Make Your Family Barbeque a Little Greener

A barbeque is a great, fun way to spend a day with family and friends. Unfortunately, the disposable plates, cups, and flatware, as well as the copious amounts of charcoal lighter fluid many of us use are not exactly Earth-friendly. With a few simple, painless changes, your next cookout can be fun and green.

Use Reusable Dishes and Utensils

Disposable dishes and flatware are convenient, but they clutter our landfills and take hundreds of years to decompose. A better option is to use normal, everyday cups, plates, and flatware at your barbeque. If you’re worried about breakage, you can purchase inexpensive plastic plates and cups, and simply wash and store them until your next cookout.

Kick the Lighter Fluid Habit

What’s a cookout without some burgers and hotdogs sizzling on the grill? There is a greener way to barbeque, too. The lighter fluid that so many of us use to start our charcoal is petroleum-based, which means not only is it non-renewable, but it releases harmful compounds into the atmosphere as it burns. A better option is to buy a steel charcoal chimney. This is basically a metal tube with a handle. You fill the  top part of the chimney with the charcoal, and crumple a couple sheets of newspaper and put them in the bottom part. Simply light the newspaper, let the coals get red hot, dump them in the grill, and you’re good to go. The chimney is virtually indestructible, so you’ll have it for years to come.

These tips will help you have a greener cookout. And, don’t forget to recycle all of those bottles and cans!

Save Trees: How to Use Less Paper in Your Office

Friday is green:work day, where we give you tips and ideas for how to green your workspace, whether you work in your own home office or a corporate cubicle.

The concept of a “paperless office” is one that hasn’t taken root quite yet. While many managers can send memos via e-mail, how many of us still find a paper version in our in-basket? Procedure manuals are still printed up and put into three-ring binders, and an endless barrage of office supply catalogs hit our desks weekly. While many of these things my be out of your control, there are simple things that each of us can do to save a few trees during the work day. Here are some ideas:

Ask yourself: Do I really need to print this?

So much of the printing we do is kind of an automatic hoarding reflex. We find some information online and say, “oh, I might need that info someday” and we print it and it clutters up our files until we need it….or we forget we have it and end up printing the same thing all over again. Make use of your web browser’s bookmark feature. If you have a lot of bookmarks, take the time to organize them so you can find what you’re looking for.

If you’re not into the whole bookmarking thing, consider using an application like Google Notebook, where you can copy and paste the information you want to keep into your own online file, and the full text of the information is there when you need it.

Use Paper Efficiently

What does this mean? It means, fit as much information on one printed sheet of paper as possible. Consider reducing the size of your margins from the default 1.25″ to 1″, and you will use 8% less paper per year. Print on both sides of the page. Consider keeping a stash of paper you’ve already printed on one side to use for drafts and the like. Or, you can put your used paper on a clipboard and use the backs of the printed paper for writing notes to yourself. Cut the sheets up and use those to take messages instead of those little pink phone message pads.

Reduce the Amount of Paper That Comes Your Way

If you are the person responsible for ordering office supplies, undoubtedly tons of catalogs come your way. Call the company, ask them not to send a catalog anymore. Most companies have online catalogs. Just bookmark them and order away when you need to.

Of course all of this paper-saving is great, but we also need to be sure we’re recycling any office paper we’re finished with, and, again if you’re the supply purchaser, purchasing recycled paper closes the recycling loop.

It can become a bit of a game, seeing how much paper we can save during a workday. And, some days, we need all the distractions we can get.

Edible Container Gardens: Gourmet, Organic Greens at Your Fingertips

Thursdays are green:eats day, where we offer tips and ideas to help you eat healthier and in a more earth-friendly way.

