11.30.06
Posted in energy, education at 4:32 pm by greengirl
By purchasing 2.1 million kilowatt hours of wind energy, Southern Methodist University is saving its corner of Texas from 3 million pounds of pollution. It’s the equivalent of building a 390-acre forest yearly, according to the SMU student paper. A student-led group did the legwork to convince SMU to join the EPA Green Power Partnership, which requires that at least 3% of the energy SMU purchases be sustainable. SMU became the first large university in Texas and the southwest US to join the Partnership. As of September ‘06, a few universities throughout the country have 100% sustainable energy use: University of Central Oklahoma, Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, Western Washington University, Evergreen State College in Washington and Hamilton College in New York. Go Mustangs!
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11.29.06
Posted in recycling at 8:33 pm by greengirl
As I patiently wait for my new cell phone battery to arrive and charge my old one for the billionth time today, I started checking for information on recycling the useless battery. I’ve heard of programs where used cell phones are given to charitable organizations, but that wouldn’t help here since this battery won’t hold a charge to save its little electronic life.
Apparently, this same program will also take cell phone batteries in addition to entire phones. What do they do with them if they no longer will hold a charge? They use a thermal process to recover all the metal from the battery, most importantly the lead and mercury. Then, the metal is reused for various products, and RBRC donates a portion of the proceeds from the sale of the metals to charity.
RBRC (Rechargeable Battery Recycling Corporation) has a form on their site to find a drop-off location nearest you, likely an office supply or electronics store. So, now I (and you) have the information I need to make sure my cell phone battery is recycled, rather than added to landfills. Cell phones are so little that it may not seem like a big deal, but the estimates are that 130 million cell phones are disposed of annually. If you piled 130 million cell phones into a very big pile, it would stretch from Washington D.C. to Miami, Florida. Woah.
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11.28.06
Posted in ecotravel, global warming at 3:26 pm by greengirl
Personally, I find sliding down a steep, snowy hill strapped to two very slippery sticks a rather foolish pursuit. Give me snowshoeing anyday. But, I understand that some people find skiing very enjoyable. Now, ski trips can be an opportunity to be green with your vacation spending choices.
According to the National Ski Areas Association, 49 resorts in 14 states are using some form of renewable energy, with one of the leaders in the field being Vail Resorts. Vail, with its five ski resorts, has offset 100% of its energy usage by purchasing 152,000 megawatt hours of wind energy and is now the second largest corporate purchaser of wind power. Purchasing wind power, instead of constructing their own turbines, meant less construction on the mountain and income to farmers who have the stately wind turbines in their fields.
Taking it one step further, Vail even gives free lift tickets for one-day to anyone who buys wind energy credits for their home for a year through Renewable Choice Energy.If you’ve got a ski vacation coming up, visit the National Ski Area Assocation’s Green Room for information on the green-ness of your favorite white powder hills. With the ski industry sure to be one of the first impacted by global warming, I would expect that ski resorts will continue to be leaders in renewable energy.
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11.27.06
Posted in home & garden, health, habitat, shopping at 6:43 pm by greengirl
As we approach flu season (approach? hello! I think this flu means I’m already in it?!), you may be looking at the rows and rows of tissue and wondering how your shopping dollar can make a difference everytime you sneeze.
The National Resources Defense Council (NRDC) has published a complete list of which brands use recycled paper in their toilet tissue, facial tissue, paper towels and paper napkins. They’ve even got a handy wallet card (pdf) to print and take with you to the grocery store. Included in their list are some inspiring factoids like: if every household in the US replaced just one roll of virgin fiber toilet paper with recycled, we could save 423,900 trees.
To be blunt, gone are the days of rough recycled paper products. As a regular user of Green Forest products, I can tell you that these are just as soft as any of the big guys. If you’d like to take a big leap and give up paper napkins and towels (hey, I said paper napkins, not toilet paper), Native Organic, Totally Organic, Downbound and many others have a lovely selection of organically grown napkins.
