ann’s Warehouse, some showing their kitchen creations. Dana de Vega created a set of salt and pepper mills with boiler drain valves used as handles. “Thinking of boiler drain valves, they’re just things that exist,” she said. “It’s to create a new look; they’re very industrial looking.” Joe Kent, another Pratt student designed a cutting board. “When you’re carving a piece of meat, it actually controls the runoff,” he said.

Bruce Marsh, of DUMBO-based brucemarsh designs, showed a bed made by strips of rope connected to a wood frame. “It conforms to your body,” he said. “I had seen a piece of rope like this in a marina, I thought it was so beautiful and soft.”

Photo by Don Evans

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DUMBO-Based Dynomighty Produces Recyclable Wallets, Goes Viral on YouTube

Here’s the situation: you need a new wallet, but it’s the recession. You don’t want to spend too much on it and you want it to last. What would you think of one that’s water resistant, tear resistant, lighter than water and expandable? Oh, and did I mention it’s only 15 dollars?

Impossible? Not for DUMBO-based company Dynomighty Design. They’ve been making the “mighty wallet” since 2005. Designed by Dynomighty founder Terrence Kelleman (pictured above left, with Tim Knock), the wallets are constructed from a single sheet of Tyvek (the same material as Express Mail envelopes) that is folded and glued in two places.

Kelleman didn’t start out designing wallets. A fine arts major, he worked at the MoMA and was inspired to create jewelry out of magnets. He sold his first bracelet at the MoMA design store in 2002 and has since expanded his jewelry line to include more bracelets, necklaces and rings.

He expanded his product line because “I had been fascinated by Tyvek,” he said. “I’d seen it used in some creative ways but not really as a robust product itself... it’s such a thin material, its eco-friendly, recyclable, super-strong, lightweight and super thin.”

So he began folding an express mail envelope, which took about a week, he said. “I was using my creative processes, which is diving head in and not letting go until I find a solution,” Kelleman explained. “The first wallet was more or less an accident.”

Since that time the wallet has been redesigned. “There’s no stitching, it’s folded and glued in two points on the inside,” Kelleman said. “It gives the wallet a lot of flexibility, so you can start out with a wallet that’s thin, but if you fill it with a lot of materials it can be as big as you need.”

One is made to look like an express mail envelope, one looked like a folded up piece of notebook paper, one looks like a folded up subway map and another has the first 3,000 digits of pi printed on it, which Kelleman calls “geek chic.”

Along with the wallets, Dynomighty also produces Tyvek luggage tags and totes.

... But How Do You Recycle It?

A common misconception of the mighty wallet is that it’s made of recycled materials, said Tim Knock, Dynomighty director of sales and marketing. It is actually the wallet that’s recyclable, he clarified.

“Most people don’t know it’s recyclable, or if they do they don’t know how to recycle it,” explained Kelleman. “One of our initiatives this summer is to focus on increasing awareness not only here in New York... to corporations who receive express mail envelopes, to say, ‘We are now a receiving center [for Tyvek].’

Dynomighty sends the used Tyvek back to the DuPont, the company that manufactures the material.

“We started it for our own products,” he added. “Our new initiative is to start doing more outreach.”

The goal for Kelleman is to eventually make the mighty wallets out of recycled Tyvek, possibly scraps and pieces left over. Those scraps would then be “reprocessed and turned into other product... giving it a second life,” he said.

Viral Marketing in a Down Economy

What’s unique about Dynomighty, Kelleman said, is that they have never taken a loan and don’t have investors. This means no advertising, so he has found creative ways to get the word out about his products.

When Kelleman made the first magnetic bracelet, he posted a video of it on YouTube. He made it himself, with his digital video camera, and as of today it has garnered two million hits, said Knock.

Since then Kelleman has posted many more videos of his products on YouTube, introducing them to viewers or showing viewers how they work.

“I’ve actually made a video on YouTube where I’ve showed people how to take their old express mail envelopes and convert them into wallets,” Kelleman said. “To demonstrate how strong these wallets are, we actually put two holes through the bottom and the top of one — Tim [Knock] hung from it in our warehouse... and it didn’t break. It’s on YouTube.”

And it’s not only Kelleman who is posting videos about mighty wallets; there are others from people who have purchased a mighty wallet. He saw one that’s “a nine-minute long video about someone receiving his mighty wallet and saying goodbye to his old wallet.”

The viral phenomenon that is the mighty wallet happens on other web sites, too. Knock said that someone posted about their wallet on the kidrobot web site (a store in SoHo), and “next thing you know, there’s two and a half to three pages of blogging about the mighty wallet. On another company’s website.”

