An opt-out program to stop the receipt of the Yellow Pages on your doorstop has recently become an option, but what about the white pages? Perhaps opting-in is a better solution for the environment.

(Photo: banthephonebook.org)

According to Banthephonebook.org, every year five million trees are used in the production of the white pages phone books. Then, it costs $17 million each year to recycle the phone books. And many phone books end up in landfills because people simply throw them away instead of recycling. The website also says that a Whitepages.com survey found that 80 percent of people would support an opt-in program, which theoretically would reduce phone book consumption because it would stop automatic deliveries of phone books.

Nowadays, many people use their cell phones or online sites to search for phone numbers, leaving doubts about whether physical copies are even necessary.

If you want to join the white pages opt-in movement, sign the petition to let the phone directory companies know. More than 16,000 people already have signed the petition. But until there is a white pages opt-in program in place, the best option you have is to opt-out with the Yellow Pages.

Copyright © 2009 Green Right Now | Distributed by Noofangle Media

Fiskars Project Orange Thumb, the Home Depot Foundation, and the City of Baltimore are teaming to make over an area in a local Baltimore neighborhood in just one day. This Thursday, 80 members from all three groups and people from around the community will build a new garden in the Oliver neighborhood. They will break ground at 8 a.m. and complete the project just in time for the ribbon cutting that will take place at 4:30 that afternoon.

Fiskars’ Project Orange Thumb, started in 2003, has helped over 100 communities and given more than $200,000 in garden grants. “The overall mission of Fiskars Project Orange Thumb is to encourage and develop neighborhood beautification, horticultural education, sustainable agriculture, neighborhood involvement, community development and outreach,” said Brent McHenry with Public Relations and Communications for Fiskars. The Oliver neighborhood garden will be Project Orange Thumb’s 6^th makeover this year.

For each makeover, Fiskars partners with a corporate sponsor and a local community organization. “Fiskars coordinates, develops and manages the day-long makeover. The Home Depot donated all the planting materials and supplies for the project and will assist with the garden installation. The City of Baltimore also will assist in installing the garden and will help manage its maintenance upon completion, ” said McHenry.

Joe Lamp’l, known as “Joe Gardener” on Fresh From the Garden on the DIY Network, uniquely designs each garden for Project Orange Thumb. The Oliver neighborhood garden will feature shade trees, hundreds of vegetables, flowering annuals and perreniels, as well as a sitting area.

“We strive to find locations that will benefit from this type of build, including densely populated areas, priority neighborhoods with a vast population,” said McHenry.

Do you know of a place in your community that could use a makeover? You can nominate an area for a new garden by emailing orangethumb@fiskars.com. With your submission, provide information on where the location is, a brief history of the area, and why it deserves a new garden.

(If you’re wondering why these green projects are dubbed Orange Thumb, it’s because of the company’s iconic orange scissors, first sold in the 1960s. Fiskars, a Finnish company, is among the oldest businesses in the world, having started as an ironworks in 1649.)

Copyright © 2009 Green Right Now | Distributed by Noofangle Media

When getting ready for Mother’s Day, don’t forget about Mother Earth. We have gathered ten ideas that your mother will love and won’t hurt the earth.

A Gift That Blooms

1. Flowers are always right for Mom’s Day. If you are leaning in that direction, consider buying local blooms from a local florist. Picking out flowers that are grown locally cuts down on the amount of gas used to bring you that flower, and you will be supporting your neighborhood economy. If cut flowers aren’t easily found, look for a perennial or shrub in a pot.

Find local flower markets and farms by typing in your zip code on LocalHarvest.org. We found White Dove Farm Flowers, in Santa Paula, Calif., north of Los Angeles, which produced this gorgeous Iris.

White Dove is just one of many possible local sellers. You’ll find several flower farms, sometimes as part of larger produce and herb farms, in any large market.

