Compact fluorescent light bulbs can save you energy and money -- and help preserve the environment!

Green Life Project is a weekly series of posts highlighting one change for readers to make in their lives in order to gradually green their lives.

||Week Seven||

This week’s green life project action item is to replace five of your incandescent bulbs with compact fluorescent light (CFL) bulbs.

Of course, some of you may have already done this.  If so, yes, by all means, take off this week and review our other Green Life Project posts to make sure your project is up-to-date.

But if you have not yet begun using CFL bulbs, you should!  Consider:

• CFL bulbs use a quarter to a third of the energy that incandescent bulbs do.  This means lower power bills!
• CFL bulbs do not give off as much heat, which proves to be good in the summer when you’re trying to keep cool!  This is surprisingly also welcome during the winter as well simply because light bulbs make for an inefficient way to heat a home!  Again,

I wanted to bring to readers’ attention a new vehicle that might revolutionize travel in cities. The PUMA! You’ve probably already heard about this by now. The concept seems on the surface to be a rather brilliant attempt at tackling the smog and congestion problems posed by motor vehicles.

General Motors (GM), known for making such gas guzzlers as the Humvee (Hummer and H2), has teamed up with two-wheeled personal transporters, Segway, to produce the PUMA, a vehicle focused on, “Personal Urban Mobility and Accessiblity.

It’s great to see GM move away from over-sized vehicles.  Also, SegWay, whose product has, to me, seemed to have held such promise for a long time but not the results to match, to have maybe found a way forward into massive implementation of their technology.

Check out this video:

The toilet may be a source of waste you rarely think about. You can significantly reduce that waste starting today!

Green Life Project is a weekly series of posts highlighting one change for readers to make in their life in order to gradually green their lives.  If you’re just joining us, feel free to jump right in here on week six — you can catch up later!

||Week Six||

This week’s Green Life Project action item is to displace water in your toilet’s tank.

We had so much fun greening our TP use last week that we figured another week spent greening our bathrooms made a lot of sense!  If you already have a high efficiency toilet, you can take this week off.  Otherwise, there is a simple and effective way to reduce water waste right now!

If you’re like most Americans,  you probably have an old clunker of a toilet flushing with several gallons of water every flush!  You might be using several times the amount of needed freshwater, and we can help you to trim a little of that waste.

Putting a Bandage on this Problem

With water potentially becoming the new oil, we all need to do all of those, “little things,” to reduce our own water use.   According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), “inefficient toilets are responsible for most of the water wasted in American homes.”

So we’re starting with this issue to try to put a, “bandage,” on the problem, since this is not a permanent fix. Ideally, we would all have high-efficiency toilets, but not all of us are going to be updating our toilets anytime soon, especially not if you rent or are feeling the effects of the economic downturn.  But, you can use less water with every flush starting today with materials you already have!

Adjust your environ|mentality to banish your eco-doubt!

Am I green enough?  Do my greener purchases really make a difference?  Are we collectively saving the earth or just making ourselves feel better about our consumption?

Okay, so you may be going through some eco-doubt.  Everyone does and I’ll help you get over it.  I’ll show you the environ|mentality to see your more sustainable living choices really make a difference and that you can get over your eco-doubt.

Sources of Eco-Doubt

Sure, you see it everyday on the news: the latest oil spill, mountaintop mining, chemical dump leaching into drinking water, or a coal’s toxic sludge flooding a town.  We see pollution in so many forms everyday.

And you likely have thought to yourself something along the lines of, “I’m using a somewhat greener laundry detergent (and paying a little more money for it) and the world around me is being polluted millions of times more than I ever have.  What’s the difference?”

Making A Difference

I was discussing just this issue today during a phone call with my older brother.  He’s relatively eco-conscious, using a reusable water bottle, recycled paper toilet paper, and generally trying to do some of the little greener, more sustainable things you or I may be employing in our daily lives.  So, he’s not your typical eco-doubter.

Small plastic garbage? Each month, more than 45 tons of CDs become obsolete—outdated, useless, or unwanted. What to do with them and their cases?

I just received an email with the following questions regarding recycling CDs and their cases:

How would I recycle plastic CD cases?  Can I just chuck the whole CD into the recycling bin?

Admittedly, I didn’t know the answer and needed to do some research.  After wading through some how-to crafts, I found the answer I was looking for.  Read on!

How would I recycle CD plastic covers?

Beyond, “I don’t know,” my first reaction to this question was that, sure, as the second question implies, you can put them into your general recycling bin and send them off with whatever cans, bottles, and paper you put by the curb or deliver to a recycling center.

However, I was skeptical of this actually working, because I could not find a recycling symbol and plastic type labeled on my jewel CD cases.

So, while some might have such a symbol, some do not.  I’m concerned that