Green Summer

By Melinda Toussaint

Because this is my last blog post I wanted to provide you with some last tips for making this summer a green one. Here are five ways to green your summer:

1. Download your music. Summer is a time for music. With concerts, new CD releases, and music festivals you can save a ton of money by downloading your music. By using a medium like iTunes you are not only saving yourself money, but also the environment. CD packaging is often made with polyvinyl chloride which does not recycle easy. By downloading you also reduce the amount of CD packaging that ultimately ends up in landfills. Listen to your music with ease by knowing you helped save the Earth and your wallet.

2. Turn off power sources. Summer is the time to spend outdoors, therefore when you are enjoying the sun… make sure to turn off all power strips and electronics that are sucking up energy and increasing your utility bills. Things like TVs, DVD players, computers, or coffee makers should be turned off while you are outside, not home, or just going to sleep.

3. Drink tap water. We have stated this before, but in times of hot weather we tend to consume more liquids, especially water. By drinking tap water or using a Brita water filter you will save tons of money on bottled water. Don’t encourage companies to make a priceless public resource a commodity! Even expensive, eco-friendly plastic bottles can leak contaminants into your water. Not to mention that millions of water bottles are clogging landfills each year.

4. Open your doors. Before turning on your energy sucking AC, open all your doors and windows to give fresh air a chance to ventilate your home. Fresh air feels great, helps the plants grow in your home, and is FREE! You can’t top free!

5. Green barbeques. Summer is the time to drag out your barbeque again and grill out. Hotdogs, brats, and burgers are an American tradition during summer; therefore let’s make it a green tradition. According to Move, Inc., “Nationwide, the estimated 60 million barbecues held on the Fourth of July alone consume enough energy in the form of charcoal, lighter fluid, gas, and electricity to power 20,000 households for a year.”

Traditional charcoal briquettes give off more carbon monoxide than any other form of grilling. One way to switch to a more environmentally friendly grill is to use a cleaner electric or propane grill. However, if you can’t give up that charcoal taste, switch to lump charcoal rather than briquettes. Imagine the decrease in harmful toxins emitted during summer if all Americans switched to an electric grill.

Think of ways you can save money and the environment this summer. Now is the best time to enjoy the environment around you… why not save it too!

Eco-friendly Swimming

By Melinda Toussaint

Swimsuit season is upon us therefore we are presented with another opportunity to bring green into our lives. Here are some top designers who have produced eco-friendly swim lines for us to support the environment with.

1. Aaron Chang International- Aaron has been a leader in the green industry created swimsuits from polyester yarn he made from recycled soda bottles. To see his collection visit www.aaronchang.com or www.faeriesdance.com.

2. Anna Cohen- Anna’s vision for her collection has always been to create products using sustainable resources through globally responsible business practices and she would like to inspire the fashion industry to do so as well. She created a swimsuit line using mill-end fabrics (fabrics at the end of their life cycle) as well as organic cotton and bamboo. Visit www.annacohen.com or www.btcelements.com for more.

3. Jungle Gurl- Jungle Gurl has made a name for itself with celebrities like Nicole Richie by making a swimsuit line from vintage fabrics around the world. With a variety of colors and sizes that range from 0-22 Jungle Gurl is setting the pace. It is however a little pricey, with suits that start just above $200. Visit www.junglegurl.com for a look at the entire collection.

4. Kelly B- Kelly is making suits from bamboo and organic cotton that is grown, processed, and produced without using pesticides or other harsh chemicals. For around $100 you can get a beautifully and responsibly made suit. Visit www.kellybcouture.com or www.faeriesdance.com.

5. Meadow- This line is made from hemp, organic cotton, bamboo, and soy and comes with a variety of designs. Priced reasonably around $100 as well you can view them at www.bymeadow.com or www.shopmodify.com.

6. Niksters- My personal favorite collection is made from soy and organic cotton as well as bamboo. They also donate a portion of their proceeds to worthwhile causes like saving the sea turtles. Niksters is also a little pricey with bikinis and monokinis starting around $100 to $130. Visit www.niksters.com for more information.

7. REI- Another great line of eco-friendly swimwear that is made from hemp, organic cotton, bamboo, or post-recycled materials. Not all of REI’s clothing will be but if it is made from those materials it will sport a tag saying it is “Eco-Sensitive” to let consumers know. For suits under $100 visit www.rei.com.

Swimsuit season has been kicked off in full force so make sure you are taking all the necessary steps to think green while you are diving into the blue. Everything from suits, to towels, to beach totes, to cover-ups can be more eco-friendly so take the steps to make them so. Now is a great time to be thinking about the environment while you and your friends are enjoying it.

Green is your style

By Melinda Toussaint

Spring is a time for change, both internal and external. Spring is the time that a lot of people want to change the look of their home or just a specific room. Below is a list of 10 categories of design that can be taken to a green level. These are just a few examples for you to build from.

1. Bedding and Bath- there are many companies that provide organic linens. Two of them are Natura. Natura provides pillows, bedding, and mattresses that are filled with wool and covered with organic fabrics. They aim to provide better sleep and organic fabrics help because they more pure. People with allergies or sensitivities tend to benefit from organic fabrics because they are more pure.

Also, bamboo products are beneficial as well. Bamboo is a sustainable and eco-friendly product that is anti-bacterial and deodorizing. The fiber structure is also four times more absorbent than cotton. These qualities are great for buying towels, shower curtains, bedding, and bathrobes.
Visit www.naturaworld.com and www.bambooandorganiclinens.com

2. Fabrics: Mod Green Pod is a great alternative to fabric. They produce 100% percent organic canvas. The fabric is grown, woven, and printed in the U.S. and uses non-toxic pigments. Visit www.modgreenpod.com to order or just get an idea of what organic fabrics offer.

3. Lighting: One designer that provides an inspirational, creative alternative to lighting is Jerry Kott. He hand makes lighting out of recycled wine bottles. Color Block Hanging Lights by Jerry Kott uses recycled wine bottles that are cut and reassembled to produce lighting art. Visit www.jerrykott.com to discover them.

4. Rugs: There are many options to green flooring. Angela Adams provides wool rugs at an affordable price or go to FLOR for carpet tiles that allows you to decide color, pattern, and size. With carpet tiles from FLOR you can pick up one tile to deep clean or dispose of. Also, when the tiles have reached the end of the life cycle return them to FLOR to reuse or recycle them properly. Visit www.angelaadams.com and www.flor.com for more ideas.

5. Furniture: Around this time outdoor furniture at an affordable price is what everybody wants. World Market provides that with their Kona Collection made from plantation-grown, fast-growing Acacia wood. The collection includes a dining table, dining chairs, side chairs, a coffee table, a side table, a lounger, an occasional chair, and even barstools. All of the pieces are sold individually for you to mix and max your perfect look. Visit www.worldmarket.com for pricing and pictures.

6. Candles: BsaB Candles provide the perfect green alternative for smell. They are made from 100% natural beeswax or soy wax with 100% cotton wicks. Their beeswax bamboo pillars are refillable with their soy wax refillable kits. They are also packaged with plant materials and made with fragrances from essential oils. Check out www.BsaBcandles.com for more.

7. Art: Art is a tricking situation but the following two designers create some great looks. Alexander Girard makes ply prints out of hand-screened prints made in the U.S. from sustainable harvested plywood. He reduces waste by using wood that could not be sold due to imperfections in the wood.
Dolan Geiman also used green solutions by making eclectic art from salvaged wood and found objects. He puts them together and uses recycled paint from Chicago Paint Exchanged Program. Check out www.maximodesign.com for Alexander Girard’s designs as well as www.dolangeiman.com for his.

