Put your green behind the green

We did it! I'm pretty proud of us. Through the month of April we made a lot of changes in our house. Some small, some big, but all of them will greatly impact the health of the planet as we continue them each day for the rest of our lives.
As the last action in our month long endeavor to live more green, I decided I wanted to donate to an organization that is working every day to keep the planet healthy. There are lots to choose from. You can go international with this one. Or locally with this one. After doing some research, and reading lots of mission statements, I decided to give to The Conservation Fund.
Our quest to live more green isn't over. It's always been important to us, but now we've really made it a priority in our life and I'm excited by that. If we all did something, even just the smallest thing, that change could mean the world.
-h

In Hot Water

Did you know your water heater can use up to 25% of the energy consumed in your house? It's typically considered to be the second largest energy consumer, following only heating. There are a few different ways to cut down on your water heating bill. There are some that are pretty obvious, like don't use as much hot water by taking shorter showers or washing your clothes in cold water. You can also turn down the temperature on your water heater, though your dishwasher may not turn out as clean of dishes if you turn it down too much. The step we are taking is to further insulate our water heater by wrapping it with an insulating blanket. Most modern water heaters have decent insulation, but giving it some extra can't hurt. Like the article mentions, if the outside of yours is warm, it will most definitely benefit from some extra insulation.

-G

One more thing to recycle!

Your old tennis shoes.
Gabe's always bugging me about having way more shoes than he thinks is necessary. I even just blogged about my newest pair. I can't help it. Shoes are so easy to shop for and I don't have to feel guilty about how much weight I've gained since we got married.
So, I decided something I should do is recycle some of the old tennis shoes I've been holding on to. I haven't thrown them away because I just couldn't bring myself to do it. I'm glad I didn't because recycling them is easy. Nike has this great program that takes the used shoes and creates different parts of sports surfaces. I know this is something they've been doing for a while, and now my shoes can be a part! There are lots of locations across the country that will take your donations. If there's not a Nike donation site near you, here are some other ideas about what to do with those old tennis shoes. (other than tossing them in the trash)
-h

Fabric

Today, Gabe bought this shirt made from organic cotton.  We previously bought towels made from organic cotton and we love them.  Yes, they cost a little bit more but it's worth it because buying clothes made from 100 percent organic cotton eliminates lots of fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides from the environment.  Whenever possible, buying clothes made from organic cotton will keep you and the Earth happy and healthy.

Does anyone have any green tips they'd like to share with us?  We're running out of ways we can change our life to help the planet.  Any help?  We need something good for these last 3 days!

-h

Draw The Curtains

Now that summer is fast approaching (it was 72 today!), it's time for us to start thinking about keeping our house cool. Since we don't have air conditioning we rely on keeping the house closed up during the day to keep the house livable during the evening. Once it cools off in the evening we open up again. To keep the sun out as much as possible, we'll be keeping our new curtains closed up tight. The curtains keep the sun from warming up surfaces in the house that then radiate the heat back into the air. Doing this keeps our house as cool as possible during the day. For those of you with air conditioning, this will cut down on your cooling bill.

Really, this post is just to brag about the fact that I finished hemming the curtains we got a while ago.

-G

Take action

against climate change. If the threat of global warming and climate change is something you're concerned about, then let those in the country who make the decisions know how much you care.
I sent this email off today. There are a lot of things individuals can do to lessen the impact we make on the Earth but sometimes businesses need the "encouragement" of legislation to do the right thing.
-h

New Resource

As I was browsing around this evening I stumbled onto Metaefficient, a review site of sorts that focuses on efficient and green products. It's got a pretty broad cross section of reviews in it's index, mostly stuff that we use everyday, not just specialized "green" products. One item that I looked at that Heidi and I have been discussing is rainwater storage. Basically a barrel you catch rain in to be used in the summer to water plants. I also read the review of the newest rechargeable batteries since the ones we're using right now are a few years old and don't hold much of a charge. When I do decide they're done, I'll be sure to recycle them.

