What could be better than winning the HGTV dream home? Winning the HGTV Green home! The HGTV 2010 Green home offers so many fantastic gems, like the mud room/recycling center (seriously..that room spoke to me!) The third floor tower room would be the perfect place to blog from! Love it. Take the tour below, then enter to win it at HGTV.
Way to impress the pants right off of us, Los Angeles!
Los Angeles is going to start a new pilot program with RecycleBank that will compensate households for recycling! The hope is that the city’s recycling rate will go up from 65% to over 70%.
15,000 homes will be eligible for the program and the contents of their tagged bins will be weighed and recorded each week. Depending on the weight, residents earn points that they can redeem at businesses like CVS, Bed Bath & Beyond, and El Pollo Loco. The total tally can reach the equivalent of $400 a year per household!
Super-impressive initiative, LA! Cincinnati…take notes!
Bottled water is not evil. Sure, it’s gotten a bad rap in the past few years…everything from plastic bottles taking over our landfills to causing cancer. In theory, those things are true, and yes, bottled water can be frowned upon in that regard.
Here’s the upside…keep bottled water out of extremely high temperatures, for instance, your car. Some scientist believe that the plastic can omit toxins into the water when the bottles are extremely hot, thus, perhaps, being the cause of breast cancer. Simply keep your bottles out of the heat and the plastic is otherwise harmless.
About the landfills…Our landfills are being polluted with millions of water bottles. Since the bottles take an estimated 600-1000 years to decompose, it’s an absolutely horrible idea to throw the bottles into the trash. Sadly, only 10% of plastic water bottles are recycled in the US. That means a whopping 90% are going straight to the landfills. It’s so easy to recycle. If you don’t…you should start.
At the end of the day, bottled water is not evil. It can be an evil if you aren’t properly disposing of the bottles and you are letting them sit in a car all day omitting toxins into the water. As long as you follow the rules, bottled water can be a very, very good thing.
A perfect green utopia! A green city of the future…whose ready to move? I know I’d certainly sign mortgage papers in this car-free, waste-free, carbon-free land of green perfection. Check out this clip for a look at a perfect green city.
“If everyone in the country elected to buy one package of 100 percent recycled napkins instead of the non-recycled variety, that act alone would save one million trees.”
-Jennifer Powers, spokeswoman for the Natural Resources Defense Council
Going Green goes far beyond recycling. Lyocell is a fabric most know better by its brand name Tencel. It has a soft finish, packs light and is made from cellulose (vegetable matter), or wood pulp, typically a mix of hardwood trees like oak and birch. This makes it a natural fabric, and it is noted for its durability and strength, in addition to its eco-friendly manufacturing techniques.
Lyocell is made by chipping wood, breaking down the wood fibers with the non-toxic chemical amine oxide, and then placing the material in a spinneret. The spinneret produces long fibers, which are then dried and woven into cloth. …What’s not to love about that? Be cognizant of what you are buying. Buy Green!
Where do I recycle compact fluorescent bulbs? Home Depot! Good to know. Since I’ve never had one of my compact fluorescent bulbs burn out before, I was unsure how to recycle it when it finally happened. A simple search on Earth 911 gave me all the answers I wanted on where to recycle things such as paint, engine oil, batteries, cell phones, and, alas, compact fluorescent light bulbs, etc. This is a great reference for proper recycling. Just plug in what you want to recycle and your zip code, and get all the information you’ll need to do the right thing.
If you need the reasons to recycle, below are 10 of them. At this point, I’d like to say we are too smart not to recycle. You can reduce so much of your garbage, thus impact on landfills….(it’s a serious issue, Google it), by recycling. You can call whomever picks up your trash and ask them for a recycling bin. You’re throwing the garbage away and taking it to the curb anyway, it’s really just a matter of sorting. But if you need further convincing, see if one of these 10 reasons to recycle move you.
1. Good For Our Economy
American companies rely on recycling programs to provide the raw materials they need to make new products.
2. Creates Jobs
Recycling in the U.S. is a $236 billion a year industry. More than 56,000 recycling and reuse enterprises employ 1.1 million workers nationwide.
3. Reduces Waste
The average American discards seven and a half pounds of garbage every day. Most of this garbage goes into to landfills, where it’s compacted and buried.
4. Good For The Environment
Recycling requires far less energy, uses fewer natural resources, and keeps waste from piling up in landfills.
5. Saves Energy
Recycling offers significant energy savings over manufacturing with virgin materials. (Manufacturing with recycled aluminum cans uses 95% less energy.)
6. Preserves Landfill Space
No one wants to live next door to a landfill. Recycling preserves existing landfill space.
7. Prevents Global Warming
In 2000, recycling of solid waste prevented the release of 32.9 million metric tons of carbon equivalent (MMTCE, the unit of measure for greenhouse gases) into the air.
8. Reduces Water Pollution
Making goods from recycled materials generates far less water pollution than manufacturing from virgin materials.
9. Protects Wildlife
Using recycled materials reduces the need to damage forests, wetlands, rivers and other places essential to wildlife.
10. Creates New Demand
Recycling and buying recycled products creates demand for more recycled products, decreasing waste and helping our economy.2.5.
