Tips, Coupons, Books and of course, green…

It’s fun to surf the Web and other blogs looking for green tips and information – I’m finding more and more great stuff everyday. I love the momentum that this gaining. Here are some things I’d like to share with everyone:

Silk Soymilk is running a –> Green Caps Promotion for which they donate to clean energy production for every entry. Also, you’re entered to win earth-friendly appliances. Check out the site for great clean energy information, including a –> Carbon Calculator you can use to calculate your carbon footprint and how you stack up against the national average. A quick run through for me showed my family’s footprint was below the national average – YAY! For more information and tips on how to reduce your footprint, visit –> Safe Climate, a project of the –> World Resources Institute.

And here is quick “Did you know?” from the Silk Green Caps site: If every American home changed out just five high-use light fixtures with energy-efficient ones, together we’d prevent greenhouse gases equivalent to the emissions from more than 8 million cars.

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Here’s a couple of green tips that we’ve taken up over the past week:

• Reuse small water bottles for all types of drinks around the house. We wash out our bottles after each use and use for everything from more water to juice for the kids and as travel mugs for the car. Keeps our cups in the cupboard and our dishwasher off since cups seems to be what we go through most with two active kids.
• In the office, I’ve been looking for ways to be more green. One area that I’ve particularly focused on is paper waste. As I audited my daily routine, I noticed that I tended to print out a lot information from emails, websites, etc. that I needed to distribute to colleagues. I’ve started utilizing the simple screen shot capabilities of Windows (Mac has it too) to send out the info via email rather than print. It’s easy; Alt+Print Screen will copy your screen to the clipboard and you can paste into any email message. If you’re using Outlook, you can use Word’s editing tools to crop the image as needed or even make notes on it. Most of the time, the receiver of the printed piece will throw it out anyways, only to print it again later. So this method allows them to forward the message and save paper as well. Try it and save some trees!

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I love shopping at my local health and organic food markets. There is always something to learn there on top of shopping for great tasting food! Some are even starting to really provide a lot of that information on their websites. One of my favorite local stores is Henry’s Farmers Market. Here’s a list from their site that is worth reading –> Five Easy Ways to Change the World.

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For you readers out there, here’s a link to a –> coupon for the new James Patterson book, The 6th Target, that you can use at Border’s or Waldenbooks for 40% off the list price. Good 5/8 – 5/14 and I believe you must join Borders Rewards Club which is free.

For Tolkien fans (I’ve been a fan for 25 years!), the new book –>The Children of Hurin is a must! It’s always to see new Tolkien material and this one does not disappoint, I highly recommend it!

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Catching up!

Whew! What a weekend – lots of good things happening. It’s been a while since I posted, so I’m going to cover quite a few things today. Here goes:

First a follow up to my –>previous post about Arbor Day – we planted our tree! It wasn’t as easy or quick as I thought it would be. There was a lot of pre-planning involved. From deciding where to plant to what kind of tree to buy, everything required some careful consideration. We decided to plant on the northeast corner of our backyard, so the tree will be getting sun pretty much all day. Then we needed to decide if we wanted an evergreen (stay green all year) or a deciduous (shed leaves in fall) type of tree – picked evergreen. Next choice is how fast you want the tree to grow – slow, moderate, or fast – we opted for a fast tree as we’re not sure how much longer we’ll be at this house. Finally, we needed to pick the type of tree. We went with a –>Brazillian Pepper Tree – grows quickly and has that classic shade tree look. The guys at the nursery told us this hardy tree will grow quickly and thrive in our Southern California climate. Will post pictures of our tree as soon as I get a chance, but here is one that is mature. Look at the vibrant green, can’t wait until ours is that big!

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This post from –>The Way We Live caught my eye; hadn’t really thought about ‘green’ housing before. Prefab houses, if done right, combine attractive design with sustainable materials and systems. This particular prefab is located in Venice, CA (love that city by the way – spent much of my college years there!) and was designed by Jennifer Siegal. You can see more excellent prefabs at her site –>Office of Mobile Design.

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Did some spring cleaning in the garage this weekend. Recycled what we could, sold what we could, gave away what we could, but we still have lots of stuff left. What to do? Here’s a –>great link from the Green Advice blog for –>Freecycle.org, a grass roots online community of folks who are giving things away for free. One more way to recycle rather than throw away. You know what they say about one man’s trash…

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Although Walmart has its share of problems, they are doing some good things on a couple of fronts. One, they are starting to carry some organic food products in their stores. Go organic wherever possible. The other is that they carrying compact fluorescent light bulbs that are subsidized by the local utility and a bargain at 94 cents for a 24W bulb (replaces 100W) and 74 cents for a 20W bulb (replaces 75W). Your store may or may not have these – I’m in San Diego and have seen a couple of stores with these subsidized offers. Here’s a –>great page on Walmart’s site that discusses the advantages and savings to switching from standard incandescent light bulbs. Also check out –>18seconds.org to see how the US is doing in switching to CFL bulbs.

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One –>fellow blogger has got a great eco-wishlist going. They are –>tracking their progress point by point. Great list of things for all of us to attempt.

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Got my hands on some crucial music as well. –>Stephen Marley just released his –>first solo album Mind Control and it is very Ital! –>Stephen was part of the original Melody Makers with his brother Ziggy and two sisters. His voice is, of all the Marley clan, probably the closest to his famous father’s. He’s sung lead on numerous tracks over the years on MM albums (I’m partial to the work he did on Joy and Blues) and often produces and collaborates on albums with the younger Marleys. I highly recommend his album – especially the more rootsy tunes on it. –>Listen to sample cuts here.

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Well that’s it for now.

50 Ways to Help Save the Planet

From Vanity Fair –> 50 Ways to Help Save the Planet: What you can do.

Great list of things anyone can do to be well on their way to living green. Some are more well known suggestions, like changing to energy efficient light bulbs and walking/cycling instead of driving. A few are more obscure and not obvious. My favorite: don’t pre-wash dishes that go into your dishwasher. According to Consumer Reports (–>here’s what they had to say), doing so doesn’t help much in the end. By cutting out the pre-wash, you could save up to 7,300 gallons of water each year! Putting this one into play right away! So read on and see how many your going to try.

Wondering how to go green?

If you’re new to the whole green thing (a lot of us are), there is a –> handy guide at Treehugger.com that covers just about any area of your life. For example, wondering how to –> green your work or how to –>green your coffee, they show you how. Great site with lots of good information.

The whole topic of green at work is timely for me. We’re just starting to have serious discussions on the subject, and some of us have realized that we’re not very green at all. Interestingly, we’ve taken to fighting for small victories while still working towards an overall green philosophical shift.

One such case is with our coffee habits. Much like the guides I linked above suggested, a lot of us have taken to bringing in mugs at work for our coffee. Once our maintenance guy told us how many paper cups we consume as a company (it’s in the thousands per month!) we made the switch instantly. Better yet, we started telling everyone. Lot’s of mugs in the office these days! Again, small victories. Check the guides and see what you can do at your office.

Peace.