Day 285 of our Green Year: Close The Oven Door

When one is cooking, it can often be useful to open up the stove and look in to see how the food is doing. However, as you open the door to the stove, the stove can lose as much as 20 degrees of its heat. That means it has to use energy again to heat up the entire stove.
Therefore, our tip for today is a very easy one. All we have to do is turn on the oven light briefly to see how the food is doing in the oven. It uses a very small amount of energy and it works just as well as opening the oven up.

It saves a little bit of power, but added up by everyone that amounts to a lot of energy saved for all of us.

Thank you to Wandering Coyote who provided us with a great list of green things you can do located here.

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Day 46 of our Green Year: Bills, Bills, Bills and wasted paper

We all get them, and we all hate them. They are bills and they come into our lives and ruin a perfectly good day. You know what else they ruin? The environment. Every month, millions of bills are mailed out to homes and that constitutes thousands of trees cut down to let us know we are past due on our cable.

To continue with the trend of the past few days, Layla and I are again going to be saving paper and this time we are doing it by getting our bills delivered to us online. Rather than find out from Shaw that we owe so much money through the mail, we will be getting online billing to our e-mail. Not only does this keep us from losing our bills, but it also helps us save trees.

Most companies these days offer billing online, so there really is no reason for you to receive your bills through the post office. I know many of you out there already do this because of the great convienance it provides, but more need to. Think of how many trees would be saved if we simply got our bills through e-mail. Of course, that uses energy on the servers to send e-mail, but many web hosting companies these days are green and actually offset their emissions or power their servers through green methods.

As well, I have to give a big thank you to Ethical Bean Coffee. They are based out of Vancouver and they were nice enough to send Layla and I some wonderful fair trade and organic coffee. We received two blends of coffee and some tea for Layla. The coffee was excellent as most organic coffee is (free of nasty pesticides). Their coffee is also bird-friendly and shade grown (grown without clear-cutting) If you are interested in checking them out, go to www.ethicalbean.com or click the Green Friends link on the side. Thank you Samantha for sending us the samples!

Day 45 of our Green Year: What to do with the reciepts?

Layla and I were out getting some things, and we used our cloth bags of course. However, as we left we soon realized that while we were putting what we bought in cloth bags, we were not giving much notice to the paper receipts that we had received.
Then, today we realized that how green are we really being when we use cloth bags but throw away our receipts?

So, naturally we decided that from now on we will be recycling our receipts, along with doing some other things to reuse them so we don't have to buy something else. One of our friends, Jennifer, commented on her own blog (Mothers Going Green http://www.mothersgoinggreen.blogspot.com/), that she uses her receipts as To-Do lists, grocery lists and more. This is a great way to save paper, and it helps you keep track of what you have already bought and how much it cost!

You can also use your receipts for composting just like you use newspaper. Of course, the best thing to do is simply recycle them with your regular paper.
You can also use receipts for various projects like paper mache, and even as a cheap wrapping paper. Remember our motto "Reuse then Recycle"

Am I missing anything? Let me know so that we can all figure out great ways to reuse receipts before we recycle them!

Also, we hit 1,000 hits today! It took us one month to hit 500, but only two weeks to hit another 500! That is awesome! Thank you so much to everyone who has helped us spread the message of Our Green Year and let's look forward to not another 500, but another 5,000, 50,000 and more!

Day 44 of our Green Year: Enough Of The Junk

We all get it, sometimes every single day, and we all hate it. Junk mail is the bane of our existence, advertising at its worst and not surprisingly, it is harmful to the environment. All those flyers, booklets and more that we get, result in pollution and lost trees. Why? So that we can think about buying a computer we see is on sale? Why not just look on the internet if you want a computer?

Each year, Americans receive about four million tons of junk mail, and if the energy to make a day's worth of junk mail were used to heat homes, it would heat 250,000 homes. When you think of the millions of trees that are cut down, simply so we can be advertised to, it is deplorable. This is especially the case when advertisers shoot for only a two percent success rate on junk mail (someone buying from something they see in the junk mail).

Some places, like our own post office, has a recycle bin for junk mail, and recycling it is a great idea, but what about eliminating it at the source?
In the United States you have GreenDimes.com, but as of yet I can't seem to find if it is available for Canada. No problem, there is already a Canadian solution!

