Home & Style

Going Green?

An environmentally-friendly builder misses with a party invitation

We get our fair share of confetti-laden invitations here at Washingtonian HQ, but here’s something we don’t see everyday: An invitation made of plastic. Clear plastic.

But that’s what just arrived in the mail from Sandy Spring Builders, a Bethesda-based homebuilder founded in 1982. The flashy six-by-six-inch plastic invite is lettered with blue writing and has an opaque green border. The postage: a cool $1.61.

So just what event entails this caliber of crafty PR genius? A Hollywood movie premiere, you ask? No. The opening of a fancy new restaurant by a Michelin-star-studded chef? Wrong again. It’s for the launch of the Bradley Green Home, Sandy Spring’s LEED-certified model home which, according to the invitation, offers “sustainable luxury in half the time”—a 6,300-square-foot ecofriendly home constructed in under 16 weeks.

Now correct us if we’re wrong, but last time we checked plastic wasn’t particularly biodegradable. So unless we recycle this (which we plan to), or unless it’s secretly made of the same magical material as Sweetgreen’s biodegradable “plastic” spoons, this tiny invitation would sit in a landfill for, oh, the next 100 years.

In the words of the wise sage Alanis Morissette: “Isn’t it . . . a little too ironic?”

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