Thinking about buying a new car? Perhaps your SUV gets 12 miles to the gallon? Or your 1985 Chevy won’t pass the emissions test? Consider this tidbit from Wired:
“Pound for pound, making a Prius contributes more carbon to the atmosphere than making a Hummer, largely due to the environmental cost of the 30 pounds of nickel in the hybrid’s battery.”
Once you pull up to the gas pump, on the other hand, it’s a whole other story.
You may have missed us over the last few weeks as vacation time rolled around and we really took advantage of it. To kick back off, I put together a few real life tips from our trip to the beach of little things that can help make your vacation just a little greener.
Properly maintaining your car can make a big difference, not just to your pocketbook but also to the air we breathe. And I now have the experience to prove it.
First, some stats. According to the UK National Atmospheric Emissions Inventory, a car throws out 2.84 ounces of pollutants per mile. Call it 3 ounces per mile, then drive 20 miles, and you’ve thrown 3 3/4 pounds of pollutants in the air. If you live in a good size city, estimate that there are at least 100,000 cars doing that every day. Pretty soon, it looks like we are grinding up a stadium and dispersing it every day.
This past week was probably the most diverse we’ve had yet in terms of topics covered.
Since the summer concert season is coming up, music was on my mind. I found three bands I like who actively minimize or offset the impact of their concerts. It didn’t take much time to find out about their efforts, so check out your favorite act before logging on to buy some tickets.
With spring and summer comes a long list of projects to complete around the house. Greenman wrote an entry with tips on a project to save energy and money while staying cooler with ceiling fans. We have them in most rooms in our house, and they do make a noticeable in both warm and cold weather.
In addition to upgrading with ceiling fans, it’s also becoming the season to paint, inside and out. With a little planning and follow through, all paints can be greener if you follow through on tips from greenman.
I’m a big fan of online / web2.0 applications. I believe they save energy, through reduced transportation, packaging, and energy consumption. See my update on our efforts to reduce wasted catalogs through the mail using one of these new online applications.
Sue Al Gore?!?!? Greenman stirs us up with a shocker of an entry!
To offset the crazy talk, check out our call to action: save energy and turn off the lights for just one hour! On March 29, from 8 to 9PM, join with your neighbors, local government, and people around the world making a statement about saving energy by cutting back on power consumption for just one hour on one night.
Concerned about plastics? So are we. We found 8 names to look at for PVC free products (5 stores and 3 brands).
Finally, we got things a little mixed up at GreenProductsNews.com this week, but everything should be back to normal some time this week. Word to the wise: website upgrades do NOT always go as expected!
With summer time coming, I thought this would be a good time to start planning. With drought in many parts of the country, it’s not going to be easy to stay green this summer. It will be worth it to try though!
Action 1: water the lawn less. We told you about this a few weeks ago in 6 Tips for Saving Water on the Lawn. The key message is to keep your lawn healthy and it will need less water.
Greenman will tell you about this pile of electronics I used to have: old monitors, outmoded PCs, discarded cell phones, even first generation MP3 players and PDAs. It was never easy to part with old equipment, but the pile shrunk. As it did, we gained back closet space.
Most of the time, the old hardware was donated to someone who was a few generations behind in technology. Some of the time, the hardware went to charities. Occasionally, it even went in the trash (I am embarrassed to say).
We’re now going through our annual rite of purging, and I’ve found a new option for used electronics and gadgets.
Not only is greenHo.ws is a great place to find tips, projects, and general green info, but it’s also closely related to GreenProductsNews. Greenman has been pulling double duty and writing on GreenProductsNews about products that improve the greenliness of your house.
This week we’ve told you about three easy home projects and some quick hit actions to increase your green-ness. All of these are very much in line with our philosophy of “being green doesn’t have to be hard.” Keeping with the theme of the week, here’s another area to consider: don’t buy software in a physical package.
Most software is sold to corporations, who get software electronically. In other words, they download it directly from the source and distribute to employees over their local networks. Consumers buy less software, but most software sold to consumers comes off the shelf in a box wrapped in plastic and delivered in a truck.
Basically, this is one area where big corporations are doing a better job at being green than the average person. Not that big business is perfect in this area, but they are ahead of the typical home user. Let’s change that.
There is so much news about how to save energy, be green, and use fewer resources in general, it’s hard to know where to start. So, to pull a few tips together, I perused a few green sites, racked my brains, pinged a few friends, then finally asked my wife for a few good and relatively new ideas.
I got lots of ideas. Before I share the new ones, here are three popular ideas that are not new, but always worth repeating. Hopefully you’ve heard them before:
These first few are a nice start with lots of information widely available. Here are five more ideas that are much less publicized:
If your mailbox is anything like mine, it holds several credit card offers or cash advance checks every day. I don’t sign up for credit card offers from random mailings, nor do I ever use the checks that come with usually outrageous interest rates. Instead, they go right to the shredder, into a garbage bag, and out to the dumpster.
What’s that you say? Isn’t that a huge waste of paper? Exactly what I was thinking! So now, what to do about it . . .
Vinnie sent me a link today to Sundance Solar. For the most part, it looks like a lot of gadgets without much practical use, which means it went right on the top of my favorites list! I know one of us will try gadgets from Sundance Solar soon, so keep an eye open for a review.
Vinnie’s note did start me thinking about the reasonability of using solar as a power source for a home. (more…)