The Red Dot Campaign is a Canadian initiative that deals with junk mail through effective measures, it also helps get rid of mail not addressed to you, like pamphlets from politicians.
First, go and download the form letter at RedDotCampaign.ca, which is addressed to the Canada Post Consumers Choice Program. Fill it out and give it to your letter carrier or mail it to them yourself.
Next, download the "No Junk Mail" notice and put it up in your mail box to say "I don't want it!"
Lastly, get yourself removed from any marketing lists by going to the Canadian Marketing Association and signing up for the "Do Not Contact" service on this site: http://www.the-cma.org/?WCE=C=47%7CK=224217

This won't prevent all of it, but it will get rid of the vast majority, and that is what Layla and I have done for Our Green Year. No more wasting trees for junk mail with us, hopefully everyone else can do the same.

Thank you to one of our readers, Mindy, who sent us some photos of her son Colin going green. These pictures are also in our photo gallery. If you want to send us photos of you doing green things, send us the photos to crwbaird@gmail.com

Day 42 of our Green Year: What About Pillows?

After waking up this morning with pains in my neck from the poor pillows I have been sleeping on, I decided that I have to get new pillows. However, to keep with Our Green Year, I have to do two things. First, I have to find a way to recycle the pillows I have without throwing them out. Second, I have to get pillows that are not going to be produced in a way that is harmful for the environment.

Things you can do for your pillow, rather than simply throwing them out include:

1. If you want stuffed pillows that go a bit further than most, take the stuffing out of your old pillows, and then take your stuffing and put it in your new pillow. Then, take the pillow case, hand wash it and air dry it and use it as a sack for vegetables.
2. Keep it in your animal's pen or cage so that they can sleep on it, or donate it to the SPCA or vet so they can use it for the pets they have.
3. If you camp, you can cut it in half, sew it along the open end and make it into small camping pillows.

When you are looking to buy new pillows, you can get some from Loolo Textiles, which uses a process to make pillows that are free of toxic chemicals and by-products, and can even be composted when you are done with them. That is right, you can compost your old pillows from Loolo Textiles. Within a year, they will bio-degrade.
There are several other companies who use soy-based fabrics in their pillows, which will help you when you need to decide on the pillow you want that is not only comfortable, but also earth-friendly.

Do you know of a company that sells soy-based pillows or earth-friendly pillows? Then let us know!

Remember, if you have pictures of you doing green things, fire them off to us and we will put them on our blog to show the world what you are doing (crwbaird@gmail.com)

Day 39 of our Green Year: Recycling

Now I know what you guys are thinking. Craig, recycling? Come on that is an easy one. You are right, it is an easy one. Everyone knows they should recycle, but for whatever reason, a lot of people do not recycle. While the percentage of recycled material used by the United States rose dramatically between the 1980s and 1990s, it has not climbed over the past few years. This means that people have more or less 'reached their peak' with recycling, and that peak is far from perfect. Recycling has actually fallen in several cities in the United States, including Seattle, where recycling was once king. Recycling rates in the United States are also their lowest in over ten years, and Americans are throwing away more beverage cans and bottles than ever before. In fact, in 1995, 37 percent of Americans recycled, while in 2002 it was only 21 percent.

That is why for our 39th Day of the Green Year, we are committing to recycling everything that we can. You can see from the picture that we already recycle cardboard, bottles, cans, milk jugs and papers, but we are going to start going a step further. A lot of what we do here in the Baird household is centered on taking what can be recycled and reusing it for another purpose in the house before we recycle it back into the manufacturing line, but we are going to go a step further, and if it can be recycled, we will. No more throwing out items. We aim to be no-impact with our garbage now. I would also like to point out that in that photo you see plastic bags, those are from before we turned Green, and we are slowly getting rid of them through recycling.

The point of this blog is to show people that we are recycling everything we can, and you should to. Far too many people only recycle pop cans and newspapers, when there is so much more that can be done. That is what this Green Year is about, teaching others how to go greener than the norm.