Knock said that this summer, Dynomighty is looking to hire an intern to blog and tweet about the products and the company, allowing them to stay in touch with their customer.

“It’s not being corporate and behind the scenes, this is an item that’s a respectable price,” he explained. “People are realizing that. What can you buy for 15 dollars anymore?”

In this economy, Kelleman says his use of viral marketing coupled with the lack of investors has made Dynomighty strong. In fact, they’ve grown in the past year.

“It’s made us a lot better as a company — more resilient, more frugal, smarter about all of our decisions,” he said. “We’re not a big company. Every time we need to make a decision, we pull all our resources together.”

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Greenway Pedals Forward

Almost 100 people packed into Speak Low Cocktail Lounge here on Monday night to acknowledge the tireless efforts of the three founders of the Brooklyn Greenway Initiative (BGI) and those who have supported them for the past five years.

It’s BGI’s five-year anniversary, but its founders, Meg Fellerath, Brian McCormick and Milton Puryear (pictured above with Independence Community Foundation (ICF) Executive Director Marilyn Gelber), have been advocating for the Greenway for much longer.

“Myself and Milton have been working on the Greenway since 1998,” McCormick told the Eagle in December. “We were the chair and co-chair of an organization called the Brooklyn Waterfront Greenway Task Force. Meg joined us about a couple of years later.”

The three of them incorporated as the Brooklyn Greenway Initiative in 2004. They envisioned the 14-mile off-road path, spanning from Greenpoint all the way down to Bay Ridge, to be multi-use and have different components. According to BGI’s plan, the path will be between 20 and 30 feet wide in total, encompassing a 4- to 8-foot landscaped buffer between it and the street, a 10- to 12-foot bike bath, and a 6- to 10-foot pedestrian path.

Because the route travels through many different neighborhoods and community boards, the first step was to enlist the support of these community boards and their officials.

The magnitude of the project required that it be split into pieces. The first piece was “the middle section, Community Boards 2 and 6 — the Brooklyn Navy Yard through Red Hook,” as Puryear described it. Next, they tackled the area in Community Board 1, Greenpoint and Williamsburg, and started setting up design guidelines.

“One of the purposes of the design guidelines was to try to come up with a scheme that would let you know that you were on the Brooklyn Waterfront Greenway no matter where you were on it,” he continued. “But that also allowed each neighborhood to have a different feel in design quality. Unlike Hudson River Park, which is fairly uniform in terms of the Greenway design, we envisioned the Brooklyn Waterfront to really look good and feel different in different neighborhoods.”

Puryear told the Eagle that the next step for BGI would be to work with the city to develop what he called a “master plan for the whole 14 miles of the Greenway.” And now, this step is slowly approaching a reality.

BGI announced at the party that “the NYC Department of Transportation has committed to a producing a master plan for the entire 14-mile Greenway route — a major project milestone,” said McCormick. “This work will begin later this year.”

Also announced on Monday night were two more partnerships: one with the Horticultural Society of New York to launch a green-collar mentoring program along the Greenway route, and another with the Brooklyn Navy Yard Development Corporation to offer historic bicycle tours of the Brooklyn Navy Yard in the fall.

Upcoming events include the seventh annual Greenway Bike Tour, on May 2, and as usual, BGI will continue its monthly Greenway cleanups, which take place on a stretch of Columbia Street along the waterfront that was paved last summer. McCormick has called it the “non-designed interim Greenway,” and BGI has assumed responsibility for its upkeep.

“If people are going to use it and think it’s the Greenway, we need to do our part,” Fellerath said. The monthly cleanups along the street generate interest, build the community and “establish our presence on the Greenway.”

The next cleanup will be this Saturday, April 4. For more information or to RSVP, e-mail bmccormick@brooklyngreenway.org. To register for the 10-mile Greenway Bike Tour, send full name and contact information to ride2009@brooklyngreenway.org.

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Getting Eco-Friendly in Vinegar Hill

It’s green. It’s the first green residential development in Vinegar Hill and DUMBO. And its model apartment will open on Earth Day, April 22. How cool is that?

This brand new eco-friendly venture at 100 Gold St. in Vinegar Hill is a project of the REDD (Real Estate Design & Development) Group, which is both a design firm and a real estate developer.

According to its founder, Anthony Morena, who is an architect trained at Pratt Institute, this is the first green building he has done on his own and he wanted to bring in as many green elements... read more.

Story by Linda Collins
Image courtesy of The REDD Group

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