Earth, Wind & Power Blogazine

How To Host A Glam & Green New Year's Bash!

By Liz Kaadou

Nothing beats rambunctiously ringing in 2010 with family, friends and plenty of festive party favors in the comfort of your own abode! From gorgeous glitter covered hats to colorful crazy noisemakers and party poppers, New Year's eve is an excuse to let your inner child out and stay up until the wee hours of the morning. But why not make the switch from 2009 to 2010 even better by hosting your New Year's party with all the "green" trimmings? Guests will go gaga for these green ideas that will make the start of 2010 your most exciting and eco-friendly year yet!

1) Opt for eco-disposable plates made from sugarcane, you can purchase a pack of 50 at BiodegradableStore.com

2) Instead of going out and buying extra folding chairs and tables if you do not have enough for your growing guest list, simply ask some of your friends if you can borrow theirs!

3) Why mail out invitations and waste the paper? It is the digital era, so send an invite through email or design a fancy Evite card!

4) Shred up your used Christmas/Holiday wrapping paper and use it as the confetti to cover the tables!

5) Opt for some soy candles to brighten up your green decor, this way you can keep most of your lights off to reduce energy usage. Click here to buy some!

6) Serve finger foods! Guests love these and they require barely an cooking time, meaning less use of electricity.

7) Have an "a cappella" singing contest! Buy some fun sheet music with lyrics and instead of using your CD player you and your guests will have a blast seeing who has the best voice!

8) After the clock strikes midnight, have everyone write down a New Year's resolution about how to go green in 2010 and put them all inside one of the hats.  Pass the hat around and have everyone pick one out! This will help guests see the importance of being eco-friendly for the new year.

Check out RTM's Earth Tones section for more ways to go green!

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Your "Green" Gift Giving Gadget Guide

By Liz Kaadou

'Tis the season to go green, and what better way than giving great gifts that also give back to the environment?  It's time to eagerly embrace eco-friendly products and truly make a difference this holiday season. A wise way to take your gift giving to an even greener level is to smartly shop online.  Forget guzzling gallons of gas battling horrendous holiday traffic. Instead, simply point and click your way to the perfect eco-friendly purchase. Here are a few intelligent ideas to make your hunt for greener gadgets much merrier!

 

You will make any iPhone addict proud to go green with this hybrid solar charger case by NOVOThink.  It uses solar energy to power up, so you can literally charge your phone anywhere under the sun!  They even come in an array of awesome colors!

 

 

Say bye-bye to harmful plastic soda bottles and hello to this homemade soda maker by Sodastream.  Not only can you enjoy the convienence and freshness of homemade soda but you can protect the earth at the same time! This set includes everything you would need to make great tasting homemade soda!

 

Icecream never tasted so green! With this Play and Freeze Ice Cream Maker by UCO, you can enjoy homemade icecream with a simple toss and roll of the ball- no eletricity required! Perfect for kids and great for the environment!

 

For more eco-friendly gift advice, visit RTM's Earth Tones section.

 

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Halloween Night: Eat the Candy, Save the Wrapper

Having a no impact Halloween means nothing gets thrown out or wasted - but there's a lot of garbage involved in this holiday. Here's some ideas for taking care of all the candy wrappers sure to accumulate.

If you're taking a child trick-or-treating, make sure they throw the wrappers from the candy they've eaten back into the bag, not on the street or in peoples' yards as you're walking around the neighborhood. Make a game out of picking up other candy wrappers - say you'll give them a nickel per candy wrapper they find, or if they get a hundred of them they can have a homemade candy apple at home.

Once you're home, keep all the candy wrappers in one place - a see-through jar or bin would make it more fun - and send them in to Terracycle for upcycling after all the candy's finally been opened. This can also be made into a fun game - kids can figure out which candy they got the most of, or at the end try to guess how many wrappers are in the jar. You could even have them count the candy right after trick or treating and then reward them if they match an equal amount of wrappers in the jar.

Terracycle will then take these wrappers and make them into materials for backpacks, tote bags, cell phone holders and laptop sleeves. You can join Terracycle's Mars/Wrigley candy wrapper brigade for free and all of your postage needs are covered. Proceeds from the products made with your wrappers are donated to the charity of your choice - each approved candy wrapper earns 2 cents. You can even get an entire school involved by setting up a drop-off location - that could be a LOT of candy wrappers!

Picture: flickr.com/photos/tinfoilraccoon/ / CC BY 2.0

For more green living advice from RTM, visit our Earth Tones section.

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Suffering from Bag-nesia?

Symptom: You often find yourself standing at the register regretting that you left your reusable bags in the car or worse yet, at home.  You must have bagnesia! Possible cures?

1) Bagnesia’s reminder kit: including a compact reusable bag, reminder door hanger, reminder steering wheel wrap, wrist lanyard key chain, carabineer clip

2) Bag the Habit shopping and produce bags: The shopping bags are stylish a-lines with padded handles that fold into small carrying pouches, the produce bags are mesh and can carry anything from vegetables to baked goods.

