Smoother gum.  Beer bottles turned into glassware. Soda made from tap water in 30 seconds. These were some of the eco-friendly items featured at the third annual Green Products Expo, held Feb. 18 at the Marriott Marquis in Times Square.

The expo presented the creations of more than 60 companies, including Cuisinart, Bissell and Skoy, a California start-up that produces 100% biodegradable, machine-washable cleaning cloths.  From booths at the media-only event, company representatives demonstrated everything from kitchen cleaners to food and beauty products to water-saving faucets and toilets. Our reporters selected seven standout products for review.

– Peggy Truong

CERAMIC CLASS

Few people think about neuroscience when steaming broccoli or frying a turkey burger, but the founders of the ceramic cookware company Xtrema want cooks to make that connection. Their cookware is neuroscientist approved, thanks to the exclusion of potentially harmful heavy metals in the manufacturing process.

Rich Bergstrom, Xtrema founder and CEO, said that Ceramcor pots, pans, utensils and other cookware is the only 100 percent ceramic line.  While other brands might put a ceramic coating on cast iron or aluminum cookware, Bergstrom said, “That’s like putting a biodegradable wooden fence around a landfill and calling it a green non-toxic landfill.”

Because Xtrema cookware is made from inorganic natural materials, fewer fossil fuels are consumed in its manufacturing than its metal cookware equivalents, he said.  Food cooked in Xtrema pots is more healthful, Bergstrom noted, because heavy metals won’t leach into it.  In cast iron, Bergstrom said, foods pick up “iron that is not bio-available” – in other words, it can’t be digested and used by the body, and may harm organs.  Other heavy metals may exacerbate health problems and certain diseases like ADHD, he added.

The black cookware line has a sleek, smooth look and feel, and is less expensive than some high-end products. Le Creuset’s enameled cast-iron 3-quart sauce pan with lid lists for $222, whereas Xtrema’s 3-quart covered sauce pot sells for $99.99.  One possible hazard of Xtrema pots and pans:  They’re breakable.
– Megan Finnegan

A GREENER PICKER-UPPER

To all the sponges, washcloths and the dishrags out there: You’ve been warned. There’s a new player in the kitchen. And it’s green. Pink, blue, orange and purple, too.

“Just don’t call it a ShamWow,” product representative Michelle Lundqvist said of the Skoy cloth, a 100 percent biodegradable and natural cleaning cloth.

Consumer awareness about the environment has opened up a huge new market for earth-friendly cleaning products. With 2.5 million tons of traditional paper towels reaching landfills annually, many consumers are switching to less wasteful alternatives.

The cloth comes in colorful 7.75”-by-7” rectangular sponge-like pieces.  One Skoy cloth can outlast 15 rolls of paper towels, and the company boasts that it can absorb 15 times its weight in water.  A set of four cloths costs between $5.99 and 6.99 on Amazon.com. If you’re doing the math, four sheets represent 60 paper towel rolls worth of absorption.
– Jonathan Balthaser

RETURN TO (RE)SENDER

The virgin paper and toxic ink used to create greeting cards take a toll on planet earth. Regreet lets users recycle greeting cards by resending them.

Designed by Christie Eichers, regreet is a line of stylish labels and envelopes, decorated with simple green circles and a small frog. To make a used card new again, stick a signature label over the card’s old writing, write your own message, and send it off in a regreet envelope.

Eichers created regreet after sorting through stacks of old birthday cards that her dad received. Given the cost of each card, she felt bad stuffing them in a drawer or throwing them in the recycling bin. She wanted a creative way to reuse them. Eichers consulted a designer friend and regreet was born.

Regreet labels, envelopes, and notepaper are created with recycled materials and printed with soy ink. Each kit costs $12 and comes with labels and envelope for eight cards, which works out to $1.50 a card, making them cheaper than the average greeting card. Each label has a “journey code,” so customers can register the card on regreet’s website and track where it goes.

Regreet donates a portion of its earnings to a customer-selected nonprofit. “I wanted to do more than just recycle,” said Eichers. “I wanted to give back to the community.”
– Jessica Dailey

BUBBLING UP

The effect of soda on our environment and our health has been a longstanding concern of the green movement.  One company aims to make soda a little friendlier to the environment, more healthful and easier on the wallet.

Sodastream USA manufactures a variety of soda makers that send a blast of carbon dioxide into a canister of tap water to make seltzer. It also features a line of flavored syrups, which turn the carbonated water into soda.

The syrups are made with natural sugar. Diet mixes contain Splenda. The syrups come in flavors similar to most major soda brands, as well as an energy drink and sparkling water.

