Quick Savings Tip: Safe and Effective Household Cleaners
With all the cleaning products available, how do you know which ones to use in your household. There are many people that have small children that should not be exposed to harmful cleaners, especially at such a young age. There are other solutions than buying harmful cleaning products. Make you own.
With the use of lemon juice, baking soda, vinegar, water and many other basic ingredients around the house, you can make a number of different cleaners that will solve many of your household cleaning problems. I have heard of using vinegar to clean windows, but I never knew there were so many practical and safe cleaners that can be made at home. Why go out and spend a fortune on different cleaning products when you can make them at home with common products you can find in your home that are inexpensive. One common mixture involves including baking soda with water to form a paste that not only is extremely safe, but is highly effective on many surfaces.
There are too many to list here so check out the entire list of environmentally safe household cleaners. I am going to try some of these to replace some of the cleaners that I have in my house. Please share your experience with any these safe household cleaners.
Best Places in America for Renewable Energy
Forbes recently published an article about the best states in America to have various types of alternative energy. This article talks about a few alternative energy options America has for the future including wind, solar, geothermal and biomass. I haven’t heard much of geothermal and biomass but both seem interesting prospects for future alternate energy sources. What is really alarming is that many states that currently are perfect candidates for some of these alternate energy source don’t utilize them. A good example is with the use of geothermal power that uses heat coming naturally from within the earth. Currently only a few states from the Southwest actually harness its power on a large-scale, when many more could be capitalizing on it. The article also contains a great slide-show that goes through each state and why they are a good candidates for each type of renewable energy source.
Save and Go Green: Local Produce
I go to a local farmers’ market every weekend because I love fresh produce. The taste of the food I buy is unmatched by any grocery store that I go to. I have even heard Alton Brown from the Food Network say on his show that large strawberry farmers only produce for looks not taste. Even though taste is a huge factory, it is not the point of this article. The article will be geared towards answering the following two questions: does buying locally promote green lifestyle and most importantly, will it save me money over buying produce from the grocery store?
I had heard various segments on the radio about how our travels far to get here, but I never realized just how far. Apparently, our food travels an average of 1,500 miles between the farm where it was grown and your refrigerator. Much of the food we buy in the grocery store that usually could be bought locally is still shipped in from other parts of the country. Why not just buy from local farmers to get fresher produce that will taste better? I can only guess that cost must be the major factor into their decision. The amount of pollution that is occurring from the food’s transportation seems extremely wasteful. Also, many major farmer don’t use sustainable or organic methods of farming.
A huge plus I find when buying local produce is that you can actually talk to the farmer that grew the food you are buying. You can just ask them the types of farming methods they use and if pesticides are used.
You can save also save a bundle when buying local produce. One food that I love to eat is tomatoes. They are ridiculously expensive at the grocery store, usually $2-$4 a pound. Thats way too much to spend on tomatoes may or may not taste like crap. The tomatoes I buy at my local market are about $2.50 for about 5. That’s a huge savings over the grocery store and they taste better. In general, many things you can buy locally will be at a fraction of the cost of comparable products at the grocery store.
On the flip side, the grocery store is a little more convenient as you can buy produce whenever you want. Farmers’ markets and local farmers can sometimes be a far drive away or only be open certain days of the week. This can lead to buying produce too far in advance and it can go bad before you get a chance to eat it. Also, grocery stores carry a much wider range of produce that you would normally find at a local produce stand.
My rule of thumb when it comes to buying produce is to buy them locally while it is in season and get any reminding produce they don’t carry (like bananas) at the grocery store. Also, don’t buy too much produce just because it looks fresh. I have done this in the past and I regret it every time.
You can check out my article on Farmers’ Markets to find farmers in your area selling local produce.
Offsetting Greenhouse Gases by Using The GreenRoad
Whereis, an online mapping website, has team up with Greenfleet to reduce the carbon emissions produced by Australian drivers in a campaign called The GreenRoad. This campaign was started in order to offset the CO2 emissions from up to 200km or 125 miles of a trip you take. I wanted to find out a little more background information about this campaign and try it out for myself.
Photo by absolutwade.
Whereis initially started in 1997 and is a subsidiary of a leading Australian information corporation Sensis. Since then, they have become a leading online mapping application for both Australia and New Zealand. Greenfleet is a non-profit organization that plants native trees on behalf of motorists and businesses across Australia. To date, they have planted more than 3 million trees to offset the greenhouse gases created from cars.
