Sunday, May 25th, 2008
Can’t afford a hybrid car but want to do your part against climate change? U. Chicago researchers have determined that eating 20 percent less meat is climatically equivalent to switching to a hybrid car. That’s because it’s incredibly energy-intensive to raise cows, chickens, and other animal-meat products. Those animals also require lots of land, which means forest clearing. And don’t forget about More…
Wednesday, April 30th, 2008
Replacing your regular “disposable” alkaline batteries with rechargeable ones can make a big differences to both the environment and your wallet. While the initial cost is considerably higher, the life time costs work out in your favor.
As a parent of two preschoolers, I am constantly replacing batteries in toys. Even though we have lots of battery free toys (my preferred type), some of my kids favorites do require batteries such as the mini-electric keyboard and various cars, trucks and flashlights. To minimize the impact of these toys, I have made a huge effort to switch to rechargeable batteries. So, how much money does it save in the long run? More…
Sunday, February 10th, 2008
Have you ever thought about how much energy it takes to get things to the store before you buy them? A lot of thought is going into that kind of thing and there is a term for it, embodied energy. Now lets apply that thinking to that morning fix so many of us have every day, our morning coffee, tea or caffeinated soda. Let’s compare drinking a pot of tea versus 24 ounces of soda every day.
I weighed a couple items around my house to get a start:
Using 2 tea bags and 3 bags of sweetener for a pot of tea, which is what we use in my house, and a pot a day for a year we end up with 8 lbs per year. Figuring that tea travels 1,500 miles to get to the store via a semi-truck with a 231,800 pound miles per gallon, that works out to 0.052 gallons per pot a day habit per year. Now let’s switch glasses to soda. More…
Saturday, February 9th, 2008
For those of you who are parents of young kids, or those that 
are looking to give a child a gift, check your attic before going to that mega store to buy some new mass produced molded plastic or electronic toy.
While visiting my in-laws this weekend with my 3 year old twins, it amazed me that the favorite new toy was something my wife played with as a kid 30 years ago. They have lots of new toys (i.e. those made in the past year or two) at their grand parents to play with as well as a bunch of toys from my wife and her sibblings’ childhood. Most of their favorite toys are not the new ones, but rather the well used ones. Maybe it is that only the favorite toys, like a Fisher Price School House or Seasame Street block, were selected to be stored for later use . Maybe it is that young kids aren’t exposed to as much mega media advertisement and so aren’t fixated on having the latest thing on TV.
Whatever the reason is, by choosing a used toy over buying a new one, you’ll help save the environment by reusing something that has already been produced, save a little money and make a little one very happy. If it has been in your closet or basement for a while, clean it well before making your favorite bundle of joy more joyful.
The photo of the tug boat is the actual toy that my kids have been playing with since arriving at their grand parents this weekend.
Monday, January 7th, 2008
Why use so much paper? It is impossible to know how many pounds of paper comes from 1 tree. But we do know that 1 cord of wood is about 1,000 to 2,000 pounds of paper. (1 cord is a 4 foot x 4 foot x 8 foot stack of logs.)
Trees also give us oxygen. If you cut down trees we will not have as much oxygen. Trees are animals houses.
So try to use as little paper as possible and not cut down as many trees. Try to use environmental stuff like recycled napkins and paper towels. Be smart and be like me.
Gavin, age 8, Denver, CO
Tuesday, November 13th, 2007
Decorations don’t have to be green to be green. Available for the past couple years at reasonable prices, LED options for holiday lighting are available alongside the standard mini-lights of the last 20 years. Unfortunately, most purchases are still mini-light strands. Using LEDs saves electricity, pure and simple. An equivalent strand of LED lights uses 80-90% less electricity than mini-lights and 99% less than the bigger (C7 or C9) lights common for many exterior decorations (those big bulb holiday lights).
If the US switched just 20% of the decoration lights this Christmas season, we would save 440 GWh of electricity, or about 300,000 tons of carbon dioxide based on the EPA national average of 1,363 lbs/MWh for electricity. That’s over More…
Tuesday, October 23rd, 2007
Of course the answer depends on a lot of factors about you, your surroundings and how you relate. I’ll share some average for the US and go into some basic ways to calculate this for you. I was quite shocked with the magnitude of the difference when I went through this exercise myself. Please don’t mistake me for saying we shouldn’t do more just because it doesn’t do as much. Every little bit helps. If you are like me, you can’t do as much as you want right now. Hopefully you can use these concepts to prioritize your actions and where best to apply your energy and resources.
