that GREEN blog

“Going green” is a concept that can be applied to almost every area of your life, including how you select your home’s window treatments. Most people see window treatments as a way to decorate or have more privacy in their homes, but there are a few characteristics you can look for in blinds, shades or draperies that make them more eco-friendly.

The first of these characteristics is energy efficiency. This is not only good for the environment; it’s good for your wallet too. Energy efficient window treatments can help drastically reduce your energy bills by providing thermal protection. In the winter, certain window treatments can help provide insulation by preventing heat loss. Others can be effective in the summer by reducing heat gain. Your location and the type of material you select are both factors in a window treatment’s energy efficiency.

Checking the R-Value and Shading Coefficient ratings of the material is the best way to determine how energy efficient it is. The R-Value tells you the material’s effectiveness at preventing heat loss and the Shading Coefficient will tell you how much heat is coming through the window. So, if you live in a region where temperatures are colder for most of the year, you want to go with a material that has a high R-Value and low Shading Coefficient.

The next characteristic you want to look for in a “green” window treatment is whether or not the material is made from recyclable or renewable materials. Try and find products that are made from natural materials like cotton, hemp or silk and are not treated with pesticides or other harmful chemicals. The impact a treatment has on air quality is a factor in this as well. GREENGUARD certified products are your best bet as they have been tested for chemical emissions. The GREENGUARD Environmental Institute is a non profit organization whose mission is to improve public health and quality of life by improving indoor air quality.

Sustainable manufacturing is the final characteristic you should look for in an eco-friendly window treatment. This means selecting a product that is manufactured without the emission of greenhouse gases, generating waste, or using non-renewable or toxic materials. A product’s entire life cycle and its full impact on the environment and the surrounding community are considered in sustainable manufacturing. The goal is to be able to manufacture in a way which is so sustainable that it is able to continue far into the future.

There is no one treatment that encapsulates all of these characteristics and unless the product comes with some sort of certification statement, you may have to do some research into a product to find out just how eco-friendly your window treatment is. But if you follow these guidelines you should be able to select a treatment that is best for you, your wallet and the environment.

Every day, the world’s many landfills become the resting place of tons of waste, many of which are not biodegradable, and are harmful to the environment. Many hazardous chemicals can mix in these dumping grounds and possibly leech into our water systems or into the soil, and into our food and drink. So any effort to lessen the consumption of goods that end up in these landfills is a must.

One of the major contributors to the mountains of waste in the landfills are diapers. Although these plastic and cloth wonders of technology are very convenient in terms of managing your baby’s bodily wastes, diapers can also cause diaper rash and is filled with chemicals to better contain urine or stool. Disposable diapers are also expensive in the the long-run. As a baby can go through a number of these items in a day, you can do the math.

But taking care of your baby doesn’t have to mean breaking the bank. You can still give the best to your child without sacrificing environmental responsibility. In line with this, many parents are now exploring old but tried-and-tested ways of managing the baby’s waste. Here are some ideas you may want to check out:

Elimination Communication
- More often than not shortened to ECing, elimination communication is certainly not a new concept. In fact, it is estimated that at least half of the world’s babies are toilet trained in this manner. With ECing, the use of diapers is replaced by a potty (or any similar container) as early as possible, and involves teaching the baby to communicate when he or she needs to use it. To get started, you can emit a subtle verbal cue to your baby, typically timed after feeding. This takes some practice and keen observation on your part, but if you are successful then your baby will be fully toilet trained well before babies who use a diaper. However, if you use this particular technique, then you will know that accidents are inevitable, and for special occasions you can still use a diaper as a back-up.

Cloth Diapers
- Again, like elimination communication, the use of cloth diapers has been around for a long time. Today’s parents choose cloth diapers because they are cost-effective and environmentally friendly, but many more are turned off by the amount of laundry one needs to do. Make clean-up easy by keeping a pail of water with borax or mild laundry soap beside your changing station. Once the diaper pail is full, wash them all in hot soapy water and then dry. Because cloth diapers are made up of cotton, these are less likely to cause diaper rash on your baby, as the fabric allows the skin to breathe.

