Eco Kettle

The kitchen is a pretty important part of the home when it comes to using energy, since you’re using electricity for appliances as well as gas or electricity for your cooker and oven. You’re also using water for cleaning your dishes, as well as generating lots of food waste from vegetable peelings, etc. Well here are a selection of eco-friendly kitchen gadgets to make your home that little bit greener!

Do you love your cups of tea or coffee? Well the eco kettle is designed to make it as easy as possible for you to only boil the water you need. Using a special chamber of water, you release the water you need into the main kettle compartment to boil it. On average, people boils twice as much water compared to what they actually need, so this simple kettle should save energy pretty quickly!

Indoor Composter

If you live in a city apartment but you still want to compost your food waste, then an indoor composter could be for you! Using heat, airflow and moisture, food waste is broken down quickly and without nasty odours. Sure the composter does use electricity, but it only uses around 5kWh a month, which will cost you around a dollar or two each month. A great bonus is that the composter reduces methane emissions, due to the aerobic decomposition of the food waste. That means you can reduce greenhouse gas emissions too.

Investors have given the needed boost Thames Estuary’s, “London Array,” a plan to build 175 wind turbines offshore in its first phase, according to The Guardian.

From the story:

The prime minister, Gordon Brown, described the London Array as a “flagship project” in the drive to cut carbon emissions by 80% by 2050. Environmental groups also broadly welcomed the project although they warned that much more needs to be done to encourage the growth of the offshore wind industry. Nick Rau at Friends of the Earth said the decision to go ahead with the project showed that renewables were becoming “major league”.

Major league, indeed!  Britain is apparently thinking on a grand scale for wind projects:

The scheme is part of the second round of offshore wind farms that have been given consent, which together with the first phase would generate 8GW of power when they are fully built, although many of the projects have stalled because of the economic climate. Bids are in for a third round of nine sites off the coast of Britain, which would add an additional 25GW. If all the proposed wind farms were built, they would together generate 33GW, meeting 25% of the electricity demand in Britain.

That’s right: 25%!  Britain has about 60 million people, which is approximately 20% of that of the U.S.  But that’s no excuse for dragging our heals over here in the States — we have a lot more available coastline for projects and should take advantage of the technology that is available here and now.  

Still, some say that the British are not coming fast enough:

One of the most oft recommended ways to reduce your energy consumption is to begin using compact fluorescent light (CFL) bulbs.  We have recommended this purchase both in the Greener Under Twenty and in the Green Life Project series.  

Many will bring up that the bulbs contain mercury, which is true.  However, they can be recycled at more and more places, including Home Depot stores.  And even if they don’t make it to the recycling center, which is bad, because they should go there, there is still less mercury being emitted by coal-fired power plants due each bulb replacing a less efficient incandescent bulb.

So, they’re much more efficient and can be recycled, taking away that mercury complaint, which makes this seem as if it might be a no-brainer.  Not so fast.  It’s not so simple!

Light emitting diodes (LEDs) have been touted recently as another contender for replacing our lights.  They are even more efficient than CFL bulbs, however are much more expensive than CFLs which are usually more expensive than incandescent bulbs.

Plus, Matthew Phillips sent me this story from the Times of London (‘Green’ Lightbulbs Poison Workers) last week, which highlights workers being poisoned due to working with the mercury in the bulbs in factories in China.  

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 want to call readers’ attention to this story published a few days ago in the New York Times regarding a method of enticing homeowners to install solar panels.

From Europe’s Way of Encouraging Solar Arrives in the U.S.:

Put simply, the idea is to pay homeowners and businesses top dollar for producing green energy. In Germany, for example, a homeowner with a rooftop solar system may be paid four times more to produce electricity than the rate paid to a coal-fired power plant.

This month Gainesville, Fla., became the first city in the United States to introduce higher payments for solar power, which is otherwise too expensive for many families or businesses to install. City leaders, who control their electric utility, unanimously approved the policy after studying Germany’s solar-power expansion.

Now, let’s get political

I’m sure many will rail against this type of, “socialism,” because they feel (I no longer consider it to be rational thinking, but rather a “feeling”) that the, “free market,” if allowed to work, will provide us with such necessities.

The, “free market,” hasn’t brought us widespread green energy use.

Likewise, the, “free market,” didn’t bring us:

• The current, now-antiquated, once state-of-the-art energy grid
• The current, now-antiquated, once state-of-the-art railway system
• The U.S. Interstate Highway system

We've indexed ten great ways to be greener without spending much of your hard-earned green!

You may be watching as the economy threatens to turn its, “recession,” moniker into, “depression,” all while reports about the dire circumstances our environment is in continue to mount.

Need a couple of examples?  Try here and here.  Below, you can find ten great ways to green your life on the cheap and save money while you do it!

While the economy plummets, you may be asking yourself, “can I really afford to be, ‘green,’ during these economic times?”

I’m here to tell you, “Absolutely you can!”

Here I have compiled a list of ten articles from Earthascope that outline different ways to improve your envirohuman impact while saving money.  You don’t have to stop your efforts to pollute less just because of bad economic times!

Think of it as turning the recession into your own, “green session”!

In my endless browsing of the internet, tonight I came across one of the coolest things I’ve seen in quite a while. It comes to us from our friends(?) at General Electric. You’ve probably seen their ads on TV over the past year or so pushing the Ecomagination campaign, which are pretty slick.

Now I’ll leave the debate open for another future post on whether or not GE really is pushing forward with greener energy options, but in the meantime check out Plug Into the Smart Grid, where you can use your webcam to create an incredibly cool holographic image on the screen. I just hope GE is putting as much energy into greening themselves as they are making cool internet tricks!

For a quick preview, check out the YouTube clip below! By the way, I tried it and it really does work just like the video!

How will regulating carbon dioxide affect the cost of burning fossil fuels?

The New York Times reports that the Obama Administration’s EPA is expected to begin regulating carbon dioxide as a pollutant.

The story begins:

WASHINGTON — The Environmental Protection Agency is expected to act for the first time to regulate carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that scientists blame for the warming of the planet, according to top Obama administration officials.

The story also stated that the change could have far-reaching implications

No, I don’t mean a weapons arsenal, but rather an arsenal of nuclear power plants the Republican Presidential candidate (John McCain) says he would like to spend $315 Billion of taxpayers’ money on new nuclear power plants.

This has gotten very little attention, and it’s understandable why, “drill here, drill now” gets more attention — it hits closer to home for most.  But as (the Bush run) Energy Department has said, there would be very little impact on gas prices from, “drilling here, drilling now,” and in about a decade.

So it makes sense for the U.S. to shift over to clean, renewable sources of fuel.  Unfortunately, nuclear power is neither clean nor renewable.

Sure, some will say that

This is a classic case of an envirohuman impact: humans use fossil fuels, such as petroleum, which upsets the delicate balances in nature that allow the weather patterns we are used to having and the earth then, “upset” by the changes, has more drastic weather patterns, and a general trend toward a warmer climate, worldwide.

Beside more frequent major storms, like Hurricane Ike, we can expect, the scientific communty’s consensus says, rising sea levels (leading to floods of densely populated areas worldwide), droughts and drinking water shortages in other areas, and mass extinctions of thousands of species.

So the pathway is: