Green News – Page 9 – Green Lifestyle

Environmental Education is important

Learners green surroundings provide a mobile phone or a portable classroom making to better comprehend problems related to ecology. School equipped with environmentally friendly functions such as technology of solar energy to produce electricity or hot water or shelter Sedum grass and plants to absorb rainwater to teach students to evaluate their environment. Noticing how the eco-friendly technology has been introduced in the construction of classrooms or mobile phones offers students the chance to better comprehend the impact of new environmentally friendly technologies to create a wholesome environment.

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Green came to the construction or relocation of students reflects the perceived significance of preserving environmental resources. Discover much more about ecology and the environment is not only a theoretical project.

Eco-friendly portables may consist of functions such as day lighting, the high quality of indoor air, open learning environment where students have a device to enrich the expertise. Power is increased awareness of their ecological character making environment-friendly laptop.

A characteristic of mobile classrooms may be a green energy program for heating. Green buildings use environmentally portable making goods and technologies conducive to energy conservation.

Portable green making can decrease the footprint per individual. Consist of renewable energy sources like solar and wind power is a way to make school buildings much more green. portable classrooms may apply for green technology, at least part of the school.

The tendency to consist of school green making has been made. Students’ well becoming status and reported to enjoy better day lighting and ventilation. daylighting methods can improve the natural light and much more glass. Another concern relates to construction supplies and equipment to create chemical byproducts. As the kids of these metabolites much more rapidly than adults, school camps are a better option in schools. portable classrooms are the boundaries between inside and much more blurred. In this way, students are exposed to the environment and discover to interact much more easily with him.

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Recycled Timber

Posted on May 5,May 9, by gogreen

Recycled wood for the next project is not only great for the environment, but is a historical reference to his function. The forest has been destroyed so rapidly, it is essential that we do everything we can to help keep these areas as possible. Wood recycling is a way to do it. Does not contribute to the destruction of trees in the forest much more than sufficient for the use of recycled wood obtainable.

Recycled wood has numerous benefits. Log on to our past are for the most greatest and best trees, and therefore are of high high high quality timber, which now can not play. A lot of it is in Australia are from numerous different sources, such as former wool shops, houses, bridges, wharves and factories. Most wood from logging throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. He maintained the high high quality of a typical history, even if the labels of time, such as nail holes, gum veins and outdoor signs. Choose recycled wood, you have to select sustainable timber, but must also respect its history and tradition by using a single piece of wood.

Questioning how you can do your component for the environment? Use it for all projects, it will reduce the impact and destruction of forest resources are limited. wood waste into wood can be as great as new wood market. It can be discovered in either its original or re manufactured say that it is suitable for all requirements of construction and renovation.

Rustic style interior is increasingly typical in the region, and are increasingly well-liked around the tree. Re-use of wood provides a distinctive range of natural colors that are the actual charm, warm and bright and character.

Save Energy and Go Green Ways

Posted on May 4,May 9, by gogreen

Simply because the global credit crisis continues to deteriorate, the possibility and reality of the economic recession in numerous countries is becoming increasingly clear, so here are eight suggestions for saving energy to help save the money and go green too.

Green your life and save money and energy.

Energy conservation begins at home. energy host much much more than 25% of CO2 emissions, so there’s no better location to start reducing the size of your carbon footprint and their own bills. Some easy changes that can decrease price and energy consumption considerably at home and could save much much more than 300 € per year.

Check your heating expenses. To avoid heating the home empty by utilizing the timer on your central heating is switched off when nobody is home. If you are a radiator valves, you can also turn off radiators in unused rooms. And if you want to decrease heating expenses of much less than 10%, just put the central heating by 1 degree.

Put the envelope of the water heater. Decorate your jacket hot water tank only expenses a couple of pounds and pays for itself inside 6 months. Fit, which is at least 75 mm (three inches) thick and you can save £ 30 per year.