With all of these designers and tips is gives you the opportunity to think outside the box for green home décor ideas. All of these ideas are inspirational to bring green into your home no matter what room you trying to redesign for Spring. Visit www.greenhomedecor.com for tips on every area of design like storage, windows, pillows, and more. Remember how to make every facet of your design more eco-friendly. Reuse, recycle, rethink, and reupholster everything you already own to reduce your consumption on new items to redesign your home with.

Earth Day 2009

By Melinda Toussaint

With Earth Day coming up in less than a week many organizations are jumping on the band wagon, hosting events, gathering volunteers, etc; but no other organization is doing it as globally at the Earth Day Network. The Earth Day Network and their Green Generation Campaign are attempting to take Earth Day to the next level.
Held on April 22nd, Earth Day has been important to citizens since 1970 when U.S. Senator Gaylord Nelson put together a nationwide grassroots demonstration on the environment. Since then organizations have dedicated themselves to protecting the Earth and producing education for others to do the same. The demonstration was meant to thrust our environment into the national agenda and for 39 years it has thrived. But now the Earth Day Network is responsible for another major environmental step for our nation.
Starting this year, the Earth Day Network has introduced us to a two year initiative that launches the Green Generation Campaign. Green Generation Campaign comprises their efforts to educate, protect, and conserve the Earth. The campaigns core principles are as follows:
- Carbon-free future based on renewable energy that will end our common dependency on fossil fuel, such as coal.
- An individual’s commitment to responsible, sustainable consumption
- Creation of a new green economy that lifts people out of poverty by creating millions of green jobs and transforms the global education system into a green one.
Thus, the Earth Day Network is holding a celebration in conjunction with Green Apple Festival. America’s largest Earth Day celebration will be held April 17th-19th of 2009. In which time, volunteers from all across the globe can log on and sign up to help in the following locations: New York, Chicago, Boston, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., Seattle, Denver, Atlanta, Austin, San Francisco

During the Green Generation Campaign launch, the Earth Day Network will be introducing a worldwide education and media campaign to mark this new beginning. With many major sponsors like Timberland, FedEx, Planet Green, TreeHugger, USA Today, and more this event looks like it will be a success.
To read more about the Green Generation Campaign or to volunteer in your area log on to: http://ww2.earthday.net/.
To show your support for the Green Generation Campaign you can even sign their petition dedicated to show the government we need help getting out of our environmental crisis. Visit: www.earthday.net/greengeneration.
Even if you can’t participate on this large of a scale to show your support for Earth Day, come April 22nd, 2009 grab some friends and enjoy the day outside. Plant trees, work in your garden, help pick up trash and recycle. Whatever you do, remember to honor our planet like it deserves.

Deep Green Living

By Melinda Toussaint

There are many ways you can start to green your home. For many the process of greening your living space can be very overwhelming. Where to start? What to do? What makes the biggest impact? What am I doing wrong? Well now there’s a company to help you get started or help you through the entire process. This company is called Deep Green Living.

Deep Green Living is a company started by a woman name Susan Short. She recognized a need to provide a support network to homeowners seeking to match their environmental values with their everyday practices. According to their homepage, “Deep Green Living helps clients create healthier lives which reflect personal values and global ideals of ecological responsibility.”
In essence they perform three major duties:

1) Come to your home and analyze everything
- Utility bills
- Products under the sink
- Appliances

2) Identify green opportunities
- Explain your right decisions and areas for improvement
- Implement immediate changes
- Answer questions

3) Set up appointments with a network of service providers
Help make green changes in your home

Log on to their website, www.deepgreenliving.com, and you will see they have a variety of programs offered to green your home living areas as well as your business areas. For example, here are a couple available programs related to your home:

1) Deep Green Living Launch- provides a general overview of energy use and water practices. They will look at light bulbs, power strips, energy efficiency, junk mail reduction, recycling, and composting. All of your basic green details that can be changed pretty quickly.

2) Home Purity- provides education about harmful toxins that occupy your living space, your air, and your water. It provides an overall guide to eliminating those harmful toxins from your home.