-G

Go paperless...

at least at the bank.  

I just signed us up for paperless bank statements.  Now we'll get electronic notice that our bank account information is viewable and paper won't need to be wasted on printing the statements.  Plus, the banks keep all the statements electronically on file for 18 months.  Here's another way to look at it...if every household took advantage of online bank statements, the money saved could send 17,000 recent high school graduates to college.  When you look at it that way, printed bank statements seem like a huge waste of resources

Also, don't forget to decline ATM receipts.  We've been doing this one for a while.  ATM receipts are one of the top sources of liter on the planet.  I often see people take them from the machine and directly put them in the garbage.  Why not just decline them and not take a receipt at all?

-h

Earth Day

So today is Earth Day, the 38th annual day where we are to gather as a planet and take some time to respect our earth. I don't really have anything specific to post about today. I just want all of you to take some time and think about what the earth means to you. What do you care about most? Is it the flora and fauna? Scenic views of mountains? Fresh clean water? I realize that these things are important to all of us, but is there one thing that you care about the most? I'm thinking that for me, the most important thing is something we have plenty of here in Oregon. It's those deep, dark, damp forests that you find all over western Oregon. The ones where everything is different shades of green, there is moss on every surface and everything seems moist. I'm thinking about places in pictures like this one, and this one.

Now that you have an image in your head about what you love about our earth the most. What are you going to do to save it, to make sure it doesn't change, to make sure it's still there for future generations?

-G

Glass vs. Aluminum

I thought this post would be sort of a no-brainer, I had assumed that glass would win easily. What I found was a complicated maze to determine what makes the most environmental sense. When looking at making containers from virgin materials, glass wins, hands down. When you start looking at containers containing recycled materials, it gets a little murkier. Cans are typically 40% recycled, while bottles are only 20-30%. The gap is even narrower when you take into account the fact that 45% of cans get recycled when only 25% of bottles get recycled. For more reading, check this out. The best solution is to use reusable containers, and the best way to do that is to make your own beer. I new there was a reason I liked making my own beer so much!

-G

New shoes

If you're in the market for a new pair of shoes. Try reducing the size of your footprint on the environment by purchasing shoes made from recycled materials. If every American household purchased just one pair of shoes made from recycled materials, 2 million pounds of waste could be diverted from landfills.

I purchased these today. Simple makes the soles from postconsumer tire rubber. They use a water based glue that isn't toxic...and there's more. But they aren't the only ones, Teva also has a new line of sustainable shoes. It looks like Keen also has a sustainable line but I'm having trouble finding it. It's not on their website but I did find it at REI.
-h

Buy Local

We enjoy going to the farmer's market but sometimes it doesn't fit into our schedule. I've found the best solution! Great local, organic produce brought straight to our doorstep. I choose the amount of produce I want, as well as how often I want it delivered. It's great! We should get our first bin on Tuesday! On average, US supermarket food travels 1,500-2,500 miles before it reaches your table. Buying local food can reduce the amount of petroleum consumed to transport your dinner by as much as 95%. These are just a few of the many reasons shopping local is better. (For more information click here and here.)

Let's not forget the benefits of organic. You can lower your exposure to pesticides by 90% just by choosing organic fruits and veggies. If just 1% of the nation's farmlands converted to organic agricultural systems, it would remove 26 million pounds of pesticides per year from the food we eat and from the environment. Buying organic, and supporting these local farmers, encourages this type of farming. Which I love! I'm also going completely organic for our garden this year too. I've never used pesticides, but I've also never been careful about the type of fertilizer I use either. I guess that's one more way we'll do our part.
-h
Check out this cute movie about organics!

100% recycled

I was thrilled to notice today that my school is using this (see picture) toilet paper. Yes...I took the wrapper.
That got me thinking...if my school district has made the switch, I should too. We have 4 rolls of Charmin left and then we're making the switch at our house. To make sure I follow through, and don't convince myself to get what's on sale (cause you know I love to get the best deal I can), I picked this up tonight. We're stocked and ready. It's exciting to think about how many trees we'll save just by making this one simple change. I know the additional cost will sting for a little while, but hopefully recycled paper TP will eventually become the norm.

Click here for more info on green home tissue products.
-h

Middle School Love

One of the best, and worse, things about teaching middle school are the notes.
I found a really cute one today. Most of the time they aren't this cute, but I really want to share this one with you.
Do you love me? Do you want to be my boyfriend? And if you do, well then don't be afraid to take me by the hand, if you want too. I think this is how love goes. Check yes or no.
Oh, to be in middle school again! Just kidding!

So, I'm on my own this weekend. Gabe's spending the weekend with his dad in the middle-of- nowhere-Oregon playing "mountain golf". He'll have to tell us all about it when he gets back. Stay tuned for my green post coming later.
-h

More Green Tech Stuff

We're a little nerdy in our house, both Heidi and I have more than one mp3 player. The main reason for this is that we like music, a lot. One thing we plan on not doing anymore is buy CD's. I'd like all our music to be downloaded, legally, of course. A new store I tried for the first time tonight was the Amazon mp3 store. The albums are less expensive than CD's, I don't have to drive to get it, nobody has to deliver it to me. CD's don't have to be made, and shipped anywhere. I just download it directly to my computer where I can put it on anything I want. If I want a CD, I can just burn it. I can even put them on any of the mp3 players we have, something you can't do with most songs downloaded from the iTunes store. There are other options too including the Walmart download store and emusic. I really can't see buying another CD, unless there just isn't anywhere else I can find it.

-G

Dex knows...nothing

Who actually uses phone books any more? Why are they still wasting energy and resources printing these? Doesn't everyone just use the Internet to find what they need?

I'm tired of recycling these humongous wastes. Ours is usually soaked with water (we do live in Oregon after all, and they sit out in the rain all day). From the front step, it goes directly into the recycling. I'm pleased to say that we will never receive another phone book at our home. It's easy to do. Just click here. The movement to rid the country of unwanted phone books is actually pretty cool. It's important because most people don't even recycle their old phone books and telephone books make up almost 10 percent of the paper waste at dump sites. That's ridiculous!
-h

Electronics Recycling

So I'll admit, I didn't actually do this today, but I'm going to tomorrow. I had planned to at least recycle the one compact fluorescent bulb we've had burn out. I knew we couldn't just throw it in the trash as they do contain some mercury, which does contribute to air and water pollution. This is why proper disposal is key, especially if you happen to break one ever, make sure you follow this. To find a place to recycle your fluorescent bulb, check here.

Heidi and I also have a few old cellphones we need to get rid of, they're just sitting in our back room. They are tough to part with since they cost so much when we originally got them. There are both recycling and donation programs. All of the phones we have are perfectly usable, especially with a new battery, so donation would be the best as other people could get some value out of them. For a few ways to get rid of them, check out this link.

We'll also be recycling our batteries as we go through the last ones as we transition to rechargeable ones.

-G

Green Your Taxes

I'm sure some of you do this already without thinking about the green aspect of it, but filing your taxes online is certainly green. You don't have to have tax pamphlets, forms, envelopes, or even stamps! Since I've been out of college I've been filing my taxes online, mainly because it's easy and fast. Now that Heidi and I are doing our "Green Month", Heidi suggested that since I filed our taxes today that I use it for my post. Looking through all the forms I would have sent in, it's clear we saved a bunch of trees.

Along these lines, something else we do is pay our bills online. We don't mail a single check to pay our bills, so we save on stamps as well.

Hope you all get your taxes in on time this year!

-G

The Weekend Edition

Sunday is always bitter sweet. It's the last day of the weekend to relax and that means Monday morning is right around the corner.
We have made some greener choices this weekend...we just haven't gotten around to posting about them. Gabe already posted about the "evils" of plastic grocery bags and we decided to take things one step further. I purchased these great nylon bags last week and we've been putting them to great use this weekend.