Walls.Around insulated roof and half of heat loss in a typical home can be accessed via the walls and ceiling. Insulating your attic is simple to do and you can also do the insulation your self. If you have already received loft insulation thickness and, if essential, add an extra layer to make it even suggested 270mm. wall cavities insulated store up to 120 pounds per year. Installation takes only a couple of hours of a typical home with three bedrooms can also be carried out.
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Greening plastic cards

Posted on May 3,May 25, by gogreen

I was going through my wallet yesterday looking for a particular debit card and it dawned on me how much plastic I carry around with me – debit cards, credit cards, membership cards, health care cards and others – 9 in total.
All these cards have a limited lifespan before they expire and are replaced with updated ones.
I searched for a resin code on all the cards to try and determine what sort of plastic is used.
Plastic resin codes are usually represented by a number within a triangle made up of three arrows that is stamped onto the plastic.
I couldn’t find any indicators, but it turns out the plastic in these cards is mostly
Polyvinyl Chloride
(PVC).

PVC isn’t the most environmentally friendly plastic, either in its manufacture or as a final product. The way that PVC breaks down is through granulation, so the pieces just become smaller; which can cause problems for creatures that may ingest the pieces.
It may seem like a trifling issue, but according to the Sierra
Club, six billion of these plastic cards are produced each year around the world. I’ve read other figures putting it at
a staggering 17 billion when gift cards, cell phone top up and other cards are also incorporated into the figures.
Aside from PVC generally being non-recyclable; in some cases you certainly wouldn’t want to be putting cards into a recycling bin without at least attacking them with a pair of scissors first; particularly in the case of cards with information encoded on a magnetic strip on the back.
So, there’s certainly a problem here – the cards need to be durable; but usually only for a few years. Yet we have a product that will be around for many years more than it will be used.
There has been some progress made in the area of gift cards. A few years back I wrote about a major retailer trialing
bioplastic
gift cards made from corn sugar and I believe a few other retailers have followed suit. However, this option also raises the thorny issue of using food crops, or crops on land suitable for food production, for something other than food.
I’ve also read about PET (Polyethylene Terephthalate) being used – PET is one of the easiest plastics to
recycle and is most commonly found in the form of soda bottles. The barrier to uptake appears to be cost, with PET costing about 20% more. But really, how much would that add onto the cost of the base materials a card? Not much I suspect.
The International Card Manufacturer’s association says there is growing consumer and card issuer demand for green transaction and identification cards and has introduced the
EcoLabel Standard
Program.
To receive the ICMA’s certification, cards need to be made with either a 25% reduction in used materials, contain 25% recycled content, be
compostable or have a minimum of 40% biobased content. It’s a positive step, but
one that looks to be still trying to gain traction as currently there are only a handful of licensed manufacturers it lists.
What can we do?
As so many big brands like to proclaim their green street cred, this is an area where we as consumers can apply a little pressure. A good place to start is with banks in relation to ATM and credit cards and stores that offer gift cards.
If you visit the web sites of these companies, they will usually have a sustainability section and contact details for that department. Shoot them an email and ask them what they are doing about the plastics impact of their gift/credit/debit/whatever cards and perhaps point them to the ICMA’s EcoLabel Standard
Program. This isn’t necessarily to get them to participate in that particular program, but just as a way of underlining that you’re not the only one who feels it’s an important issue within the power of the company to rectify.
Repurposing old cards
Quite a few people have found interesting ways to repurpose these cards. If you run a search on Google using terms such as “repurpose gift card” and “repurpose credit card”; a bunch of pages
with ideas will show up.
As mentioned, for security’s sake, be a little careful how you repurpose cards that have a magnetic strip on the back as that strip may contain personal information that could be used in identity theft. You can “scramble” the information by running a strong magnet over the strip, but to play it safe, you really should just cut them up into little pieces. Hopefully in the not too distant future all plastic cards will be “green” and you’ll be able to recycle or maybe even compost what’s left.