3) Energy Efficiency- an overview of where in your home do you emit the most harmful CO2 emissions and how to eliminate them.

4) Deep Green Living Signature- provides a complete package of the above three: Deep Green Living Launch, Home Purity, and Energy Efficiency.

These are just four of the nine programs they offer. Deep Green Living even offers specific programs for the individual like Baby Well-Being, Cocktail Presentation, and/or Green Office. Visit the website for more information regarding this great company. You can even write to them asking what a service like this would cost and if they are able to visit your area. Deep Green Living is changing the world… one living space at a time.
www.deepgreenliving.com

“Save the trees… save the world!”

By Melinda Toussaint

From a young age we were all taught to not be wasteful; to not waste paper, water, and food. We heard this from our parents, our teachers, and even our friends. Little did we know that we grew up learning one of the most valuable lessons before it was cool to “be green”. This lesson is even more crucial to live by today.

Trees are the most important natural resource we have, supplying us with oxygen while eliminating CO2 levels from the atmosphere. According to a study “Helping Companies Reduce Greenhouse Gases” by James DeRosa, Director of Research and Development for Global Warming Initiatives, Inc., there are one billion people worldwide that attend work in an office environment everyday.

We are all guilty of tossing paper out before both sides are used, rewriting a letter/note more than once, and/or printing an article before we knew we needed it for long term use. One ream of paper equals five pounds. The average world office employee uses around 7 reams of copy paper each year. This fact has set the world’s average paper consumption at 123 pounds of paper per person each year.

This average is causing one billion trees to be cut down each year to satisfy the world’s paper demand. Global Warming Initiatives is only expecting this number to grow in future years causing more harm to the environment.
Besides the aesthetically pleasing benefit of trees, they impact the Earth in some major ways:

- Trees remove 100 to 120 billion tons of carbon each year from man-made sources like (cars, trains, planes, etc)
- Trees moderate climate, improve air quality, conserve water and also harbor wildlife
- Trees cut down energy costs- air conditioning and heating costs are lower in shaded areas. The less energy used by consumers the less CO2 emissions in the atmosphere

According to DeRosa’s article, one tree cut down can produce 173 reams of paper. A total of 7 million reams of paper is equivalent to 12 pounds of CO2 being released into the atmosphere.

What many people forget is that not only is cutting a tree down harmful to the environment but the process by which it goes through to become paper is harmful as well. All 12 steps of the process- from logs to chips to pulp to paper- all emits heavy levels of CO2 into the air by using large amounts of electricity and chemicals. (6.5 pounds of CO2 emitted per ream during the industrial process). It’s evident that the pulp and paper industry is very harmful to the environment:

-represents 10 percent of all global CO2 emissions
- uses more than 23.5 billion kilowatt hours of electricity per year
- 74 million metric tons of CO2 to produce paper each year
-uses more water than any other industry

The pulp and paper industry needs to be cut down, not the trees! Many programs online, like Adobe Reader, are doing their part to reduce the statistic that 28 percent of paper consumption is used by printing articles alone. Their use of Green PDF documents is a direct solution to the heavy paper consumption world wide. Green PDFs are electronically circulated articles that are not allowed to be printed.

Each ream of paper not printed due to Green PDFs equals 18.5 pounds less of CO2 in the atmosphere. In America right now, 173 reams of paper are used every five seconds. THAT’S ONE TREE USED EVERY FIVE SECONDS!

DeRosa explains that “if all 700 million Adobe Readers users decided not to print an article ten pages long each year, there would be 3 environmental effects:

1) less waste due to 14 million reams of copy not used
2) 80,000 trees wouldn’t be cut down annually
3) 118,000 less tons of CO2 in atmosphere.”

