Image credit: milajake

I know we usually save the videos for A/V Fridays, but I recently watched a brilliantly simple TED talk that I think is worth sharing on a Thursday. If you’ve got four minutes and 28 seconds to spare, go watch it now. The gist is that if you use paper towels to dry your hands, you’re probably doing it wrong, and if you switch to Joe Smith’s “Shake! Fold!” method (which guarantees you dry hands using only ONE sheet of any thickness and size), we could save 571,230,000 pounds of paper a year. That’s no small figure. It is, however, a small change, and the small, easy changes that make a big difference have always been some of my favorite posts on The Greenists. So bookmark that for later if you must, but seriously, watch that video. You’ll hear Joe saying “Shake! Fold!” every time you wash your hands in a public restroom from here on out, and you will use way less paper as a result; I swear.

For the record, I do avoid using paper towels at all as often as I can, and I’m sure you probably do too. I keep a tea towel on a magnetic clip under my desk at work; I would never think to waste a paper towel to dry my hands at home; and it annoys me no end when people reach for paper towels in the gym locker room when they’ve got a washable cloth gym towel hanging out on a bench ten feet away. But it drives me crazy to leave a public restroom with wet hands (or damp jeans from trying to dry them on my legs), so I’ll admit that I cave to using paper towels outside the work/home/gym/friends’ homes venues. Now, however, at least I use only one when I do so.

Of course, people use paper towels for more than just drying their hands. Read more…

photo courtesy of Nest

Any good Greenist probably already knows that one way to save energy around the house is to install a programmable thermostat for your home’s heating and cooling systems. You program the thermostat to cut back its efforts at night or when you’re out of the house during the day, and boom, you’re saving energy.

But what about the times when there’s an unseasonable change in the middle of the day? Do you reprogram the thermostat with every slight change in the weather? And do you remember to change the programming when you go out of town for the week? How about for the weekend?

Read more…

Please welcome today’s guest poster, Thomas Maurer.

Image: http://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/2550093

Organic and natural mattresses are now readily available on the Internet and are becoming more and more available in regular stores. The mattress industry can be confusing to many people at the best of times and now, with all these new organic products out, there’s the possibility that the confusion will step up a level when trying to determine the health and environmental benefits of different products.

Most reputable organic mattress producers are completely transparent about their products. They are confident in its quality and certifications and they have nothing to hide. Others are a little bit more cagey and offer up less information. These are some things to consider.   Read more…

I kind of have a thing for soap. I mean, it’s nothing I think to put on my Christmas list or mention on my online dating profile, but I have a hard time walking past a display of handmade soaps without sniffing (if not buying) at least one of them, and probably a full third of my Etsy purchases have been bar soap-related. I’ve even written about the virtues of bar soap here more than once.

As much as I love bar soap, however, in my kitchen, the tidiness and ease of a liquid hand soap just makes more sense. And there are lots of green, eco-friendly hand soaps on the market, many of which I’ve purchased over the years. I haven’t bought liquid hand soap in over a year, though. Why? Because my new favorite hand soap is one I mix up myself from something I already always have under my sink.

You may or may not remember the post I wrote about castile soap a while ago. It’s some amazing stuff, castile soap. It’s about as environmentally friendly as it is versatile. I listed several uses for castile soap in that previous post, but one simple use in particular has become so routine for me that I feel it bears mentioning again.

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Please welcome today’s guest poster, Jessica Arinella, creator/writer/producer of the What You Can Do series.

My friends know that I suffer from something I refer to as ISD — or Impending Sense of Doom. You may recognize this feeling of hopelessness when you see an image of a polar bear hanging off the edge of a rapidly melting iceberg. With so many concerns from hunger to ocean pollution, it’s hard to know how to make a positive impact on our world. And one critical challenge that really gets my ISD going is water conservation.

While our planet is covered in water, only one percent of it is suitable for human use. Some experts even believe that water could become as scarce as oil in the not-so-distant future. And the EPA estimates by 2013, 36 of the 50 states could be facing water shortages.

The good news is there are many easy ways to save water. As I believe action is the only cure for ISD, I created a project called What You Can Do, a series of 60-second videos to show how to help our world’s most important issues. Below are some of our favorite ideas and episodes on water conservation:   Read more…

Are you guys addicted to Pinterest yet? There’s a lot of that going around lately. So many great ideas! So little chance I will implement ANY of them! A few weeks ago I saw an idea I did decide I should try, however. It was a post proclaiming the wonders of baking soda and hydrogen peroxide to make old cookie sheets look like newish. My own cookie sheets have definitely seen shinier days, so I mixed up a paste of baking soda and peroxide and tried to go to town. And it… sort of worked. If I really cared more about the state of my cookie sheets, I probably could have scrubbed and scrubbed with that concoction and maybe eradicated at least the most recent few years of ugly, baked-on crud. But you know what? I don’t. I’ve used my cookie sheets, so they look used. And I’m OK with that.

