Healthier you, greener planet
From the category archives:
Most Americans’ idea of a dream home is something like a large mini-mansion with six bedrooms, six full baths and four living areas. Not mine. I want to live in an earthship. An earthship is made of rammed earth tires (tires filled with packed dirt) with solar panels on the south side of the house. [...]
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For those of us who are really into “green”, finding an eco-friendly pillow can be a challenge. One of the biggest challenges is that not only do we want it to be free of unsustainable materials, but comfortable as well. The greatest ideal for such a pillow is one that is made of all natural [...]
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I have a laundry quandry. A few years ago, before I was really into green and trying to buy only natural and/or sustainable materials, I bought this nylon laundry basket from a home department store. It isn’t your typical plastic basket, but a deep nylon cylinder held up by a wire coil. The combination of [...]
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I thought I was doing pretty well in developing a green kitchen. Here are just a few things I’ve done to make my kitchen a healthier, more energy-efficient place to be: Got rid of all non-stick cookware (okay, I have two Teflon cake pans and two Teflons bread pans, but my husband had them before [...]
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Much ado is made these days about compact flourescent light bulbs. They are said to last eight to fifteen times as long as incandescent bulbs (the non-eco friendly kind you grew up with) and use much less power, producing significantly less of the greenhouse gases than the incandescents put into the air. They also only [...]
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As a resident of one of the nicer neighborhoods in a middle-class suburb, I would like to give kudos to my neighbors who not only maintain their own lawns, but also use a broom to clean up afterward. Whether they do it consciously or not, they are making the greener (and more economical) choice. I [...]
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…reduce, reuse, recycle! When I was teaching in the inner city, I was continually annoyed at how wasteful my students were. It didn’t matter how old they were. Fifth graders destroyed puzzle boxes as quickly as my Kindergartners, and every year I had to take each class through intensive training on why we put waste [...]
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The concept of fair trade is simple. Producers in developing nations are paid fair market value for their goods, thus helping them to achieve economic stability and self-sufficiency. Sounds reasonable, doesn’t it? People should be paid well for the work they do and receive a living wage. However, since the inception of the Industrial Revolution–especially [...]
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I first started line-drying my laundry when my son, Benjamin, was about 20 months old. It was the “green” thing to do, I knew. So twice a week, I would lug the basket outside and hang our laundry up on the makeshift clotheslines that my husband had put up for me. I thought I would [...]
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