Sustainable style news from EcoSalon’s West Coast Fashion Editor.

Modal T— There’s not much point to a t-shirt, environmentally-friendly or not, if it doesn’t hold its shape or last a long time. Jeff Denby, founder of San Francisco based PACT organic underwear, took his considered approach to making undies and applied it to the task of reinventing that other wardrobe essential, the t-shirt. Launching PACT shirts this month with a stellar line of tanks, V-necks, and crew-necks, the secret to Pact’s perfect tees is their proprietary blend of premium organic cotton and super-durable and soft modal. Not only are the subtle design details perfectly placed, but they’re perfectly pitched. For every PACT t-shirt purchased you’ll be making a positive impact on the world. This latest venture will continue PACT’S fundraising efforts to support over 150 artists with disabilities at Oakland’s Creative Growth Art Center.

Chez Borja — For most of us mixing wine with fashion results in taking home a little more fashion than we maybe intended. Luckily for us, Berkeley designer and knitwear extraordinaire, Cari Borja’s recent vacation to the Barolo wine region of Italy simply inspired her to make more gorgeous clothes. Joining her Chez Panisse tribute collection, inspired by her internship in the Chez Panisse kitchen, Borja added a second “pairing” collection of gowns and coats based on her favorite Italian wines to go with the main meal and dessert. Raise a toast to both collections this weekend at a dedicated pop-up store and reception for the designer at The Gardener store on Berkley’s Fourth Street.

Fashion Frenzy – Music and fashion together is always a collaboration worth checking out. Add to that some irresistible sketches of bears, boats and trees and you’ve got a super appealing fashion item to keep you cool all through California’s Indian summer and beyond. Los Angeles’ favorite green lifestyle brand, Alternative Apparel have enlisted A Fine Frenzy’s Alison Sudol to design three limited edition tees for the International Union for Conservation of Nature. Alternative will donate a portion of sales from each tee purchase to the IUCN, for which Alison serves as a goodwill ambassador. To kick off the partnership, catch Sudol at the line’s launch event at their flagship Venice store on August 20th.

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I first heard about Alejandro “Alex” Velez and Nikhil “Nik” Arora’s plan to grow mushrooms from coffee grounds about two years ago. At the time, I dismissed it as one of those ideas that sounds great as part of a green business contest for graduate students but that would probably get dropped as soon as the lucrative job offers came along.

And, for awhile, that’s essentially what happened. Nik and Alex did the MBA thing, interviewing for jobs in investment banking and consulting and securing offers from great firms. But fast forward a year: I’m meeting Alex in a dodgy parking lot under the freeway overpass in Emeryville to tour the warehouse of Back to the Roots Ventures, his and Nik’s start-up. He drives up in an old beat-up sedan and hops out in jeans and a plaid shirt … not exactly banker garb.

We head into the warehouse and Alex introduces me to their warehouse manager and a young intern who’s busily packing cardboard kits. “We came to a point where the mushroom thing was really taking off and Nik and I decided to go for it,” Alex explains. “We turned down our job offers and became farmers instead.”

Well, sort of. What started as a small agricultural business is now a booming consumer product business: Nik and Alex’s Grow-Your-Own Mushroom Garden, a do-it-yourself mushroom-growing kit, is currently sold at all Whole Foods around the country. It’s a pretty amazing trajectory for a business that started just over two years ago as a project in the boys’ fraternity kitchen, with a few buckets-full of coffee grounds and some mushroom seeds.

Both MBA students at Berkeley at the time, the two had shared a class focused on potential business uses for the world’s waste products, during which they learned about various uses for coffee grounds. For some reason Alex still can’t quite explain, he and Nik were drawn to the idea of growing mushrooms from the stuff. They began experimenting and eventually managed to grow oyster mushrooms. “We took them over to some people we know at Chez Panisse to have them try them and tell us whether they thought we had something, and they said wow, these are really good.”

That was their first stroke of good luck: Not every MBA student has connections at Chez Panisse. Buoyed by a thumbs-up from that venerable Berkeley slow food institution, the two took their next batch of product to the popular Berkeley Bowl market. “Then the guy at Berkeley Bowl introduced us to the regional buyer for Whole Foods and once they were interested we started to realize this could really become a business,” Alex later told me.

It may sound like a string of amazing coincidences, but it’s partially the pair’s passion for what they’re doing that has managed to get so many other folks on board so quickly. The Whole Foods buyer loved the idea of mushrooms grown from a waste product and soon had Nik and Alex supplying oyster mushrooms to all of the Bay Area’s Whole Foods, and participating in the market’s local producer loan program as well. The problem? It’s tough to make money in mushrooms unless you’re running a major agricultural operation, and the Back to the Roots guys weren’t really interested in that. That’s where the mushroom kit came in.

