Eco Ideas large & small

I was planning to do a second eco-salon, but the first Sunday of the month was Labor Day weekend & then I just didn't get my act together to do it the 2nd Sunday, so next month will be the 2nd eco-salon.
The reason I didn't get my act together was I was in the Rocky Mountains at the Telluride Film Festival. It was beautiful as always and they are doing some really cool eco friendly things with the fest. I worked the Festival as the assistant manager of the Abel Gance, the outdoor theater in the middle of town. Beautiful to see films under the stars, but it gets cold & there was some rain. That didn't stop us, we still showed movies.
Back to the eco/green ideas. Biggest one was they had Brita as a sponsor & every pass holder & all the staff were given Nalgene (BPA free of course) water bottles. Then they set up Water Filling Stations around the theaters so people could fill up. They lost out on the revenue of selling bottled water, but what a great idea. The water was just filtered town water, filters provided by Brita, naturally. The Wastemasters (trash pickup by the staff) were so happy. They said the worst part of the job was picking up the trash with so many 1/2 empty bottles of water, super heavy & messy. They had to empty them to recycle them.
NOTE: The lids on bottles are usually not recyclable so if you leave it on, it may get thrown in the trash to save time or it has to be twisted off by a sanitation worker to be recycled. So REMOVE YOUR LIDS when recycling plastic bottles. Or better yet, don't buy them & use a refillable bottle.
Ok enough about that, they also had Alice Waters consult on the food provided by the festival. She made a menu that took advantage of locally grown ingredients and organic ingredients. Funny thing is Ann Cooper used to do the food program & is now big in revamping school food programs, check out her lecture on the TEDtalks program. Will try to post a link for that.
So getting back into the swing of things here in Los Angeles. Miss siptea and talking tea, so tonight I am going to see Gail at Algabar, a great place to buy tea in Los Angeles, that is also closing it's doors. I think LA needs to pick up it's game in the world of tea & all things green. Prove me wrong, tell me about green things happening in LA.
Will post soon lots to blog about. Forgot how good it feels to get some of these things out there.