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 […]
Sustainable Smoothie (part 3)
2 Smoothie Recipes Well, here are my “secret” smoothie recipes. The first one is what we have been doing until recently. It has some major issues in regards to sustainability. For example the banana and orange are not grown here but transported from far. And then the special ingredients are not grown here either and besides the flax seed, couldn’t be grown here. The second one has also the green super food in it. It is not locally from here, but could be replaced with some green kale, cucumber, spinach, etc. During the winter, which is cold and snowy here, […]
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 […]
Produce Bag Solution
Not so long ago I ran across information regarding plastic, specially in the form of grocery bags. The reports were about what types of chemicals plastics contain and what they do to our environment and our heath if ending up in water, how plastic bags go into the landfill and slowly disintegrate into smaller and smaller pieces, finally into particle sized aggregate penetrating groundwater. How much plastic is found in the oceans already, from whole bags to those tiny particles posing and threatening to fish and the whole maritime ecosystems. There was one research project that scooped up water and […]
Thoughts on “Community”
Have you ever asked yourself about how your community, be it family, a circle of friends, or your whole town or neighborhood, your church, etc. are actually forming? What makes a community a community? And than of course why do we want and often deeply crave a community that we are part of? The term “community” for me brings up a number of different associations, like co-op housing, ecovillage, commune and also family – specially when coming together at my grandparents house during my childhood- and also friends and neighborhood. All this in this one word and at the […]
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 […]