Eco-disposable Diapers
- These eco-disposable products are much like the typical disposable diapers we are used to seeing, and these are touted as chemical-free and made up of wood pulp from sustainable sources. However, despite the name, many of these diapers are not totally biodegradable, as it still comes with the normal plastic outer covering. (One product claims to be entirely compostable, as it supposedly has an outer covering made up of corn products.) Another thing is that these products are not as widely available (although they can be found online and can be shipped directly to your home) and are typically a little more expensive than regular diapers. Many detractors of these supposedly eco-friendly diapers say that using these is more like paying lip-service to being environmentally friendly.

The truth is, it is still up to you to choose which product or technique to use to toilet train your baby. Do your research and decide which works for you and your lifestyle.

Tulsa Mayor Kathy Taylor and her staff have sent a strong educational message to Oklahoma school administrators, teachers and students. With the alliance of Global NES, Inc. Headquarters, Global NES-Oklahoma and Kaizen Renewable Energy (A Global NES Affiliate), the city of Tulsa recently embarked on a School Wind Program that is 100% funded by outside sources. Kaizen Renewable Energy CEO/owner,
Lisa Randolph, who was raised in Tulsa, introduced the program to the city of Tulsa to raise awareness and educate students on how utilizing renewable energy resources will positively impact their future world.

The School Wind Program is the brainchild of Global NES, Inc., an international renewable energy firm specializing in large scale projects for commercial applications, non-profits and municipalities. They are donating a wind turbine and curriculum to Hamilton Middle School under their local Oklahoma State Affiliate,
Global NES-Oklahoma. The donation is being awarded to Hamilton Middle School because of a winning essay written by student, Adriana Rodriguez. The winning essay, ‘Sustainable Energy: It’s Important to
Our Community’, was submitted for the Sustainable Energy Essay Contest held by Tulsa Public Schools and the City of Tulsa. The essay contest second and third place winners, respectively, are Ryan Bunch and Brienna Milleson from Thoreau Demonstration Academy; their school will receive a science project kit donated by Global NES, Inc.

Following the installation of the wind turbine, Tulsa Public Schools and the City of Tulsa will hold a renewable energy celebration on November 5, 2009 from 1:00PM-2:30PM at The Helmzar Facility located at 1006 N. Quaker, Tulsa, Oklahoma 74106. In attendance will be Beth Chenoweth and Lisa Witzel, owners of Global NES-Oklahoma, Lisa Randolph CEO/owner of Kaizen Renewable Energy (A Global NES Affiliate), and personnel from Global NES, Inc. Headquarters out of Denver.

Jon Wellinghoff, chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, raised a lot of eyebrows recently when he suggested that the US may no longer need to build conventional power plants – that efficiency and renewable energy might meet our needs.

He has since clarified his position, saying much will depend on how we think about energy, its use in the system, and market response.

Still, critics say he overestimates green technologies. Are they right? Reading over the most recent report by the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy gives one pause about underestimating technology.

We know that semiconductors have given us computers, cell phones, the Internet – they’ve changed the way we live and work. But often semiconductors are thought of as the source of energy gluttony. We are all plugged in much more than we were 20 years ago.

Steve Nadel, ACEEE director, calls this “the high tech energy paradox,” in his introduction to the report. “Analysts tend to pay more attention to the energy-consuming characteristics of semiconductor devices than to their broader, economy-wide, energy-saving capacity.”

Turns out that in making life easier for us, semiconductors also have been taking a lot of strain off our power system. ACEEE looked at how we might have accomplished tasks without the semi-conductor and found it would have taken a lot more energy.

“Computers and servers show us that it can be easier to make decisions, and that it is easier to move electrons than it is to physically move people and goods,” says the report.

In fact, technologies that use semiconductors saved us 775 billion kWh in 2006 alone. Without semiconductors we would have used 20 percent more power that year. Or put more strikingly, had it not been for semiconductors, we would have built 184 additional, large power plants.

The report goes on to extrapolate that the semiconductor industry is likely to lead to even greater savings in the future.

