By Barbara Kessler
Green Right Now

Most commodities come with a clear price attached to a distinct amount. A bag of potatoes, a can of beans, a jar of peanut butter….the cost of these is stamped on a sign at the grocery and an individual label breaks down the nutritional details.

Zerofootprint's Talking Plug

Electricity is sold with a price tag also, a price per kilowatt. Every month, customers pay a provider based on how many kilowatts their household has used. But there’s no label breakdown.

We don’t know how much electricity was expended to power the HVAC or dishwasher or fridge or computer. It’s a mystery what caused that spike in our bill. Our worst power phantoms are hiding.

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Green Right Now Reports

We hate to just sit around and wait for technology to work us out of this global warming fix….but hey! Look at this technology from Popular Science’s just released Best of What’s New list:

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By Barbara Kessler
Green Right Now

Would you feel guilty if your toilet was “phantom flushing” or slowly leaking gallons of water a day?

Leak Alertor

We would, and we’d be concerned about the costs on our water bill too.

A Philadelphia-area company feels our pain. The company, nth Solutions, has invented the Leak Alertor to let you know when the water closet is out of control, so you can get in there and fix the flap or that other thinga-majig that makes the toilet behave.

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From Green Right Now Reports

In 1995, The ULS (Use Less Stuff) Report developed a statistic that is frequently quoted to describe how much extra waste is generated between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day: 5 million tons. Use Less Stuff Day (the third Thursday of November) was created to educate people and help them reduce that waste.

Rather than declining, that number has grown by 20%, to 6 million tons. Obviously, Use Less Stuff Day hasn’t been a big enough event to get people into the conservation spirit. Starting this year, ULS is proclaiming the entire week before Thanksgiving (Nov. 19-25, 2009) to be Use Less Stuff Week.

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Green Right Now Reports

Where there’s a need, there’s a way. Turns out that the biggest proportion of ENERGY STAR homes are being built in steamy Sunbelt locations where keeping the AC under control is an urgent need.

The top market, with the most ENERGY STAR-qualified homes built since the program begin in 1995, is Houston, with 144,000 homes.

The next top cities with the most homes built to these guidelines include Dallas, Las Vegas, Phoenix and Los Angeles

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By Bill Sullivan
Green Right Now

In Omaha, Neb., Travis Freeman is a bit of a local Christmas legend. Not only does he own and operate Brite Ideas Decorating – which specializes in both commercial and residential seasonal lighting – but he also is known for his efforts in putting together the Salvation Army’s Tree of Lights, a big part of the local holiday landscape.

Omaha's Tree of Lights uses LEDs (Photo: Brite Ideas Decorating)

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By Bill Sullivan
Green Right Now
Looking to upgrade from your old, often unreliable incandescent Christmas lights to those cool, environmentally-friendly LED (light emitting diode) numbers you’ve heard so much about? The Home Depot is offering an incentive to do just that.
Between Nov. 5 and Nov. 15, you can redeem old or non-working Christmas lights and [...]

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Green Right Now Reports

October, like many months, is stocked with special campaigns. As almost everyone knows, it is Breast Awareness and Diabetes Awareness Month (interesting duality there as we load up kids with Halloween sweets).

Lesser known commemorations: “Eat Country Ham Month” and “Vegetarian Month” — which weren’t well coordinated, eh?

Who knew that October also hosts National Weatherization Day, which is October 30. So as we prepare our haunted mansions, we might also consider those scary power bills to come after Hallows Eve.

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By Melissa Segrest
Green Right Now

Ornamental gourds (Photo: Cooksgarden.com)

If you’ve cruised the produce section at the grocery lately, you probably stopped to eye the small, colorful, oddball gourds near the pumpkins and winter squash.

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By Barbara Kessler
Green Right Now

When it comes to saving water, we all know that the commode is key battleground. In a typical household – unless people are obsessively washing clothes or taking large baths — more water is used to flush the toilets than for any other single use.

Experts estimate that toilet water consumes from 25 percent to 40 percent of all the water used in a house.

You’ve likely heard about potential solutions. You could enact a household rule, “When it’s yellow…” If you’ve got the constitution for it. You could stick bricks in the back of the tank, but conservation experts advise against that, saying the clay flotsam that will be released could cause a bigger problem by getting caught in that pesky flap mechanism. Then a running toilet would run away with all your water savings.

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By Tom Kessler
Green Right Now

The mantra of “reduce, reuse and recycle” tends to play out in real life with an emphasis on “reduce” (be frugal) and “recycle.” That’s because “reuse” is a harder concept for we Americans to embrace. “Reuse” makes us a bit uncomfortable — it starts to sound a bit distasteful like “used” or, even worse, “second hand.”

Yech! Let’s not get all “Depressionary” just because we’re,well, living through a depression.

But “reuse” isn’t about looking like you’re so down on your luck you have to shop at swap meets. It’s about reclaiming things that haven’t exhausted their usefulness — or maybe have a new life through some alternative use.

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By Ashley Phillips
Green Right Now

Photo: Nike

In just one year, 300 million pairs of shoes are thrown away. These shoes end up in landfills across the US. Not only do these shoes not easily break down, the glue that holds a shoe together is toxic. So instead of adding to the growing trash problem, give your shoes a new life. What’s old to you, could be a playground for someone else thanks to Nike.

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