A Gift With A Conscience

2. Make your mom proud and invest in another woman’s future. Microplace.com enables you to make an investment in a loan of a hard-working borrower in an impoverished nation. With only a $20 donation, your mom can receive a hand-woven, free-trade scarf from Bihar, India and you will help a hard-working entrepreneur to lift herself out of poverty.

A Tasty Treat

3. A basket full of fresh organic fruits and vegetables can more than carry the day. Stop by your local farmers market and hand pick some fruit or veggies. To be earth friendly, reuse a basket or pretty tote you have in the house and fill it with your hand-picked goodies, her favorites.

Add some baked treats from Blackbird Bakery for some gluten-free sweets to make mom smile. Blackbird, founded by Karen Morgan, and popular with Courtney Cox Arquette, Island Def Jam and Laura Dern,  uses 100 percent organic fruit, eggs and dairy in its products.

Or add a sweet touch from Taza chocolate – it’s organic and stone ground and available in gift boxes.

Here are just a few examples of how shade trees can have a big impact on your energy bills:

Photo: Arbor Day Foundation

Some shade trees, like this Catalpa, can do double duty, providing beautiful blooms in the spring and growing tall to shade even upper stories. The Catalpa, just one example of a towering, flowering tree, can withstand wet or dry environments, and sun or partial shade, growing 40-60 feet tall in zones 4-8.

Wouldn’t you just love to pick your house up, turn it this way and that way on the lot, and figure out where it really makes the most sense? The spot where it catches the prevailing breeze, has shade in the summer, sun in the winter, and energy savings year-round?

That’s how houses were placed before air-conditioning, when a family’s comfort inside depended on how well the house functioned. But today, we live in tidy rows on uniform blocks that line up in a way that makes more sense for real estate than anything else. The decision as to which way our doors and windows face was most likely made by a developer putting down dozens of homes at once; the placement of our driveways and patios followed suit.

More from GRN

Slideshow: Trees that can help cut your energy costs

And if the sun bakes us in the summer, or if our living room is freezing in the winter, we tend to focus on things we can do inside the house to mitigate the problem. We turn the thermostat up or down; we dig out the blankets in winter or the fans in summer.

And we pay for all of it, in comfort and utility bills.

What to do?

Tackle the problem from the outside as well. Plant trees.

Deciduous trees – those that lose their leaves in the fall – will shade a home in the summer and let the sun through in the winter, reducing both cooling and heating costs. Evergreen trees will block a cold wind or shade an air-conditioner year-round.

“Planting trees to save energy costs makes sense,” said Misha Sarkovich, Program Manager of the Sacramento Municipal Utility District’s Shade Tree Program. In addition, “you improve the air quality, improve the property values and beautify the community,” he said.

Sacramento’s utility district, called SMUD for short, has planted more than 450,000 trees since 1990 in a program where homeowners get the trees for free. The Sacramento Tree Foundation has community foresters who visit the homes, work with property owners on tree location and selection (they offer 38 varieties), and then deliver the trees. The homeowner plants the trees and pledges to care for them. And everyone benefits: The homeowner improves the property and saves money; the utility reduces its electric load (which California has required), and the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is reduced.

And the trees do more than provide shade. In essence, each tree creates its own micro climate – in photosynthesis, water vapor escapes through the leaves, creating a minuscule mist – and can reduce the temperature surrounding it by several degrees.

Sacramento is one of the largest and oldest tree programs in the country, and is a member of the American Public Power Association (APPA), a national organization that represents community- and state-owned utilities.

The APPA’s Tree Power Initiative encourages utilities nationwide to organize tree-planting activities in their own communities. Since it began its program in 1991, 267 shade-tree programs have been started in 38 states. A list on the web site identifies the companies and cities that participate.

“The right tree in the right place, that’s our mantra,” said Tobias Sellier, a communications specialist who helps administer the program. “We try to encourage the utilities to be as big a partner as they can in the process,” Sellier said.

Plant a tree. A simple environmental concept. Trees absorb many of the toxins produced by today’s global warming. They add beauty to the landscape.

