30 Tips for Going Green and Saving Money

Thirty-one tips for reducing your impact while saving money

I was reading through comments here on the blog last night and I found this great list of tips by reader Millie Barnes, who writes a blog about health and gardening called Optimum Nutrition. Her tips were just too comprehensive to let them languish in the comments. So here they are (I don’t even mind including the plug for her products). Thanks Millie!
My Level of Living Green
by Millie Barnes

1) Air dry all laundry–had to put a lock on the dryer cord to convince my daughters I was serious–they have learned to plan ahead! I wash all laundry in cold water, always wash full loads, and use a drying rack inside if it is raining. It’s good for the earth and great for your skin, a free humidifier in the house. Which also makes it feel a few degrees warmer in winter, and cooler in summer. I use soapnuts for laundry.http://www.zamuta.com/

2) Buy all organic food, beauty and cleaning products.

3) Buy all organic non-toxic beauty care products and make-up. I make my own skin care cleanser and moisturizers. I make my own soap. My beauty products can be purchased athttp://ezchef.net/spacuisine/

4) Use baking soda and vinegar for cleaning the bathroom. I use Ms. Meyer Clean Day for dishes, Citri-Clean for counters and general purpose cleaning. I use a loofah for scrubbing dishes (I am growing my own right now so I won’t have to buy them anymore!) My sister is making scrubbies by crocheting them, we will offer these for sale soon!

5) Take cloth bags to store for groceries and all other purchases. Take muslin bags I made to grocery store for produce.

6) Recycle, re-use, make my own and have stopped buying anything I don’t really need.

7) Don’t use paper towels, never have. Used cloth diapers for all 5 kids.

8) Don’t buy stuff in plastic, I try to buy all glass. Store all food in glass. Re-use glass jars. I mostly buy real food (meat, produce) try to not buy anything that needs a label, so no packaging.

9) Have been using recycled toilet paper for years but am considering switching to cloth at home. (don’t freak, we all used that same choice when we used cloth diapers and wash clothes on our baby’s tushes!)

10) Make my own gluten free granola, make my own mayonnaise, salad dressings, spice blends.

11) I use a compost toilet, no toilet paper (think cloth baby wash clothes).

13) Use very low flow shower heads. Ace Hardware has a 1.5 GPM with a shut-off valve.

15) Use all CF light bulbs…and use them as little as possible. I have one evening a week that I use no lights..on Shabbat! Dinner by candlelight!

16) Use grey water from shower (I keep a 3 gallon bucket in shower and use it throughout the day to flush the toilet, take what’s left to the flower beds.

17) Use water from rinsing dishes to water flower beds.

18) Use a broom on all my wooden floors instead of using vacuum cleaner.

19) Run as few errands as possible, car pool and combine trips.

20) Use micro-cloths to clean with, even on glass you do not need cleaning products!

21) NEVER buy bottled water. I bought a Kleen Kanteen for each person in the family, we refill and take with us. I’ve had mine over a year.

22) Go paperless or CD-less as much as possible. I provide my clients with emails of my book, but still put cookbook software on CD.

23) Unplug all appliances not being used. Yes, that cell phone charger and TV are using power when you aren’t using them! I use power strips to keep them plugged in, turn them off at night, or when I’m gone all day.

24) Use only a hurricane lamp when we sit outside at night. It gives enough light to read by…but is perfect turned low …for just hanging out. Very romantic, too!

25) Use candlelight at dinner, not just on Shabbat!

26) I have an outdoor solar heated shower that I built.

27) I put in a raised bed garden, square foot garden I have green leaf lettuce in a grow box, cherry and big sweet tomatoes, basil, thyme. I have sweet potatoes growing, beets (mmmm, beet greens), onions, Swiss chard, purple flowering kale, nastutiums, broccoli, cucumbers, peppers, red potatoes, a banana tree. Inside I am growing cucumbers and strawberries hydroponically.  UPDATE_ I have quit using raised beds to grow veggies as it wastes a lot of water and is labor intensive for organic growing.  I now use sub-irrigated containers…

28) I use a non-disposable razor, an old-fashioned stainless steel, very high quality razor that uses double edged blades. It was 24.00 from ClassicShaving.com. The blades are 10 for 5.99, and they are double edged! They give the closest, smoothest shave you can imagine! No disposable blade can compare.

29) Wash dishes with 2 dish pans in the sink, one for hot soapy water, one with warm rinse water. Do glasses first, pause a moment to let the soapy water drip off, then move to rinse water. Stop when rinse water is almost full and rinse quickly. Repeat with silver, plates, then pots and utensils. All with 2 dishpans full of water. Then I pour the soapy water, with all that organic matter, onto my plants in the garden. It helps repel pests and loosens the soil. And good for the biceps when you carry it outdoors.

