dining & entertaining

Returning blogger TaraG convinces us with 5 Reasons To Buy Organic Foods over at Go Green Street. Great stuff, TaraG!

Jourdan Henderson gives us ways to Green your morning coffee! posted at Green Justice. I heart coffee and I totally agree with Jourdan’s recommendations.

health & beauty

Jourdan Henderson comes with a second submission, asking us Do you have a fruit tree? posted at Green Justice. Really great idea on putting your excess produce to good use! Thanks Jourdan!

living spaces

Apparently, TaraG was feeling the makeover itch and shows us a Bathroom Make-Over with Recycled Glass Tiles posted at Go Green Street. Despite my aversion to the color, I am seriously impressed with the results. Very cool!

Rebecca Noori presents a great quick run down of Being Green in London featured at Moving to London. Good to know those on the other side of the pond are doing the same things!

Looks like it’s invasion of the Brits here at Green Your Apartment! Mrs. Green tells us how to Dispose of your WEEE responsibly this Christmas posted at MY ZERO WASTE. (WEEE, if you are concerned, stands for unwanted Waste Electronics and Electrical Equipment. Hehe.)

In the News

Mrs. Green is on a roll and also offers us The Age Of Stupid review posted at Little Green Blog. I’m so Netflixing that movie! Thanks for the review.

One of my favorite blogs has joined us! Wise Bread discusses What Can Retailers Do With Their Unwanted Merchandise? over at Wisebread. While I adamantly do not agree with the “free rack” idea, donations to charitable institutions or discounted racks (clearance racks anyone?!) would be greatly advisable and beneficial to all involved. If you work in retail, have connections with management, or are just a concerned citizen, take action and let your favorite retailer know what options are available to them!

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That concludes this edition of Tips for Green Living. Thank you all for your excellent submissions and I hope you found some useful info in this carnival. You can find a new edition posted every second and fourth Monday here at Green Your Apartment. Submit your blog article to the next edition of Tips for Green Living using our carnival submission form.

Go green and live well!

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“You want to WHAT?”

Immediately she set to discouraging me. “The endless laundry!” she exclaimed. I shrugged it off and said I’d be home with the baby anyway. “But the cost!” I explained I had calculated it out and figured it was actually cheaper, even including the laundry room quarters. Seeing that she was not going to talk her stubborn daughter out of this debacle, she emailed me a link to a website with the simple remark: “Use these instead.”

The link was to gDiapers. We used them religiously up until my husband lost his job and we were living on the kindness and charity of family members.

I love these things! To quote from their site:

For the last 40 years there have been but two choices in diapers. Cloth or disposable. That’s it. Now gDiapers offers a third option. 100% biodegradable*, flushable diapers. gDiapers puts waste where it belongs, in the toilet. Not the landfill.

gDiapers have no elemental chlorine, no perfumes, no smell, no garbage and no guilt. In fact, our gRefills are so gentle on the Earth you can even garden compost the wet ones in one compost cycle, approximately 50 – 150 days. Just think of the standing ovation you’ll get from the planet.

You wash the soft, adorable covers and compost, flush, or toss the soiled inserts. It’s that easy! My daughter loved them and couldn’t pull them off (those brilliant people put the Velcro in the back!) despite all her trying.

I can tell you right now that for the next kid in our household, gDiapers will the only way to go. Convenient and earth-friendly – that’s what I like to hear. Thank you Kimberley and Jason for this great product!

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Until then, check out our archives from the list below!

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for the greenhorns

Autumn Beck presents New to Cloth Diapers? Part 1 posted at All About Cloth Diapers. Such a great post, especially since there are so many options now!

Heaven forbid we be left out of the iPhone obsession: Gracie Turner presents 100 Best iPhone Apps for Students Going Green posted at Online Courses.org.

jerklogic presents a “Humorous article about littering and how it affects our environment and peace of mind” called Litterbugs, beware! posted at Jerklogic.

in the news

Mark Donovan presents Green Window Treatments Reduce Home Heating Bills posted at HomeAdditionPlus, saying, “Mark Donovan of www.HomeAdditionPlus.com discusses a new Green Window Treatement product that is Eco-Friendly, and that can reduce home heating bills by up to 35%.”

Let’s welcome back Katy Unitek with her post on Historic Energy Legislation posted at Boots On The Roof.

Angela Martin gives us 100 Exciting Lectures on All Things Green posted at Online Colleges.org, you know, if you can sneak it in between your holiday preparations!

living spaces

Ivan Gomez presents Raw Business Talk: COW! Simply Clean Beverly posted at Raw Business Talk, saying, “An excellent example of how you can wash your car with little to no water and absolutely no run off into the drainage systems.”

patio & garden

Here’s some money-saving (and green!) advice from The Backyard Grower on Saving Seed posted at Bobbie Whitehead.