Here is a list of the many things that can be recycled:

File Folders, envelopes, paper, paper clips, staples, newspapers, flyers, magazines, catalogs, text books, coffee trays, phone books, beverage cans, food cans, glass jars, glass bottles, plastic bottles, plastic containers, ink cartridges and electronics.

Here are some 'fun' facts about recycling in the United States.

• Recycling aluminum saves 95 percent energy than making it from scratch. You can power a TV for three hours by recycling one aluminum can (in terms of energy saved).
• Enough aluminum is thrown away to rebuild the commercial air fleet of the United States, four times over, every single year.
• Recycling one glass container saves enough energy to light a 100-watt bulb for four hours.
• Recycled glass generates 20 percent less air pollution and 50 percent less water pollution than making it from scratch.
• One ton of glass made from 50 percent recycled materials saves 250 pounds of mining waste.
• You can reuse glass an endless amount of times, yet 41 billion glass containers are made each year.
• It takes 60 percent less energy to recycle paper than make it from scratch, while generating 95 less air pollution.
• For every one ton of paper recycled, 17 trees and 7,000 gallons of water is saved.
• Every year enough paper is thrown away to build a 12 foot wall from New York to California.
• If Americans recycled every plastic bottle they used, it would keep two billion tons of plastic out of the landfills.
• Americans use enough plastic wrap to wrap all of Texas, every single year.
• If you incinerate 10,000 tons of waste, you create one job, putting 10,000 tons of waste in the landfill creates six jobs, but recycling 10,000 tons of waste creates 36 jobs.

Did I miss anything that can be recycled? Let me know. Don't forget, send us your photos of you doing green things as outlined in Our Green Year and we will post it on our website.

Day 37 of our Green Year: Unplugging The Power

Today, we decided to do an easy one and it is one that every one of us can do in our own green years. When you turn off something like your television, Wii, DVD player, stereo and more, you do not necessarily keep it from using power. Many devices these days will have lights that will show they are still plugged in and to show that light, you need power.

Unplugging things when you go to bed, or leave the house is not only safe as it can prevent fires from shorts, but it can save you money. By unplugging everything in your house, you can actually save up to $20 to $30 on your energy bill, depending on how much you pay each month. This means that not only are you saving power, but you are also saving money. It is just one of the many ways that you can go green, and save green.

Unplug your electronics, your coffee makers and your microwave. None of these things need to be plugged in when you are not using them, so you can save some money by just taking the time to unplug them

As well, Layla and I decided to do a demonstration of the baking soda and vinegar drain cleaner, which works great, so we did a video. Enjoy!

Day 34 of our Green Year: No More Dryer

Layla and I already wash our clothes with cold water detergent, and we only do it when we absolutely have to (although hand washing may be coming in a future blog ;) ). However, we thought that it didn't make much sense to save energy by using cold water in the washer, and then use the dryer which uses up a bunch of energy.

So, from now on we will no longer be using a dryer, and that means in the winter time as well. The great thing about clothes is that they dry, and since we don't wear tonnes of different clothes, we are not going to be overwhelmed with the amount of clothes that we will need to dry. The truth is, we will be able to dry them quite well outside. We know that this is common knowledge, but surprisingly, not many people actually do this. It may be because they are not allowed, as many cities do not allow clotheslines because they are 'unsightly'. However, there are other solutions to drying your clothes without a dryer.

One of our readers actually suggested drying your clothes in your living room in the summer. This is a great idea that Layla and I will be using because you can actually cool down your living room with the clothes drying in there, so you are keeping cool without energy and you are drying your clothes without energy. A double whammy!

If you live in the city and are not allowed to dry your clothes outside, then you can also dry your clothes in the basement of the house. There should be plenty of room and the clothes will dry just as well as they would outside, albeit slower.
Layla and I are quite lucky because we live in a mountain town that allows clothes to be dried outside, so we can dry our clothes in the fresh mountain air. It is a win-win scenario.

If you do dry your clothes inside, you can actually kill a few more birds with one stone (sorry for the expression). Put some pots or bowls under the clothes and catch the water that drips off of them. This keeps your carpet from getting wet and you can reuse that water on the lawn or garden. This of course works best if you don't use detergent. Right there you have water saving, energy saving and you are cooling down your house!

In the winter, things get a bit tougher but you can still dry your clothes inside just the same, and if things cool down, then just bundle up.