When the weather starts turning cool, as it soon will for those of us in the northern U.S. and Canada, it’s the perfect time for sowing some greens to enhance your diet. Happily, a wide variety of lettuces and other greens grow happily in a container, so even those of us who don’t have a large vegetable garden can get in on the tasty green action. Any container that is about six to eight inches deep and has adequate drainage (you can always drill holes in the bottom of containers without existing holes) will work for this. Fill your container of choice with either organic potting soil or compost. Here are a few delicious and unique greens to grow in your container:

Arugula: This spicy green, also called “rocket lettuce” is dark green, packed with antioxidants, and is attractive in a container. It can be harvested as baby arugula, which works out perfectly for container gardeners, because you can just sow more seed if the container starts looking sparse. Arugula can be eaten raw, as a simple salad with tomatoes and some red onions, or sauteed in a bit of olive oil and garlic for a tasty side dish.

Kale: This often-overlooked member of the brassicas family is one of the most nutritious foods you can eat. One cup of chopped kale offers a whopping 300% of your daily Vitamin A and 200% of your Vitamin C. It’s also a decent source of calcium, providing around 13% of your daily calcium needs per cup. As with arugula, it can be harvested young–it’s most tender this way–and eaten raw or sauteed. If you let the leaves mature a bit, it may be a good idea to trim the stems off before eating—they can be tough, and don’t contain nearly as much nutrition as the leafy portions.

Swiss Chard: If you’re looking for an edible green that will pack a visual punch as well, try growing chard. Chard sort of resembles celery, except that the leafy parts are dark green, and the stems can come in a variety of colors from dark red, to white, to orange and yellow. The stalks are perfect for tossing into soups or stir-fries, and the leaves are delicious either steamed or sauteed with some garlic or ginger.

Spinach: Everyone knows spinach. Popeye’s fave is a nutritional powerhouse, providing plenty of calcium, potassium, vitamin c, folic acid, and vitamin a. It’s at its best harvested young, when the leaves are tender and mild in taste.

Mesclun/Leaf Lettuce: If a tasty salad is what makes you happy, you’re in luck. Seed can be found for a wide variety of tasty, pretty lettuces, any of which will grow perfectly in containers. As the lettuce grows, keep harvesting the largest leaves, and it will keep producing more.

To grow any of these greens, simply buy/collect organic seed of your choice, sprinkle lightly on the surface of the soil, and cover with a sprinkling of more soil. Water it well, and don’t let your container dry out. A container of greens like this will take you through the first frost, and maybe longer. Kale only gets better after a frost, so it’s a good option for cold climates. And, if you’re not ready to stop growing, you can try bringing your container indoors (if it’s not too large) and growing your greens in a bright window.

Eating fresh isn’t hard. And it’s so rewarding to grow your own greens.

Kicking the Disposable Habit

Wednesdays are green:home day, where we bring you tips and ideas to make your home a greener place to live.

The deluge of disposable cleaning products in the marketplace has grown steadily over the last several years. You can’t turn on the television without seeing a commercial for Swiffer, Clorox Wipes, or Pledge disposable dusters. It all looks so easy: just clean and toss! No more cleaning after you’re done cleaning. It sounds great, but all of those disposables have to end up somewhere, and the more items we can keep out of our landfills, the better. Besides, how much sense does it make to spend good money on something you’re going to throw away?

To replace Swiffers:

Go back to using a normal broom and dustpan. Is it really that important to pick up every speck of dust on the floor? So the broom misses a teensy bit of dust….life’s too short.

If you have a dustmop around, these were the original Swiffers. They kind of look like mops on the end of a push broom. They’re perfect for dusting wood and tile floors.

If you already have a Swiffer, don’t toss it! You can wrap old t-shirts around the cleaning head, and continue using it. If you’re really crafty, you can hack your Swiffer ala Treehugger.

To replace disposable cleaning wipes:

My grandmothers always had old, ratty t-shirts and bath towels that they refused to throw away, because they were perfect for cleaning. My mother-in-law endlessly embarrasses her teenage son by keeping old (clean!) cotton underwear around for cleaning. My grandmothers did it out of frugality, which is a good enough reason—but it’s the epitome of earth-friendly, too. Buy or make eco-friendly spray cleaners, use your recycled cleaning clothes, and kiss disposables good-bye.

To replace disposable dusters:

Um. A duster. The non-disposable kind. One of your recycled rags will work, too.

There you have it, simple ideas to kick the disposable cleaning product habit. You’ll put less into the landfills, and you’ll save money too!