Together, the two organizations are offsetting greenhouse gases through the GreenRoad campaign. The basic concept for the program is pretty simple. Find directions for a trip using the Whereis mapping application. For every kilometer of the trip for up to 200 km, Greenfleet will plant trees to offset the amount of CO2 generated from your car during those trips. Over 6100 trips have already had their carbon emissions offset through the planting of 350 trees. This will lead to 93 tons of carbon gases being offset. Those are impressive numbers for a program that just recently started. What I also didn’t realize is that it is completely free and funded entirely by Sensis.
I wanted to try out this program for myself to see if it was as simple as they say. I went to the Whereis website and put in two random locations to find directions for. There was a link directly below my travel distance taking me to the GreenRoad website. The registration was easy as it only requires my name and email address. Once I registered, it showed how CO2 offset credits I had remaining out of the 200km I am allotted. You then click a button to offset the particular trip. The process was really simple and took very little work on my part.
It’s refreshing to see these two organizations taking the initiative to take a small step towards reducing greenhouse gases. If you currently live in Australia or New Zealand, you should take full advantage of this program and use as many of the 200km as you can.
You can still take part in helping offset CO2 even if you can’t participate in this program. There are plenty of volunteer opportunities through the Arbor Day Foundation or you can donate to Plant a Tree Today Foundation and Greenfleet to have new trees planted. You could also try to limit the amount you drive or participate in car pooling programs with fellow co-workers. There are a numerous other ways to leave a smaller carbon footprint, many of which require little or no change in your lifestyle. Every little thing makes a difference.
This Week in News: July 17th
Government
The Australian government released a Green Paper earlier this week in order to introduce the idea of a Emissions Trading Schema or ETS as a way to reduce green house gases. The official white paper that will contain more details about the plan will come towards the end of the year. The idea behind the ETS is to allow businesses to trade permits among themselves to determine how much they are allowed to pollute. There are mixed reactions to this news as it does target to reduce emissions, but overall prices are slated to rise.
Environment
In order to attempt to suspend a federal mandate the use of bio-fuels, Environmental groups have sent a letter to the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. Environmental groups are fighting against bio-fuels, such as ethanol, because they are not sustainable and bad for the environment.
They say environmental problems stemming from the mandate include soil degradation, water pollution, and biodiversity loss, and immense greenhouse gas emissions due to changes in land use.
Using fuels like ethanol are just not a long-term solution for our over-dependency on oil. Our country needs to start moving towards using sustainable sources of energy like solar and wind and invest more in hydrogen technology.
Photo by john hanson.
I always knew that the coral reefs were endangered along with some of the creatures that live in them, but I never knew how bad the problem is. Global Marine Species Assessment (GMSA) published an article stating that one-third of the more than 700 species of reef-building corals are threatened with extinction. This is such a sad number. There are a number of culprits including overfishing, the rise in water temperatures, bleaching of the coral and buildup of CO2. If we can greatly reduce the amount of CO2 build-up in the water and treat the coral as an endangered species, we can save much of the coral reef that is at high risk to dying.
Quick Saving Tip: Shorter Showers
When I was a kid, I would constantly hear my mom tell me I need to stop wasting so much water and take shorter showers. She would also use the fact that it costs so much to shower as a point to get me out of the shower. I now take showers around 5 minutes as it is not about the money, but more about conserving water. I will go further into how much money and water you can actually save by cutting your shower time down.
(Updated 2/17)If you would like to calculate how much water and energy you are using while taking a shower, please check out my Shower Calculator.
I first needed to find the average cost of water to begin my calculation of which I found was $2.00 per 1000 gallons. The next number I need was the number of gallons of water the average shower head uses per minute. This number was readily available on a number of sites and is 2.5 gallons per minute. I used these two numbers to figure out how much you would be save by showering 1 less minute.
That means that you an save a half of a penny for each minute you shower less. This doesn’t seem like a lot, but it can add up.
So that means you can save a little over $9 per year if you cut back on showering 5 minutes less in the shower per day. That doesn’t seem like a large savings, but you also have to consider the amount of water you are also saving. You will also be saving over 4500 gallons of water per year.
CO2 Stats Project
I just added a free widget that I added to my site that shows its carbon footprint. The site is called CO2Stats. What’s so great about this little widget is that they will measure your websites carbon footprint and will offset it by buying renewable energy.
To determine the carbon footprint of a website, they use the locations of both the visitor and the server to determine what sources of energy were used to generate the electricity for both. They are then able to determine the overall carbon footprint of the visit to a particular website. The site then offsets CO2 resulting from your site traffic by helping support the environment.
Check out their site and considering adding it to your website as well.
