I’ll be the first to admit: When standing in line to check out at any store and someone busts out the checkbook to write a check, I start to fume.

Not necessarily because they’re harming the environment using the little paper payment, but because it wastes an extra 30 seconds of my day standing in a pointless line. This VISA ad is so right on:

But aside from my snobby distaste for check-writes, it brings up a better point beyond just the speed and convenience of a credit/debit card: you can reduce your envirohuman impact by using one as well!

From the New York Times on May 31, 2008, by Floyd Norris, the story begins that Americans are driving less. Whoo Hoo!

In normal times, the number of miles driven in the United States rises each year, as more people drive more cars and as rising housing costs force some commuters to move farther and farther from their jobs.

But the Federal Highway Administration estimates that in March — the most recent month for which data is available — vehicles traveled 246 billion miles. That is a lot of driving, but the figure is down 4.3 percent from the previous March.

Monthly comparisons can be volatile, since changing holidays and weather can have substantial impacts that have nothing to do with decisions to drive less or more. But the trend seems to have begun last winter. In the 12 months through March, the total miles driven — 2.99 trillion — were nearly 1 percent below the figure for the 12 months before.

I’ve been a dog person my entire entire life having had many different breeds both large and small. Recently, my wife and I adopted a beautiful little miniature dachshund (that’s right a Wiener dog!) named Mia. Now, granted, having a pet is not the most environmentally friendly choice, but they are enjoyable and so many people have pets, we should talk about a small way to reduce the negatives impacts of that ownership.

After nearly 3 months have passed since Mia entered the family, I came to a few realizations about the benefits of small dog ownership both for the owner and the environment:

According to an article I recently found on Cnet.com, titled: New Way to Save Energy: Disappearing Ink, technology is currently being developed to create paper than can be reused instead of thrown away or recycled.

Ultimately, there is something to be said for being able to hold a piece of paper in your hand for viewing certain kinds of information. Take for instance, a menu at a restaurant that is reprinted with new menu items on a daily basis. What if, instead of throwing it away at the end of every day, you could just reprint it onto the same page? It may some day be a thing of the past! Check out the video below to see it in action:

The digital age has afforded us many things including the ability to limit our envirohuman impact. Today, we look at one of the easiest ways to reduce your consumption (and a company’s production/use) of paper.

Every month, you probably receive 2-3 small novels in the mail taking the form of various statements, whether for a credit card, bank, or cell phone monthly usage statement. These can vary from 2 to 30 pages long and oftentimes, many people don’t even bother looking at them in the first place.

Well, if you didn’t already know, most of these companies provide you the opportunity to “opt out” of the paper version of your statement in favor of just viewing a PDF or web page version of the statement. Now, if at some point you’d like to have a paper copy of a statement, a magnificent invention from over 25 years ago can help solve that: it’s called a printer.

We recently came across a very interesting piece of consumer research: the Greendex courtesy of National Geographic Online.

While most research looking at various countries’ impact on the environment is measured by the actions taken by the governments, the Greendex is a consumer based survey that ranks countries’ envirohuman impact based on the individual consumers’ green-related habits, consumption, and sentiments.

Basically, this gets at the heart of the green movement by finding out what people are actually doing and how their personal decisions towards sustainability compare to that of others around the world. So how do you stack up? Where does your country rank and what can we take away from the the survey?

First, some results and takeaways according to the site:

Like the need for rain comes and goes, clouds follow (hopefully!). But what if the need for storage, server capacity, and overall website testing and use calls for a company to add expensive servers, finding room (if it’s a young startup, that might mean renting space, hiring professionals to install and maintain the servers, never mind buying the servers themselves)?

Oh, and by the way, you are not even sure that you will need the servers, you are just going on the hope and hunch that your website idea will take off and have a sudden glut of hundreds of thousands of users trying to visit your “brilliant, market-changing” creation.

For every promising website that takes off and sustains traffic, hundreds, if not thousands have flopped if not at first, shortly after early successes. Many a webmaster (indeed, web entrepreneurs) has had grandiose aims, goals, and visions of a future as a mainstay destination only to see those dreams fade.

Before we even get near the potential solutions related to the transportation problem, we have to look at the myriad problems related to transportation in the United States.

Right now, the most common ways people travel in the United States for long distances continues to be by airplane and car. Even short distance traveled in the United States continues to be dominated by personal vehicles rather than rapid mass transit.

Partly, this is due to “rapid” being left out of the “mass transit” that is present in small and large cities. It’s difficult to have people believe in investments in the infrastructure necessary for new rail lines and more bus routes before there is a large enough mass of people willing to take advantage. But in the meantime, people feel compelled to use their personal cars, SUVs, and other means to get where they’re going, whether recreation or work on time, because it otherwise feels like rolling the dice on arriving promptly.

I am most excited to present the debut of “The Green Deal,” EnviroHumanImpact’s latest series! This series of articles will detail a modern, commonsense approach to tackling some of the main environmental problems faced in the United States.

Why the U.S.? We know many of our readers are from other countries, but we are based in the States and can better talk about the problems here and potential solutions. The U.S. is the world’s number one polluter, also, so let’s start with the biggest problem here. No, we won’t pretend these are the only answers to these vast problems, but rather a set of proposals to spark interest and thought on these problems that many may accept as facts of life. They do not have to be!

Have you ever stopped to think about the amount of paper wasted from fax machines? If you use one at work you probably see it spewing new documents all day long. Own a small business? How about all the junk faxes you get from salesmen with their latest and greatest solicitation? How nice of them to send a twenty page information packet, wasting your precious recycled paper that will inevitably just end up right back in the trash can (or, hopefully, your recycling bin!).

Wait, aren’t we in the digital age now? Fax machines are so last century, but no doubt there are still some times where one is necessary. Did you know there are easier ways to manage both the onslaught of incoming faxes and save time, money, and paper?

For nearly a year now, I’ve been using the fax services of MyFax.com to eliminate the need for an actual fax machine in my home. I needed one for work purposes and thought, “There has to be a better way, this isn’t 1990!”