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11.25.06
Posted in recycling, organic, shopping at 9:15 pm by greengirl
I’ve been trying to find some sort of eco-friendly version of bellydancing clothes or accessories for my boyfriend’s cousin’s gift. So far, I’ve been unsuccessful, but I did run across some more really great environmentally-friendly shopping sites for your holiday gift buying perusal. (If anyone’s got any leads on this, please post them in the comments. Hopefully she won’t find my blog until after the holidays.)
- thegreenloop.com: I had no idea that organic fabrics could be so fashionable; they’ve got really amazingly cool clothes for men and women.
- motherboardgifts.net: these are really well constructed and attractive items made out of faulty circuit boards
- bamboosa.com: lovely, comfy clothes for adults and infants made of bamboo. Bamboo! Who knew!?!
- ekologic.com: knitted materials made from recycled post-consumer fabrics, especially cashmere
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11.24.06
Posted in organic, shopping at 12:26 pm by greengirl
As we enjoy or avoid Black Friday and the holiday gift buying season, green ideals need not go out the window. The old stereotype was of donations made to a favorite charity in the recipient’s name. And while that is still an excellent idea, many children (and adults, myself included) want something to unwrap on their holiday of choice.
– Environmental Defense has published a broad green gift guide.
– Coop America’s Responsible Shopper allows you to do brand research to see if the must-have brand your teenager wants supports the ideals that you find important.
– My personal favorite is gaiam.com, which has a lot of gifts for infants and fitness-minded folks, as well as some great organic cotton goods.
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11.18.06
Posted in education at 12:01 pm by greengirl
It’s not a groundbreaking statement to say that environmental problems are global problems. But, when political issues and country borders are part of an environmental issue, the fact that we’re all citizens of the planet can be forgotten.
Happily, Bayer (the aspirin people) has a program - the Bayer Young Environmental Envoy - that invites a select group of young environmental leaders from multiple countries to come together and learn more about global environmental issues. It rewards young people that are already engaged in environmental projects in their own countries by bringing them to Germany for a week to learn about German environmental technologies and giving them the opportunity to work with youth from other countries.
Congratulations to Bayer for recognizing that getting youth from different countries to work together is the key to environmental progress.
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11.17.06
Posted in energy, home & garden at 12:33 pm by greengirl
Energy efficient bulbs, with that signature spiral, have seen a very slow but steady increase in popularity in recent years. And, happily, they’ve come down in price as they’ve become more popular. While speciality energy efficent bulbs can still be challenging to find (see Environmental Defense’s guide on finding bulbs), light bulbs for standard fixtures and lamps are often available at large grocery stores and hardware stores.
But are they really more efficient? A common suggestion is that you try them out in places with hard-to-reach bulbs, because they last 6 to 11 times longer than standard bulbs and thus have to be changed less frequently. Wouldn’t it be interesting to know if an increase in use of compact fluorescent bulbs (another name for energy efficient bulbs) results in a decrease in ladder injuries? Anyway, regarding efficiency (source:wikipedia), a 60 watt bulb will cost $48 to operate for 8000 hours while a compact fluorescent (CF) of a comparable wattage (a 14 watt CF puts out light equal to a 60 watt standard bulb) will cost $11.20 to operate for the same time period. This assumes that both are running at a cost of $0.10 per 1000 watt hour.
How much energy can one light bulb really save? Does changing a light bulb really help? Indeed, it does. Numbers vary, but all the news is good. One compact fluorescent can prevent 450 pounds of emissions from a power plant over the lifetime of the bulb. If every home replaced one bulb with a CF bulb, enough energy would be saved to light 2.5 million homes for a year. Or, in other terms, enough energy to turn off two power plants. Lighting is responsible for using 19% of global energy production, and changing to CF lighting would reduce the global electricity bill by 38% by 2030.
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