Thankfully, things are beginning to change and cities, states and provinces are beginning to change their minds on outdoor clothes drying. In fact, in April the Ontario government lifted the ban on drying clothes outside. This was because several subdivisions, cities and towns did not allow it, but the new ruling by the government means that it does not matter and people can dry their clothes outside, which means our good friends Min, Jay and Faith can begin drying their clothes outside.

Here are just a few facts about dryers and the environment:

• Five dryers produce the same amount of emissions as an average-sized car.
• The average dryer uses 900 kilowatt hours of electricity a year.
• Consumers can save 25 percent on their energy bill each year by not using the dryer.

I don't know about you, but I am looking forward to sniffing that mountain air in my clothes from drying them outside.

Day 32 of our Green Year: Reusable Takeout

When you go out for something to eat and you bring home what is left in a Styrofoam container, what do you do with it? When you go to McDonald's or Subway, what do you do with the paper wrapping, plastic bags and more?
If you are like most people, you simply throw it away and before all of this, Layla and I were the same way. However, Our Green Year is all about changing the way we deal with our day-to-day lives and understanding how everything we do affects the environment.

So, as part of our Green Year, Layla and I have decided to do away with these containers. From now on when we go out for supper and there is food left over, it goes in a Tupperware container. When we go out to Subway, as we sometimes like to do, we will be putting the subs, without the paper, in the containers. Doing this can eliminate large amounts of waste in your home because you only use the paper, bags and Styrofoam for a few hours at most. By spending only $10 to $20, you can get the containers you need to never worry about how your food wrapping is affecting the environment.

You should probably get used to not having take-out containers, the Styrofoam ones at least. San Francisco has banned them out right, as has China, and I am sure the rest of the United States and Canada won't be far behind.

Thank you again to the Trail Daily Times for their wonderful story on us today. It is nice to see we can get the word out on what we are doing.

Remember, we will be posting pictures of our readers doing green things, so if you have any, send them to us at crwbaird@gmail.com and if you have any suggestions, let us know.

Day 25 of our Green Year: Building A Solar Cooker

Hey everyone,

Day 25 has come and it was a big one. To start, we took to task to build a solar cooker that would allow us to barbecue outside during the summer by using free and renewable energy; the sun. The solar cooker was built mostly by Layla who has a knack for these kinds of things. She was able to put it together using just reflective material, electrical tape and cardboard.
We tested it outside and within about 20 min it was over 200 degrees so we hope it works all right.
We will be posting up the steps to build the cooker soon and they will be displayed on a link to the side. Then you will be able to make the cooker yourself.
To build the whole thing, we did not spend over $20 so it is very affordable. We will post pics soon of how well it worked cooking. It may need fine tuning but overall it looks like it will work pretty well.

Also, thank you to Kate Webb from The Province newspaper here in B.C. This is a big paper and they were nice enough to do a story on us, which will appear on Tuesday. Kate also provided me with some links to other individuals who are living the green life:
No Impact Man - http://noimpactman.typepad.com/
Green As A Thistle - http://greenasathistle.com/

We should be using some ideas from those sites as well for our green initiative.

Stay tuned everyone as we begin to go more and more in-depth with the things you can build and use to help you go greener. We are hoping to make this an all encompassing year and want to cover everything, so thank you all for visiting.

Day 23 of our Green Year: Going Green On The Lawn

Well, with spring comes the time to mow our lawn, and since Layla and I have a large front yard and backyard, there is a lot of lawn to mow. That being said, we have decided we will not be mowing our lawn with a gas or electric mower, and have instead decided to go old school with our mower.

We will be using a Reel Mower, which is a mower that cuts grass as you push it around. The motor is you and they have been designed to be lightweight and easy to push around.
So now not only do we get great exercise pushing the mower around, but we also don't deal with gas at all, which means we do not put any CO2 into the atmosphere just so we can cut our grass.

We were quite surprised by prices for the mower, we thought they would be expensive but the one we are purchasing one for only $99 at Canadian Tire. These mowers have been proven to last longer than other mowers, if they are cared for properly, and they are even better for your lawn.
When most people cut their lawn, they cut it too short for one thing, but they also collect all the grass in bags and then dump it elsewhere. When you let the Reel Mower cut up the grass and leave it on the lawn, it creates a great natural mulching system that will actually help your lawn.

This is just the start of going green with our lawn. You can check back in the future as we use a rain barrel to deal with watering, we use natural fertilizers and more!

A traditional gas lawnmower puts 22 pounds of CO2 in the atmosphere for one hour use. This means, that if we mow the lawn, one hour every two weeks from April to September, that puts 264 pounds of CO2 in the atmosphere, which is exactly what we are taking out of the atmosphere with our Reel Mower.

Some good news! We were awarded the Blog of the Day award from http://blogofthedayawards.blogspot.com/ so that is great! Word is getting out! Thanks everyone!

Day 22 of our Green Year: Cooling Down In A Green Way

Where we live, southern British Columbia, we deal with a lot of heat. While we are on top of a mountain, we enjoy not having hot nights but the days can get pretty hot and that presents a problem when you want to fight the heat. Down the road from us, there is a town where it gets to 40 degrees and where people leave the AC cranked all day long.

Nonetheless, where we are there are some air conditioners but not many, and for this day of our Green Year, we have decided to offer some tips we will be using to help beat the heat without the air conditioner.

Air conditions are horrible for the environment, and they cost you a lot of money on your energy bill. Instead, there are a few things you can do to beat the heat:

1. Insulate Your Home: Insulating your home helps keep it warm, but it can also keep it cool. Put in the right caulking and weather stripping and you will be able to keep the heat out during the summer time. You can also put trees up to shade your home, which can lower the temperature in your home by as much as 40 percent.
2. Open the windows on the ground floor of you house on one side only, then go to the top floor and open the windows on the opposite side. This will bring cool air into the bottom of your house and push the warm air out the top (hot air rises remember). Put some fans pointing inward on the window sill downstairs and outward upstairs to help make things work a bit better. (See diagram above)
   
3. Close blinds on your large picture windows. This will prevent a lot of heat from coming into your home, it will get dark but it is not the end of the world.
4. Keep anything that generates heat off, throughout your home. This is everything from lights, clothes dryer and more. These things will actually increase the heat in your home and make things a lot hotter.
5. Drinking water will cool you down because your body will feel cooler and refreshed. Having hot clam chowder and hot tea is only going to make you feel, well, hot.
6. Heat is a state of mind. If you simply try and ignore it, you will but if you focus on it and whine about it, the heat will bother you all that much more.
7. It is going to get cold in the winter and you will wish it was hot, so just enjoy the heat while it is there. It is going to be hot, that is what summer is.

You can be assured Layla and I will be implementing all these measures in our house and in no way will there be a air conditioner running inside of it.

Day 21 of our Green Year: Recycling Package Material

Three weeks! That is the point we have hit now and we are happy to be continuing on this amazing journey of environmental discovery, meeting new people and helping new people learn about the many things we can all do to help Mother Nature.

As professional writers, Layla and I will often receive books in the mail for which we are supposed to use for research on certain projects. As well, we love books and we often order a few every few months from Amazon.com to help fuel our creative and literary juices.
However, we have begun to think, as part of our green year, about the problem these can create for the environment, when we waste a lot of packaging to hold a few items.

So, for Day 21, we are going to start recycling our packaging material.
First, you can reuse the packaging material to send a package you may need to send to someone. This will save you money from not having to get packaging, and it helps the environment by reusing the item. Of course, you can't just hold onto all these boxes and package material for months on end, unless you want your house to look like a pigsty.

You can also find out if any of your friends, co-workers or family need any boxes or packaging material. If they do, then you simply need to provide some of your excess to them. This may not happen often, as no one wants a bunch of packaging material in their office, but you never know. It is better than putting it in the landfills where it can pile up and become a growing problem.

Now, you can recycle everything in the packaging material, including the bubble wrap and foam inside. You simply need to find a recycling center in your area that will accept it and then you can drop it off. This is by far the best option because you are not contributing at all to waste and you are not adding bubble wrap, boxes and foam filler to your office closet.

This may seem like a rather small thing to focus on when we have talked about saving trees and more, but the truth is that we have to alter everything about our lives in order to help the environment, and everything from recycling bubble wrap to driving less play into making the environment healthy and saving our civilization from an ecological disaster.

Day 19 of our Green Year: Vinegar For The House

We are nearly to our twentieth day of our Green Year, and for this day we are going to talk about vinegar and how it really is one of the best environmental things you can buy for your house. The number of uses it has is really amazing when you think about all that it can do, and by using vinegar you can actually stop using many of the other cleaning products that carry harmful chemicals.

Now, when you buy vinegar, be sure to find out what brand you are buying because some come from fossil fuel products, which negates using it as an environmentally friendly solution in the house. To find out how to make your own vinegar, visit this site: http://www.vinegarman.com/VinegarMaking.shtml

So, what are the uses of vinegar around the house?

• Instead of using paint thiner, use vinegar as it is much better than turpentine and is safer for both your hands and the environment.
• Mix it with water as we did earlier this week and you have a product that is much better than most cleaning products bought at the store.
• If you burn yourself, or have a bit of pain, you can use vinegar by soaking it on a cotton ball and putting that on the bruise or burn to quicken the healing.
• Fido pee on the carpet? Use vinegar to deal with it.
• If you have a stain, you can put vinegar on the stain before washing it, which is better than using the expensive and environmentally-harmful stain removal products on the market.
• It serves as a better fabric softener and uses about half the amount needed.
• In the kitchen and bathroom, you can use vinegar to deal with mold, stains and soap scum.
• If you have clogs in the drain, boil white vinegar and pour it down the drain to remove clogs without the need for Drain-O.
• If you want to cleanse your face or deal with dandruff, you can use vinegar instead of other expensive products.
• One of the most toxic items you will use is oven cleaner, but vinegar can actually work better in the stove simply by soaking stains in vinegar and then scrubbing them off.
• If you have a stinky room, put a bowl of vinegar in there to deodorize it. Both the vinegar smell and the bad odor will disappear in no time.

There are so many uses for vinegar, that many people really do not realize it. Give a try to some of these uses for vinegar and let us know how they work for you.

Thanks to AboutMyPlanet.Com for all these helpful tips!

Day 18 of our Green Year: Cooking Green

We have come to Day 18 of our Green Year and we move to the kitchen for our next bit of green change in the Baird household.
We know that the fridge and stove are big power consumers in the household. There is not much we can do about the fridge right now except upgrade it to an Energy Star appliance, but with the stove Layla and I have endeavored to use it as little as we can; instead, choosing to use a hot plate grill that allows us to cook nearly anything we need without ever using the stove. It uses much less power than the stove and in some ways, does a much better job.

Another thing we are doing is cutting down on the energy waste of our cookware. When we are cooking a little bit food, we won't use a large pot because the water takes longer to heat up and that means more work on the stove to do it. Instead, we are going to be using pots that are sized perfectly for what we need. We will also be upgrading our cookware so that it has a flat bottom, which provides more contact with the burner and allows it to cook the contents faster. We also will not be cooking anything on a burner that is larger than the pot; this is just a huge waste of energy.

We mentioned yesterday about solar cookers, which we will be building on our own and displaying, that will help us cut down on the use of the stove. Coupled with our reliance on the small grill, we will save quite a bit of energy in the kitchen simply by cooking smart and with the environment in mind.

Day 17 of our Green Year: Solar BBQing

For Day 17 of our Green Year, Layla and I are going to change our BBQing habits. While the barbecue is better than the stove in that it uses less energy and causes less pollution, it still is not the perfect option. This is why we have begun to look at solar cookers for our BBQing options. We do not have one yet, but we will be getting one soon to help use the most powerful form of energy we have at our disposal; the sun.

With charcoal, you get cheap fuel but it is very dirty. Each time you start cooking with charcoal, you are releasing soot and carbon monoxide into the atmosphere. This may not seem like a lot from a BBQ on your deck, but multiply it by the millions who barbecue each day in North America and it becomes a problem.
As well, lump coal which is made from unprocessed charred wood is a big time cause of deforestation and greenhouse gases, while briquettes have a lot of wood scraps in them, which contain chemicals that were in the wood before it was chopped down. These carcinogenic fumes then go up to the closest thing to them; your nose.

