Set sprinklers to water the lawn or garden only - not the street or sidewalk.
Use the microwave to cook small meals. (It uses less power than an oven.)
Purchase "Green Power" for your home's electricity. (Contact your power supplier to see where and if it is available.)
Scrape, rather than rinse, dishes before loading into the dishwasher; wash only full loads.
Cut back on air conditioning and heating use if you can.
Turn off appliances and lights when you leave the room.
By Julie Bonnin
If you’re in the market for a custom-built home, there really isn’t a reason not to build green. Who doesn’t want a smaller utility bill? Or to leave a reduced carbon footprint on your corner of planet Earth? FreeGreen, a web site with free green home designs, allows users to browse [...]
Tags: Briefs · Home Building · Model Projects
By John DeFore
Even those among us who spend a fair deal of time daydreaming about living in a solar-powered home may stop short of actually shopping for the required equipment. You can’t just hop down to Home Depot and pick up a photovoltaic rig, after all, and we all know it’s expensive.
Happily, some pioneers [...]
Tags: Briefs · Home Building · Home Improvements · Model Projects
By Tom Kessler
Colorado developers have announced what they say is the country’s largest net-zero energy, master-planned community in Arvada, Colo., a suburb of Denver. Geos Neighborhood, which will begin infrastructure construction this fall, will feature 250 residences and can generate enough renewable energy to supply 100 percent of the annual energy needs of the entire [...]
Tags: Briefs · Home Building · Model Projects
By Paula Minahan
The idea of living in a truly sustainable green environment is a homeowner’s dream: Lower energy bills, healthier materials,
Photo: Barley & Pfeiffer Architects
Overhangs provide protection from the sun.
the satisfaction of “doing the right thing.” But with our slumping U.S. economy, many worry about holding onto their home — let alone building a [...]
Tags: Cut Consumption · Energy & Water · Home Building · Home Improvements
By Paula Minahan
Peter Pfeiffer doesn’t mince words. His passion for green building takes an almost proselytizing tone at times. And it’s no wonder. The straight-shooting architect has spent the past 30 years at the forefront of the
Photo: Barley & Pfeiffer Architects
Peter Pfeiffer’s green house in Austin
green building movement. The award-winning work of his Austin-based firm, [...]
Tags: Cut Consumption · Green Enthusiasts & Researchers · Home Building · Home Improvements · Model People
By Julie Bonnin
Era Ford met EcoBroker Stephanie Edwards-Musa at a class on green building offered at Rice University in Houston.
Now the two of them are on a home tour in the Heights, a historic neighborhood near downtown, and just a few steps inside the door Ford is all but pumping her fist in the [...]
Tags: Cut Consumption · Energy & Water · Home Building · YOUR HOME
By John DeFore
As counterintuitive as it sounds for those raised to think of all trees as environmentally precious, there are some varieties that prove a nuisance, possibly even a hazard, in certain areas.
Western juniper, for instance. While natural wildfire/regrowth cycles once kept juniper under control, modern firefighting efforts have sometimes allowed the trees [...]
Tags: Briefs · Greener Businesses · Home Building · Home Improvements
By Michele Chan Santos
On a quiet street in the tree-covered city of Rollingwood, a suburb of Austin, Texas, sits a house designed to epitomize everything technology and modern design can do to make a home environmentally friendly and safe for families with children.
Tags: Activists & Authors · Clean & Maintain · Energy & Water · Green Them · Home Building · Model Projects
By John DeFore
Of all the products that made BuildingGreen’s new Top 10 list, the one most likely to be of use to those of us who aren’t building homes (or remodeling kitchens) any time soon is the LR6 LED Downlight from LLF. Designed for use in recessed lighting fixtures, the downlight offers predictable benefits over [...]
Tags: Briefs · Home Building · Home Improvements
By Barbara Kessler
As the sub-prime loan implosion continues to seep the red ink of bad mortgages, home builders have been seeking cover in the color green.
No, it’s not yet a Christmas party. Building starts remain sluggish across the country. But green building, that once pigeonholed province of hippies and do-gooders, is growing despite the [...]
Tags: Home Building · Model Projects
By Harriet L. Blake
BOSTON — Green is the word among a growing number of multi-family housing projects around the nation, from San Francisco to Austin and beyond. In Boston, developer Tim Pappas has built the city’s first residential “green building.” The Macallen Building, which opened in June, is a condominium development that incorporates the environment [...]
Tags: Energy & Water · Home Building · Model Projects
By Barbara Kessler
It is 86 degrees as the afternoon sun assaults the asphalt roofs of Frisco, Texas. But it is cool inside the Craftsman-style house on Beacon Hill Drive.
The usual whir of the AC, ever present in so many area houses, has been replaced by the sounds of gently rustling leaves and breezes outside [...]
Tags: Home Building · Model Projects
In the race for top carbon emissions polluter, the United States is still Number One, but China is sprinting forward and could soon edge into the lead. The current Olympics host nation accounted for a “staggering 57 percent of the growth of emissions” worldwide this century, and will likely surpass the U.S. as the single biggest belcher of fossil fuel emissions sometime this year, according to the Worldwatch Institute.
The standings right now: The U.S. currently contributes 19.5 percent of global fossil fuel emissions compared with China’s 18.3 percent. [Read more →]
British Petroleum (BP) has announced plans to bring cellulosic ethanol to market in the U.S., through a 
partnership with bio-fuel developer Verenium, a company that makes biofuels from rice straw, sugarcane stalks, switchgrass and wood chips. The partnership could help speed the availability of lower cost, more environmentally friendly biofuels, according to an announcement by both companies this week. [Read more →]
By Tom Kessler
Almost 90 percent of the car shoppers who visit Kelley Blue Book’s Web site say they are concerned about the future of our environment, company research shows. Among survey respondents, 80 percent agreed that individuals should make lifestyle changes to help reduce CO2 emissions. And 75 percent of KBB shoppers reported that they have made changes to further the betterment of the environment. The most frequent lifestyle changes cited were:
