Inside Sonoma

In the skin-care market, there are hundreds of products that bill themselves as “natural” and “eco-friendly,” and only a handful of products that actually are.
One of the good guys: Sumbody, a line of products created right here in Sonoma County.
The company is the brainchild of Sebastopol resident Deborah Burnes, who started the company by making [...]

If you think all concretes are created equal, think again.
One concrete option is markedly greener than the rest: CleanCrete, formerly known as Ekocrete. The ready-mix concrete is comprised of up to 85 percent recycled materials, and Cazadero-based Austin Creek Materials is the only Sonoma County materials supplier to provide and sell the product.
The company, with [...]

Wood and other building materials get second (and third or fourth or fifth) life thanks to Petaluma vendor Heritage Salvage.
Located at 1473 Petaluma Blvd., S., next to the Petaluma River, the business specializes in reclaiming, repurposing and reusing wood and building materials from existing structures. The facility boasts has about 400,000 board feet of wood [...]

Sonoma County residents who prefer to shop at independently owned home improvement stores have another reason to spend their dough at Friedman’s: the three-store local chain employs a “Greener Choice Coordinator” to help customers go green.
The coordinator, Rebecca Bautista, works out of the Santa Rosa store but spends time in the chain’s Sonoma store as [...]

Sonoma garden lovers frequently thank Audubon Canyon Ranch for Glen Ellen’s Bouverie Preserve, one of the most beautiful conservation areas in the entire county. Now it seems that ACR is spreading the knowledge, teaching a handful of Sonoma Valley High School students how to restore eight acres of oak woodlands.
The initiative is part of a [...]

There are two wonderful benefits to all of the rain we’ve been having in Sonoma County over the last few weeks: a swollen Lake Sonoma and an early mustard season.
The first has been news for two weeks or so. As reported in the Press-Democrat, Independent-Journal and even the San Francisco Chronicle, Lake Sonoma was at [...]