Day 61 of our Green Year: The Ultimate Recycling

Well we are going headlong into our third month of going green and things are starting to really take off for us.
For today, we have decided to go green by joining Freecycle.org. Freecycle is a website that has actually been around for a few years, which allows people to essentially join the world's largest free garage sale.

Freecycle works through Yahoo Groups, and it gives the ability for people to put things that they want to get rid of up on the group for their area (our area is Trail, B.C.). Whether it is plant pots, a dresser, clothes or more, you can find it here and all you have to do is contact the person giving it away and pick it up.
As well, you can put up your things as well to prevent the things you own from ending up in the landfill. Remember, one man's trash is another man's treasure, and you don't want to contribute to our growing landfills by throwing things away, which someone else may want.

Think of how much waste goes to landfills that does not need to? How many times have you seen things like couches, pots, books and more at a landfill? There are about 10,000 landfills across Canada right now. That is about one landfill for every 3,500 people. As well, landfills account for 38 percent of all our methane emissions in Canada, which is 20 times stronger than greenhouse gases. While the items you get on Freecycle are not going to be producing methane, beginning by giving away what you would throw away, is a good start to preventing you from simply throwing everything away because it is easier. That way, landfills get smaller and more gets recycled.

Currently, Layla and I are looking for some things on the site to help us go green. We will see what we find!

As well, be sure to check out www.greenmagazines.com, where Layla and I will have ten tips on how to go green in each issue of Organic Lifestyles. They were nice enough to speak to us and we are looking forward to sending our message of how to go green to a wide audience!

Here is a photo of Layla doing the right thing by drying our clothes outside on the deck. Do you have any photos of you doing green things? Send them to us at crwbaird@gmail.com

Day 60 of our Green Year: Pop, Green Style!

Whoo! Two month anniversary of Our Green Year. Things are going strong for us and really picking up, which is great. Only ten months, or 305 days to go, before Our Green Year comes to an end and Our Green Life begins!

For today, we have decided to make our own soda. We figure that things like Coca-Cola, Pespi and other pops have huge amounts of items that we may not want in our bodies, like Aspartame (which apparently gives tumors to rats). The surprising thing of all this, is that making soda is really easy to do and does not take that much in ingredients.

So, here is how you make it:

1. Get a 4 Liter jug, a washed out milk jug will work great. Then, get a cup of warm (baby bottle warm) water and put 1/8 of a teaspoon of yeast in it. This is important, if you put too much yeast in, your pop will taste funny and the bottle may explode. However, too little and you won't get the "ssss" when you open the jug. Let the water and yeast mix together by sitting on the counter for five minutes.
2. In the jug, put one to two cups of sugar in, depending on how sweet you want it.
3. Put two tablespoons of flavoring in the jug. Most supermarkets will sell this flavoring and it comes in many varieties, from Dr. Pepper and Coke to Grape and Orange.
4. Put the warm water and yeast in the jug.
5. Fill the jug with water until there is a few inches of space at the top.
6. Shake the jug for two minutes.

After you have done that, put it in the fridge for about four to six days so it can carbonate. Check it every so often. If you find that it is very firm (as in hard to push the jug sides together), then open it and let some of the air out to relieve the pressure.

There you have it! All there is to making soda, pretty easy and quick. It should not take you more than ten minutes to do this.

UPDATE: Our biodegradable pens arrived from Grassroots Store, and they are great. You can see our dog Niko also likes them...or how they taste!

Our story was on the radio stations (KBS Radio and Mountain FM) here in the Kootenay region of BC, so that is great!
http://www.mountainfm.net/?q=node/5147

Do you have a pop recipe? Send it to crwbaird@gmail.com and we will put it up. If you have pictures of yourself going green, send that to us too and we will post it on our blog. Our friend Min did, by showing us her new biodegradable bag!