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That concludes this edition of Tips for Green Living. Thank you all for your excellent submissions and I hope you found some useful info in this carnival. You can find a new edition posted every second and fourth Monday here at Green Your Apartment. Submit your blog article to the next edition of Tips for Green Living using our carnival submission form.

Go green and live well!

________________

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First let’s set up the order of importance in purchasing these items.

1. Local always surpasses organic -there’s less tax on the environment as a whole. Plus with local foods, most of them are from smaller farms that don’t douse their produce with ridiculous amounts of chemicals so a good washing in a plant-based produce wash will do fine.
2. Next comes organic. This means you are eliminating the pesticides and chemicals you are not only ingesting but voting for use with your dollar. And if you can get local and organic, then double-kudos to you!
3. Now comes fair-trade. For those of you new to the lingo, fair-trade items are part of “an organized social movement and market-based model of international trade which promotes the payment of a fair price as well as social and environmental standards in areas related to the production of a wide variety of goods” (thank you, Wikipedia). This comes third because you want to try and stay as local as possible to minimize the shipping, etc.

Knowing these priorities, how is one supposed to eat well and still be green? Here are a few tips to help you along your way.

Newbie
Cost: will generally save you money
Time: a longer trip to your local “health food” store versus the corner market
Energy to do this: minimal to moderate

Shop at your local health food store. I’m a big fan of Henry’s and Trader Joe’s (I hail from Southern California so these are my local stores) but you can definitely find your local stores by searching in your area. Not only are organic and local produce offered at these stores, but I found when I started shopping at Trader Joe’s that my grocery bill was easily cut by 40% though I was buying the same amount of stuff. At Henry’s, I search their weekly flyer (available by email!) for sales on bulk items and such so I can stock up and save.

Amateur Environmentalist
Cost: you’ll save money on produce and spend a bit extra on gas depending on location
Time: an extra half hour to hour a week
Energy to do this: minimal to moderate

Get to know your local farmer’s market! Most cities have them once a week where you can purchase locally grown, in-season foods. In-season is important because for one, it really means it’s local and for two, you are reducing the need to ship in out of season foods from tropical locations like Chile and Ecuador. We have a local grower that has stands all over the city by his crops and he has the best organic strawberries I’ve ever tasted!

Certified Tree-Hugger
Cost: $20-50 a week according to my quick research
Time: ranges from minutes to pick up the produce from your front door (for the delivery-based CSA’s) to 1-3 hours a week to go and harvest your produce
Energy to do this: minimal to significant

So you are dedicated, REALLY dedicated to locally-grown, organic produce. Good for you! Join a CSA or Community Supported Agriculture project. Basically, you pay a certain amount per month or growing season to have your share of the produce grown on that patch of land either boxed for pick-up, delivered to your door or for you really green-thumb types, to harvest yourselves! To find out where you can participate, check out sites like Local Harvest and the US Department of Agriculture’s site on CSAs.

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I have no idea what brought me to ReusableBags.com but I LOVE LOVE LOVE them!

For example, I hate that I haven’t had many options to get rid of those horrible produce bags that even “health food” chains are using! What to do?

How about an organic netted cotton produce sack for a whopping $4? Brilliant!

Shopping bags are also an issue. In general you want something you can slip in your backpack or purse or, for you gents out there, slip in your pocket. Something with long enough handles to slide over your shoulder and strong enough to handle your shopping load – be it clothes from the mall, a few groceries to tide you through the end of the week or some office supplies from IKEA.

How about their Reisenthel – Mini Maxi Shopper with long handles? Zips up into a teeny-tiny bag with attachable hook! Again with the brilliant. I’m so getting two or three of these things…

But what about that trip to your local big box store like Costco or Sam’s Club? Then these Super Strong Canvas Messenger Bags are worth the $13!

What got me so excited about this website was the fact that they have fabulous products promoting sustainable sources, reuseable and recycled items at prices that the average Joe can afford.

Going “green” doesn’t have to be overwhelming or über-costly. Mostly going green means thinking about what you want to do and planning ahead of time to use what you have, reduce what you use and only bring into your life the things that give and sustain life instead of living a “throw-away” or “prepackaged” existence. Life should be fun and beautiful and the things you buy and use should support life continuing to be fun and beautiful.

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For my first tip, I’m going to recommend you start the New Year with less stress on your electric bill and the whole energy-making schematic by enlightening your life with energy-efficient lighting. It’s easy, cost-effective and has more impact than you think.