Renewable Heat Incentives and Funding

Posted on May 3,May 9, by gogreen

Department of Energy and Climate Alter in 2011 is driven incentives to contribute to such a heater. This is fantastic news for those who want to use renewable heat, as they can encourage this, so they can be rewarded. Questions, please, come down, come on funding. Is it just bounced in 1 form or an additional, so that customers must pay anyway? Sufficient funds to make it a realistic objective? These are the questions will be answered, but thankfully, it appears that there are numerous methods to finance these advantages, which will prove useful and advantageous for both short and lengthy term.

A means of funding will pay for electricity from renewable energy sources will enhance in coming months, and this extra money is utilized to assist pay incentives. Even though it does not really feel a particular sense, it aims to assist encourage people to use choice sources simply because they want to have incentives, instead of paying an extra fee, you can double your savings. Many people do anyway, and so numerous resources that come via them. It can be extremely actual, large companies across the region, which use a lot electricity and will not pay to replace all of its sources, simply because it is more essential than a standard home.

Taken together, this new tax on fossil fuel suppliers to create these fuels instead of renewable heat to the public. It is component of incentives for renewable energy or RHI, and the heat rapidly turn to rising expenses, as described above.
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What’s in that product?

Posted on May 1,May 25, by gogreen

With so many products claiming their green goodness in eloquent, fluffy
language it can be quite a job for consumers to cut through the spin to
determine if a product lives up to its eco-claims. Even figuring out
what’s in “normal” products and their effect on the environment can be
quite a challenge, and “nature identical” labelling; but that was related to food items.
In this article we’ll take a look at how you can track down further
information on a variety of other goods we use regularly such as
cosmetics, hair care products, cleaning materials and more.
Step 1: Identifying greenwashing
Put simply, don’t believe the hype. Go beyond the marketing message and ask questions. Here’s an example.
Recently, a PR company approached me wanting me to write an item on well known mainstream brand’s range of “green” laundry detergents. PR company + well known mainstream brand = immediate suspicion That might sound a little paranoid and prejudiced, but big brands have a lot of marketing dollars. They can spend a fortune on developing
messages that maximise the positives and minimize the environmental negatives of their products. This is a science as much as it is an art as it works on exploiting chinks in our psychological armour.
Still, I asked for more information as clothes washing is an area of consumption that contributes a great deal to our
environmental impact – and if there’s products out there to lessen it, I love to know about them.
I specifically asked the company for an ingredients list. What came back was incredibly vague and mentioned (in glowing terms) only a couple of components of the product that were of course quite environmentally friendly. It’s what was left out that I suspect would reveal the true nature of the product to be not as green as they tout.
Further research confirmed that. A conscious attempt to portray a product as being more environmentally
friendly than it actually is, is called greenwashing – and the practice comes in all sorts of forms with the goal of distracting the consumer from delving too deeply. You can learn more about the tricks and traps in my article on
avoiding greenwashing.

My thoughts are if you contact a company wanting to know about ingredients and components in relation to environmental impact and they are vague about it; don’t waste your time any further, take it as meaning there’s something being hidden – and don’t be fooled by “I’m sorry, that’s a trade secret” spiel. While approaching companies directly is a good method, you can bypass the potential spin by using the web.
Household products
One of the best resources I’ve come across for tracking down information on thousands of products used around the home is the Household Products Database of the National Library of Medicine. This database contains information
on over 8,000 consumer brands and is very user friendly. Categories include:
Auto
Products
Cleaning and related
Pesticides
Yard and garden
Personal Care
Home Maintenance
Arts Crafts
Pet Care
Home Office
Or you can search by product names, types of products, manufacturers
or ingredients

While the results are more focused on human health and toxicity, you can drill down by clicking links on the various chemicals listed to get more information. Alternatively, you can just copy the chemical name and run a query on a search engine such as Google like so:
“Sodium lauryl sulfate” environment
By the way, Sodium lauryl sulfate is commonly found in products that lather, such as in shampoo, toothpaste and detergents. It doesn’t break down easily and it toxic to aquatic creatures.
Cosmetics and hair care
Along with the Household Products Database, I’ve often referred to the cosmetic database Skin Deep when researching information for articles relating to cosmetics and hair care products. Skin deep is is a safety guide run by the Environmental Working Group. It pairs ingredients in more than 42,000 products against 50 definitive toxicity and regulatory database.
You can enter a brand name or an ingredient and receive results along with hazard scores, both for the product overall and for it’s individual components. The hazard rating of a product can be higher than for its individual ingredients — it adds up the hazards of all ingredients. The hazard score is on 0-10 scale, with 10 being the worst possible rating.
As with the Household products database, you can click on particular compounds to learn more or perform a search such as suggested above.