30)
I water my garden with buckets from the rain barrels that are under the eaves of my garage. 10 feet from my garden. The front flower garden gets watered entirely from the dish water.
30) I work out at home, no expensive gym memberships that I never used anyway. I save all the expense of membership, and gas and time driving. I have a set of weights, two exercise balls, a yoga mat and a chin-up bar.

Subscribe to this feed • Digg This! • Email this • Save to del.icio.us (7 saves, tagged: asides carbon diy) • Technorati Links • Stumble It! • AddThis! • Share on Facebook

Stylish Carbon Filter Water Bottle by Black + Blum Taps Ancient Japanese Techniques

Bonnie Alter

black+blum/Promo image

Black+Blum is the British design team that specializes in creating household items that you want to use again and again. Now they have come out with Eau Good, an organic and stylish looking water bottle that makes tap water taste great.

Dan Black and Martin Blum wanted to create a bottle that was ergonomically- (and aesthetically) designed and would filter tap water as you drink. Ever conscious of the environment, they are well aware that over 22 billion plastic water bottles are discarded yearly.

The ingenious and careful design is based on an ancient Japanese filtering system using carbon filters. In Japan carbon filters have been used as a water purifier since the 17th century. They reduce chlorine and chemicals, add minerals to the water and balance the pH. The active carbon filter lasts up to 6 months.

The lovely looking bottle is made from BPA-free plastic. It has a cork top. Just released this week, the water bottle has alrealdy won best new product award at the Home Show in London. TreeHugger Lloyd heard about it in Toronto last week at the Interior Design Show: it is sweeping the world.

The way it works is ingenious. You squeeze the bottle to lock the filter in place as well as release it when it needs to be changed.

TreeHugger had the pleasure of meeting up with Martin Blum and Dan Black, so we know a bit about their background.

The pair met at the University of Northumbria where they were both studying industrial design and decided to work together because they both wanted to design “products for the right reason.” They acknowledge that they are lucky to have the freedom to choose the kind of work that they want to do and the flexibility to branch out and not be pigeon-holed. Blum’s wife is Japanese and she has influenced their thinking in the development of the products, as would seem likely in the case of the eau bottle.

http://www.facebook.com/widgets/like.php?href=https://optimumnutrition.wordpress.com/2012/02/18/stylish-carbon-filter-water-bottle-by-black-blum-taps-ancient-japanese-techniques/

Swim Down Through a Sea of Trash With Dramatic, Eerily Beautiful Photos by Mandy Barker

From TreeHugger

Jennifer Hattam

© Mandy Barker
SOUP: Bird’s Nest. Ingredients: discarded fishing lines that have formed nest-like balls due to tidal and oceanic movement. Additives: other debris collected in its path.

What would it be like to swim down through the estimated 100 million tons of trash swirling around in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch? Mandy Barker‘s photographs bring viewers probably as close as they’d ever want to come to finding out.

Looking at the images in the U.K.-based artist’s "SOUP" series creates the vertiginous feeling of sinking into the ocean, watching colorful — but deadly — bits of plastic in all shapes, sizes, and hues rise through the blackness of the deep sea.

© Mandy Barker
SOUP: Refused. Ingredients: plastic oceanic debris affected by the chewing and attempted ingestion by animals. Includes a toothpaste tube. Additives: teeth from animals.

"I have always been interested in collecting natural objects from the beach but began to notice that there was more and more man-made materials debris amongst them," Barker told TreeHugger in an email this week. In an earlier series, "Indefinite," she photographed individual pieces or clusters of beach trash, abstracted to resemble the strange sea creatures such debris is threatening, with captions indicating the number of years it takes each material to decompose.

Inspired By Photographer Chris Jordan
The visually striking, even beautiful "SOUP" photographs were inspired, Barker says, by TreeHugger favorite Chris Jordan, who famously photographed the extensive collection of plastic pieces found inside albatrosschicks after they died. Seeking to show the vast scale of the problem in her photographs, the artist collected bits of plastic from beaches in the U.K. and elsewhere in Europe, and contacted researchers in other parts of the world, asking them to send her specific garbage finds.

© Mandy Barker
SOUP: Translucent. Ingredients: translucent plastic debris.

Barker, a former graphic designer, also previously created a Silent Spring-inspired series of haunting multiple-exposure photographs combining images of birds, eggs, and diagrams of chemical structures to bring attention to the impact of pesticides on bird populations. She is currently trying to find funding to expand the "SOUP" project and continue the artistic exploration of the impact of oceanic plastic that she has been working on for the past two years.

"My intention aesthetically was to visually attract the viewer to the image and for them to question what it represented," Barker told the website London Independent Photography in an earlier interview. "I felt by enticing the viewer to discover the meaning in this way would create a more lasting impact and message of awareness… All the images are created to represent the disturbing statistics of dispersed plastics having no boundaries."