Posts Tagged environment
Posted by Candice on February 26, 2010 at 17:33 pm
Friday
“Earth911.com is your one-stop shop for all you need to know about reducing your impact, reusing what you’ve got and recycling your trash. Get involved in our world by checking in for daily news, reading weekly feature stories, surfing product channels and opting into our weekly emails.”
This website got it’s start as a hot line for recycling and has grown into a busy website with around 200,000 unique visitors in January according to compete.com. They do still have their hotline though so you can still call them on 1-800-CLEANUP if you prefer a live person to help you find a recycling location (their database has over 100,000 across the country) or specific information on where to recycle electronic goods or packing peanuts.
Earth911.com has definitely enjoyed more than five minutes of fame having been featured on The Oprah Winfrey Show and Good Morning America as well as online in the The New York Times. You can also find their content syndicated on sites ranging from National Geographic to the Huffington Post.
If you were to encapsulate their mission, the folks at Earth911 are all about the 3 R’s – reduce, reuse, recycle! They want to show you how to make your trash another man’s treasure or how to direct your trash to the best place for it to be recycled or reused. They want to provide the guidance that will help you to clean up your home, your community and your world by being environmentally responsible.
This is a site the Bidmycleaning team loves! Hop on over to visit Earth911.com today!
Posted by Candice on December 4, 2009 at 13:52 pm
Friday
The Good Human, a website founded by a guy called David, encourages people to be better humans through working to clean up the environment, being active in political issues and being more aware of one’s life and surroundings. David says “there are so many ways that we can all contribute to our existence here on Earth, and I found over time that mine was talking about environmentalism and sustainability issues.”
David covers a wide range of topics from solar energy to environmental impact of the fashion industry. There is lots to read about recycling, green washing, energy efficiency and other advice on how to “go green”. Of interest to us are the topics on natural cleaning. David has a comprehensive list of ways to use homemade cleaning products to tackle just about every cleaning task in your house. Many of them we’ve blogged about in our Green Cleaning Pantry series.
There is a series called ‘Greenwash of the Week’ and one example calls out SC Johnson on the Nature’s Source line which they claim to be simple, biodegradable, plant-based cleaner, however, David points out that they still contain non-natural ingredients including fragrances, dyes, stabilizers and preservatives.
The Good Human is definitely worth adding to your RSS reader or a quick browse now and then when you have the time.
Posted by Candice on October 23, 2009 at 15:16 pm
Friday
GoodGuide provides the world’s largest and most reliable source of information on the health, environmental, and social impacts of the products in your home. There is definitely a growing interest in the impacts of the products we buy – on our health, on the environment and on society. There are more people buying organic and more people who can tell you what fair trade means and why it is important. Sometimes though, unless you’ve got a Ph.D, it is almost impossible to wade through the marketing speak to determine what the impacts of the products actually are. That is where The Good Guide comes in.
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Posted by Candice on October 9, 2009 at 15:43 pm
Friday
Green Technology Daily is online news and information for everyday people seeking real-time information on what environmental responsibility and sustainability means to you or your business and how to apply to everyday life.
Green Technology Daily keeps you up-to-date on developing green trends, products and business practices with some examples being your carbon footprint, green products for your home, choosing a fuel-efficient car or learning about the current White House policy on renewable energy.
You can find topics of interest to you in the categories of Green Living, Green Policy, Energy, Environment, Technology & Investing and Transportation.
In their EarthTalk section, a recent question was about energy efficiency incentives for homeowners. If you’ve been considering upgrading your water heater to a more efficient version or installing solar panels then you’ll be interested in the response.
A recent article of interest looks at how the economic crisis has slowed climate change – finding the upside in the recession. Another looks at the growth in the market for organic coffee making it the single most valuable organic product imported into North America. We are a nation of coffee lovers for sure so this shift in demand can surely be seen as an indicator of a wider growth in demand for organic and natural beverages, foods and products. Even in the face of this tough recession people are prepared to pay more for organic.
News includes the passing of the nation’s toughest mandatory composting and recycling law by San Francisco which will require everyone to have three separate color-coded bins and sort their trash using blue for recycling, green for compost and black for trash. An interesting fact I learned from this article is that material like food scraps and plant clippings that go into landfills decompose to form methane, a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide … aside from the fact that they take up costly space.
Green Technology Daily isn’t as light and fun as some of our recent links but if you’re looking for the latest happenings on the green front with solid reporting then it is worth a visit.