Yesterday we had a few things to pick up from the store for an appetizer dish we were making to take to a party at Gabe's co-worker's new house. So, we decided to take a bag and walk down to Safeway since the weather was amazing yesterday. It wasn't all just a business trip, we did also make a little detour past Otto's for lunch. Then today when we needed to do our shopping for the weekly groceries, we took all three bags (no we didn't walk this time) and filled them to the brim. It was great not having 10 plastic bags to haul home with us!
-h

Two New Ideas

Sorry I missed posting last night. We took off for an evening out shortly after I got home from work. A few weeks ago I got us tickets to go see Cirque du Soleil down at the waterfront. To round out the evening Heidi made us reservations at McCormick and Schmicks. While we were eating, Heidi remembered that there was a note in The Green Book discussing what to do with your leftovers when you eat out. They say to make sure to take home your scraps, in the smallest container you can, to share with your dog, or the compost pile. This saves the restaurant from having to put it in the trash, 12% of garbage is food waste, and 25% of all food produced is wasted. Given that, it's good to know there is a program in Portland that allows restaurants to compost their food waste. The McCormick and Schmicks we ate at participates in this program.

The second tip for today is to spend some time outside working out instead of heading to the gym to hit the treadmill or elliptical. Tonight, since it was beautiful here, Heidi and I went for a walk around the neighborhood. Moving 25% of your time to an exercise activity that is outside can save 60 kilowatt-hours per year. Around here, it's easier said than done for most of the year, but now that spring is here, we'll be giving this a try.

-G

Flushing Confession

I have a confession to make...
I'm only making it because I went out to dinner with Peggy tonight, and she assured me it was safe. She assured me that she does the same thing and we're both hoping we aren't the only 2.

Well, here it goes...sometimes I don't flush the toilet. I started doing it because I didn't want to wake up Gabe in the middle of the night. But in order to be more green, I think I'm going to start doing it more. That's because if you just flush one less time per day, you'll save about 4.5 gallons of water. That's as much water as the average person in Africa uses for a whole day for drinking, cooking, bathing, and cleaning. I feel like I should do something more to conserve this precious natural resource. As Americans we really do use more water than we need.
So think twice before you pull that handle!

-H

Even Your Pets Can Go Green!

Jupiter, our cat, is an indoor only cat. This means the bathroom he uses is a box filled with cat litter in the back room. Most common cat litter, any kind that forms clumps, is made from sodium bentonite, basically clay. This clay is mined through strip mining, which can lead to watershed pollution among many other environmental problems. Also, most cat litter can be very dusty and can lead to respiratory problems for the cat. To resolve some of these issues in our house we are going to try Feline Pine, a natural cat litter made from dried pine. There are a few other products on the market that don't use clay either, so if Jupiter decides he doesn't like this stuff, we have a few other options. Hopefully he takes to it since I like the idea of smelling pine more than his current litter box.

-G

Do you like to read?

Do you want to be more green?
Then visit your local library. Using the library, or buying secondhand books, is a great way to live a more green lifestyle. About 3 billion new books are sold each year and that requires four hundred thousand trees to be chopped down. Those of you who know me, know that books are one thing I love to buy. Well, I decided I need to be getting more books from the library. I picked this one up yesterday. (It's one I've seen many of my kids reading and thought I should check out what they're reading.)
Here's another interesting idea: book swapping. It seems like a great way to get new books to read, clean off your book shelf of the books you're no longer interested in, and help the environment. Maybe I'll sign up. Or maybe I'll just stick to the library right now since I have a such a hard time getting rid of books.
Half time is over...I better wrap this up. Go Kansas!
-h

Recycle Your Plastic Bags

You know, the ones you end up with like 20 of after going on a seemingly simple trip to the grocery store? The ones you put your produce in, the ones you put your already sealed package of meat in and then the ones the checkers use to bag the rest of your groceries. For a long time I didn't really think about recycling them until I noticed there was a bin in the entrance to our local Safeway where you could drop them off. Your grocery store of choice may have something similar, or for a list of places that accept them, check here.

