The following is a guest post by Neil, who attended Debbie Durkin’s 4th Annual Eco-Emmys Celebrity Chateau, where he met with a representative from Hybrid Solar Lite.  Hybrid Solar Lite provided flashlights for Neil’s review, but his opinions are his own.

I bought my first car last week.  I recently moved to Los Angeles from New York City, for though the mass transit in New York proved to be more than adequate, their West Coast equivalent…isn’t.  However, I was eager to purchase this car for it would help me realize a childhood dream.  Growing up, my sole impression of cars driven in California during the 2010’s was from the 1989 film Back to the Future II.  In this world, not only are there light-up Nike sneakers with power laces and hologram sharks coming out of movie theaters advertising the latest sequel to Jaws, there are…flying cars.

Seriously.  Moving to LA had to be the best idea I’d ever had, for in moving there I would be able to drive on the Skyway and fill up at a talking Texaco station.  This was going to be the coolest experience ever, and I was grateful to Robert Zemeckis for directing a film that so thoroughly prepared me for this brave new world.

When I arrived in LA, I made a horrible discovery.  There were no power laces.  There were no hologram sharks.

There were no flying cars. ANYWHERE. Read more…

If you have access to fresh food and freezer/refrigeration, making fresh, homemade baby food is a green, economical, DELICIOUS, and incredibly satisfying way to ensure that your child is receiving the highest quality food that you can provide. I decided to make homemade baby food after I opened a jar of organic peas and began gagging because of the horrid smell! I did not want to feed my children anything that I was not willing to taste (or sniff) myself. Read more…

Image credit: http://www.himachal.us/

You may have heard about Sustainable Dave, the man who saved all his garbage for a year. Imagine it! Piles of plastic wrappers and take-out containers stacked all over the house.  It surely got stinky along the way, but Sustainable Dave’s experiment with trash gave him a clear idea of just how much we consume and how little we think about what we’re consuming.

Inspired by this adventurous man, I decided to tackle a smaller challenge.  Whenever I put a new liner bag in the trash can, I write the date on the bag. Everything that can’t be reused or recycled goes into the trash, and the date (written in big black permanent-marker numbers) reminds me that I’ve come home from a shopping trip with more unnecessary packaging or one-use items that can’t be recycled.

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Primed and ready for paint

The Modern Fiance and I a few months ago bought a 100-year-old house that, despite being in pretty good shape, has needed a little updating a lot of greening. One of the first big things on our to-do list was painting. It’s been a couple of years since I’ve lived in a place that needed some painting. In fact, the last time I painted anything there was no place I knew of locally that sold low- or zero-VOC paint — it was only available to me if I ordered it online. I like to test paint out before committing, so that really wasn’t an option.

Boy how things have changed. The Home Depot sells Freshaire Choice VOC-free paint. Lowe’s sells VOC-free Olympic paint — really every paint store I’ve been to lately had VOC-free options. It’s great to have choices. But like most green home products, my concern was whether the quality would hold up compared to the VOC-heavy paint options.

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WARNING: Once you start cloth diapering, it becomes an obsession. Once you try one Kushies Ultra-Lite Cloth Diaper, you WILL purchase more!

Kushies sent me a Trial Pack of Infant (neutral colored) diapers to sample on my little Owen. The Infant diapers are sized to fit babies from 10-22 pounds. I discovered that the diaper did not fit him properly until he was about 15 pounds – the only drawback to this incredibly soft and vibrant diaper (every baby is shaped differently – just because they did not fit Owen properly until 15 pounds does not necessarily mean it will be the same for your little one). As one of the least expensive “All-In-One” diapers on the market at $12.49 or less, I additionally purchased a Toddler Pack of 5 (boy colored) to use on my 2-year old son. Read more…

Ed Begley Jr., Leonardo DeCaprio, Ed Norton (easy on the eyes and the environment!), Robert Redford, and Daryl Hannah, and Cate Blanchett (swoon!) are just some of the celebrities that put their money and their environmentalism where their famous mouths are. Kudos for using your fame and status to do good things. Some other celebs have put their money and their fame where their feet are, which also just happens to also be their mouths.
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Attention Seattle residents! You may think it makes no difference how close you live to Amazon headquarters, since the company ships to all over the world. But if you’re a frequent Amazon customer, you can green up your purchases a little by using its AmazonTote service.

AmazonTote works like this: When you’re ordering stuff, click the button that says “Ship Free with AmazonTote” and then proceed through the checkout. Keep adding as much as you like to your bag. Then, your new stuff will be delivered to your doorstep in a sealed, weather-resistant, reusable tote bag once a week on your designated ToteDay. You can keep the tote bag or leave it on the doorstep for the Amazon delivery people to pick up the next time they swing by.

You can also return items using the AmazonTote service.

Currently AmazonTote is only offered in the Seattle area, but if you’d like the service added to your area, contact Amazon to put in a suggestion.

Do we have any Seattle readers? Have you used AmazonTote? What do you think of it?

Apparently it’s product review week here at The Greenists. So far, we’ve heard about body butter, bar soap, baby bottles, and hand wash. I’m sort of glad The Modern Gal threw an “h” in there with that last one, because that means it’s not me who spoils all that nice alliteration by telling you that today’s post is sponsored by the letter “c.” Friends, we’re going to talk about candles.

Learning to live a greener life involves just that: learning. I’ve been working on that basic Reduce, Reuse, Recycle mantra for years now, but I’m always coming across other tidbits of varying significance and concern that simply never occurred to me before. Take candles, for instance. Like lots of people, I burn candles at home now and then to fill the room with fragrance or simply enjoy the cozy glow. And sure, I knew candles are made of wax, but I never really stopped to think about where that wax comes from.

In most cases, it’s from paraffin, which is a petroleum product. As we all know, petroleum is a non-renewable resource. It also contains carcinogenic toxins, and burning it releases contaminants that pollute the air in your home and, on a large scale, contribute to global warming. Traditional paraffin candles also produce soot, which can blacken not only the inside of the glass that holds your candle, but your walls and furniture as well.

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It’s Memorial Day, the unofficial start of summer, which means lots of people will be breaking out the picnic baskets and firing up the grills for the next few months. Eating outdoors seems like a more natural way to enjoy our food, but it also takes a few extra steps to stay eco-friendly. Here are some reminders of how to enjoy your summer barbecues and picnics without leaving a larger footprint.
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I am always amazed by what can be created with patience, talent, skill, and the simplest of materials. Chuck Eblacker creates dry stone wall structures using what already exists in nature: stone, and nothing more. No mortar is used in the creation of a dry stone wall.

From an article by Building Green:
“Cement production is one of the most energy intensive of all industrial manufacturing processes. Including direct fuel use for mining and transporting raw materials, cement production takes about six million Btus for every ton of cement. The industry’s heavy reliance on coal leads to especially high emission levels of CO 2, nitrous oxide, and sulphur, among other pollutants. A sizeable portion of the electricity used is also generated from coal.”

And, according to the article the chemical process that occurs in Portland cement is “responsible for roughly 1/2 ton of CO 2 per ton of cement.”

So, creating stone walls without cement is a markedly greener practice. It’s also an art form. Dry stone walling is said to be the world’s oldest craft. There are only a handful of people in the United States certified to build dry stone walls.  If properly built, the way in which the stones are laid creates gravity and friction enough to create a wall that can stand for 100 years or more. Read more…