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.

The U.S. citizenry is again gaining interest in what they are eating and for various reasons.  Some are interested in the financial benefits of starting your own garden, others are concerned about their health, and many are concerned about the negative impact most of our agricultural and grocery industries are having on our environment.  

So, although I have not yet seen the film, Food, Inc., which features the likes of Michael Pollan (who, by the way, I get to hear speak at the Harold Washington Library in Chicago next Monday), it seems to focus on many of the problems with our food industry, most specifically, its production.

Check out the trailer below and let me know what you think!

In an effort to further green their business (and image), Google is now mowing the grass around their office property with, that’s right, goats!

According to their blog, for about the same price as their lawnmowing service, they now have a herd of about 200 goats graze for a week at a time courtesy of California Grazing.  Not only do they trim all the grass but fertilize it too, yeah, exactly how you’d think!

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”!

Corn husk or food wrapper?

Tomales!

Why are tomales a green food?  Well, the ones I enjoyed at lunch today had green peppers inside, but that’s beside the point.

It’s the wrapping! Check out the steamed corn husk being used to wrap tomales!  While munching on my tomales today at work (yum!), I found myself admiring the continued use of corn husks to wrap food.

It seems as if this is an age-old practice that has been passed down over time (and has somehow been preserved as common practice) and, well, why not?  The husks are otherwise going to be tossed and this way they get another use before making their way back into nature — with their fully biodegradeable goodness!

We had a whole bag of tomales brought in at work, and while the bag was not biodegradeable (it was plastic) imagine any other fast food — or food from the store — coming in a bag and most likely, it would be wrapped in paper, plastic, foil, or styrofoam — all of which are not nearly

Welcome to the October 6, 2008 edition of Cirque du Vert: Circus of the Green! After another short break, we’re excited to get rolling again with some fantastic articles from some of our best writers yet. We’d like to thank everyone for all of the great submissions and congratulate our contributors who have their articles featured below!

Wesley presents Four Way to Green your Wallet (and the Environment) posted at EnviroHumanImpact.  Wesley gives his top 4 common sense tips for saving money and the environment at a time where we find ourselves in a slowing economy and tightening purse-strings.

Jeremy presents

As ordinary citizens of the United States and also citizens of other connected economies await to see what will transpire in the coming days and the fallout from the credit/subprime/overall economic decline, one might wonder what effect this might have on the environment.

While most are likely much more worried at this point whether or not their savings and investments will be worth much after this mess and still others wonder whether or not they will have food on the table or a roof over their head.  Still, even others already find themselves hungry and/or without a home.

While you may feel somewhat hopeless about the financial system at-large, there may be some small things you can do to both save money and improve your envirohuman impact simultaneously.  

Turn any plastic bottle into a eco-watering can!

We’ve already mentioned the benefits of using a watering can around the house but today, we’ve got a tip for greening this already pretty green activity!

Behold the EcoSpout! The EcoSpout is a small spout kit that can turn almost any small plastic bottle or milk jug into a watering can.  The system will fit most quart and gallon plastic containers.  A new adapter will connect to snap-on and non-standard threaded jugs.  Included are a small spray spout and thin stream pouring spout.

How does the EcoSpout green your plant watering can?

So you have taken the plunge and taken the advice of many extolling the environmental virtues of composting, such as replenishing needed nutrients to the soil in your own community (rather than filling up landfills with otherwise useful organic matter.

That’s great!  But how often do you have a very small item for the compost and feel it is too much to stop making your meal to take that one peel out to the compost heap?  My guess is that it is too much to take every scrap piecemeal (no pun intended) to your compost pile, but maybe you have adapted to that situation by collecting compostables in a container until day’s end.  But who wants to have to remember to take it outside everyday or face the smell sitting right there on your counter?

So maybe those coffee grounds end up in the garbage from time to time?  Not a big deal, right?  Not a big deal?  Well, sure, there will be times when composting doesn’t happen for whatever reason.  But composting is a big deal considering that synthetic fertlizers are used to replinish our lands of necessary nutrients when it becomes depleted (among other reasons) and I have a simple method so that you don’t have to take every bit of compostable matter outside separately.  

All that organic matter paid to have that organic matter shipped our way and now we’re going to have a gas guzzling (er, diessel drinking) garbage truck haul it away and mix it with inorganic, toxic materials?  Make sense to you?  It’s needed in your own backyard!

So, for that Quick Tip: Simply, put an old butter container (preferably a larger one) or a coffee can into the refrigerator or freezer and put your banana peel, coffee grounds, tea bags, crushed egg shells, and other matter into the container as it is produced.  When it is full, take it out and leave it on the counter for thirty minutes as it thaws loose from the sides of the container.  Then, take it outside and bury the block of ice under some leaves, sticks, and green matter to avoid pests from picking at any food remnants.

If you need the room in your freezer, then keep it in the refrigerator until more room is available.  It’s that easy!  And it helps you to save energy by keeping your refrigerator or freezer stocked.

Occassionally, I get to combine two things I enjoy and care strongly for.   Today is one of those days!  I came across a very interesting website while browsing the web called Portable Farms.  Basically, it’s a commercial site selling these mini-greenhouses made for growing plants, flowers, vegetables, and even fish!  I was especially interested in this idea as I am an avid aquarium hobbyist and have done my own breeding of tropical fish.

So the whole idea here is obviously reduce our dependence on food sources that are heavily processed, travel far and wide, and use significant amounts of energy to end up in your stomach (or garbage can – didn’t your mother ever tell you that there are starving children in Africa?).  Now, I’m not a vegetarian and regular gardening can only get me so far; I need a little meat in my diet!

Add Tilapia to the mix now!  It’s not my favorite fish in the sea but it is versatile, you can do a lot of different things with this light, white fish.

They call it “Aquaponics” and focus on creating a closed system that fosters both the growth of plants and fish (much like a planted aquarium).  Fish waste is siphoned from the tanks into the plants and used as a fertilizer.  The excess water is then drained back into the tanks after having been cleaned and reoxygenated.  As they describe it:

Aquaponics is the growing of fish, or other water-based animals, along with land plants in a controlled environment, to maximize the use of the energy and nutrients in the system in order to harvest the greatest amount of vegetables and fish protein from the system.

At the very least, I think the Portable Farms site is worth checking out, if not just to get you thinking about how you can grow more of the things you use and eat every day.