Porcelained out? Carve your niche with an alternative sink for soaking up greener materials like certified teak, bamboo, recycled metal and glass and friendly painted ceramics. You can even experiment with poured concrete with 50% recycled fly ash, as seen in the striking orange basin by Jeremy Levine Design.

Here is a handful of other options we rounded up:

From William Garvey’s Fusion Line of handmade sinks from certified teak grown in the mixed deciduous forests of South Asia.

Spotted at the Story Hotel in Stockholm, these decorative ceramic bowls make brilliant bathroom basins.

Recycled aluminum and brass vessel sinks from ECO round out the eco bath and are paired well with a bamboo plywood or stone tile counter top.

Handblown recycled glass emerges as sensuous craft for the bath with the clear tortoise trim Classic design (above) and Ocean shell (below) from Bear Creek Glass.

Main Image: Jeremy Levine Design

My old college bud, Kenny Scharf, is arguably the original green artist – a brilliant guy from L.A. who began his career nabbing trash from the streets of Manhattan and embellishing old appliances with his phantasmagorical, Fifties-inspired, squiggly creatures and symbols.

Working alongside East Village graffiti muralists like Keith Haring and Jean Michel Basquiat, his uproariously spacey icons were quickly embraced by Andy Warhol and other enthusiasts with clout. He quickly rose to the ranks of artist superstar.

Scharf  conveyed his erumpent celeb status to me when I caught up with him back in 1984. I was covering festivals and parades during my first big break as a TV reporter in Central Pennsylvania.

“I’m really big now, Luanne,” he informed me. “I mean really big.”

Oh, yeah? Well, I just downed my 10th funnel cake at another Keystone country shindig, so there!

A few decades later, the prolific, globally-acclaimed pop star is still doing what he does best: painting, scavenging beaches for trash for his sculptures, performing at his recycled Brooklyn live-work space and enjoying the fanfare of a new retrospective book, Kenny Scharf by Rizzoli.

Oh, and another thing he’s still doing – riding his bike instead of driving whenever possible. It’s been his favorite mode of transport for the past 30 years. In fact, he was riding with cell in ear when I caught up with him, yet again, huffing only so slightly. Quite admirable for 51.

“I ride my bike everywhere,” he says. “I live in Brooklyn and ride over the bridge and back, sometimes twice a day. Why drive a few blocks when you can walk or ride?”

His biking is admirable not only for cutting fuel emissions, but also for keeping him as fit as the new crop of young artists who form his entourage in New York. They include Daniel Heidkamp, who encouraged Scharf to lend his magic to one of the many empty commercial storefronts hit by the recession.

Landlords have been luring in artists to keep up appearances in the darkened spaces with that edgy, gallery feel. According to the New York Times, the goal is to deter crime while attracting tenants who can afford the rent. Scharf agreed to be part of a group show in one of these pop-up galleries, finding it exciting to be part of the scene.

“I said I didn’t have work I could donate, but I could do something directly on the wall like a spray painting,” he told me. “I will do that pretty much anywhere. So I did my spray painting and there was a photographer and a reporter from the New York Times waiting for me there.”

The unexpected coverage boosted the opening of the show, entitled ‘Too Big to Fail: Big Paintings’.

“I went and it was nice, like a bunch of 20-something artists,” he says. “I liked the work and to be part of the youngsters [scene].”

I assured him he’s still a youngster, too. After all, I still sense a wide-eyed wonder in his current work that merges organic earth elements with sensual, knobby creatures in the perspective of a damaged Cable Guy way over-exposed to TV Land stimuli. The familiarity of his fantasies make us laugh as we drink in the irony and nostalgia.

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Today, the high-energy Scharf divides his time between homes in Brazil and NYC.

He enjoyed a recent show of his paintings (above) and sculptures at the Honor Fraser Gallery in Venice, Ca. At home in Brooklyn, he lives in a basement studio called the Cosmic Cavern A-Go-Go, which moonlights as a psychedelic nightclub for parties and performance art.

