Home & Garden...

If you’re building or remodeling green you’re likely interested in finding products, companies, and services that match your green values, offer real eco-friendly solutions, not just a green sticker, and if all goes your way, a decent price.

There are many places you can look for homebuilders, eco-friendly appliances, green supplies, building materials and more. However, basic phone book or internet searches aren’t always useful. As of now there’s very little regulating green practices or green labels of any kind.

By checking with certain sources you stand a better chance of getting what you need. Not a perfect chance mind you; you always need to personally research a company before investing in green, but your chances of avoiding greenwashing increase when you concentrate you research efforts on trusted resources.

Here are some decent to good places to start your search for green minded companies – these are places I’ve had decent results with.

Co-op America’s National Green Pages: This is basically the “green” yellow pages; offering services from investing, furniture, gifts, B&Bs, restaurants, real estate, housing, lumber, and far more. I’ve been using them to find reputable green services since 2000 with good results.

If you live in one of the following areas:

• Denver / Boulder / Fort Collins
• Greater Salt Lake / Park City
• Portland/Vancouver

You can check out the ReDirect Guide. I love this guide and it covers a wide range of green companies. Not so wide as the National Green Pages, but good. It would be nice to see guides like this in other areas. In fact, some areas do have their own green guide. Ask your local Chamber of Commerce or visitor’s center.

Green Home Building is one of my favorite green building sites ever. One you can find many links to services and two they even have an expert panel (it’s huge). You can submit a question and get an answer to your most pressing green home question.

The U.S Green Building Council not only offers advice but breaking news about all things green including residential LEED. Best of all they offer a huge ever updated monster page of green building links. Seriously, one of the best lists you find.

Here's what they offer links to:

Associations and Non-Profit Organizations
Building Codes and Standards
Building Materials, Guides and Certification
Case Studies
Campus Initiatives
Commissioning and Post-Occupancy Evaluation
Design and Simulation Tools
Design Resources
Economics
Energy
Funding
Government Initiatives & Guidelines
Life Cycle Analysis and Costing
Media
Rating Systems
Research Centers
Sustainability/Miscellaneous

Green Building has useful information about all things related to green building. Their one major problem is that the “Find a Pro” section is under construction – with what looks like a long way to go. That said, the site already has offered good info in the past, offers some services, and they may be one to watch for more resources.

These are just a few places where you can find better, greener home building, renovation, and material information. In future posts I’ll share more of my favorite green building resources and earth friendly architects.