Building a Foundation for Energy Conservation

Want to get the most bang for your buck in going green? High profile projects like home solar panels may not actually be the best first step. Check out Minnesota Power’s energy conservation pyramid above, which can help in understanding the best choices to get the highest return on your investment.

As the pyramid shows, changes like reducing vampire power and switching to energy-efficient lighting can make a big impact for your home without the significant cost of more complex projects like replacing windows or installing a home wind turbine. This means smaller purchases like CFL bulbs to replace incandescents or power strips for electronics can be the best way to start conserving.

Even more importantly, the pyramid shows that the base for energy conservation is information. Understanding your energy usage, potential steps, and appropriate products and tools is fundamental to any other conservation measures you may take.

A Green Home Makeover from your local Green Irene Eco-Consultant is a perfect first step in determining your best path to energy conservation. Your Green Irene Eco-Consultant is your local green friend who can help in making sure you get the best possible return on your investments. They can also provide you with more information on Green Irene’s wide selection of products for energy conservation and more, making sure that you choose the right products for greening your home. Contact him or her today, and start building the foundation to your family’s energy efficiency.

Eco-Feasting

Are you ready for Thanksgiving yet? As you prepare, consider bringing some eco-friendliness to holiday meals with these great tips from Green Irene.

If you’re cooking for the holidays, go local with your food shopping to reduce your carbon footprint. See how much of your meal you can find at your local farmers’ markets. For supermarket purchases, try to choose items with minimal packaging to reduce waste. As always, bring reusable bags to reduce waste from disposable shopping bags. If you’re bringing your food to someone else’s house, pack your dish in a reusable container.

Go organic with your ingredients. Don’t forget to go organic with beverages as well; look for organic and local wines, beers, and non-alcoholic drinks. Fair-trade chocolate, tea, and coffee will also add some green to your holiday table.

Green Irene offers a terrific solution that easily produces sparkling water and soda in seconds, eliminating the need to carry, store and dispose of bottles and cans. The Green Irene Sodamaker uses a carbonator and glass carafe to make dozens of flavors of soda (or just sparkling water) as you need it. Rather than bottled flat water, invest in a great water filter and fill pitchers of water (rather than a cheap pitcher filter, invest in a more effective premium 10 stage filter like the one Green Irene recommends).

Serving turkey? Choose a heritage bird. Prized for their flavor, heritage turkeys may cost more than conventional birds, but they are raised naturally rather than in an industrial setting. Purchasing a pastured local bird or an organic bird from your supermarket are also other possibilities to consider when looking for the best holiday turkey for your family.

Recycle and compost while preparing food. Keep a bin handy for glass, plastic and paper trash you can recycle rather than toss. Add vegetable scraps from cooking and dinner to your compost. Green Irene offers a great automated indoor composter that operates without the hygiene or odor issues that can occur with indoor composting.

Adjust the thermostat down a couple of degrees during holiday gatherings in cooler climates. The heat from cooking and from your guests will keep your home warm.

Disposable plasticware is energy intensive to produce and can take thousands of years to degrade in a landfill. Providing cloth napkins and reusable tableware is the best option, but can make for a lot of cleanup work. When reuse isn’t an option, go green at your holiday parties by using biodegradable tableware. Green Irene offers a line of “bagasse” (sugarcane) tableware and cups that fully biodegrade within 60-90 days, unlike plastic or coated paper products which can take thousands of years to decompose. The sugarcane stalk fibers used in its production are also an easily renewed resource, unlike petroleum or wood used in most paper or plastic tableware.

If you’re traveling to enjoy dinner at someone else’s house, carpool with family, friends, or neighbors. If you need to fly for the holidays, consider purchasing carbon offsets to keep your travel carbon neutral. Green Irene sells a BeGreen Flying Offset card to make this easy.

Use all the food you make. Send guests home with leftovers in glass or stainless steel rather than wrapped in plastic or aluminum foil. Freeze leftovers in easily reheatable portions.