 

3) "Paper or Plastic?": The words you don’t want to hear when you can’t come back with a “neither”. When you've forgotten your bags, simply remind yourself to bring them next time, and think of a place you could've left them that would be easier to remember (such as your car). However, if you’ve got the right state of mind, taking home a few plastic or paper bags isn’t such a bad thing. Use your paper bags to fill with paper products for the recycling bin or make your own shipping envelopes, and use plastic bags as garbage can liners or bring them back to the store to fill with produce.

 

Based on the economic facts, I wouldn't recommend turning in your plastic bags for recycling: it costs $4,000 to process and recycle 1 ton of plastic bags, which can then be sold on the commodities market for $32. So, many bags that are collected for recycling are actually just shipped to China and incinerated (according to Christian Science Monitor).

 

For more green liiving tips from RTM, visit our Earth Tones section.

 

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So Green For Ice Cream: Local, in a Cone

Ice cream is one of the most exciting treats to look forward to - and today, with its rich variety of flavors (and even textures) there's an aisle of it in every grocery store, and ice cream shops line the streets of cities. It's certainly not a health food - but that's not the only thing wrong with it. Ice cream is transported in energy-guzzling refrigerated trucks and stored in hydrofluorocarbon-using refrigerators (HFCs have 1,4000 times the global warming impact of CO2). Though ice cream as we know and love it will never be healthy or entirely eco-friendly, there are more responsible ways to indulge, that are just as yummy:

1) Buy from responsible companies like Ben & Jerry's, who recently partnered with Greenpeace to make a climate-friendly refrigeration systems that don't use HFCs. This technology, relatively new to the states, has been commonplace in Europe since the '90's. By 2010, Ben & Jerry's will only use cage-free eggs, and is taking many other measures to reduce its carbon footprint and educate others about global warming, such as finding good uses for their waste.

2) Buy locally. If a local ice cream shop makes their ice cream locally, support them! Anything that includes less shipping of the ice cream reduces the cold stuff's carbon footprint enormously. Or, buy organic versions such as Stonyfield Farms' ice cream, whose ingredients are more eco-friendly.

3) Make your own! Almost always the most eco-conscious - and fun - experience, DIY allows you to pick all the ingredients, requires much less transportation of ingredients, and less freeze time - especially if there's lots of hungry people to devour it quickly. Get an Ice-Cream Maker for around $30 on Amazon.

4. Last but not least, always order ice cream in a cone rather than a disposable bowl - the concept of eating the container is a waste-free marvel when it comes to to-go.

For more green food tips from RTM, visit our Earth Tones section.

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Why Organic? Green Grocery Shopping Simplified

The whole organic food world seems so complicated and full of twists - each type of food seems to have it's own reason for being better-off organic. Sometimes the price just doesn't even seem to make sense.

The legal definition of organically grown food is that it is produced without the use of synthetic fertilizers, artificial pesticides, herbicides, antibiotics, growth hormones, feed additives, or genetically modified organisms (GMOs)." When you buy organic, you'll know you're reducing your potential exposure to synthetic pesticides," says Richard Wiles of the Environmental Working Group. "For some produce, we have found that even with washing it's difficult to remove traces of pesticides. Nonorganic strawberries, for example, can be washed 10 or 11 times and still show traces of synthetic pesticides."

A simple way to look at the whole organic food situation is to consider what you want the food industry to be like. When you think about where your apple or slice of cheese came from, do you want to imagine a big, polluting, degrading, chemical-using farm, or a smaller, more ethical and eco-conscious farm? Do you want to support farmers who grow your food with more natural processes or the big corporate guys who do whatever they can to make more, bigger, and "better" crops? These items may look superior, but are certainly not better.

An even more simple way to look at it is that because organic food is healthier, you'll feel better about eating it, and it tastes better. Once you start, you really can't stop. If consumers keep insisting on buying organic, soon bigger non-organic produce companies will be forced to go organic in order to survive.

That being said, there are some foods that you shouldn't bother buying organic - fair trade, maybe. You don't need to buy organic if it has a skin you don't eat - like bananas or oranges. Some important items to buy organic are dairy, wine and fruits that you eat whole.

For more green living tips, visit RTM's Earth Tones section.

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On-the-Go Beverages That are Better For the Planet

Still can't kick the old bottled drink habit? You can feel a bit better about drinking these more sustainable options. From water to drink mix to juice, you can have your eco-friendly beverage and drink it too!

Naked Juice - Their bottles (made from other bottles, what a concept) are recycled and recyclable. Their juice is free of added sugar and preservatives. Every banana that goes into the drinks is sourced by the Rainforest Alliance. It's a win-win-win.

O.N.E. Water - Amazon Acai, Cocnut Water, Coffee Fruit are just some of the exotic flavors of this water, packaged in renewable TetraPak cartons.

Flavrs Drink Mix - Though Flavrs' concentrated organic drink mixes sweetened with agave nectar are the main draw to their site, the online Flavrz Store is committed to selling only eco-friendly products.

Find more advice on sustainability in RTM's Planet Driven Section.