Photo: Liza Eckert

The soda maker has several different models, which range between $80 and $200. The carbon dioxide canisters, which are good for about 60 liters of soda, run $30 for a two-pack. Mixes are $5 a bottle and make 12 liters of soda.

Sodastream recycles the carbon dioxide containers that make your water fizzy. Consumers return the empty containers after ordering replacements. The company cleans and inspects them, then sends them out again.

The Sodastream system both lightens the load you carry home from the supermarket, and decreases the number of bottles and cans that end up in the trash.
–Bobby Melok

ECO-VILLAGE PEOPLE

Seventeen energy self-sufficient houses built on a half-acre of land, surrounded by nothing but nature. No, this isn’t Dharmaville of “Lost” fame. It is Katywil, a self-sustaining eco-village where, the founders say, people can live in peace. The brainchild of Bill Cole, the community is based in Colrain, Massachusetts, and named after Cole’s parents (Katherine and William). The houses have solar thermal roof panels that heat water, which is then pumped through the floors, “R-45” walls made out of recycled sheet rock and a window system that lets in passive solar heat.

Cole, who showed pictures of the houses and their floor plans at the expo, has sold four of the houses, two of which are now inhabited.

Cole developed a love for eco-friendly living in the 1960s after boarding with a couple that lived organically. Cole’s mother’s farm in Virginia also inspired Katywil.

Next summer, the community will plant its orchard and first organic garden. Eventually, Cole hopes to raise chicken as well as goats. But for now, Katywil is, as Cole puts it, only “ a vision of how life might be.”
– Jessica Courtemanche

SKINCARE – FOR A CHANGE

The Answer for Skin, a new skincare line, promises to help pre-menopausal women deal with their unique dermatological irregularities. Tired of hormonal acne, dry and oily patches and discoloration, Ellen Holder, 46, took things into her own hands when she developed The Answer for Skin: Peri-menopausal System.

Holder debuted the product line at the expo with her best friend and business partner, Carol Kelling. The Answer for Skin includes a balance lotion, detox spot treatment, cleanser and facemask, which average about $24.95 a piece. A starter kit is available at carenonline.com for $26.95.

Holder and Kelling launched carenonline.com four years ago because they were unsatisfied with the quality of organic beauty products at Whole Foods and other vendors, and wanted to provide brands they had tested and approved for women like them.

“You’ll see things that have been slightly green washed – they’ve added the botanicals in there as well and a lot of cheaper ingredients,” Kelling said of treatments that don’t live up to the promises on their labels. The Answer includes Moroccan Argan oil blended with pure detoxifying botanicals.

“We’re really picky about what we carry,” said Kelling.
– Eugenia Miranda

FIT TO A (RAIN) TEE

Beth Doane has carved out her own niche in the green movement. Her tee shirt line, Rain Tees, features illustrations drawn by children in Central and South America.  Doane’s young artists draw what they see: bright toucans and macaws, soaring trees and sweeping rivers. Rain Tees debuted at Mercedes Benz Fashion Week last year.

A tag on each shirt catalogs the story behind the illustration, the name of the artist, and the country where the child lives. The eco-friendly handmade organic cotton t-shirts run from $25-$38. Proceeds garnered from each shirt benefit the children who designed them. Rain Tees sponsors artists whose work is chosen for the designs, allowing them free education at a school in their respective home countries.

Doane’s employees, based outside the Peruvian Amazon and in downtown Los Angeles, are paid 15-25 percent above the average wage, she said.

Portions of the profit also go toward preserving Costa Rica’s threatened rain forest:  Every Rain Tee bought guarantees a new tree planted in conjunction with the non-profit Kids Saving the Rain Forest program.
– Alex Abad-Santos

Five dollars a week.

That’s what Fort Greene resident Nia Hoyte pays so that her three-year-old son, Kaiden Neith, can learn to read. These days, although he’s not old enough to understand all of the words, Kaiden’s a bit of a bookworm.

“Every day he comes home he’s like, ‘Mommy, read, read, read,’” Ms. Hoyte said last Tuesday morning after dropping her son off at Duffield Children’s Center on Fleet Place, a 15-minute walk from their apartment. “We read on the bus, we read on the train.”

Duffield, which is run by the Brooklyn Bureau of Community Service (BBCS), is a publicly funded day care center serving a number of children from nearby public housing developments and lower income families. Duffield also is one of two centers in Fort Greene that might have to close if a proposal to shutter 15 care centers in gentrifying areas citywide goes through.

To the city, the leases for some of the centers — the list of which also includes Farragut Day Care Center on Gold Street — are draining money from a tight budget. Located in neighborhoods where real estate values are rising, the spaces themselves are no longer affordable.