A few of these steps can go a long way in reducing your holiday dinner’s environmental footprint. Your local Eco-Consultant is your source for the great products mentioned above, and they can provide you with even more ideas for waste reduction and greening your holiday table.

Do you have other tips for greening Thanksgiving? Share them with us in the comments below!

Mercury in CFLs: Should I be concerned?

I often get questions about the safety of mercury in CFLs. We know that mercury is bad for us – pregnant women are told to avoid eating fish high in mercury and we’re supposed to take extra care around mercury thermometers. Given these warnings, it makes sense that people have some concerns about using a mercury-containing light bulb around their family. I want to address those concerns briefly, and share with you why I’m so confident that CFLs are a great choice all around.

First off, CFLs do contain a small amount of mercury. Mercury has special properties that help make CFLs so efficient. Generating light is a function of vapor pressure. Too little vapor, and most of the energy goes to heat the lamp; too much vapor and the light gets trapped and degenerates into heat. Mercury is still the only substance that yields just enough vapor pressure to shed light efficiently without having to heat the lamp.

You should know that, according to EPA and many other sources, no mercury is released while the bulbs are intact. The amount of mercury in the average CFL is very small – usually around 4-5 milligrams. The premium light bulbs offered by Green Irene contain even less mercury than average – around 1 milligram for our mini spiral bulbs. By comparison, older thermometers contain about 500 milligrams of mercury, and many manual thermostats contain up to 3,000 milligrams. It would take 3,500 Green Irene light bulbs to match the amount of mercury in a house that had just one older thermometer and manual thermostat.

Since the amount of mercury in the bulb is so low to begin with, the risk posed by a broken bulb is minimal. Moreover, airborne mercury poses a very low risk of exposure.  Mercury becomes much more problematic when it enters the soil and water, transforming into a highly toxic chemical as it builds up in fish and other animals. If a CFL bulb does break, there are special clean up instructions you should follow. See AGI entry #317 and #716 for more information about options for disposal and recycling.

The majority of your mercury exposure is likely due to our continued reliance on coal-fired power plants. According to EPA, power plants account for 40% of all human-caused mercury emissions – by far the largest source. Once released, mercury bio-accumulates in animals and plants, entering our food system and posing a significant danger to everyone, particularly children. We still rely on coal more than any other source to meet our power needs. In 2006, nearly half of all electricity generated in the United States came from coal power plants. CFLs, which use 75% less energy than incandescents and last up to 13 times longer, can dramatically reduce the overall demand for power. That means less demand for coal, and less mercury in your environment.  When you add the money savings from CFLs, it becomes clear that switching to CFLs makes sense for your health, your environment, and your wallet.

Check out our full range of CFLs and our new LEDs (which contain no mercury).

Rosamaria Caballero
The Original Green Irene Eco-Consultant

Efficiency First!

Commentary: You can begin making your home more energy efficiency immediately by first getting a Green Home Makeover (GHM). A GHM will help you identify what kinds of improvements you can make in your home. Green Irene will provide specific recommendations that you can implement with the help of government funds and save money while reducing your footprint. Green Irene also carries a range of energy efficient lighting products that will save you hundreds of dollars annually on energy costs. This is the time to GO GREEN while saving GREEN. Get a Green Home Makeover today! Contact your Local Green Irene Eco-Consultant for more information.

In an old folktale, a man travels the world in search of treasure, only to return home and find it had been in his hearth all along. Similarly, as we all hear daily news reports on the ever-worsening effects of climate change, we tend to look beyond our own communities for the solutions, from looking forward to new renewable fuel sources to waiting for exciting future technologies, like plug-in hybrid cars. But a huge solution—one that’s available right now and can cut our climate emissions in half, quickly and painlessly—has been in our own homes the entire time: energy efficiency.

We can create significant energy savings—at home, at work, and in our communities and beyond—using technologies available today. Simple things like light bulbs, surge protectors, and clotheslines, banded together with more complex machinery like Energy Star appliances, solar powered hot water heaters, and other cutting-edge solutions, when implemented together, hold the promise of massive energy savings—and massive climate crisis mitigation.