In the Big Apple, Mayor Bloomberg’s parks department has teamed with Bette Midler’s nonprofit New York Restoration Project to create MillionTreesNYC. (Midler founded the NYRP in 1995.)

MillionTreesNYC, which began in the fall of 2007, pledges to plant a million trees in New York City by 2017. The initiative will help New York City increase its trees by 20 percent. This includes street trees, park trees as well as trees located on public, private and commercial land.

Director Cristiana Fragola says the concept was a simultaneous effort by both the city and the Midler group. The plan is to have the city plant 60 percent of the trees in parks and public spaces. Private community groups, organized by the NYRP, will plant the rest.

“So far, we are totally on target,” says Fragola. “To date, we have planted 172,000 trees. In fact by the end of the fiscal year, which was in June, we exceeded our projections by 17 percent.”

In addition to the many community groups participating, several celebrities are lending their names as well, including Sting, Andy Summers and Stewart Copeland of The Police. The ‘80s icons performed a concert last summer with a pledge of $1 million in support of the MillionTreesNYC project. The donation was matched by the city. The combined $2 million goes toward the planting of 10,000 trees, which in turn helps reforest the 2,000 acres of parkland throughout the five boroughs as envisioned by MillionTreesNYC.

The money pledged by the Police, says Fragola, helped purchase the trees for their fall planting event. The Nov. 8 event attracted 1,000 New Yorkers, who planted 15,000 trees, she says. “We are having a spring planting day as well that takes place Saturday, April 25. People can register online.”

Reforestation helps clean air and water, while reducing greenhouse gases and lowering energy costs. Cleaner air keeps asthma attacks and other respiratory diseases at bay. In the summer, trees are particularly beneficial because they cool down streets, sidewalks and homes. They also add to a home’s property value.

According to Fragola, just four trees planted around a home can save as much as 30 percent on summer cooling costs. Currently, all of the trees in New York City remove more than 42,000 tons of carbon from the atmosphere each year. The one million additional trees planted through this program are expected to remove more than 150,000 more.

The program also serves as green jobs training for young adults who need career skills. These aspiring horticulturists recently planted 1,000 trees in Riverdale Park as part of their paid-internships with MillionTreesNYC. (See picture at top.)

Despite efforts to increase recycling, landfills aren’t going away any time soon. But a process called “phytocapping” might drastically reduce their impact on the environment, according to a paper published in the first 2009 issue of the International Journal of Environmental Technology and Management. (The full paper can only be seen if purchased, but it is summarized here.)

Organic materials in landfills produce the greenhouse gases methane and carbon dioxide as they decay, and this decay happens most rapidly when rainwater reaches the material. Today, many sites attempt to counter this by covering heaps of trash with impacted clay, which is intended to keep water from “percolating” into the heap. But clay is ineffective in many areas because heat and dry conditions cause cracks that let rain through; other attempts to regulate methane, like gas-collection devices, can be prohibitively expensive.

Kartik Venkatraman and Nanjappa Ashwath of Central Queensland University just conducted a study of a much more natural solution: placing layers of plants and trees on the top of the decaying junk.

In addition to the obvious aesthetic improvement, the authors have found that these plants and the soil they hold in place can stop water from seeping into the mound, with plants using it for their own growth processes. In trials at a landfill in Rockhampton (where their university is located), the researchers found that the water barrier had a dramatic effect on subsequent emissions: “Phytocaps can reduce surface methane emission 4 to 5 times more than the adjacent un-vegetated site,” they reported, going on to note that of two caps tested, a thicker one (almost a meter and a half) was 45% more effective than a thin one.

The team used 19 different species of trees at the site, boosting their conclusion that, in addition to the atmospheric benefits, phytocapping plans could help encourage biodiversity zones in areas that are now wastelands.

Copyright © 2008 | Distributed by Noofangle Media

Everyone knows that shade from the sun keeps you cooler, but a new study has quantified the benefit in a way homeowners might want to note. The right kind of shade, it turns out, can easily shave ten percent off your summertime electric bill.

