Category Archives: Environmentally Friendly

Travel and Climate Change

I love to travel. Most people do. Seeing new people or people you love, travelling to someplace other than home is just a lot of fun.

Unfortunately it’s not all that environmentally friendly. Travel can produce a lot of carbon.

I’m not against all travel. Taking a trip to a new place means seeing new things and maybe learning about a different way of life, if you travel to someplace not like where you live. It helps keep us connected to the rest of the world and to realize why living a more environmentally friendly lifestyle is important.

There are ways to make your traveling plans more environmentally friendly. It won’t work for every trip, but you do what you can. Consider traveling by train. If that won’t work, consider buying carbon offsets. Expedia has partnered with TerraPass to make it easier for you to buy carbon offsets to match your travel. It’s not perfect, as offsetting is still in its infancy, but it’s certainly better than nothing. Continue reading →

So Hard to be Green Sometimes

Just figuring out how to be green is tough a lot of the time. I read a story a week or two back about how scientists are realizing a lot of biofuels aren’t so environmentally friendly as they thought. Turns out the production techniques cause more environmental issues than the use of the fuels solves.

A lot of trying to live green is like that. You think you’re doing something right and it turns out to not be as good as you thought. Compact fluorescent light bulbs are more efficient and last longer than traditional incandescent bulbs, but they aren’t so good in terms of what’s inside them. How should we handle that waste? Which one is really better? I’m still not 100% certain.

Other things work a bit better. Organic gardening done right is very good. Buying organic produce can be good, but where did it come from? If it’s not local you aren’t being as environmentally friendly as you thought.

Living a greener lifestyle definitely means educating yourself constantly. Sometimes you think you have the answer and it turns out that the implementation is more harmful than doing things the old way. It’s a tough problem, and you can’t always spot these things up front.

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Solar Technology Marches On

I’m really impressed. If Nanosolar can pull this one off… wow! Talk about an improvement in the availablity of solar power!

They’re working on a printed solar panel technology. They’re building a plant right now that could produce 430 megawatts of solar cells annually… compare that to current solar panel production in the United States of 153 megawatts. Beautiful. Just beautiful.

You can read a variety of news reports on their site. Here’s a quote I liked from one of the stories, which appeared in Mercury News: Continue reading →

How Much Can a Stay at Home Mom Really Do For the Environment?

Why is it that when women talk about being a stay at home mother, many describe themselves as being “just” a stay at home mom? I’ve always felt that there’s nothing so simple about it. As a stay at home mom you have the power to make a big difference for your family or even for others.

I like to think about the environment, for example. There are plenty of things you can do around the home to make sure that your family lives in a more environmentally friendly way. Some of it can even save money, which is often near and dear to the stay at home mother’s heart.

You’re always home, so that probably means you’re always using some electricity. But at some times of the year you can cut down on your electricity usage by something as simple as opening the blinds during the day and letting the sun light the house. This may not work in the dead of winter or when it’s so hot during the summer that you’d have to turn on the air conditioning, but it can be effective. Continue reading →

Is Recycling Worth it?

This should be an interesting thing to take a look at. I was reading over on Evolgen about whether or not it is really environmentally beneficial to recycle most goods.

Now, the concession is made that recycling aluminum cans is good, and nothing was said of other metals. Given the value of most metals I would expect them to in general be worth recycling.

However, there could be a case made that things such as paper and plastic take more energy to recycle than recycling saves. This is an arguement made by Penn and Teller on their show.

I’m pretty much a chronic skeptic, so when someone like Penn and Teller say it, I’m not going to take it too much to heart. But it can get me to thinking and exploring. Continue reading →