Pesticides and herbicides
Pesticides and herbicides are by their very nature not environmentally friendly – otherwise they wouldn’t work. However there are degrees of toxicity, particularly in relation to non-target species. You can learn more about the chemicals in various brands using the Crop Data Management Systems database which contains information on herbicides and pesticides from over 100 manufacturers.
MSDS

Both the Skin Deep and Household Products database are very US-centric. That’s not a major problem as so many of the brands we use in other countries contain the same ingredients as the corresponding brand in the USA. From time to time though, there will be ingredients banned in other countries that aren’t in the USA and vice versa; so a
brand may have different formulas for the same products in different countries.
One way to get local information is to directly consult a global MSDS database; which the above services also draw on.
MSDS stands for Material Safety Data Sheet. An MSDS contains information regarding the properties of a product such as toxicity, health effects and spill handling procedures. They can be somewhat vague on environmental effects, but again, you’ll be able to get a listing of chemicals contained in a product to research further by running a search on your favorite search engine using the chemical name along with the word “environment”.
A great MSDS search engine can be found at MSDS.com. Just enter the product name and listings for that product’s components in various countries will be displayed.
Keep things in perspective
When I first started really getting into researching products I was shocked at how just about everything was “bad”. I arrived at the conclusion I should be naked, live out in the open and only eat rocks. That of course is a little unrealistic.
Rocks really don’t taste all that good as well as being incredibly hard to digest. Being naked in winter presents some problems too. Just about everything we consume has some sort of negative environmental impact these days – whether it’s the ingredients themselves, how the ingredients were sourced, the packaging, the transport to get it to us
and so on. It’s sometimes just a matter of choosing the lesser of the evils so to speak; finding products with minimal impact.

For example, lets say a product you use a lot of contains a substance that’s particularly environmentally unfriendly and there doesn’t seem to be any alternatives. In that situation, sometimes the best thing you can do is to find a brand of that product that contains less of the nasty substance if it can still achieve the same outcome until such time that greener alternatives appear on the market.
Another scenario – Brand X has a chemical that’s environmentally toxic and Brand Y has a different chemical that is also very un-green – the question you should ask yourself is which of the two is less damaging. Yet another example: Product X and Product Y have exactly the same ingredients, but X is sold in packaging that can be recycled and Y isn’t – so go for X. Thankfully, having to make these sorts of tough decisions is slowly becoming less of an issue as there are
more green alternatives for so much of what we now. While the process of sorting out the green from the garbage can be a little exhausting at first, over time you’ll be able to more easily recognize issues such as green washing and to have a general idea of the impact of X chemical is without having to run to the nearest Internet connection.

Something else to bear in mind – as with everything related to living a greener life, it’s not just the product choices we make, but how much we use of them. Think lean when going green – it not only helps conserve the environment, but also your bank balance.

Obtaining Your Children Involved in Your Green Lifestyle

Posted on April 30,May 9, by gogreen

There are numerous suggestions for your child to participate in his green lifestyle. If you have a process going “green”, it is important to know and comprehend that this is a lifestyle choice, a lifestyle that ought to consist of all family members members. Kids of all ages can get a “green” the epidemic, to discover to live in a way that is wholesome, and rewarding, and protecting the environment. The secret is that your child will receive what they do and have enjoyable performing it. If you do look like a “household” so they could be the lack of interest. Nevertheless, if you do a lot of enjoyable activities for the initiative, then they are excited about this! Here you are presented with their suggestions lifestyle ecological children.