“I have been working with garbage and refuse for all these years, and the Cavern is made out of found objects from the street that I pull in and decorate,” he explains.

The Cavern attracts a following of young visionaries (like the space Cadette with Kenny, below) eager to talk trash with the painter and celebrate his lighthearted sensibilities.

“We have actual performances when the music stops playing,” Scharf tells me about the club. “People appear as art objects and they go all out. It’s about being inclusive and everyone being allowed to be a part of it.”

The lucky patrons who come unadulterated get a quick Scharfian make-over.

“I just paint their faces,” he says. “Then they sweat it off dancing.”

Guess we can’t really call that sustainable craft, but the artist himself is enduring longer than most of his peers, many of whom passed on years ago from AIDS (like Haring).

“I miss my dead friends very much, but I’m used to not having them around,” Scharf says.

Instead, he surrounds himself with their art (he used to trade his for theirs) and his golden memories, while forging ahead in a brave, new and green world. A world where the resourceful painter is as much at home in Orbit City as George Jetson.

“I’ve been an eco-artist for a long time,” he tells me. “Though I’m not some puritan. I use spray paint; I take airplanes; I make sculptures out of resin when I need to, but I’m very conscious of it.”

I believe you, Kenny. You are really big and you are really conscious. Anyway, it’s not easy to spray paint with vegetable dye and ride a bike to Brazil. But if you could, you would.

Main Image: New York Times

Image One: Kenny Scharf

Image Two: RizzoliUsa

Image Three: Honor Fraser Gallery

Images Three, Four, Five : Kenny Scharf

There’s a sad sight. After they’ve lugged your belongings from one corner of the world to the other and obviously won’t last another mile, the final stop for your careworn companions is the trash. There’s no alternative. It’s a fact.

Nonsense, says the team at Junktion!

If you’re keen to make your life a trashless one (particularly on Tuesdays), there are many ways to upcycle your garbage – but there’s a limit, surely? There are some items that you can’t do anything with – like empty gas bottles…?

No trying this at home, please. Junktion are professionals and know how to get into gas bottles safely!

Based in Tel Aviv and founded in 2008, this upcycled design company is interested in all the everyday things folk leave behind (rather like the Wombles, then). They’re keen to challenge our concept of “junk”, and they think there’s quite enough stuff in the world already for their creative purposes.

A car trunk door becomes a sofa. A chopper bicycle reforms itself, Transformers-style, into a stool. Metal piping becomes a classy-looking towel rail.

And if it’s attention-grabbing decor you’re after, how about this industrial-style octopus of a lamp, made from a metal cooking pot writhing with swarms of illuminated teapots? Or desklights make of bakelite-style phones?

Junktion trades out of their shop in Tel Aviv, asking locals to supply them with the raw materials. If they opened near you, would you be a regular customer?

Images: Junktion (via Haute*Nature) and Phineas H.

The people in my neighborhood really get into Halloween whether they’ve got their own little ghouls and goblins or not, proving the most fun night of the year is for the kid in all of us. You know, that kid who is addicted to Halloween chocolate!

I’m big on using decor to lift my spirits each fall, ideally with the surfeit of tools and supplies stashed in my green storage bins rather than ready-made plastic junk on the shelves of stores.

I found inspiration in Etsy’s Voter Page for the best Handmade Halloween items, from spooky bloodshot eyes (which get my vote) to crocheted spiders and DIY costumes. Go to the site and place your vote.

Here’s a look at some of the amazing crafts whipped up in kitchens across America:

Mister Skully Hand Carved Stamps by Tresijas

These cool articulating jaw motifs were made into stamps (salvaged manzanita, foam and rubber) that you can use to create Halloween art for your windows, doors or other creepy places.

Lost Zombie Brooch by CityroadFelt

“I made him using felt from a lovely stripey sweater, along with bits of wool blend felt, & beads & thread – designed by my partner, who is much more into zombies and such things than I – I think he’s quite proud of the end product, too!”

Crocheted Spider Web by Spacestitch

Like the spider web but want to make it yourself? But of course! See the Spider Web Crochet Pattern here.

Gaggle of Spooky  Ghosts Prints by Luminous Dreams Designs

“The ghost was hand drawn, inked then scanned where he was given different grungy digital backgrounds,” explains the artist.

Upcycled Pumpkin Hat by Imogens Garden

“I raided my son’s clean laundry pile to construct this hat from a recently outgrown thermal shirt,” explains the maker. “The flower is created from scraps from my studio, and the button embellishment came from the shirt. No more thermal shirts = a one of a kind garment.”

Main Image: Work of Whimsy

Welcome to The September Issue, a frockumentary chronicling the genius behind the fattest ever edition of Vogue, weighing in at over four pounds, reaching 13 million readers and boosting the sinking morale of the $300-billion global fashion industry.

I don’t know about you but I don’t like my documentaries contrived any more than my fashion. Albeit entertaining, this one by R.J. Cutler smacks of high level spin and pretense.

Adding to the “entertainment value” was an art-versus-bottom dollar subplot pitting the painfully bored Vogue chief Anna Wintour against brilliant, model-turned-photo stylist Grace Coddington, both British veterans who have been with the magazine for more than 20 years.

Coddington makes a statement with her unkempt orange mane and naked, aging face, an appearance which defies everything that lets Vogue survive, namely stick-figured, cover-girl celebs with flawless airbrushed faces who are posed like Barbies in lay-outs specifically engineered to sell fashion.

True, it’s always been about the sales, but four pounds of retail pitching might be overkill.

Coddington cringes throughout the film as she battles her nemesis Wintour. We the audience tend to root for the vulnerable underdog in the power struggle as the boss eliminates various elements of Coddington’s romantic fashion spreads at her whim – images labored over with great attention to lighting and detail to add depth to the 2007 September book.

One comes away with little empathy for the emaciated Wintour, who, so taken with herself as a removed icon, keeps her trademark goggles on while observing the indoor runway shows. Guess she figures she has seen it all so missing a few nuances of color and texture shouldn’t be a big deal. Her vacant expression dares the wizards behind the curtain to try and impress her.

If Coddington is the magazine’s soul, Wintour emerges the cold-blooded business brain going through the tedious motions but never really responding to her vibrant environment. Never mind that hundreds of talented, unemployed journalists are waiting in the wings for that chance-of-a-lifetime job monopolized by Wintour for two decades.

Appearing even more bored that the overblown caricature portrayed brilliantly by Meryl Streep in Prada, Wintour seems desperate to pad Vogue and her paycheck at any cost – even resurrecting fur on the cover in the 90s to save the dying trade.

A longtime Peta target for her Cruella Deville attraction to pelts, Wintour is pompous in her disregard for the mission of animal rights groups who have fought hard to sensitize humans to animal cruelty and the absurdity of slaughtering  for fashion’s sake alone. Recently, she told Sixty Minutes she needed to get security to protect her from anti-fur militants. She insisted she likes fur and that is the only reason she wears it. Right.

I find the most staged scene in the film is Vogue’s annual meeting in Paris with the movers and shakers of the retail world, such as the head of Neiman Marcus, who nudges Wintour to wield her influence to get couture houses to speed up delivery of gowns to an ever-increasing and demanding clientele. Hogwash! There was no increasing demand for $15,000 gowns even prior to the recession, and the only demanding clientele is the celebrity stylist crowd that manipulates its clout to borrow treasures for a day.

The only message I came away with is that it might be time for Wintour to hang up her Warhol wig, glasses and venti Starbucks paper cup and give someone else a shot at salvaging her doomed fashion rag. Perhaps it should be someone like Grace, who embodies her name while clinging to what matters most to fashion visionaries and fans – the process of creating and wearing desirable, three-dimensional art.

No one annoys me more than a constant quoter of clichés. Especially irksome is the motivational kind of cliché – overused, inane and just plain tired.