Propane isn't as bad as charcoal, but it is not perfect by any means. It is more efficient than your stove, so if you can, use propane or natural gas.

The best option by far, and the option Layla and I will be going with, is a solar cooker. These amazing devices can cook with temperatures up to 400 degrees Fahrenheit, and they can be used to deep fry French fries, grill meat or bake items. You can bake, broil, boil or roast with these wonderful devices.
With a solar cooker, no fuel is burned and all it uses is the free solar energy we all have. It is perfectly environmentally friendly because no greenhouse gases are emitted, as well it uses less materials in its construction than barbecues do. They also last longer, roughly five times as long as a gas or charcoal barbecue.

There are two options for your solar cooker needs. You can buy one from www.solarcooking.ca, or you can make one using the plans and many of the recycled materials you have at home, from this website: http://www.wikihow.com/Make-and-Use-a-Solar-Oven

Layla and I will be making our own, so check out a future blog.

If you make a solar cooker from scratch through the plans in the website we provided, let us know and we will post a picture of you with it on our blog!

Day 15 of our Green Year: No more bottled water

We have hit our two-week mark and are very happy with the progress we are making with our Green Year. For today, we have decided to rid ourselves of bottled water. Why have we chosen to do this for our fifteenth day? Well, bottled water is a huge environmental problem for the world right now, yet people prefer to have bottled water instead of tap water. Thirty years ago if you told people we would buy bottled water, they would call you nuts, now it is the norm. So, what does bottled water do to our environment?

Every single year, 1.5 million tons of plastic is used to bottle 89 billion liters of water. This is an immense amount. This amounts to the same amount of water that flows over Niagara Falls over the course of two entire days. When you have seen Niagara Falls and the 500,000 liters of water that flow over it every second, you realize just how much water that is.

In the United States, the Earth Policy Institute has estimated that the process to make the plastic for water bottles, burns 1.5 million barrels of oil, which could power 100,000 cars for a year. This is made even worse when you realize that 90 percent of the plastic bottles are not recycled, and sit in landfills where they will slowly decay for centuries.

Instead of using bottled water over and over again, you can simply have one bottle that you clean out, which you fill with water when you need it. There is no reason to have so many water bottles being thrown out over the course of a year, it is the utmost in waste and a huge problem for the environment.

No more water bottles will be entering this house.

Day 14 of our Green Year: Washing Windows The Eco-Way

For our 14th day of our Green Year, we decided to take the suggestion of one of our readers, which was to wash your windows without using paper towels. It is hard to say how many trees are cut down each year to make paper towels, but it probably numbers in the millions. Like toilet paper, it is something we use briefly before we get rid of it and it is a huge waste. Most people do not recycle their paper towels and only a few buy recycled paper towel. Here are some statistics of what can be saved, simply by replacing your current paper towel and toilet paper with recycled paper from Seventh Generation.

• One million trees would be saved if every U.S. household replaced just one 250-count package of virgin fiber napkins with 100 percent recycled ones.
• 544,000 trees would be saved by replacing a 70-sheet roll of virgin fiber paper towels with recycled.
• 424,000 trees would be spared by replacing a 500-sheet roll of virgin fiber toilet paper with recycled.
• 170,000 trees would be saved by replacing one 175-count box of virgin fiber facial tissue recycled.

You can also use a very eco-friendly solution, which is to use a clean sock to clean the window as one of our readers suggested. It will work great, and when you use a mixture of vinegar and water it creates a wonderful clear window (the smell will go away if you open the windows). Windex, while it has improved greatly for the environment, is still laden with some chemicals.

Have more suggestions for us? Let us know so we can implement them in future blog posts!

Day 13 of our Green Year: Controlling Pests Naturally

As you have read in previous entries, Layla and I are going natural with a garden in our backyard. We are doing it to help the environment, as well as save costs for ourselves with rising fuel and food costs.
As we grow the garden, we are beginning to find ways to get rid of pests, without worrying about hurting the environment. We have chosen not to use pesticides or anything else chemical, and are choosing natural ways to protect our garden plants.

As a result, we have a list of the things you can do to keep pests out of your garden and keep your garden looking lush.