Day 58 of our Green Year: Homemade Butter

As part of our goal to be self-sustaining, we have decided to begin making a lot of things that we could buy, in our home instead. The reason for this is because we want to take a bit of our carbon footprint away from having to buy items like butter and pop at the store. So, today we have decided to make our own butter.
To make butter, you need two things; cream and salt. The homemade butter you make is much better for your health than margarine and retail types of butter because there is nothing in it but cream and salt.
The reason this is an environmentally-good thing to do is that the less butter you buy, the less butter has to be shipped, the less greenhouse gases that go into the atmosphere. Granted, you do need to have cream, which has to be shipped. To beat this, Layla and I are buying our cream from a supplier in the Lower Mainland of BC and will be looking for a place where we can buy the cream in an area of the Kootenays.


So, to make butter, follow these steps:

1. Let cream (whipping cream works best) get to room temperature.
2. Put cream in jar with tight lid.
3. Shake jar for 30 min (you can do this with a food processor, but shaking it is good exercise and does not use electricity). As you shake the jar, you will find that it becomes like whipped cream and then suddenly, and its kind of cool, the cream will separate from the butter and it will be sloshing around in the jar. Shake for a few more minutes.
4. Once done, you will see a lump of butter in the middle that will be quite soft. Pour out the cream, which is now buttermilk.
5. Put cold water into jar and shake, then pour out water. Do this until the water comes out clear.
6. Get butter out of the jar and onto a plate. Put salt on it, mix it on the plate and form into a butter block shape (if you can).
   
7. Put in fridge to chill.

That is all there is to it, and trust me it tastes far better than any other butter you buy at the store. The price for the cream is comparable to what you would pay for the butter, so it is more or less equaling in cost for you, with a little bit less than what you would usually get in a butter container but it is much healthier.

Do you have a recipe for butter that may work better? Let us know. If you have a picture of you or your family making butter, send it to crwbaird@gmail.com and we will put it up!

Day 54 of our Green Year: Biodegradable Pens

Layla and I are writers. Working from home, we write books for clients and also write our own books. As a result, pens are a big part of our lives. We use them to write out notes, write out ideas, pretty much write out everything.

Until we started doing Our Green Year, we never thought about the pens we use and throw away. However, since we are trying to be net-zero in our impact on the environment, the question came up of "what do we do with our pens?"

Thankfully, there are companies out there that actually specialize in green products and the one we chose was the Grass Roots Store (https://www.grassrootsstore.com/index.asp), which sells environmentally friendly products. So, from here we went and bought some biodegradable pens. Yes, that is right, biodegradable pens. You can actually compost them!
They are made from corn, and are completely environmentally friendly, so this is big for Layla and I because now we can make notes on our recycled paper with biodegradable pens and be completely net-zero in our writing lives.

Layla and I will also be buying more green products from the Grass Roots Store to go with Our Green Year, so stay tuned!
If you know of another store that sells environmentally friendly products, please let us know!

Lastly, here is a nice statistic to show you just how large this pen problem is. Every single year, around the world, TEN BILLION pens are thrown away....that is a lot of plastic and ink.

Day 36 of our Green Year: Green Birthdays

Today we hit Day 36of Our Green Year and there is a birthday in the Baird household. I won't tell you who it is, but there are only two of us here and it is not Layla's birthday.
So, the point of this blog is to focus on going green for birthdays. Too often during someone's birthday we will try and buy them as much as we can to show how much we care, and this is a nice gesture, but it feeds into the consumerism and unsustainable mentality too many have about our world.
Instead of buying things that are not 'green' or 'environmentally friendly', why not go green for a birthday. There are a number of ways that this can be done, and all it takes is thinking green.