To be fair, these bags aren't quite as evil as everyone tends to make them out, but they are made from oil, and more often than not, they just get thrown away to sit in a landfill. They can also do a lot of harm to animals if they make it into the wild.

I'm not saying you have to give up using them, in fact, many studies show them being lower impact than paper bags. The studies also show lower recycling rates for the plastic bags when compared to paper bags. So, just use one of the bags as a place to gather them, and when the bag is full, drop it off at the store on your next trip. That's what we did today!

-G

Tire Pressure

Have you checked yours lately?
Keeping your tires fully inflated can improve your gas mileage by around 3 percent. Not to mention that it makes your tires last longer. The average American, who drives 12,000 miles per year, can save about 16 gallons of gasoline by keeping their tires at the proper pressure. Find this fuel saving tip, and others, here.
Gabe picked up a gauge today (being such a car guy, you'd think he'd already have one) and just checked the pressure in both our vehicles. They look good. Gabe will now be adding this to the monthly car maintenance routine.
-h

Vampire Power

Phantom power, standby power, whatever you call it...it's wasted power. Most of the electronics you have plugged in around the house, even though they may be off, are still using some electricity. Our biggest areas are definitely the entertainment system in the living room and the computer in the office. The electricity they use goes towards keeping our various pieces of equipment at the ready, waiting to be turned on. To cut down on this we're going to start using the switch on the power strip they are all plugged into. As we go to bed each night, we'll switch off the power strip in the living room and office. They will stay off until the next evening when we get home from work. We're going to try to get into a routine to do this, but if it becomes too tedious, there is a lazier way. There are auto switching power strips that sense when a main component is turned on or off, and then turns on or off the rest of the power strip. For example, one used in your office would be controlled by the computer. As you turned your computer off, the power strip would detect it and shut off the entire strip including the printer, speakers, monitor, etc.

Another phantom consumer are the "wall warts" we all have plugged in, ready to charge a cell phone, laptop, or iPod. These chargers all convert the AC power coming out of the wall into DC power, doing so even if it's not plugged into the device it's supposed to charge. We're going to work on keeping the devices unplugged until they are needed.

You can listen to an Energy Star podcast on the topic here.

-G

Green Batteries

Next up on the quest to be more green...the green battery. We use a lot of batteries in our house. Most of our electronics have built in rechargeable batteries (phones, laptop, i-pods, etc.). But since Gabe got his Wii for Christmas, our battery consumption has dramatically increased. Since a single rechargeable battery can replace up to one thousand single-use alkaline batteries over its lifetime, we've made the switch.
Did you know that Americans throw out approximately 179,000 tons of batteries per year? That's a lot of hazardous chemicals sitting in the nation's landfills.
-h

Composting

For our second step towards becoming more green around our house, we decided to begin composting. It's something we've been talking about doing for quite a while, and feel that now is a good time to start. We saw a good deal on a composter at Fred Meyer and picked it up this evening. We plan on composting the organic matter from our kitchen and the bulk of our yard debris. We'll be cutting down on what we put through the garbage disposal and what we put out on the curb every other week for somebody else to make into compost. Once we actually begin getting some compost, we'll be able to cut down on the fertilizer we use and minimize the bags of topsoil we end up buying over the course of the year. I'm pretty excited about it from a science aspect too. I get to look at the ratio of carbon to nitrogen in to pile to ensure that things break down properly as well as the moisture content. Should be pretty fun!

-G

Junk Mail

is the bane of my existence. I hate it. So, my first act for Earth Month is to get rid of it completely. Yes, we recycle it but I'd prefer it never enter my house in the first place. I hate to think about all the energy used to recycle it. Did you know that the average US household receives 1.5 trees' worth of junk mail each year?

We will now be a junk mail free home! It's easy to do. Go to this website and you can do it online for free or send it in for just $1. This will also include being free of the mountain of catalogs that we don't even look at before they get tossed in the recycling. I also stopped those annoying credit card offers while I was at it. You can get rid of those by going here.

-h