Category: Treehugging

Earth Day pointers

A co-worker shared this idea with me…

We save water (and keep our plants outside in good shape in summer) by saving our pre-shower water, you know, that water that just goes down the drain as we wait for the shower to heat up?

It fills a bucket per day for us, a bucket of water I am paying for that usually goes down the drain. Instead, it goes on my potted plants and trees outside, making them very happy, even when rationing starts in the summer.

And here are some good tips for what to do with left over 2-liters:


2 Liter Recycling – video powered by Metacafe

We’ve been trying to save all our milk jugs and water jugs and such to recycle but there are certain rules/restrictions you have to follow in Red Oak. Our jugs were starting to pile up and so the other day while we were working in the yard I started cutting the tops off of some of them and are now using them to hold soil, grass clippings etc until we get a “formal” compost box.

Also – anyone know where I can get rid of several cups worth of old gasoline?

Going green

Found several examples of folks getting creative with green energy sources for transportation today (mostly thanks to the MAKE blog).

Andrew, a 17 year old in Michigan has already constructing two EV (electric vehicle) cars.
He’s converted a 1988 Mazda B2200 to electric, as well as his current project, a 1992 Toyota Tercel. He get a top speed of 55 mph out of the Mazda and can get around 40 miles out of a charge. He’s hoping to get closer to 80 mph on the Tercel. You can read more about the projects on his blog.

SUNN

Another cool project is the SUNN vehicle that was designed and built a guy and several high school students in Maine as a hobby project but is now also available through the SUNN Solar Electric Kit. The car can be charged with solar panels or being plugged in directly to a wall and gets an average of 20 miles per charge. The top speed is 20-25 mph. There’s even a cool 14 min video on YouTube showing the car in action during the day and at night.

Finally, there’s the steam powered micro-car and motorbike (moped).

I also read last week about a community that told their 15 year olds they couldn’t get a driver’s license until they were able to create a vehicle that runs on something other than oil/gas based products. So they built a pickup truck that runs on burning mesquite wood.

I wonder, if we keep putting our heads together like this, what will we discover in the next 5 years? What if the next big thing in transportation is steam powered vehicles, or maybe a waste powered vehicle? What waste product can you think of would be better suited for powering the vehicles of the future?

Whether is for environmental or economical reasons, I think we’re all beginning to agree, something must be done to reduce our dependence on foreign oil.

Green Tip

This came from a co-worker on our office’s Green Team:

The website changethemargins.com is calling for printer owners everywhere to take the simple step of, well, changing their margins from the current luxurious standard 1.25 inches to a the more modest .75 inches. It may sound like a small change, but if everyone in the nation did it, we’d save a little less than a Rhode Island’s worth of trees every year. Does tinkering with Word’s cumbersome preferences scare the fonts right out of you? Another goal of the site is to petition Microsoft to change the default margins on all its Office products.

Changing your margins in Microsoft Word:
Go to “File,” then “Page Setup.”
Once on “Page Setup,” click the “Default” key, and you’ll be offered “Do you want to change the default settings for the page set up? This change will affect all new documents based on the normal template.”

Set each margin to .75 and save an immense amount of paper.

Thomas Nelson to produce eco-friendly Bibles

From the Reformergent:

As the first move by a major publisher of Bibles, Thomas Nelson, Inc. has decided to no longer mass produce synthetic bounded Bibles, but switch to a more eco-friendly alternative. Thomas Nelson also were the publishers behind McLaren’s Everything Must Change, which specifically points out that the book is printed on eco-friendly material. I have to say, good job Thomas Nelson for making the switch. So now as Americans we can start buying up the eco-friendly Bibles to add to our Bible shelf, and send away all of our synthetic ones to areas of the world where they can start polluting their environment with materials that don’t decompose.