My glass baking pan, however? That one I haven’t given up on. And yet, I foolishly used that pan to broil a piece of salmon the other night rather than using the black metal roasting pan that’s actually designed for such a thing. And hence, I ended up with some burned-on stains on the bottom of the pan that weren’t coming off with plain dish soap and a scrubber sponge. So I tried the baking soda and peroxide mixture in there, and you know what? That actually worked! Hurrah. Ditto on my black nylon spatula and spaghetti server, both of which have had a weird white residue on them (Hard water stains? Dishwasher detergent? No idea…) for years now. A little scrubbing with the soda/peroxide paste, and that residue’s all but vanished. Magic!

I was trying to remember why I bought the bottle of peroxide I have stashed under my sink in the first place, so I did a quick search of The Greenists archives and remembered. It was this post, written by Courtney a year and a half ago already. Have I tried a single one of those five unusual uses for hydrogen peroxide since I first read them? Apparently not. But I will now! Maybe I’ll even pin them to a Pinterest board to be extra sure I don’t forget. Maybe you should, too!

A few days ago, I noticed a discussion on another website about a real estate survey published by Yahoo! back in December. That survey asked 1,500 current and aspiring homeowners to choose the features that their dream home would include. Lo and behold, “green or energy efficient” was the top vote-getting quality after being chosen by 58 percent of the poll’s respondents. My knee-jerk reaction was, “Great! Our fellow Americans are finally getting it! Taking a green-minded approach with our homes IS important.”

But then I read a bit farther into the poll’s results and noticed the disconnect.

Tied for second  was “building a custom home,” chosen by 38 percent of poll respondents. Clocking in at last place with a measly 5 percent was “tiny house,” a feature chosen by fewer people than “stately, traditional mansion” or even “castle or castle-style.”

Read more…

Please welcome today’s guest poster, Izzy.

Everybody needs to do their bit when it comes to protecting the environment, and there are so many ways you can make a difference. Your home should be the first place to start when it comes to lowering your carbon footprint, and there are a number of simple ways you can create a green home with minimum effort. Equipping your home with things like an all-natural bed or an open log fire is a great start. Buying only organic food to stock your kitchen is also a move in the right direction. But to really make your home as eco-friendly as it can possibly be, there are a number of steps you should try to take.  Read more…

Please welcome today’s guest poster, Edward.

A clean home is a healthy home. As common sense a statement as you’ll get — doubly so, when one remembers that much of the ill-health of the past came from dirty homes and unsanitary practices. But to get our homes clean these days seems to require rather a lot of specialized cleaning products — so much so that just opening the cleaning cupboard can be something of a health hazard.

And when you start thinking about all of the various chemicals being sprayed in your house daily, it does add up to quite a cocktail. Is all of that chemical soup, released in your own personal environment, really healthy for you?

The EPA certainly doesn’t think so. In its discussion on volatile organic compounds (VOCs), it noted that inside the average U.S. home are up to five times as many of these nasty compounds than are present outside. And one of the main sources of VOCs is manufactured cleaning products. With VOCs being fingered for problems relating to nausea, headaches, eye/respiratory tract irritation, and even cancer, maybe a healthy home should really start with natural cleaning.

And using natural cleaning products is a surprisingly easy, and refreshingly cheap, option — just check out this list of the top six natural cleaning tips for your home.  Read more…

If you live in the city like me, there are eco-friendly options for your safety better than this dog- although probably not as cute!

Wanting to live an environmentally friendly lifestyle doesn’t mean you have to limit yourself from basics you need. You just have to find alternative means that accomplish what you need while still being sustainable for the environment. Some people spend a fortune on home security systems that use up a lot of energy and aren’t efficient at all. You can go to online resources like protectyourhome.com for eco-friendly information that are easily affordable options – and I have a few green options to share too!

Natural protection

I have family in the south that lives out in the country. Here in the city, our homes are separated from our neighbors by a few feet. In the country where my family lives, huge fields separate the neighbors. There is a lot of space and there aren’t many people who travel the country roads. They never owned a security system to protect their home, but they always kept a few dogs in the yard. These dogs were friendly with us—and the pigs and chickens my grandparents kept—but whenever a stranger pulled up they let us know. My grandfather liked dogs but he kept them more for protection than as pets. They stayed outside and kept stray dogs and strangers from entering the yard. When it comes to green security nothing is more eco-friendly than that! But I live in Chicago, and I understand that in certain areas you will need a lot more than a dog to provide security.

Harness the sun’s energy

Vivint is one company that has jumped on the green bandwagon and is attempting to create a new system that will save money and use less energy. Their idea is a bit more radical than others because it requires a drastic change that is definitely beneficial, although many people still don’t have the capabilities to do it yet. They are focusing on homes with solar powered panels that use the sun’s energy to power home appliances. They install panels into the home that allows users to track how much energy certain appliances are using. They are also extending that feature to smartphones so people can track their status while on the go.

Recycle when you upgrade

ADT security systems are a good choice for security systems because they reuse parts of outdated devices to produce the newer models. Each system has minerals inside of it that can be taken out and put to use along with metals that are difficult to break down and would only increase waste if they were thrown away. ADT has implemented smartphone usage into their system too. Users can turn lights off and on and save energy while they are away from home. The thermostat can be controlled via the phone too—giving users control of their home while on the move.

There are many ways to protect yourself and your family while still looking out for the environment and conserving energy. Each day people are working on new ways make these systems even more efficient and eco-friendly too. Do you have any tips or ideas to add that I didn’t mention?