For an oft-humorous quick read about green-living tips, consider checking out Ideal Bite.

This week their focus was on green tips for guys.

My friend don Miguel was recently out looking for surf in Northern California when he took this self-portrait. DM is one of the founders of Guayaki, the leading company that brings us a fairly traded organic green tea called yerba mate which helps me survive these cold gray Pacific Northwest winters.

Don Miguel, David Karr, Pierre Ferrari and the rest of their crew are doing an amazing job with their company, bringing high quality yerba mate products to the US while generating money to reforest large areas of Brazil, Argentina, and Paraguay.

Look for it in your local grocery market, or if you are in Northern California, stop by their new cafe at 6784 Sebastopol Avenue.

What a great pairing to help survive the winter blues...two eco-friendly Fair Trade products that get your body moving and energized - a soccer ball and a warm yerba mate drink!

More fun from the Sundance Film Festival with Your Vegas, an amazing new band from the UK.

They had fun with what they kept referring to as our Fair Trade "football". 

:)

The band is pictured here lounging with our eco-certified soccer ball and Joe Tomlinson, Founder of RE:VOLVE Apparel Project, a very cool new eco-company and creator of the Giving Suite.

For more Sundance reading, check out Greenloop's blog coverage of the event by Jenn Breckenridge.

The Giving Suite at the Sundance Festival in Park City, Utah is a hopping place this week.



They've taken the idea behind a "Gifting Suite" - where celebrities, VIPs, and trendsetters get handed bags of free stuff - and changed it to a Giving Suite, where those folks can purchase products like our eco-certified Fair Trade soccer balls with all the profits going to charity. Their tagline says it all: Giving. It's the New Getting.

The charities featured this year are The Waterkeeper Alliance, Earth Pledge, The Environmental Media Association, Healthy Child/Healthy World, Our Future Now, The United Nations HCR, and the favorite of Fair Trade Sports...Room to Read.

The concept was created by Joe and Amy Tomlinson, the owners of RE:VOLVE Apparel Project and executed by Mathew Gerson's crew at eConsciousMarket. What a brilliant idea. We're stoked to be a part of it.

Check out their video blog.

Solvie Karlstrom of National Geographic's Green Guide recently featured our eco-friendly Fair Trade football on CBS as one of her favorite items this season.

"The other item that I really like this year is this fairly traded football, it's lined with FSC certified rubber, which comes from the rubber trees of well managed forests." explains Ms. Karlstrom. Check out the article and the video.

Project Good - a joint venture between World of Good and eBay - is donating 40 Fair Trade soccer balls to Africa.

The eco-certified Fair Trade soccer balls are going to the Better World Cup, an organization founded by James Rose, who we've mentioned previously. Suffice it to say, we believe the answer to the question, "Can a Fair Trade soccer ball change a child's life?" is a resounding Yes!

Not only of the child who receives the ball, but also the child who was not forced to hand-stitch the ball. To learn more about our adult stitchers, check out this set of posts.

The campaign was put together with a brilliant World of Good staffer named Matt Levinthal. Well done, Matt!

OK, so it's not entirely accurate (Transfair doesn't certify our sports balls, FLO does), but it is fast and funny. Check out this clip from the hipsters at ViroPOP featuring our new eco-certified Fair Trade basketball...

I'm going to find an empty water bottle and make my Flock of Seagulls sunglasses right now...

Coop America’s new Guide to Fair Trade (PDF) was recently released for both consumers and Fair Trade advocates.

The Guide features descriptions of national and international Fair Trade products (such as our Fair Trade soccer balls) with an extensive directory of businesses and organizations offering those products.

In addition to general information on Fair Trade, there are personal testimonials and suggestions how to involve yourself more as a consumer in the overall Fair Trade movement.  I liked the step-by-step plan of action for mobilizing consumers and local producers, such as hosting Fair Trade events and petitioning local supermarkets to carry more Fair Trade products.

This is a great tool to empower consumers! The more consumer demand for Fair Trade, the more people we help around the world!

Susan and I have been fans of the Gaiam catalog for years, especially when they purchased the Real Goods company (I dream about putting solar panels on my house).

Be sure to check your mailbox this week for the Fall 07 Gaiam catalog featuring our Fair Trade soccer ball, football, and basketball.

Washington Post writer Kathleen Hom just published an interesting article on the greening of sports gear.

In it, Kathleen explores gear ranging from surfboards to sports balls, and pulls expert opinions from Ken Segal, a composite materials engineer at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, and Hugh Casey, former head of the materials technology division at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

After reading about the new bamboo longboards, I know what I’ll be hoping to receive for Christmas this year.

Kathleen interviewed Becky Bavinger - one of our East Coast customers - about our Fair Trade soccer balls for the article, who reported that the eco-friendly soccer balls from Fair Trade Sports played great and felt just like a normal ball. Take a read through the article when you get a few free minutes.