Water

Even although the country consists of 75% water, we can not use the water resources worldwide. There are a lot of our water resources are utilized in cooking, cleaning, sanitation and drinking water, but they are limited. It is important to teach children that water is 1 of the most important resources we have on earth. This question is important simply because it is the foundation of all life on our planet. When teaching children to live “green” and save the planet from the water supply of things you can teach them to do:

* Teach them that if they wash their hands, it is important to use hot water, but they ought to be able to run at full power. Instead, they should challenge themselves to create a small fountain in the thickness of a pencil.

* Encourage your child to shut off water when brushing your teeth, if they use it to rinse your toothbrush.
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Green Way of life Conservatives

Posted on April 29,May 9, by gogreen

Favorite half-green life-lengthy liberal who is touted more – more – a democratic character. The truth is – this is not true. He is a liberal who speaks nicely, he is a liberal approach to the street had been asked to donate a dime to save the earth, but the trenches, fighting every day battle environment a lot much better and safer location to grow food and meat?

The answer is may surprise you. Conservatives have lengthy argued that polluters may actually be innocent, we can draw attention to some errors, but the easy truth is that conservatives are not a new green way of life. They could perhaps teach us a factor or two about the problem when we are ready to pay attention and discover.

They have not jumped on the train and tried to imitate the more liberal desire to keep the world clean and totally free of contaminants. In reality, they most likely beat us this game

A sad reality that we are proponents of green living is to discover from these people, many of whom have lived a hundred years longer than the lifetime of green with us.

If you grew up in town, you might not know that states like Iowa or Nebraska or Arizona, or even Texas, is a bastion of conventional conservative voters that you will see a lot smaller vehicles, many clean air and a wide range of organic farming is carried out.

Typically, organic farmers, owners of little bakery utilizing only natural elements and composting in the back yard is urban or suburban housing liberals want to believe it. These voters are strongly conservative took control of organic substances in a hundred years.

The greatest factor about compost heap you saw that most organic foods you’ll eat anything, you’d a lot much better not breathe fresh air, very often, has become a country that is largely component of nature conservative, and perhaps it was no accident. Perhaps we can discover some factor from all of us when we, our party politics and reverted to the conservatism of old farmers, we believe that we can not teach us some factor.
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Eco-Friendly Cleaning Products

Posted on April 29,May 9, by gogreen

Decrease, reuse, recycle. These are the fundamental elements of a green way of life. Numerous individuals began to take action to follow this mantra, but there is still a lot to do. There are a lot of green cleaning goods, which might alter numerous issues at house that each and each and every family members to use on a daily basis.

Businesses are paying their services for future development and to offer land by land-friendly, all-natural goods at an affordable price. Every aspect of their business, such as production, packaging and distribution, is committed to helping the environment. This indicates that goods are manufactured utilizing fossil fuels in as small as possible and as long as possible by utilizing renewable energy sources as possible. These packages are built from nearby recycled supplies, so it’s not simple to get transported to the institution sent out. packaging can be recycled or re-use of the product re-run.

So, what goods are obtainable and how they are produced to read like a green eco-friendly business?
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Energy Efficient Suggestions For Your House

Posted on April 28,May 9, by gogreen

Suggestions are just some of the topics listed, you can do to decrease energy expenses every month to month. They are low or completely totally free of charge and can be carried out rapidly, so you can be safe, comfy, and help the environment and pricey. Share with your family members and attempt to add every individual.

1. Install a programmable thermostat to maintain the home warm in winter and pleasantly cool enough in summer.

2. Do not use compact fluorescent bulbs ENERGY STAR ® label.

3. dishes air dry instead of utilizing the dishwasher drying time.

four. Turn off the pc and monitor when not in use.

5. Plug home electronics, such as Tv and DVD player, power strips, turn the power strips off when the item is not far (TVs and DVDs in standby mode, is presently the number of watts).

6. Lower the water heater thermostat to 120 degrees F.

7. Take a quick shower, individual bathroom.
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