Semiconductors could support an economy in 2020 that is 35 percent larger than today, but uses seven percent less electricity. By 2030 the economy could be 70 percent larger and use 11 percent less power. What does this mean in practical terms? About $1.7 billion in electricity savings, a lot less carbon dioxide and many more jobs, says the report.

Such startling projections make Wellinghoff’s statement seem less dramatic.

Here I’m in danger of sounding like a sales pitch on the jacket of a paperback. But if you read only one energy efficiency report this year, make it this one: “Semiconductor Technologies: the Potential to Revolutionize U.S. Energy Productivity. http://www.aceee.org/press/e094pr.htm. It is an eye opener.

Renewable & Alternative Energy Resources

Visit Elisa Wood at www.realenergywriters.com and pick up her free Energy Efficiency Markets podcast and newsletter.

Living an eco-friendly lifestyle is rapidly becoming an important goal for a lot of people lately. However, sometimes making those green lifestyle changes are not the easiest on the pocketbook. There are some ways that you can do things differently that will actually save you money and make a huge impact on our world. One of those is to stop buying bottled water.

It seems that having bottled water has almost become a necessity in this country; we buy it like we buy milk and bread. Everywhere you look there are people with bottle in hand. Actually, the United States is the largest consumer of bottled water in the world. Unfortunately, we are also are not doing a very good job of recycling all of those bottles. According to The Container Recycling Institute we are only recycling about 20% of plastic water bottles. Yes, you read that right, only 20% are being recycled! To make matters worse, a lot of the bottles that are deposited for recycling are actually exported, sometimes to as far away as China, which just adds to the resources used by this product.

The manufacturing and transporting of bottled water uses massive amounts of fossil fuels. Most of the bottles are made from polyethylene terephthalate (PET) plastic, which is derived from crude oil. Just making the bottles for the demand in America requires 17 million barrels of oil annually. That is enough to fuel more than 1 million U.S. cars for a year. The energy used to transport the product to consumers just adds to this number. Nearly a ¼ of all bottled water crosses national borders, transported by boat, train, and truck. The US does produce about 94% of its bottled water domestically, but we do also import some water shipped from faraway places like Fiji simply to satisfy the demand for chic and exotic bottled water. Compared to tap water, which is delivered through an energy-efficient infrastructure, bottled water is an extremely wasteful product.

Let’s just stop and think for a moment, is it really necessary to have water pre-packaged in a bottle? Before the bottled water craze we seemed to get along just fine. A lot of people are under the false belief that it is healthier for you than tap water, when in fact using a water filter removes more contaminants than any other purification system. Many may be quite surprised to learn that about 40% of bottled water actually begins as tap water and usually the only difference is added minerals that have no health benefit anyways. Furthermore, in the U.S., there are more regulations governing the tap water quality than bottled water. For example, the Environmental Protection Agency mandates that local water treatment facilities provide a detailed report to the citizens outlining the water source and any test results, including contaminant level violations. There are no requirements like this in place for bottled water companies. Also, public water systems must test for harmful microbiological content in water multiple times a day while bottled water companies are only required to test for these once a week.

Aside from being better for the planet and for your health, drinking filtered tap water is also much more economical. It is not uncommon for somebody to purchase 1 case of water per week for about $7. That is an annual cost of $364, just to drink water and I’m willing to bet that is a lower figure than most spend. Do any of us spend anywhere near that much per year for our entire household water usage? Many justify the purchase touting the convenience factor, but the same convenience can be achieved by simply purchasing a few reusable water bottles. There are a variety of them on the market and they are specifically designed for this purpose. You will make back the money spent on a reusable bottle in no time once you stop spending money on cases of bottled water.

Do something great for your pocketbook, your health and your world. Get yourself a water filter if you don’t already have one as well as a few reusable water bottles and stop buying bottled water. This is definitely one way everyone can contribute to the future well-being of our planet!

Michele Dupper is Mom to her almost 2 year old son and the owner of Truly Organic Beauty. She lives in sunny FL and has been transitioning to a green lifestyle since starting a family. Michele enjoys educating others about living a more natural lifestyle that is beneficial for the health of our bodies as well as our planet.

Environment