For an average US household, the energy utilization is mainly around HVAC (Heating Ventilation and Air Conditioning), Lighting, Cars, Refrigeration. The percentages from Wikipedia are:
32% space heating
13% water heating
12% lighting
11% air conditioning
8% refrigeration
5% electronics (includes computers)
5% wet-clean (mostly clothes dryers)
To calculate your annual cost (both environmental in terms of carbon footprint and economic in terms dollars) follow the steps below.
A house is a complex system of inter connected components. Most of us, myself included, only have gross utility usage from each source to gleam some useful information from. Even with just your gas bill (natural gas, heating oil, or propane) and electric bill you can calculate a reasonable estimate of major energy usage. If you use electricity for heating, hot water, clothes drying and cooling, then this becomes much harder and you may wish to have an expert do a home energy audit. Check with your electric company as they may offer this for free if you are really interested in conserving. Given that gas furnaces/boilers, hot water heaters and clothes dryers are much more efficient than equivalent electric models, you should consider switching if that is an option. Here is how you can calculate how much energy goes into heating, hot water More…
Thursday, October 11th, 2007
My wife thinks I’m nuts keeping these, but sometimes you’ve got to challenge the norms to make a difference. We’ve been saving popsicle sticks for a couple months now and use them for a number of things.
It was making me sick to see us throwing away all these little pieces of wood. I started savings them in hope of using them in future art projects with my kids (almost 3 now) but we have collected so many so fast that I have been forced to come up with other uses or given in to societal pressures and pitch them rather than pitching in. Since my kids are a few years away from building bird houses or bridges with popsicle sticks, I’ve found a bunch of other uses for them. Here are a few ideas More…
Saturday, September 15th, 2007
School has started for my 4th grader. I tried to be an environmentally-friendly school supply shopper, but it proved to be a little difficult at times. I could not, for the life of me, find wide-lined notebook paper or pronged 2-pocket folders with recycled paper content, so I was forced to purchase (gasp!) virgin paper. Another disappointment was the discontinuance of the Prang(C) soybean crayons (made with no petroleum products), so again, I was forced to go the environmentally-unfriendly route (i.e., Crayola(R)).
On the bright side, I did find spiral notebooks and Post-it(R) notes with recycled paper content. In addition, a number of supplies we kept from previous years followed the “reuse” point on the reduce-reuse-recycle triangle. These included: the plastic box for holding supplies (this has been in circulation for five years now), last year’s bottle of liquid glue, scissors, ruler, still good pens and #2 pencils, and, of course, the trusty old backpack.
As for lunches, a new lunch box was required because the old one was falling apart, but at least we don’t use disposable paper sacks. We also avoid plastic baggies by reusing old sour cream containers to put things in like grapes, trail mix, and Goldfish(R).
All in all, I think I did fairly well in finding environmentally-friendly school supplies, considering the market. Hopefully, more consumers will start demanding “green” school supplies, and in turn, the manufacturers will start producing them. My fingers are crossed…
Tuesday, May 8th, 2007
My sister Rebekah just sent me a link to this excellent idea from the Frugal for Life blog.
It’s so simple. I never knew about solar lights before, but it seems they sit in your lawn charging throughout the day, and then automatically turn on at night (or they’re always on as long as they have enough charge?). So why not use them inside the home too?
Get a few from the hardware/garden store and rig them up to hang in any window that gets sunlight in the evening. Then, come nightfall, they’re providing you with plenty of free light to last as long as you need. Apparently, however, there’s no way to turn them off, but who cares, because the electricity is free and clean and you can put them in another room or drape a piece of fabric over them when you’re ready to go to bed. It sounds like they’re pretty affordable too.
Get the whole lowdown here, at Dawn’s Frugal for Life blog.
We’re going out to live something of an indoor/outdoor existence at my girlfriend’s father’s house for the next couple months. It’s a small house, so we’re probably going to set up a big tent in the yard to sleep in and spend a lot of our awake time on the porch or elsewhere on the property. I’m going to get me a few of these lights on the way out there and try them out. Why ever pay for lighting again?
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