By John DeFore
One of the most buzzed-about Green Tech items over the last year has been the Kill A Watt, a gizmo that tells you exactly how much power is being used over time by any single appliance you plug into it. (We covered it last year in the context of multiple “know your footprint” ideas.)
Now the device’s makers have given it a serious upgrade, a tweak offering enough everyday usefulness that one can envision it being used by folks who don’t think of themselves as green freaks. The Kill A Watt PS, after all, functions at one level just like any other surge-protecting power strip you might use to protect a half-dozen computer peripherals or home-entertainment components while only using one power outlet.
It does so, though, with the power-conscious features of the earlier tool built-in. It measures the amount of power you use, not just for a single device, but for a whole room’s worth of gear, letting users easily find out how much, say, a month’s worth of Monday Night Football really costs them. It stores data, so totals aren’t lost during power outages, and warns users when their electrical load is higher than a circuit should have to bear.
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Green Goods: From bottles to baubles
By John DeFore
Gifts made from recycled goods tend toward the hip and funky, but not all are incompatible with dressier occasions.
Ecoist, the company that has made a name for itself with reclaimed-material handbags ranging from happily garish to chic, recently started offering a small selection of jewelry, made from recycled glass, that displays a similar range of styles in only a handful of products.
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Tags: · Green Goods, John DeFore, Kathleen Plate, recycled jewelry
Green Goods: Sierra Club Socks
By Barbara Kessler
Green Right Now
Socks, they’re a universal holiday gift. Anyone can use ‘em, and most anyone would appreciate an extra pair, which is why the Sierra Club settled on having a sock drive to help the homeless this season.
Buy a pair of Sierra Club brand socks (made by Devmir Inc., based in North Carolina) in a blend of organic cotton, bamboo and recycled synthetic fibers, and the conservation group will donate a pair to The National Coalition for the Homeless. Sierra Club also will get 10 percent of the proceeds in this mutual effort to raise money for Sierra Club and donate one million pairs of socks to people in need.
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Tags: · bamboo fabric, Green Goods, homeless, organic cotton, Sierra Club, socks
Green goods: biodegradable fishing line
By John DeFore
Eco-minded fishing enthusiasts may be aware, and appalled, that the traditional monofilament fishing line they 
probably use isn’t only made of petroleum but, should a stretch of it break off and get lost in the deep, it will hang around for centuries, quite likely obstructing fish habitat and definitely junking up our already too polluted waters.
One solution: Bioline biofilament, which when dropped into a lake, according to the manufacturer, “will be gone in five years versus six hundred.”
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Tags: · biodegradable, Bioline Biofilament, fishing line, Go Fast and Light, Green Goods, John DeFore
Green goods: Pentel’s “Recycology”
By John DeFore
Barring a mass return to quill-and-ink pot technology, one way to green the world’s desk drawers is to pump up the percentage of recycled materials in office supplies. Pentel is working that angle aggressively with a Recycology line that touches on most of the popular ways to manually put words and pictures on paper: Its pencils, gel and fiber-tipped pens, and permanent markers are all made with a high percentage of recycled plastic.
None of the items contains less than 50% recycled material in its body (ink and lead, of course, don’t count in that percentage); some are well over that threshold, like a “Cool Lines” pencil that is 75% recycled and 67% post-consumer waste.
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Tags: · Green Goods, office supplies, Pentel, recycled materials
There are several options on the market, including recycled plastic plates and pressed paper plates that will biodegrade (shout out to Chinet; who knew?). But there’s only one product we’ve seen that covers the green spectrum like moss on rocks: Verterra disposable dinnerware.