1. If you have cats going in your garden and using it as a litter box, you can circle the garden in lemon peels, or you can put together an orange peel/coffee ground mixture and scatter it around the garden. Can't will not go in as a result.
2. Fill some grocery sacks with air and tie them shut. Afterwards, place stakes around your garden and tie the bags to them. The rustling sound it creates will scare rodents and birds away.
3. If you have birds taking your strawberries, then simply get some small stones and paint them red and put them around the plants. The birds will eventually tire with trying to eat the 'hard strawberries' and will move on.
4. Insects cause a lot of problems in the garden, and if you have spider mites, just spray leftover coffee where they are and they should leave. You can also create a mixture that will get spider mites off your plants. The mixture is 1/2 cup buttermilk, 4 cups of wheat flour and five gallons of water (try to use rain water). Spray it on your garden and you should be able to keep spider mites out, as well as ants, caterpillars and cabbage worms.
5. You can mix up black pepper and flour and sprinkle it around your plants to keep the insects out.
   
6. If slugs are moving into your garden, simply take an old recycled sandpaper disk, cut it open and put it around the plant. Slugs won't cross the sandpaper.
7. Plant garlic throughout your garden. Doing this will keep insects out of it because they do not like the smell or taste.
8. While some bugs are bad for the garden, others help. Spiders eat insects that destroy plants, so to encourage them, lay some mulch at the beginning of the year. This will attract them and they will eat the aphids that come into the garden.
9. Are dogs digging in your garden? If they are, you just have to mix a clove of garlic, onion, Tabasco sauce and cayenne pepper in a bucket of water. Let it steep, then let it dribble into the garden where you don't want the dogs. If you have cats digging in your garden, then use powdered mustard and flour instead of garlic and onions to deter them. Mice will keep out of the garden, as will squirrels because the sauce, powder and pepper will stick to the bottom of their feet, which will frustrate them and keep them away.
10. Spray vinegar at the base of trees and walls to keep cats away and hide the scent of tomcats who have been in the area.
    

These are just a few of the natural ways you can keep your garden safe without killing anything, or resorting to chemicals.

Day 11 of our Green Year: Tin Can Uses

Everyone know that you should recycle your tin, aluminum and glass containers, but surprisingly very few people do it.
As part of our Green Year, Layla and I are making the effort to recycle everything that we can, including tin cans, aluminum cans and glass jars. However, the whole point of this blog is to show ways that things can be done that help the environment, and there is nothing better for the environment that recycling items into new items for your home.

So, Layla is making pen jars that can be sold through request to us through the blog (quite cheaply) and through a local farmer's market. By taking the cans we have and converting them into something else, that is a little bit less energy used to create containers for pens, knick-knacks, junk and more. The one on the left is made from a tin can, the one on the right, a Pen Monster, is made from a glass jar.

Recycling your tin cans, either through a recycling program or by turning them into things you can use in your home, is incredibly important. Each year, 15 billion cans are simply thrown away. This is very unfortunate because recycling one tin can can save enough energy to power a TV for three hours, while the average American throws away six pounds worth of tin cans every single month!
Make sure to recycle the tin, aluminum and glass in your home and try to be creative to create things out of those cans that can be of use to you in your house. The Earth will thank you.

Here are just a few of the uses you can get out of cans and jars:

1. Plant Pot
2. Candle Holder
3. Pencil Holder
4. Portable Compost Container
5. Edge your garden with tin cans to create a unique marker
6. Gift Box
7. Soap Container

Here are a few uses for cans and jars from the Home and Garden Network:

1. Tomato juice cans covered in pretty fabric or ribbon make great wine holders for gifts.
2. Make a picnic holder from two coffee cans and four soup cans. Spray paint them in fun colors and hot glue them together. Place paper plates and napkins in the large cans and flatware in the small ones. The wind won't blow them away.
3. Make a decorative umbrella holder from four coffee cans. Open both ends, hot glue them together end-to-end, and cover them with adhesive-backed paper. Leave the end on the bottom can for a base.
4. Use a large coffee can to make "round" bread. Remove both ends and lay on the side while baking.

As well, here is a great sight for creating tin can lanterns, great for Halloween or other holidays:
http://www.crafty-moms.com/tin-can-luminary.shtml