The quickest, easiest, and most powerful way to move at the speed and scale necessary to counteract the worst effects of climate change is by vastly ramping up our energy efficiency efforts—at home, at work, and as a nation and world. It’s the closest thing we’ve got to a magic bullet that will solve the climate crisis, but all of us have to be willing to do our part, right now.

That’s why we’ve amended our 12-step climate change plan to say that US homes and buildings need to be 50 percent more energy-efficient than they are today. Fifty percent is possible, right now, using existing technologies. Fifty percent is, according to numerous experts, cost-effective, meaning we’ll actually save money taking these steps. And fifty percent will bring us benefits that go beyond curbing climate change and preserving our world for future generations—our homes will be more comfortable, our energy bills will be lower, our air will be cleaner, we’ll create green jobs, and we’ll pave the way for a green energy future, making it more cost-effective to install massive amounts of solar and other renewables.

Excerpted from Green America.

Continue Reading…

Rosamaria Caballero Stafford
Co-Founder and the Original Green Irene

Energy Efficiency Funding Available!

Commentary: You can begin capitalizing on these funds immediately by first getting a Green Home Makeover (GHM). A GHM will help you identify what kinds of improvements you can make in your home. Green Irene will provide specific recommendations that you can implement with the help of government funds and save money while reducing your footprint. This is the time to GO GREEN. Get a Green Home Makeover today! Contact your Local Green Irene Eco-Consultant for more information.

The Obama Administration is dolling out $3.2 billion for energy efficiency and energy conservation projects in states and cities across the U.S., moving that portion of the economic stimulus money a bit closer to your home.

The Energy Efficiency and Conservation Block Grant program will fund new and existing programs in states to promote home energy audits, weatherization, energy efficiency upgrades, replacement of outdated appliances and other similar initiatives. The Department of Energy had previously estimated that the average qualifying home could benefit from $6,500 in improvements. Each program differs by state and city, so look to your local agencies or energy.gov/recovery for details. While home improvement initiatives are likely to help individuals most directly, the grants cover a broad array of potential initiatives:

“The funding will support energy audits and energy efficiency retrofits in residential and commercial buildings, the development and implementation of advanced building codes and inspections, and the creation of financial incentive programs for energy efficiency improvements. Other activities eligible for use of grant funds include transportation programs that conserve energy, projects to reduce and capture methane and other greenhouse gas emissions from landfills, renewable energy installations on government buildings, energy efficient traffic signals and street lights, deployment of Combined Heat and Power and district heating and cooling systems, and others.”

Don’t wait for the money to find you. Check out existing Home Energy Tax Credits available this year.

Rosamaria Caballero Stafford
Co-Founder and the Original Green Irene

Missouri’s Show-Me Green Tax Holiday

Recently, Governor Matt Blunt of Missouri introduced legislation into that state’s legislature to call for annual Show-Me Green Tax Holidays. The goal of such holidays, to take place from April 19-25 this year (2009), are to exempt energy efficient and other green products from all sales taxes. This allows consumers to purchase appliances and products that can help reduce energy bills and greenhouse gas emissions.

The Green Tax Holiday is intended to entice consumers to choose products with environmental stewardship in mind. While it is important to ensure that our supply of energy and other natural resources is sustainable, it is also important that we minimize consumption and waste. The Green Tax Holiday focuses heavily on energy-efficient appliances and lighting fixtures, which would allow Missouri citizens to cut their energy bills substantially. The bill has been modeled on a 2008 initiative taken by the government of Virginia in October 2008 to push consumers to purchase energy efficient light bulbs and appliances.

To learn more about energy efficient appliances and how they can help you green your home, contact a Local Green Irene Eco-Consultant. Green Irene Eco-Consultants can provide you information about what kind of lighting fixtures and appliances you should purchase to reduce your energy use.

Rosamaria Caballero Stafford
Co-Founder and the Original Green Irene