David Laband, a professor in Auburn University’s School of Forestry and Wildlife Sciences, studied 160 area houses between May and September — quantifying the amount of shade trees cast on each and comparing their power usage. Those with a sizable amount of what he called “heavy shade” had bills over ten percent lower than those with no shade at all. (11.4%, to be exact, which in this study amounted to between $31 and $33 per month in savings.)

Trees providing lighter shade could help a household achieve similar savings, but many more trees were needed. One of Leband’s hopes is that this information will encourage real estate developers not to bulldoze big old trees because they interfere with house plans. Even if builders re-plant young trees in more convenient spots, the loss of shade will be significant.

Of course, where trees stand in relation to a house makes a difference. “We looked at the amount of shade in the early morning, early afternoon and late afternoon,” a statement from the researcher read. “If you have trees on the west side of your house, you will have a much lower power bill.”

The study cost over a quarter of a million dollars, vastly more than the electric-bill differential in the houses Laband studied. If the data he collected filters out into the development community, though, where “green building” is gaining traction, it might not take long to pay off.

Copyright © 2008 Green Right Now| Distributed by Noofangle Media

PVC isn’t looked upon kindly by many environmentalists, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t without its uses — like a beautifully simple watering device that could do a lot of good for struggling plants.

The natural tendency, when you’ve planted a tree and are concerned about helping it survive, is to set a sprinkler system on heavy rotation or go out every day to water it. But sprinklers spread water far beyond where it’s needed, and a heavy one-time watering can lose a lot to evaporation and runoff.

Enter the Treegator (as in “tree irrigator”), which almost literally could not be simpler in its solution to this problem. It’s a piece of thick plastic that wraps around the tree, zipping up like a jacket and letting you fill it with up to 20 gallons of water that will slowly soak into the soil over the course of 5 to 9 hours.

Part of the idea is that slow water delivery means the soil is soaked to a deeper level, encouraging roots to grow and the tree to become stable more quickly. The most readily available benefit, though, is that you can care for a tree using far less water; for most trees, the manufacturer says that one watering a week is enough.

The Original model, which is also advertised as a perfect solution to city employees who may be responsible for scores of young trees at a time, is joined by a different design called the Treegator Jr. PRO; despite the “Jr.” moniker, it actually fits around trees with thicker trunks. (Jr. can accommodate a 6-inch trunk, while the Original fits diameters of 1-4 inches; two Originals can be zipped together, though, to fit an 8 inch trunk.) The product, which has been around since 1991, can be ordered online or found through mainstream work-supply outlets like Gempler’s.

Copyright © 2008 | Distributed by Noofangle Media

Attention all recycling innovators: they city of Houston has launched a nationwide contest designed to create new markets for recycled tree limbs and make use of the mountains of woody vegetation left in Hurricane Ike’s wake.

With enough tree trunks, branches and other tree remnants to fill Houston’s Astrodome nearly four times, the debris- 5.6 million cubic yards — far surpasses what can be used locally for mulch.

So with the help of a private donation, the city has launched “Recycle Ike,” and Mayor Bill White has said he hopes the contest will spark the country’s single biggest recycling project this year.

First, second and third place winners will be paid $10,000, $5,000 and $2,500 for the best ideas on what to do with the massive amount of wood scrap remains from the Houston metropolitan area. The city has already given 700,000 cubic yards to companies that manufacture mulch and compost. Some ideas that have come up for consideration – like selling the wood ships to fuel boilers – have proven impractical due to the cost of shipping the chips around the country.

The city is considering using the tree waste for erosion control and electric generation, but hopes to generate additional sustainable proposals by launching the contest.

You don’t have a lot of time to brainstorm. Participants must register with the city by midnight Oct. 31 and have their ideas submitted by midnight Nov. 14. Proposals should focus on projects that can benefit the city and be sustainable. Email your idea to recycleIke@cityofhouston.net or go to the RecycleIke website for more details.

