Going Green with the Green Depot

If you are a builder or a do-it-yourselfer and you want to go green, you no longer have to wade through the isles at Lowe's or Home Depot to find eco-friendly products. The Green Depot is completely stocked with environmentally friendly and sustainable building products, services and solutions. Its primary goal is to facilitate green living and building in communities so that it is accessible, affordable and gratifying.

Items are labeled with a Green Depot Icon System designed to show at a glance why a particular item is green among five basic environmental benefits: improves indoor air quality, conserves resources, stimulates the local economy, saves energy, or is manufactured responsibly. If an icon is only half-tone then the product has room for improvement in one or more areas. In this way, they hope that green consumers start steering the marketplace, and demanding more full-tone icons.

One of the highlights of the Green Depot store is their "juice bar," which offers a selection of natural, non-toxic cleaning products for various applications. BYOB (bring your own bottles), and fill up from fun beer-tap style dispensers. They even have nice labels you can stick on your bottles so you know exactly what's in the product. You can take it home and transfer to more elegant bottles for display, if you like.