Share your ideas about how you chose to make your party green. http://www.echoage.com/forum/list.php?5 Thu, 09 Sep 2010 10:27:43 -0400 Phorum 5.2.7 http://www.echoage.com/forum/read.php?5,283,283#msg-283 http://www.echoage.com/forum/read.php?5,283,283#msg-283 www.chicagotribune.com]]]> Alison Smith Green Birthday Party Ideas Tue, 06 Apr 2010 20:51:13 -0400 http://www.echoage.com/forum/read.php?5,263,263#msg-263 http://www.echoage.com/forum/read.php?5,263,263#msg-263
1) Save the unnecessary waste of disposable plates and utensils by serving finger foods: mini burgers, mini quiche, sausage rolls, bruschetta, bread sticks with genoa salami, puff pastry with spinach and goat cheese, pita pizzas.

2) Make your dessert waste-free too, swapping the typical platter cake for organic cupcakes or mini cheesecakes.

3) Try potted trees or plants as centre pieces instead of cut blooms.

4) Send guests home with a living momento of your party, with tree seed boxes or plantable paper goods (thank-you cards, etc) as your party favour.

5) Need something to wear for the party? Go shopping your own closet, your best friend's closet or your mother's - you won't believe what you’ll find. Even better, make your next Girls' Night In a clothing swap!

by Sandy Caetano]]> ECHOage Green Birthday Party Ideas Mon, 01 Feb 2010 09:13:10 -0500 http://www.echoage.com/forum/read.php?5,193,193#msg-193 http://www.echoage.com/forum/read.php?5,193,193#msg-193 I love ECHOage and plan on doing my son's birthday party & hopefully the rest of our birthday parties through ECHOage. I hope this posting helps others who have similar ideas. The following is my account of my daughter's Go Green birthday party which I submitted to the birthdaypartyideas.com website:

My daughter wanted a ‘Go Green’ birthday party for her 7th birthday party. She had been talking about it for months, even told her first grade teacher. So we actually did it. I just want to be sure to give credit to my daughter who inspired us to do this in the first place.

I thought of making our own seed embedded paper for invitations from recycled junk mail (there are some resources on line that show you how) but ended up deciding that was much too labor & time intensive, as much as I liked the idea. I ended up finding a website ‘ECHOage.com’ that does your invitations the way Evite does but this website is especially geared for kids birthdays. The child who the birthday is for gets to choose a charity through the website and when the invitations are emailed out, the guests are given the choice to make a donation instead of driving around, buying a present with accompanying packaging, wrapping the present, etc (greener). Then when everyone has had a chance to respond the total of the donations is tallied. The website gets 15% of the total. Then the remainder is divided in 2 with half going to the charity that the child chose & the other half going directly to the birthday child to buy one meaningful gift or to do with it as they please. I loved the idea, although my daughter hesitated when she thought she wouldn’t get any presents. In the end we made sure on the invitation to let the invited guests know that ‘gifts were appreciated but if they wished they could make a donation’ & the charity my daughter chose was Earth Corps.

For the kids for whom I didn’t have parents’ email addresses we printed out the invitations, added a few details & hand delivered them.

We actually didn’t do much decorating since that would merely add to the waste after the party but we did put some ornaments on our trees in the backyard. We used green & blue as the color scheme. Luckily we have a set of blue & green dishes so that went well with the theme. We went ahead & used our own dishes & cutlery but had some paper plates on hand in case we ran out. I meant to use our cloth napkins (it would have been a hodge podge of colors & sizes) but I ran out of time & forgot to put them out in the end.

We had the party in the mid afternoon so we had snacks/finger food which lessened the utensils needed. Some foods I found were organic or local although not all. For the food we had fruit kebabs (Fruity Biofuel). veggies & dip (Trees, Roots & Shoots), corn salad (‘Corn’-post Salad), edamame (Soylar Bean Energy), Snap Pea Crisps, Cheddar curls (from the farmers’ market), the Naked brand Green Machine (a very yummy juice smoothie) & water in a big pitcher (Cool Clear Water).

For activities we started off making bird feeders out of empty water bottles. I had drawn circles (about 2 inches diam) on 2 sides of the bottle about ¾ of the way down & made a large cross-hatch in the middle of it with an exacto knife so that the kids had an easy place to start with their scissors. Then I poked a small hole with a nail a little below that circle & had them use golf tees to make the whole big enough to put a dowel through each side. I had them decorate them using different colored Sharpie markers. When they were done I had them tie a string around the neck of the bottle & replace the cap. I bought a bag of birdseed (about $7 for 10 lbs) & they scooped out a cupful of birdseed to take home with them. I’m a pack rat & save all of our kids drinks take home cups with the lids that you get from restaurants & I had a ton of those. We used these for the kids to take their birdseed home in. Got the dowels and birdseed at Walmart, the Sharpies pack at Costco and luckily we had house-guests a few weeks prior & had a lot of empty water bottles.