Right now each ream of paper costs $5.00 for your company. If the world could reduce printing by just 10 percent it would save over 100 million trees, and 100 million metric tons of CO2 in the atmosphere, and $3.5 billion.
This is what you can do to help:

1) Use both sides of paper: don’t buy new notebooks for classes or work until the first ones are used up!
2) Read articles by way of Green PDFs: don’t print articles you don’t need, save them and refer back when you need to.
3) Encourage: your company, friends, and family to make important documents into Green PDFs
4) Save paper at every chance: reuse newspaper, magazines, wrapping paper, etc.
5) Use the internet to your advantage: send Evites, Ecards, and Emails. Download map, directions, and recipes right to your cell phone (that’s what you’re paying for!)

For more information or to check out the article yourself: visit www.greenpdf.com or www.gwi-nc.org.

Growing Green

By Melinda Toussaint


Spring is a time for a rebirth. People start to bring out the swim suit, rock the flip flop, and find any excuse to be outdoors. It also means leaves start to come back, flowers are blooming, and the grass becomes green again. But how green will it be? Now is the time to rethink our lawn care as well.

According to the Idiot’s Guide to Green Living, there are 27.6 million areas of turf grass in the United States, 21 million of which are household lawns. Thus the lawn care and gardening industry generates nearly $40 billion for the economy… an area of which can afford to grow a little greener.

The World Group for the Evergreen Foundation suggests that 93 percent of homeowners value their green space and 90 percent actually believe that their lawn increases the value of their property. This is why we as homeowners should be helping our lawns like they help us.

James Beard, a Ph. D. expert on turf and chief scientist at International Sports Turf Institute claims that the ecosystem benefits from a good lawn in many ways:
- lawns help cool hot air through evaporation
- grass produces oxygen and keeps dust and pollutants out of the air
- lawns and plants help control erosion, keeping soil from ending up as dust or in bodies of water
- trees, shrubs, and bushes are also great sound insulators, helping to keep traffic and street noise out of your living space

Thus Americans need to take care of their lawns, not just in upkeep, but in green, eco-responsible ways. Here are 7 ways you can help green your lawn for this Spring:

1) Instant Change:
- Stop using commercial pesticides that in some cases are leading to cancer, birth defects, reproductive complications, or problems in nervous systems for lab animals, or worse if it gets into our water supply.
- Cut your lawns before weeds go to seed therefore preventing them from spreading (cutting down use for pesticides altogether)

2) Disposing of Pesticides/Chemicals:
- Contact local waste management facilities to inquire about hazardous waste collection programs in your area to get rid of your pesticides or other chemicals on hand
- Call 1-800-CLEANUP (1-800-253-2687)

3) Soil Analyzing:
- Have your soil analyzed to test nitrogen, potassium, and phosphorus levels
- It will help let you know what your lawn and soil lacks
- Find out what plants will most benefit your individual lawn and plant them

4) Grass:
- Choose grass seed that’s specifically beneficial to your region and doesn’t require much watering
-Buy seeds that are disease free and certified from a lawn center
- Add clover seed to your lawn- it resists drought, is green and flowers for a great look

5) Watering:
- Water early in the day so lawn has a chance to dry before night time
- Watering right before the hottest time of day discourages fungus from developing
- Don’t water too much – that’s wasteful

6) Mowing:
- Keep blade sharp (blunt blades are unhealthy to grass)
- Leave mower blade high- never cut below 3 or 4 inches- this will dry out your lawn
- Use lawn clippings in a compost bin or leave them where they land- they provide necessary nutrients for the soil

7) Planting an Organic Garden:
- Check out www.kitchengardeners.org
- Home food production is declining
- Average distance traveled for ingredients used is between 1,000-2,500 miles- 17 times more fossil fuels used than two decades ago
- Organically grown produce is proven tastier
- Check out www.organicgardening.com
- Learn about “companion planting” that will help your garden thrive
- Learn how to build a better composting bin as well as other tricks

No matter how you decide to take care of your lawn… remember that little green steps along the way make a big difference. The greener our grass grows, the safer we are, and the healthier the planet becomes. Spring forward and start growing green!