Posts tagged "embodied energy"

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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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Ecobuilding Retreat

Over a long weekend the Northwest Ecobuilding Guild (NWEBG) held its member retreat, which is also open to non-members. If you have never heard about the NWEBG you are missing out on one the premier green building associations in the Northwest. And, it is not just building, but related areas as well, landscaping, design, manufacturers of green materials and more. According to their website “It is a community of builders, designers, suppliers, homeowners, and partners concerned with ecological building in the Pacific Northwest. The Guild empowers people through education to transform the built environment for long term sustainability.” have to […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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What is a Mail Chimp?

What is a Mail Chimp? You might wonder, why, as you find out below, I am writing about software, the internet and technology. Before I jump into this article’s topic, let me explain. I do think technology is playing such an enormous role in my live and many lives of people around the world and has such a huge impact that, if we can create truly green technology, the vision of creating a sustainable and green way of living will greatly benefit and maybe be really helpful in the transition towards that. One benefit for me is that it allows […]

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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 […]

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