I had printed out some activity sheets that I got online from the EPA website (http://www.epa.gov/kids/) for the kids who were done & waiting for the next activity. There’s a whole plethora of things to look through so that you can choose activity sheets that are appropriate for your party’s age group. I used some activities from the Follow That Trail booklet online for the Planet Protectors club through this EPA website (http://www.epa.gov/epawaste/education/kids/planetprotectors/index.htm).

Next I read the kids a book I had borrowed from the library. I actually borrowed a few books & movies. I was planning on having them displayed on a table to the side or something so the kids could have some to look at if they were done but never got around to that either. But the movie that I found that I would have liked to show if I could have found a way to show it in the garage was a half hour VHS of Sesame Street’s ‘Sing-Along Earth Songs. It had catchy songs & gave my kids ideas for activities. It was good for the 3-6 yr age group. The book I chose to read was ‘Earth Smart-How to Take Care of the Environment’ by Leslie Garrett. It pretty much covered what I thought we might need to cover in order for the kids to be able to play the games we planned. Here are a couple of other titles that I found that were good for various reasons:

Each Living Thing by Joanne Ryder
A Cool Drink of Water (a National Geographic book) by Barbara Kerley
The Great Kapok Tree-A Tale of the Amazon Rain Forest by Lynne Cherry

After we read the story we divided the kids into 2 groups & sent them on a scavenger hunt (Trash Hunt). For the week or 2 prior to the party I collected various items of trash to use in the Trash Hunt (milk cartons, granola bar wrappers, metal food cans, etc). We had come up with a few riddles for clues & then ran out of time so the kids were given a list of items (& how much of each they were to find) & then for bonus they had the 3 or 4 riddles we came up with to find the last few items.

After that (they had gathered all the items into a bag for each team) I had 5 boxes placed in the yard; one labeled Recyclable, another Reusable, another Compostable, another Household Hazardous Waste & the last Disposable Waste. These were set up for our Three R’s race or our Waste Race. I gave each team a stack of red stickers for one team & blue stickers for the other & each person took a turn taking an item out of their trash bag, labeling it with a team sticker & then they had to figure out which box it belonged in. There were some items that could go in a couple of boxes. Once they were done with all their items I was going to go through & count all the items that each team had placed correctly but we were running out of time so we went straight to the last activity which was to plant seeds.

I had collected egg cartons (I have a nephew that raises chickens & is always in need for more egg cartons) & bought a bag of dirt from Home Depot. I dumped the bag of dirt into a spot in the yard & placed the egg cartons around. The kids were given scoops to scoop some dirt into each egg cup in their egg carton (you can always cut the cartons in half too) & then had them choose the seeds they wanted to plant. I had a bunch of different packets of vegetable seeds & made a numbered list with the name of the vegetable, the amount of sun needed & how far apart they needed to be planted & made copies of these to put in the kids goody bags. Each packet of seeds had a number on it so that when the child chose that seed packet they would label the appropriate place on the carton with that number so that when they got home they would be able to remember what they had planted. We didn’t water the seeds but they were told to water them once they got home.

I also put together a little quiz for the parents & had a prize for the parent with the most right answers. People were amazed at some of the answers (like How many years does it take for glass to decompose in a landfill? 1,000,000 years, How many plastic bottles do Americans throw out every hour? 2.5 million bottles) I’m afraid I forgot where I got these from but they were online too.

Then it was time for snacks & cake☺ I had made cookies called Bird’s Nest Cookies using chow mein noodles & cornflakes & coconut for the nest part & candy covered pastel almonds for the eggs. It was really cute. People really liked them. I got the recipe from Barbara Beery’s Fairies recipe book (she has a series; a Princess cookbook, Mermaid Cookbook , a Fairies one & probably more but those are the ones I know about).

I ended up ordering the cake & cupcakes (my daughter wanted cupcakes). We got 2 dozen cupcakes (17 kids & about 10 adults) & a single layer round cake that the bakery did in an earth motif (I had to bring them an image so that they could copy it). There are actually recipes & tips on line for making a home made earth cake (Wilton has a ball shaped cake tin that is half of a sphere that you could use or they also have a 2 piece set each is half of a sphere & you could actually make the cake into the shape of a globe) but making & decorating the cake was too much stress for me so I chose to order it. We had blue & green sugar crystals & blue & green dolphin sprinkles for the cupcakes And the round cake was all blue with the motif of North & South America in green & the trim at the bottom was like waves of the ocean. We served home made ice cream with the cake also, which can easily be made well ahead of time if you have an ice cream maker!