When I’m in the midst of something challenging (good or bad), the last thing I need or want to hear is “when the going gets tough…” or “when this is over you’ll look back and be grateful for it…” Um, I’m going to be sick now.

What is more likely to move me in those moments is actually much simpler than a silly statement. Something like a smile, a hug or just a pretty picture might provide me with the necessary attitude adjustment.

The Alternative Motivational Posters by Right Brain Terrain are the perfect pretty picture. Subtle, stylish, smart…without the ego. They aren’t attempting to be the answer, but rather help guide us through and toward our own answer.

According to the company website, the posters “…serve as subtle reminders of our imperfect nature or of our personal victories. They can be our cheerleaders on good days and our coaches on bad ones. They are positive decorations for our occasionally monotonous lives.”

Printed on 100% post-consumer recycled, FSC-certified and chlorine-free papers, Right Brain Terrain is doing its part to go green. They use vegetable based inks and ship the posters in tubes made from 70-100% post consumer recycled content.

My favorites are Give…, Integrity, ___ the Planet (image top) and Peace. All Alternative Motivational Posters measure 18” W x 24” H and are available for $14.95 plus $6.95 shipping at Right Brain Terrain.

If we can swap party dresses and soccer shoes, why not club chairs, throw pillows and framed art prints, too?

You can probably convince a designer friend to work for food, trading services for a veggie burger and a smile. Even IKEA organized a swap at its Amsterdam store in February, advertising the husselmarkt as a way to get customers to think like designers by exploring the rearranging of vignettes in their own homes. Up to 250 people were invited to bring in unwanted pieces to shuffle around and swap.

Swapping and trading is a good alternative to shopping Craigslist for purveyors of bargain furniture and accents. When you shop Luanne’s list or Sara’s list, you can get it for free.

Here are 10 ways to freshen and color your space without spending a dime:

1. Hold an art swap in your backyard inviting friends to bring framed prints or unimportant paintings they no longer enjoy. Serve lots of wine so that everything looks extremely enticing and you leave the party feeling you plucked something great from the treasure chest.

2. See if you have a designer friend who will work for food. Offer to make him or her lunch or dinner for a design consultation. What do you say, Orlando? You do my dining room and I cook you an omelet. Deal? Things are so slow – designer buddies might take you up on it. If you need the designer to return for more free advice, offer a massage!

3. Form a design crew with your circle of friends and travel to each other’s homes to help with a quick-fix makeover. Often, simply rearranging the furniture can make a huge difference. Let’s face it; some of our friends just don’t have the talent but still desire a cool pad. It’s also a way to get a small room painted. Call it Extreme Makeover – the economic collapse home edition.

4. Pillow Talk: Changing out pillows is an easy way to make a big difference in reviving a sofa or bed. Flickrstream photos of pillows you no longer love and get friends to do the same thing. Hopefully, the bed pillows won’t tell tales.

5. Have a Father’s Day garden party for actually gardening, not just firing the BBQ and watching grandpa rock and sip bourbon. Turn on some lively tunes and get down to that urban gardening. Replant those pots and flower beds. Maybe someone has a bird house or feeder they don’t want that would attract feathered friends to your garden.

6. Roll out a fabric free-for-all with rolls of extra upholstery fabric from your past projects. I have several I’d be happy to part with that might be useful to someone. And I know my friend, Susanne, has some spare Ikat I wouldn’t mind using to cover a bench.

7. Pass on kids’ furniture that your little ones have outgrown. There is nothing like getting a used rocker or desk set that your child will view as special and new. It’s absurd to have to buy a lot of furnishings for children’s rooms when so many of our friends also have children and can share the wealth ““ especially pieces that aren’t marred with permanent marker graffiti or dented from raucous play.

8. Media rooms are simply spare spaces with televisions and lots of good DVD’s. But we all know they get pretty tired. Have a Hollywood night and let everyone bring movies they can’t watch again, no matter how sentimental the scene of George picking out a Cracker Jack ring for Audrey at Tiffany’s. I’ve even given away large-screen televisions to people who wanted them. Electronics are another good thing to swap. Anyone got an iPod for Sydney? I’ll give you a Hello Kitty CD player for it.

9. Register for serving items again (with your friends), after the divorce or when you have decided you never use that china in the spare closet or that giant salad bowl in the attic. Tell everyone what you need, and offer to swap with what you no longer want. I could use a can opener that actually opens the entire dog food can.

10. Call area hotels and department stores and find out if they have spare furniture they want to get rid of. You’d be surprised how much of their stuff is headed for the heap. I’d take anything from Hotel Vitale. You might be able to score a nice headboard or set of chairs. Say you will return the favor by telling all of your guests to stay there. Hospitality, indeed!

Image: Jeff Kubina

Art is an intensely personal experience. What whets your appetite might leave me longing for something slightly different. Or the piece I prize and display in my home could inspire in you nothing more than a really bad headache.

But something tells me that Tracy Melton’s Tree Ring Paintings will strike almost anyone’s fancy.

I like how the raw and natural elements sync perfectly with the modern and graphic in these little treasures. The colors are bold while the imperfect contours of the wood retain the earthy and natural.

Tracy Melton, a nature buff and full time artist from Knoxville Tennessee, creates his Tree Ring Paintings using reclaimed wood from dead Elm trees. He cuts pieces ranging from 3 to 8 inches in diameter and approximately 2 to 3 inches thick, then sands down and clear coats each piece, finishing with colorful acrylic paint.

The backs are hollowed out for hanging – group three or four together or cover an entire wall. Any set of 3 paintings, each measuring 5 inches or less in diameter, is $32.99. Sizes up to 8 inches in diameter run $52.99 for a set of 3.

Something about these paintings should strike your fancy, but see for yourself at Melton’s website and Etsy store.

Before you accuse me of being a tad too fond of a certain seat-like piece of furniture, let me explain. This chair isn’t exactly that, and although it looks and acts like one, I swear”¦it’s not really a chair.

At least I wouldn’t want to sit on it. Ouch.

Tokujin Yoshioka, the designer of Venus – natural crystal chair, probably doesn’t want me to, either. Rather, he’d like us to think about it – along with its relationship to technology, design and the power of nature.

As part of an exhibition in Japan that he directed, Yoshioka “grew” his Venus natural crystal chairs in large aquariums filled with a mineral solution and the vibrations of classical music that he played directly into the tanks.

Natural yet manipulated by music and man, Venus “”¦makes its appearance over time as if the goddess herself gradually emerges from water. This [chair], which is formed using the laws of nature and embodies a beauty born of coincidence, pushes the boundaries of creativity.”

The words of the artist are as beautiful as his work. He definitely has me thinking – I hope he has you thinking too.

- via Inhabitat

Yoshioka is a 40-year old Japanese conceptual artist/designer extraordinaire who pushes the envelope of anything he gets his hands on. His installations have won awards. He has collaborated with big name designers. Newsweek selected him as one of “100 Japanese respected by the world”. See more of what he does at his website.

Poor little plates, unwanted, unloved and discarded. That is, until Daddy Warbucks, or rather Christopher Jagmin gets hold of them. Then the magic happens.

Jagmin finds his “orphans” at estate and garage sales and flea markets. Any shape, size or pattern will do. A complete “makeover” follows that involves cleaning, polishing and the application of a 24K gold decal. Then to the kiln for firing.

Intended as art objects rather than place settings for your next party (with older, found ceramic plates there’s no way to know how they were made), Trudy Recycled Plates ($29 each) are adorably different and one-of-a-kind.

I’d use them to serve my boyfriend’s favorite cupcakes, or for a display of 2 or 3 candles on the coffee table. I’m sure you could think of something creative to do with a recycled treasure like Trudy.

To order, contact Christopher Jagmin and specify what you’re looking for – he’ll do his best to meet your needs.