Newbie
Cost: about $20
Time: 30 minutes (run to the store and changing bulbs)
Energy to do this: minimal

Purchase one six-pack of Compact Florescent Lights (CFLs) to replace your most used lights. Because the CFLs use lower wattage to produce the same amount of light as standard bulbs (15 watts in a CFL is equal to a 60 watt regular bulb), the estimated savings on replacing just 6 lights in your house that you use up to 4 hours each day is $54 a year in your electric bill. That’s only $4.50 a month, but those bulbs will pay for themselves within 5 months!

The other impressive thing about this little change will keep an estimated 3 tons of CO2 out of the atmosphere over the life of the six-pack of bulbs. To get an idea of that kind of impact, you’d have to live car-free for a little over 7 months to get the same CO2 impact!

Amateur Environmentalist
Cost: $20-$100 depending on how many lights you have
Time: 45 minutes (including run to the store and changing bulbs)
Energy to do this: minimal

Replace ALL your light bulbs with CFLs. It will cost you upfront, but if you’re like me, it’s worth it! We have 22 light bulbs in our apartment, which means it cost us about $80 to replace all the bulbs. But using the same calculations as above, we’re saving about $198 a year on our electricity bill – about $16.5 a month.

And in CO2 emissions, our change was the environmental equivalent living car-free for two years and two months! It has even been estimated that if every household in the U.S. replaced their lighting with energy-efficient lighting – like CFLs – we could comfortably retire 90 average sized power plants.

Certified Tree-Hugger
Cost: $0 – $121 + s/h
Time: Depends
Energy to do this: minimal

Despite all the wonders of those little compact fluorescents, there is a danger. CFLs contain the neurotoxin mercury, just like in all those warnings about contaminated fish you keep hearing about. This means dumping them in the trash when they eventually burn out is not a good option. The best thing to do is recycle your CFL bulbs. Depending on your situation, you have two options.

One: if you have an IKEA near you, you can recycle all your CFLs there for free! (See their site for more details.) It’s a lovely service provided by a fabulous company.

Two: if you don’t have an IKEA near you, you can purchase a CFL recycling kit here. Yes, it’s a little pricey but you don’t really want to dump mercury into our landfills which will leak into our drinking water now do you? I didn’t think so.

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But why?

Unless you have been living in a cave for the past decade (which is quite a ecologically sound lifestyle!), you already know the reasons why. Global warming. Overpopulation. Sustainability. A better future for our kids and their kids and all the future generations of this world.

But what I want to prove to you is being an ecologically-conscientious person doesn’t have to mean being a radical hippie, never eating out or *gasp* giving up your tv! Low-impact living can be easy, convenient and affordable if you just think ahead a little. I want to prove to you that low-impact living is a lot easier than you think!

Now, most of these tips can be used for anyone living in an apartment, condo, townhouse or even a house of your own. But this blog will be specifically geared toward those of us living in American apartments (which makes up roughly 1 in 4 households according to the Residential Energy Consumption Survey way back in 2001) because I’m sick of hearing people say that low-impact living is entirely undoable in a modern American apartment. Hey, if this guy can be no impact, then you can certainly learn to easily lower yours!

Each Monday, Wednesday and Friday I will offer you one way to Green Your Apartment. With each tip, I will try to offer three levels of Green as well as letting you know how much time, money and energy you will have to put in to make these changes.

• Level One, also known as “Newbie“: you are concerned about all this “global warming” talk. Heck, have you noticed the freaky weather?! This is the easiest, cheapest, quickest tip I have to offer.

• Level Two, also known as “Amateur Environmentalist“: for those of you who have seen “An Inconvenient Truth“, changed to CFL’s and recycle your beer cans and bottles. You believe in making a difference but the convenience and cost factors have made you reconsider going pro.

• Level Three, also known as “Certified Tree-hugger“: for those of us (yes, I’m in this group) who look for cloth diapers instead of the disposable paper, use homemade cleaning supplies and bring your own reusable bag to the store. There is a deep commitment to the environment which makes your relatives look at you a bit funny when you refuse the Styrofoam cup at a local burger joint and pull your own non-leeching plastic cup from your bag for your beverage.

There is, however, another level. Level Four, also known as “Green Guru“: you are dedicated, you are Dharma-esque. You forgo plastic containers and use your own organic hemp shopping bags. You have undyed organic fair-trade sheets and bamboo wood in your kitchens stocked with homemade organic preserves. I salute you and aspire to make you proud with my tips.

Look for my first tip starting with the New Year on January 2nd! Until then, have a Merry green Christmas and a Happy New Year!

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