environment
Work
The Complete Guide To Going Paperless
2:00AM Gina Trapani | You already pay your bills online and get electronic statements, but there are even more ways you can stop killing innocent trees and wasting time and money dealing with paper. It’s time we went paperless. More »
Money
2:00PM Angus Kidman | If you want your next car purchase to be more environmentally friendly, the government-funded Green Vehicle Guide is a sensible place to start. The site ranks cars based on greenhouse and air pollution emissions, and lets you compare up to three models for relative performance. The lists are ranked by both best performance and vehicle sales, which reveals that most of us apparently haven’t yet taken the green message to heart when it comes to car purchases.
Green Vehicle Guide
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Green Vehicle Guide Rates Cars By Emissions
2:00PM Angus Kidman | If you want your next car purchase to be more environmentally friendly, the government-funded Green Vehicle Guide is a sensible place to start. The site ranks cars based on greenhouse and air pollution emissions, and lets you compare up to three models for relative performance. The lists are ranked by both best performance and vehicle sales, which reveals that most of us apparently haven’t yet taken the green message to heart when it comes to car purchases.
Green Vehicle Guide
More »
Fix
Eat Meat In Deck-Of-Cards Portions For A Healthier Earth
11:00PM Kevin Purdy | Reducing your environmental impact by diet doesn’t mean having to go entirely vegetarian. If you’re intrigued by climate change and “flexitarianism,” one meat-loving author says eating 3.1 ounces per day is just about right. In his (long) piece for Audobon Magazine, Mike Tidwell consults with researchers and crunches the numbers to suggest that eating enough meat to make up a deck of cards per day, with only half of it red meat, is an ideal goal for having a real impact. Your ability to get by on that amount, or beliefs in climate change’s importance, will certainly vary, but it’s a good guideline to use for gradually switching to a less-meat diet. A shorter summation of Tidwell’s findings is linked below. Photo by jslander. How Much Meat Should a Climate Change-Wary Flexitarian Eat? [Example Source via Example] More »Get Started with Composting
9:15AM Kevin Purdy | Wired’s How-To Wiki guides newcomers gently into the soft terrain of composting, a great way to recycle biodegradable goods and create some of the best growing soil around. You can get started with something as simple and low-cost as a trash bag, the authors note: Just fill it up with a good mixture of browns (paper and plant pieces) and greens (kitchen scraps), soak it down, punch a few air holes and wait three months. Viola! Compost. The wiki has more detailed advice for those who want to keep a tidier pile, or learn more about what makes for great material—one easy-to-find example, as previously posted, is non-glossy, low-colour junk mail. Are you composting? What’s your setup? Let us know in the comments. Photo by normanack. Compost [Wired How-To Wiki] More »
HP Smart Web Printing Saves Tons of Paper
7:30AM Adam Pash | Windows only: Freeware application HP Smart Web Printing combines clips from any number of web pages into one page, so you don’t have to print five different pages of filler to get one page worth of information. The tool—which despite its HP origins works with any printer—integrates directly with both Firefox and Internet Explorer, so clipping text, images, or any part of a page is as simple as clicking a button. Before you print, you can edit, resize, and adjust all of your clippings to your liking. The result is more useful printouts and less wasted paper. If this freeware, Windows only download tickles the environmentalist in you, check out other easy ways to go green and save money with your computer. HP Smart Web Printing [HP via Shell Extension City] More »
How to Water Your Lawn Efficiently
5:00AM Adam Pash | AU – Please note that water restrictions are in place across most (if not all!) of Australia right now. These tips are about saving water when caring for your lawn, but you should check what restrictions are in place in your local area! Spring is upon the northern hemisphere (AU – and down under we’re living with water restrictions!), and with a little know-how, you can water your lawn more smarter this year. Tutorial site wikiHow offers strategies to reduce your water usage while maintaining a healthy, hearty lawn. For example: Water deeply to encourage deep root growth. Frequent shallow waterings encourage weed germination, and they also cause the grass plants’ roots to grow shallow, leaving the plant more susceptible to drought and to certain diseases. Watering only when your grass really needs it encourages the roots to grow deeper The article is full of other smart watering tips—like watering early to avoid evaporation—that are worth a read before you put out the sprinklers. Photo by Finstr. How to Water Your Lawn Efficiently [wikiHow] More »
Mulch Your Garden with Junk Mail
11:30PM Gina Trapani | A reader at frugal finance blog Get Rich Slowly suggests shredding your junk mail and using it to mulch your garden. To avoid killing your garden with inks and metals leeching off the shredded paper, the author uses the following guidelines: I only shred the non-glossy stuff, and try to avoid coloured ink as much as possible. Since I’m shredding to avoid identity theft in the first place, and credit applications these days contain coloured ink, I can’t stay 100% black and white, but I can accept that. More »What Disposable Items Do You Re-Use?
11:00PM Kevin Purdy | Over at the TipNut blog, they’ve rounded up 20 supposedly disposable items and how to reuse them, in ways both common (newspapers for kitty litter liners) and unique (greasing pans with used butter wrappers). There’s a handful of items that might make you think twice before trashing, but with so many products turning the way of use-and-toss these days, there’s got to be far more creative reusable hacks out there. So I put it to you, dear readers: What items do you never toss before getting a little bit more out of them? How do you save money (and save landfill space) without spending a lot of time? What web sites do you turn to for reusable inspiration? Drop your tips, ideas, and links in the comments, and we’ll consider them for a future post. 20 Things You Can Use Twice Before Tossing [TipNut.com] More »
Easy Ways to Go Green with Your Computer
2:00AM Adam Pash | Not everyone can afford to install solar panels or get a new Prius this Earth Day, but there is one place you can go green without spending an arm and a leg or radically changing your lifestyle: your computer. Chances are you spend the majority of your day sitting in front of the keyboard, and a few small changes can go a long way toward reducing its negative impact on the environment. As an added bonus, doing your part for the environment will save you money, too. This Earth Day, we’ve rounded up a few simple ways you can go green with your computer. More »