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Composer Arthur Kampela isn’t afraid to make musicians work – especially if they’re master players in the New York Philharmonic.

“They are practicing their a–es off right now,” he said recently, over Sri Lankan tea in his Harlem apartment.

The 20 Philharmonic musicians premiering Kampela’s “MACUNAIMA,” on Dec. 17 a Symphony Space, are grappling with his 70-page score, which demands they shake maracas, stand up and walk off stage, and beat their priceless instruments like congas.

Cello With Chopsticks

The composer’s work takes advantage of “extended technique,” where musicians use their classical acoustic instruments in unorthodox ways. Play a cello with a chopstick. Use your violin as a drum. Stick your hand inside the grand piano. Kampela himself plays the viola, but held at his chest facing out, as if it’s a guitar – another instrument he’s mastered.

“I saw the score while he was working on it, and I told him no classical flutist is going to do this,” said his colleague Margaret Lancaster, a flutist who specializes in new music.

Kampela begrudgingly changed part of the work, but it’s still “very, very challenging,” said Lancaster.

The 49-year old Brazilian has been a fixture on the new music scene in New York since the early 1990s, when he began graduate work at the Manhattan School of Music.

Arthur’s Wonderwall

Kampela, who wrote his first work at the age of 12, went on to earn a doctorate in composition from Columbia University, and currently teaches both there and at NYU.

The inspiration for “MACUNAIMA” came from the wall of percussion instruments that line his living room. Percussionists, Kampela said, are natural practitioners of extended technique.

“When you have a percussionist in an orchestra, you say play the zipper and he plays the zipper. He plays the drums, but then he can play this book,” Kampela said grabbing a book and rifling through its pages, eliciting a muffled flopping.
Some of the musicians who are performing his work are struggling with his ideas, or just baffled.

“I’ve been receiving emails, ‘Arthur, bar 61 – do you really mean really that?’ And I say yes, and they ask me how, and I tell them, and they say, ‘Oh my God,’ and so on,” he said, not entirely displeased.

Beat Goes On

Kampela, who has moved on to working on a new piece commissioned by the Koussevitsky Foundation, has no patience for naysayers.

“I’m still waiting to get famous, like Bebel Gilberto,” he said, referring to another New York-based Brazilian musician. “Her albums sell so many copies.”

But faced with the suggestion that he might have to make pop records, he’s emphatic.

“Then forget it!”

To many subway clerks across the city, Michael Ring is a familiar face – but not because he’s a frequent rider.

The Park Slope dad and marathon runner hardly rides the train at all these days. Ring, 46, descends underground to hunt for MetroCards.

Commuters reportedly are expected to leave more than $53 million on expired MetroCards in 2009. Over the past year, Ring boasts he’s picked up more than $900 in MetroCards that were either lost or discarded. The hobby – or compulsion, as some see it – started about a decade ago when MetroCards began replacing tokens.

A 19-time marathon runner, Ring’s latest training routes take him in and out of subway stations. On a good day, he not only gets in his stair training, but also his daily dose of MetroCard hunting.

Before heading out on one such adventure, Ring described his unique strategy for finding cards citywide:

Combining cards, he said, is the easiest way to make a quick buck from commuters’ MetroCard castoffs. As long as the clerks are cooperative, it’s an easy procedure Ring said:

But the highest value MetroCards aren’t typically found in the subways. The further Ring travels from the city’s subway and bus stops, the better the odds for scoring a high-value find, he notes:

Supermarkets, movie theaters and tourist attractions are just some of the places Ring has stuck MetroCard gold – once finding a $47 card.

But karma works both ways, said Ring, who doesn’t hesitate to give a MetroCard swipe to a straphanger in need. He will even return the occasional monthly card he finds back to the TA, so the original owner can be refunded.

Ring loves the sport of MetroCard speculating. Still, the hobby isn’t always appropriate, he concedes. Ring resists what has become second nature to him when he has his 9-year-old twins in tow:

When Ring isn’t scouring the city for lost treasure, the licensed sightseeing guide volunteers at the office of tourism at Brooklyn Borough Hall. He also works part-time training local teachers to use computer software. But until he gets back to working five days a week, Ring says he’ll keep picking up MetroCards.

“Right now I have too many MetroCards,” said Ring, whose current collection is worth close to $300. “But eventually, I’ll start using them up.”

During his re-election campaign, Mayor Bloomberg said he wanted to make parking easier by introducing new technologies, like text message updates for expiring meters and GPS-based tracking of vacant spaces.

Community advocates and some merchants say they would be happy if the city simply brings a relatively low-tech parking upgrade to Myrtle Avenue: Muni Meters.