Posted by Candice on October 2, 2009 at 10:30 am
Friday's Eco-Friendly Find
As it’s name implies, Do The Green Thing is all about inspiring green action. Their belief is that individuals can make an impact but a community can make a much bigger one and in so doing, encourage governments and businesses to follow suit. They have inspired people from 202 countries that have visited the site 4 million times, told 52,054 stories, and saved 11,389.00 tonnes of CO2. Green Thing, a not-for-profit public service that is Green Thing is endorsed by some of the planet’s leading environmental thinkers, uses videos and inspiring stories from around the world to highlight 7 key things you can do to lead a greener life because they believe entertainment is very inspiring while lecturing is less so.
What are the seven things?
- Walk The Walk
- Stay Grounded
- All Consuming
- Easy On The Meat
- Human Heat
- Plug Out
- Stick With What You Got
All seven are pretty self evident as to what they encourage. For example ‘Walk the Walk’ is about getting from A to B without any C ie. car and ‘Plug Out’ is a their take on a philosophy being promoted by all green initiatives which essentially encourages people to cut the use of electricity-guzzling electronics and not leave electronics plugged in. ‘All Consuming’ promotes the the art of wasting nothing and using up everything or “one man’s biscuit tin is another man’s tool box” and “let everything be born again as something spangly and useful”. Their latest initiative in this category is the ‘Glove Love’ campaign which encourages people to send in their mismatched gloves to be matched with a partner and then sent to a glove loving new owner.
An interesting item I found under their ‘innovation’ tag is Amazon’s initiative to be less wasteful with right-sizing their packaging by having “software determine the “right-sized” box for any given item based on dimension and weight”. Hopefully this means a whole lot less of the dreaded packing peanuts and sealed air bags will make their way to landfills. The blog is also a great read with lots of fun features like the one showing how you can use one black dress 365 days of the year and still have a different outfit each day and another featuring the best environmental poster ads.
To keep up with what’s new and newsy at Green Thing follow them on Twitter – http://twitter.com/dothegreenthing but definitely make sure you stop by sometime.
Posted by Candice on September 4, 2009 at 12:23 pm
Friday's Eco-Friendly Find
There is so much to like about Mother Nature Network, MNN.com. It is a great looking site with a wealth of content which is touted as being ‘environmental news and information that makes sense!’ The site claims to be everyman’s eco-guide and there really is something for everyone whether your interests are personal pursuits or business interests, local focus or global view, there are articles, blogs, videos and original programming to suit you.
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Posted by Candice on April 22, 2009 at 13:24 pm
Earth is our Home - Earth Day is for cleaning house!
Today is Earth Day — April 22 – and this year is the 39th year! Just one more to the 40th anniversary of Earth Day. On April 22, 1970, 20 million Americans took to the streets, parks, and auditoriums to demonstrate for a healthy, sustainable environment. Earth Day founder Gaylord Nelson, then a U.S. Senator from Wisconsin, proposed the first nationwide environmental protest “to shake up the political establishment and force this issue onto the national agenda. Denis Hayes, the national coordinator, and his youthful staff organized massive coast-to-coast rallies. Thousands of colleges and universities organized protests against the deterioration of the environment. Groups that had been fighting against oil spills, polluting factories and power plants, raw sewage, toxic dumps, pesticides, freeways, the loss of wilderness, and the extinction of wildlife suddenly realized they shared common values.
Now in 2009 it seems that not much has changed – we are still fighting oil spills destroying our oceans and marine creates but add to that a huge swirling mass of plastic, we still have rampant pollution but now we also have the threat of global warming, we are still fighting the use of toxic chemicals in everything from cleaning products to personal care products and we still need efforts like ‘Replanting the Rainforests’ to try and reverse the loss of our wildeness.
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Posted by Candice on August 28, 2008 at 00:21 am
Pretty soon we’ll be celebrating the holidays with lots of new electronic toys and gadgets most off which require batteries to make them move, groove and swing! This just adds to the staggering numbers of batteries purchased in the US each year, estimated at half a billion. When they run out of power and are ready to be replaced they typically go into the trash can and from there straight to a landfill.
Reducing the hazardous waste in landfills starts at home. Millions of households are producing billions of pounds of solid waste. Products used every day in our homes leach hazardous chemicals after entering landfills and batteries are among the worst.
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