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,

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

Recycled paper toilet paper no longer looks like the rough-as-a-cob stuff pictured here. You can find TP made from recycled paper that is actually soft!

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 five — you can catch up later!

||Week Five||

This week’s Green Life Project action item is to begin purchasing 100% recycled content toilet paper.

A popular recent New York Times article states that, “In the United States, which is the largest market worldwide for toilet paper, tissue from 100 percent recycled fibers makes up less than 2 percent of sales for at-home use among conventional and premium brands.”

What should you do?  Wipe your butt — with a green toilet paper!

Purchase a 100% recycled content toilet paper.  Try to find one with at least 50% post-consumer product and one which was not manufactured using chlorine-based bleach.

But it’s toilet paper.  Why does it matter what I flush down the toilet?

As we work toward personal sustainability, we have to look beyond our own backsides.

Check it out these four must-read bullet points regarding the, “toilet tissue issue,” (mostly from the same New York Times article) and see how your use of a such a seemingly mundane product could be so very damaging to our environment!

Environ|Mental is a series of posts regarding changing your mentality about the environment.

Adjust your environmentality!

What?  Don’t recycle plastic?  A website promoting greener living telling you not to recycle?

Kind of…  but not really.  Read on!

Actually, I’m telling you to think about not even needing to recycle plastic — that is, when possible, avoid using plastic altogether.

Don’t let plastic into your life!

Plastic is difficult and costly to recycle, it degrades each time that it is recycled, and it takes many lifetimes to break down. So, when you can, stop using it! Just cut it out of your life!  Use metal, use wood, don’t use it at all!  Don’t buy that gadget.  Don’t pull that plastic bag off the roll.  Give

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!

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

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.  

Last Saturday morning, I awoke early to make my way to North Avenue Beach in Chicago.  I was not there to play volleyball.  I was not there to fail at volleyball, either (I once was working on overhand serving and managed to hit my ball directly at the head of a guy putting a net up next to ours.  Three times in a row!).

I also was not there to stare at a crush of mine, although that happened.  I had no idea she was joining in the fun until I arrived.  Bonus!

I went to the beach, actually, to participate in a beach cleanup effort, organized by the Alliance for the Great Lakes.  I am not a janitor by trade and typically I would not have found picking up garbage out of sand and seaweed a great fun, but my increasing awareness of the hazards posed by water- and land-borne litter made this a fun activity.  The giant omelet and apple pancake afterward helped, too!  Plus the presence of a crush.