For the goody bags I was blessed with the support of the surrounding communities. When I first started to explore ideas for a ‘Go Green’ kids birthday party I had a hard time coming up with games, ideas & resources so I emailed our local Waste Management company & city maintenance department. They were so supportive & quite impressed that my soon to be 7 year old daughter wanted a Go Green party. We got Watershed and Conserving Earth’s Resources activity books, pencil cases with pencils, ruler & eraser from the engineering department, & Frisbees made of recycled plastic. I also got flower seed packets, Kids Clif bars, bookmarks (embedded with seeds), & Planet Earth activity books for the boys & a bead kit for each of the girls. There are actually activity books available at the EPA website also that I was initially planning to print for each child but then we got the activity books. I bought reusable bags made from recycled plastic bottles from Trader Joe’s for $0.99 each also which were great because the kids could fit their bird feeders, cup of bird seeds & egg cartons of planted seeds into them. I also included a list of website resources if kids wanted to do or learn more about the environment.

I actually had some other back up activities if we ran out of things to do but it was actually hard to squeeze in all we did. But I had collected a bunch of shoe boxes (we also got some from our neighbors) & was planning to have the kids decorate them with glass vase fillers /acrylic jewels & glue dots to make treasure boxes. I had also found a recipe for a Luscious Layered Landfill (kind of like the dirt cups you make with pudding, oreo cookie crumbles, etc). Here is the web address I got it from (page 173-176 of the document): (http://www.epa.gov/epawaste/education/quest/pdfs/sections/u2_chap4.pdf)
This document is actually an Activities & Resources document for teachers K-8 (Quest for Less) which is where I refined our ideas for the party activities.

I don’t usually spend this much time on typing these things but I had a hard time figuring out what to do & thought it would be nice for anyone else who might need ideas to have some place to start. I’ve used this website for many of my previous parties & thought I should contribute at least once!]]> Nancy Chung Gill Green Birthday Party Ideas Tue, 06 Apr 2010 20:59:32 -0400 http://www.echoage.com/forum/read.php?5,181,181#msg-181 http://www.echoage.com/forum/read.php?5,181,181#msg-181 With Green Planet Parties!


Green Planet Parties is an online store, offering options for families looking to host more sustainable parties and events with biodegradable & compostable tableware, hip & reusable party decorations, and fun & sustainable loot bags & gifts.

Green Planet Parties is here to provide fun and eco-friendly alternatives to the typical birthday party experience which invariably ends the same way; plastic forks, styrofoam cups, virgin fibre paper plates and napkins, along with single-use decorations into green plastic garbage bags, followed by junky party favours that were made neither locally nor with sustainability in mind.

Why is Green Planet Parties such a hot topic among moms and party planners? You can:

* Eschew commercial and licensed plastic toys for these party give-aways and gifts that are sourced as locally as possible, and are packed with good-old-fashioned age appropriate imagination, and fun.

* Forgo the typical plastic land-fill destined party decorations at the store and opt for locally handmade banners and tablecloths that can be used to make any day special.

* Go easy on the environment (and your time!) by ordering all your party supplies and goodie bags on-line and having them shipped directly to you

* Help educate and inspire your children and party guests on how we can make more environmentally friendly choices in our everyday lives – how simple it can be. When biodegradable / compostable tableware is purchased, Green Planet Parties provides tent cards for your party table that educates guests about the green choices their host has made. An oxo-degradable garbage bag is included complimentary with all tableware purchases, and a reusable Ecobag for produce at the grocery store is also included with each ‘Party in a Bag’ .

* Check out their page of tips for holding a more sustainable birthday party at http://www.greenplanetparties.com/pages/EcoPartyTips.htm

Reusable & hip party decorations, better environmental choices for disposable tableware, and a great selection of loot bag items, reusable loot bags & gift ideas await at www.greenplanetparties.com. Now go do the green thing!

Thanks!
Suzanne & Suzanne
Co-founders, Green Planet Parties]]> Suzanne Corrin Green Birthday Party Ideas Tue, 06 Apr 2010 20:52:42 -0400 http://www.echoage.com/forum/read.php?5,130,130#msg-130 http://www.echoage.com/forum/read.php?5,130,130#msg-130 Kids Konserve Has Parties in the Bag!



Planning an event can be fun and dreadful at the same time. A party is a wonderful way to celebrate your daughter's/son's birthday or a special holiday event (Valentine's Day, Halloween, Christmas, etc.). However, all the waste that it can create can be overwhelming.

I remember those birthday parties that I would just buy the disposable plates, cups, silverware, and napkins so I didn't have to do any clean-up! I just tossed out the disposable goods into the large plastic kitchen bag and tossed it into the garbage can, even having to jump on it to fit it all in. Never did I think about the afterlife at the ever growing landfill.

Imagine the mounds of landfill waste created by a classroom of 25 students having 4 holiday classroom parties and an average of 6 student birthday celebrations per school year. This would amount to upwards of 250 paper plates, cups and disposable cutlery in a single school year. Multiply this by an average school with 400 students and 16 classrooms and you arrive at an astonishing 4000 paper plates, cups, plastic forks, spoons and knives being tossed into our ever growing landfills. Now you do not have to sign up anymore to buy and bring paper products for the classroom party or for your child's birthday party.

Our new Party Pak takes the waste out of our parties. It is perfect for birthday parties, classroom parties, picnics, holiday parties, and block parties. Waste-free events are a great way to show your commitment to the environment, but also model waste-free for your guests. So, this year, have a birthday party that's easier on the planet, and still have a ton of fun!

Kids Konserve has parties in the bag! Perfect for the classroom or at home.

25 - 7" recycled plastic plates
25 - 16 ounce recycled plastic cups
25 - sets of recycled plastic forks, knives and spoons
Organized neatly inside 3 cotton drawstring bags. All made entirely from 100% BPA and phalate free, recycled #5 plastic. Think old yogurt and cottage cheese containers. In addition, they are manufactured in USA! The ultimate in REUSE!!!

To receive 10% off enter coupon code: echoage]]> Christy Aune Green Birthday Party Ideas Tue, 06 Apr 2010 21:01:05 -0400 http://www.echoage.com/forum/read.php?5,116,116#msg-116 http://www.echoage.com/forum/read.php?5,116,116#msg-116 1. bead or candy necklaces
2. a picture frame painted by your child
3. painted pottery
4. cookie decorated by the child

Alternatively, if we must send something home with each child, I like to send them home with something that they have used at the birthday party or that is home made and will not create garbage:
1. a ball that was part of the party activity
2. home made rice crispie square on a stick (like a lollipop)]]> Lee Mendelsohn-LiVolsi Green Birthday Party Ideas Fri, 13 Mar 2009 05:14:29 -0400 http://www.echoage.com/forum/read.php?5,115,115#msg-115 http://www.echoage.com/forum/read.php?5,115,115#msg-115 Lee Mendelsohn-LiVolsi Green Birthday Party Ideas Mon, 28 Sep 2009 15:47:05 -0400 http://www.echoage.com/forum/read.php?5,81,81#msg-81 http://www.echoage.com/forum/read.php?5,81,81#msg-81
For goody bags, we gave away the book "It's Earth Day" in a reusuable grocery bag from our local grocers. It ended up being cheaper than the expensive and lead infested toys and will be used more I am sure!

This year, we will return to our local park. I have just ordered the book "Ecoart!" and plan to have a couple of environmental related craft projects at her party. The goody bag will be replaced by the guests taking home their projects.]]> Kimberly Stapleton Green Birthday Party Ideas Mon, 28 Sep 2009 15:52:55 -0400 http://www.echoage.com/forum/read.php?5,76,76#msg-76 http://www.echoage.com/forum/read.php?5,76,76#msg-76
My friend copied sections of her arts and crafts book, and included the supplies to make paper animals etc. in her son's party bags.

Not a plastic toy in sight!]]> Janice Milnerwood Green Birthday Party Ideas Fri, 11 Sep 2009 09:15:23 -0400 http://www.echoage.com/forum/read.php?5,25,25#msg-25 http://www.echoage.com/forum/read.php?5,25,25#msg-25 Bake it, don’t fake it.
From scratch, or a mix, bake your own organic cupcakes and make your own icing. First of all, you can’t imagine how much easier it is to simply hand out cupcakes to everyone rather than the chaotic minutes where you have to cut and serve a cake. I won’t preach here about the avoidance of fake stuff and adopting “cleaner” food – oops, did I just do that? This is also a great opportunity to involve your kids in preparation - if they are old enough, they will take great pride in it.]]> lisa borden Green Birthday Party Ideas Wed, 15 Oct 2008 19:32:17 -0400