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For the past few weeks, hope that a health care provider would save Jamaica’s 108-year-old Mary Immaculate Hospital seemed to fade with each IV pole, stretcher and stack of office paper loaded into moving vans.

The Oct. 15 sale of Mary Immaculate Hospital, along with St. John’s Queens Hospital, to a developer appeared to be the end of the line for the two medical centers.

Brooklyn-based firm J. Guttman Realty purchased the hospitals at auction for $26.63 million. The hospitals shut last February after their owner, Caritas Healthcare, Inc., filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

After the auction, the Guttman firm announced it plans to use Mary Immaculate for office space, educational and religious facilities.

That came as sad news to many in the neighborhood. Southeast Queens currently has the lowest ratio of doctors to patients in the borough, with 48 primary care doctors per 100,000 people. North of the area, there are 132 doctors per 100,000 people.

“The people in downtown Jamaica and a lot of other people who have lost their jobs and are fending for themselves, they don’t have the ability to go to these other locations and seek doctors out,” said Eugenia Ruddman, president of Hollis Park Gardens Civic Association and member of SQUISH, or Southeast Queens in Support of Health Services, a coalition of community groups and residents formed when Mary Immaculate first faced the threat of closure.

Some 3,000 workers were laid off when the two hospitals closed, but a few stayed on to maintain the buildings until they were sold. The day of the sale, two of a handful of workers left at Mary Immaculate Hospital paused to reflect on the hospital, and the fate of the community they have worked in for over two decades.

“The California Fantasy Van,” covered in 5,000 pieces of brass and $15,000 in coins, has rolled into New York City.

The mobile piece of art is in town on a national tour promoting a new documentary about art cars and their eccentric creators called “Automorphosis.”

“The film is an exploration of people who have transformed their car into rolling pieces of art,” said Hunter Mann, driver of the “fantasy” van built over a 22-year period by his godfather Ernie Steingold.

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Rosa Martinez used to stroll to the local money transfer office in Corona every week to send $200 to her family in Cuenca, Ecuador.

She still goes to the Delgado Travel office, but not to send money. Instead, it is she who collects a little cash from those family members in Cuenca.

“My husband used to earn $140 a day working three, four days a week as a construction worker,” said Martinez, 48. “Now he gets $80 a day and works two, maximum three days a week.”

The economic downturn has battered the nation in recent months, but it also has deeply affected countries like Ecuador, where a recently improved standard of living has devolved with less money flowing from immigrants working in the U.S.

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The last place you might think to look for honeybees is on a rooftop in Brooklyn, but that’s exactly where they are. In Fort Greene to be exact. John Howe started keeping bees nine years ago and has been hooked ever since. Two beehives sit three stories up on the roof of his Fort Greene home, where he has lived for the past 31 years.

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The Yankees and the city Parks Department broke ground on the replacement Yankee Stadium in Summer, 2006.  Bulldozers scooped the brown dirt clods of the former Macombs Dam Park and piled it into large metal dump trucks, making way for the new ballpark.

Now the Bronx Bombers are playing in a new $1.5 billion stadium. Meanwhile, All Hallows Catholic High School, long a fixture of the diamonds in Macombs Dam Park, is still searching for a new place to call home.

‘Very Frustrating’

“When they built Citi Field in Flushing, they knocked Shea Stadium down before they threw the first pitch in Citi Field,” the Bronx school’s principal and baseball coach Sean Sullivan said.  “It’s very frustrating.  But we have to adapt, adjust and improvise.”

All Hallows used Macombs Dam Park as a home field for its baseball, soccer and track teams until the start of the stadium construction.  Now All Hallows’ baseball players are reluctant road warriors, playing their home games on opponents’ fields and holding practices in the school’s basement cafeteria.

Sullivan – and many other in the Bronx – want the city and the Yankees to make good on a promise to build a replacement park on the old stadium site.  “Shame on you,” he said.  “You took from my kids.  You haven’t backed your word as to what you were going to do to help the situation here.”

Delay of Game

Work on the new park was supposed to start last year.  It’s been put off until 2010, angering many Bronx residents, who rallied on April 18 amid the Yankees’ Opening Weekend.

A group of nearly 30 parked themselves in front of the old stadium, chanting “Broken promises!” as they shook their fists at the new ballpark.

“You know, we see a new palace here,” said Ramon Jimenez, a local Bronx activist and attorney.  “But the contrast of the palace and the way people live here is quite evident.”

“We got a raw deal,” said Bronx resident Manuel Rodriguez.  “And [the Yankees] need to make this right.”

Yankee officials did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

– Maya Pope-Chappell, Lois DeSocio, Alex Green IV, Nicholas C. Martinez and Rachel Senatore