1. Why not plant a tree for someone on their birthday? You are adding another oxygen producer to the world, and you are also putting down a living symbol of this person that will grow for decades and decades.
2. You can do what Layla did and paint a flower pot, which she planted a Marigold in. For me, this gift will last longer, and mean more, than any other gift she could have given.
3. Donate to a green charity in someone's name. This is a great gift but some do not like it because it seems like you gave their gift to someone else.
4. Buy the person something that is consumable, like organic tea, fair trade coffee, dried fruits, or fresh flowers. This is a great gift that will bio-degrade and not sit in a closet.
5. Give the gift of yourself. Sometimes a coupon (on recycled paper) for a free hug can mean a lot, or simply a cozy date in front of the fireplace.
6. Buy a gift that is made locally or grown locally. This will support your local economy and you won't be spending money on clothes or products that are made in Third World Countries in sweat shops.
7. Think about the packaging of the gifts. Too many people buy wrapping paper that is used for a moment and then ripped apart. Instead, why not use cloth bags to hold the gift? Why not use some of the scrap paper, newspaper or even subway sandwich wrappers as something to cover the gift? You can buy gift bags that will last for years instead of buying wrapping paper that will last for two minutes.
8. Buy fair-trade, eco-cotton shirts that are made with green screen printing processes and that use natural dyes. This will allow you to get them some nice clothes, without having to think about where they come from.

Personally, getting the gift of a flower pot that I can use over and over again is a great gift for me that I will cherish for a long time, just like the pen monster Layla made for me last year out of cardboard, yarn and an old jar. Sometimes the greatest gifts are creative, personal and green.

Here are a few stats on gifts to get you thinking about going a bit more green for gifts this year:

• There is a 25 increase in the trash generated during the holiday season.
• Most people feel their kids have too many things, but they continue to buy them more things during birthdays and holidays.
• About 97 percent of restaurant gift certificate receives say they would like to receive that type of gift again. This is a great green gift because it supports a local restaurant (make it a local one, not a chain one), and it is a consumable.
• About 83,000,000 square meters of gift wrap ends up in United Kingdom garbage dumps after the holiday season.

Thank you to Treehugger for those stats.

Also, thank you to our good friend Min in Hanover who submitted our name to her local radio station, 101.7 The One for the Website of the Day. We won today and are listed on the radio station's website.

Also, don't forget to send us your own stories of going green so we can put them on our bandwagon page (link is on the right hand side), as well as pictures of you using green solutions outlined here for our photo gallery!

Day 20 of our Green Year: Greening Up Mother's Day

One of the most important days of the year is here and with Mother's Day arriving we have decided to try green methods to getting mom a Mother's Day present. While you could get her perfume that contains harmful chemicals, jewelry that is taken from the ground in massive holes that look like scars on the surface of the Earth, or any number of environmentally-unfriendly gift ideas, you could instead go green for Mother's Day, as we have.

Both Layla and my mothers live in Edmonton, but both are coming to visit us at the end of the month and that is when we will be presenting them with their green gifts. What green gifts can you use? Well, there are actually plenty.

1. Flowers are a great gift because they are green, beautiful and they smell nice. Try and buy locally to support your local retailers, but if you can, grow them yourself and transplant them to a pot for your mom. If you can, buy your mom some potted plants. As we have discussed in the blog, this is a great way to clean up the air and green up the Earth.
2. Plant a tree for her. This is one of those special kinds of gifts that few people seem to think about. When you plant a tree for your mom, you are not only helping take CO2 out of the air and putting out oxygen instead, you are also putting up a living reminder of your mother. Four decades down the road after she is passed on, you can go to that tree and remember the day you planted it for her.
3. Try and make her something by using things you have in your own home. Using some arts and craft supplies, you can make a great picture frame out of branches on the ground, or you can make her a wonderful wind chime using tin, wood or other supplies.
4. Candles are a great choice because moms love candles. Get ones that are earth-safe, usually made of soy or beeswax. These are great gifts for your mom because they are green, they look good and if they are scented, they smell good.
5. Birdhouses are also a good choice. Not only do you give her something to help add life to the yard, you are providing a home for birds who may have lost their home to urban sprawl.