Energy

Energy, the generation, distribution and use of it, is one of the key factors in most of today’s societies world. The easy to get, cheap and abundant energy fuels the global economy and consumer lifestyle of the 20th and 21st century. The industrial growth model needs ever more increasing amounts of energy to handle growing population, increasing consumption and piling up of waste. Green living is energy efficient living, using renewable energy that is not polluting.

Laundry

How much laundry do you have? How many times do you do laundry? What a boring subject, getting our clothes, sheets and all sorts of fabrics cleaned. But wait, its something we all in one way or another are dealing with and doing this greener has a big impact on our energy consumption. I remember several years ago reading an article that went into quite some details how to do your laundry by and. Not that I am advocating that. The article was so amazing in describing exactly how to do this with not more work involved than when using […]

Free Notes Paper

I have figured out how to reduce the use of white paper and even how to have plenty of note taking paper, some of it free. Here are some of my thoughts about it, what I am doing and how to get the free notes paper: Even though we are using computers for more and more things in our day to day lives, at work and for entertainment, to store information, paying our bills, conducting business, staying in touch and many, many more things, one of the promises of this technology was to reduce the amount of paper we will […]

Short Green Study on Candle Jars

Here we are, after Christmas, after New Years, after many other holidays one might have been celebrating. I hope you enjoyed it all! I did. Nevertheless, I have been looking for a solution to one particular recycle problem. We use candles. For some of our workshops, my wife has found candles she likes most, for various reasons: The don’t smell and are unscented, they develop hardly any smoke, almost all the wax is burnt and they burn for 100 hours. Moreover they are made from palm wax, which is, potentially, a renewable resource. Of course, to be a sustainable or […]

Green Living Contradictions

It seems that when working towards leading a sustainable lifestyle often I am ending up in some sort of contradiction. Let me give an example. I live in the US since over a a decade. My immediate family lives in Europe. As I do want to be in touch with them I call regularly or send emails. Once in a while I really like to see them in person. For a while I was visiting about every 2 or 3 years. Since a while I have been visiting once a year, due to two realizations. One that traveling will become […]

What to do with Newspaper Bag?

For the longest time we did not know what to do with the plastic bag the daily paper is put in that is delivered to our house door. The recycle situation of both these items in our county is such, that they would end up in the landfill. So after a number of ideas, including to maybe not order the paper anymore, we came up with two different solutions. 1. We take one of the bags and put it a convenient spot in a cupboard, which itself holds the other bags. When we pick up the paper, the plastic bag […]

Getting Around

In today’s life for many it is unthinkable to not have transportation available at will at any time. This wasn’t always like that and certainly isn’t like that for the population in many places. Once the automobile was becoming the center of fulfilling our transportation needs, our city and land use plans were designed around the need of the car. Eventually this has contributed a lot to the fragmentation in our lives. We live at a different place where we shop, where we work and where we meet with friends or where we learn. The distances are often so far […]

Sustainable Smoothie (part 2)

Have you been enjoying smoothies recently? We are just past the peak of our fruit harvesting season – pears, plums and apples. In the previous post about smoothies, we posted several questions to consider, if wanting to have a healthy and although otherwise sustainable smoothie, a “green” smoothie. Not because of the color it might have, but in the sense of having considered ecological aspects for its whole life-cycle and its footprint. To which level of detail and level of interconnections to other elements in the chain of processes and events necessary to produce our smoothie one wants to take […]

Heating Tidbits

Where we live temperatures get low for winter and part of fall and spring and we can have lots of snow. So heating is needed. We have made sure our house is well insulated and has no leaks. The house is designed in a way to utilize some sun during the cold time of the year and not overheating in summer, but instead staying cool by using passive methods. We have the entry door on the West side, opening into a sort of entry/mud room, which provides another buffer to the outside temperatures. We can control the airflow from the […]

Sustainable Smoothie (part 1)

I want to use a smoothie, to go through the sort of thinking when looking into the question about what sustainability is, what details are involved to call something green, in the sense of environmental, social and financial viability. This is not treated exhaustively. Just a little warm up. So lets dive into this, first with the bigger picture. There is so much diverse and contradictory information out there in regards to what is a good diet. I am not planning to add to that. I am not a nutritionist or food scientist, or anything like that. Reading keeps me […]

Low Energy?!

Some mornings when getting up the level of my energy is not at its peak. In fact, the resting place looks majorly attractive – just a few more minutes rest, please, with the hope that maybe then my body will tell me how well it feels and how it can’t wait to enjoy this new day. I purposefully led you down a different path than what this article is about, as there are connections. What I really wanted to talk about is the energy we use individually. And low energy use is probably in the center of transitioning to a […]