Copyright © 2008 | Distributed by Noofangle Media

We all know the drill: “Paper or plastic?” But when it comes to receipts there hasn’t been a choice — until now. allEtronic, a Fullerton, Calif., company knows that paper receipts are a nuisance and wants to rid the retail experience of those paper tag-a-longs that billow out of your purse, bulge inside your wallet, and languish in Rubbermaid containers in your closet.

The process of printing a receipt for every purchase depletes more resources than we consumers care to imagine. “Our technology will completely eliminate the production of receipt paper, which as we know is having a damaging effect on our environment,” says Isaac Lay, co-founder and CEO of allEtronic.

The company shares an office with its parent as a unit of Cyndigo Corporation, which has been in operation since late 2004 and develops and markets point-of-sale (POS) systems as part of its business.
allEtronic is a service developed from its POS division that soon could be available at a store near you.

The company has compiled the data: In one month, a single big-box retailer will print enough receipts to wrap around the circumference of the Earth – twice, it says. Printing receipts burns through 9 million trees each year, allEtronic claims. And for each ton of paper that’s manufactured, it takes 390 gallons of oil and more than 19,000 gallons of water, while producing enough CO2 emissions a year to equal that of 13 million cars.

allEtronic has built a business that addresses this environmental problem and boasts advantages for consumers and retailers alike. Its service is designed for digital cash registers that run point of purchase applications. When allEtronic’s software recognizes the customer, it blocks the receipt from being printed and redirects the receipt to be printed digitally on its servers. The company is working with a top Major League Baseball stadium and a college, among others, and it’s scheduled to appear at several trade shows, including the National Retail Federation’s BIG Show held in New York at the Jacob K. Javits Center in January 2009.

Customers who shop at retailers supported by allEtronic receive a paperless receipt by setting up a free allEtronic account that links to accounts for their credit or debit cards. Businesses that enlist the allEtronic service reduce the cost of providing printed receipts or coupons at checkout while also helping the environment. Behemoth retailers the likes of Wal-Mart would stand to save substantial operational costs if they participated and their customers choose the paperless receipts option.

U.S. Consumers eventually throw away enough receipts in a year to fill more than 2 million garbage trucks, according to allEtronic. For those of us who accumulate a hefty stack of credit card receipts and those mile-long grocery store versions with the colorful ads on the back, here’s a green solution that could free up space in the glove box.

Copyright © 2008 | Distributed by Noofangle Media

The idea of training plants to grow into odd, useful forms isn’t a new one. It’s been done for ages, has been the subject of enthusiast-penned books, and in recent years has attracted the interest of fine artists and architects.

Photo: Dr. Mitchell Joachim, Terreform 1

Now two professors at Tel Aviv University hope to move eco-architecture into the commercial realm, designing products that can be sold and grown around the world.

As envisioned by Professors Yoav Waisel and Amram Eshel, the structures would emphasize the use of tree roots instead of branches: Manipulating “aerial root development,” they imagine using aeroponically grown (that is, without soil) tree roots that remain easily pliable for unique applications like tree-root dwellings that would be inherently earthquake-resistant in California.

Nothing like that is currently being offered by the professors’ commercial partner Plantware, which is showcasing more whimsical and decorative items like tree-shaded chairs and coat hangers that grow out of pots. The joint TAU/Plantware effort is starting modestly, with plans to “build” street lamps and park benches out of growing materials in locations around the United States, Australia and Israel.

But that hasn’t stopped the researchers and entrepreneurs from releasing some very fanciful drawings depicting whole homes that use trees for their skeletons. Plantware CEO Gordon Glazer admits such dwellings are further down the road, probably at least a decade. But they would have some nice green features – beyond being intrinsically green – such as built-in composting and rainwater capture systems. See the dissection below.

As a press release puts it: “While the method of ‘growing your own home’ can take years, the result is long lasting and desirable” — especially for prospective home-growers who don’t live in regions with heavy woodpecker populations.

Photo: Dr. Mitchell Joachim, Terreform 1

Copyright © 2008.Distributed by Noofangle Media