Packed with about a pound of coffee grounds plus the mushroom seeds, the Grow-Your-Own Mushroom Garden promises a pound of mushrooms within 10 days. All you have to do is spritz it regularly with the tiny water bottle enclosed in the kit, and keep it out of direct sun. The kit retails for $19.95 and is available at Whole Foods and through the company’s own website. To get coffee grounds they need, the two also inked a deal with Peets, which pays them to pick up over 10,000 pounds a week of grounds, and also sells the kits in some of its shops. Meanwhile, the spent mushroom substrate they’re left with after they make the kits turns out to be an excellent soil amendment, which they’re now selling as well.

Bouncing around aisle after aisle of mushroom kits, Alex is excitedly describing their journey, a tale punctuated often by segues like “Oh! And kids really love the kits, too, and any kid that sends us a photo of them with the kit, we send them a free kit.”

He’s so genuine it’s hard not to get swept up in the excitement, despite the fact that I’m cold and everything smells vaguely mildew-y. And the excitement continues at home, where I’m thrilled to find that even with my minimal gardening skills, the mushrooms were sprouting out of the kit on my counter in days. Sure, I forgot the spritzing half the time, but I still managed to get some nice shrooms out of it, and it’s hard not to feel pretty pleased with yourself when you’re harvesting mushrooms you grew from coffee grounds.

Follow Amy on Twitter @amywestervelt.

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Edith Heath first introduced us to her understated glazed pottery in the mid-forties with a one-woman show at San Francisco’s Palace of the Legion of Honor, where her unusual pieces were picked up for sale at Gump’s of San Francisco.

It was after that success that she opened her factory in Sausalito, Calif. dedicating the past half-century of her life to the craft of ceramics and the skill of the artisan.

This passion, along with the legacy of her work in stoneware clay body and glaze development, gives Heath its unique place in ceramics today as a modern classic in home decor. As a result of Edith’s timeless and unique design sense, many of her pieces live in the permanent collections of museums such as the MOMA in New York City.

The signature ceramics also live on in our homes as mid-century design enjoys a spirited revival among collectors, modern architects and green designers.

Heath Ceramics is the real McCoy when it comes to purity and sustainability with great uses for the vintage aesthetic, from skillfully pared-down cups and bowls for the tabletop to elegant field tiles for kitchen surfaces.

San Francisco designers like Jennifer Weiss are drawn to the minimal and modern lines of Heath.

Weiss commissioned white relief tiles to use as a range backsplash in a kitchen, adding warmth to an otherwise ultra-clean environment. “The iconic shapes are modern in the true sense of the word since the ceramics date back to the 50s,” says Weiss. “I wanted artwork to stand out in the room and this is part of the art.”

Aspiring to maintain the local craftsman traditions, husband and wife team Robin Petravic and Catherine Bailey bought the business in 2003. They set out to revitalize the handcrafted techniques while expanding the business to a new studio in Los Angeles last year.

The company holds open studios in both its Bay Area and L.A. locations, allowing visitors to tour the factory and kilns and see the large inventory of products produced by local craftsmen carrying on Heath’s legacy.

There is so much to see, from gorgeous field tiles in 80 glazes to organic cotton linens, design books, and of course the famous tableware that includes an understated Chez Panisse line – a collaboration between Alice Waters, Christina Kim and Heath Ceramics for use in famed restaurant.

Through its thriving To the Trade business, Heath also has customized serving dishes for Four Seasons Hotels worldwide and the Wynn Las Vegas Hotel.

In keeping up with green, the company also offers Kiln Shelves made from glazed and recycled kiln furniture to use for exterior walls and floor pavers.

Some of the new elegant and organic Heathware editions are the result of collaborations with designers like Christina Kim of Dosa, who helped craft the beautiful Phases of the Moon Tea Set inspired by Edith Heath’s hand-thrown California stoneware. Finished with a complex glaze, the tea cups come in sets of four with a tray and are offered in either dark or light glazes, representing phases of the moon observed by day as well as night.

The new owners also continue Edith Heath’s community outreach by holding sales events in which they donate a percentage of sales to Architecture for Humanity. You can find all news and events, including sales and open studio tours at the web site.

Also, check out the exhibit: Edith Heath: Tabletop Modernist May 31, 2009 – September 20, 2009, at the Pasadena Museum of California Art. The opening reception is on May 30.

Edith Heath

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