Green Daily

Wanna be like Matt and Sara Janssen, give up your stinking mortgage, and strike out on the open road -- permanently? Well, the sustainable home on wheels -- formerly known as the RV, motorhome, or camper -- has been generating lots of interest as of late for the adventurous and eco-friendly lifestyle it seems to advertise. Well, up until recently, the one thing the mobile life didn't offer was a stylish, glamorous existence that others would envy.

Luckily, designer Alexandre Verdier has already come up with a solution to that problem. His greenovated VW buses are a dream come true for the design-oriented ecophile with a lust for life on the road. Based on beloved VW Westfalia, these luxury cruisers boast a self-sustaining solar array, a GPS Sun Tracker System that helps you find the perfect parking spot, a hybrid drive train that also serves as a generator, and a super stylish design inside and out.

As you can see, the amenities don't stop there. The Verdier camper is equipped with a pop-up roof, stow-away lawn furniture, 2 sleeping areas, and even a kitchen complete with an electric range.

[via Inhabitat]

When Hurricane Ike blew through Texas last summer, it left a lot of debris in its wake. More specifically, 6.5 million cubic yards of felled trees and branches were cleaned up from homes. Now the city wants to know the best way to recycle the wood and they are paying for the best ideas.

The top three ideas for tree recycling can earn $10,000, $5,000 and $2,500 respectively. If you are tempted to simply tell the city to "mulch it" and collect your cash, don't. They have already done that and surpassed any demand for Texas grown mulch. The best answers appear to be a way to use the trees locally to save on shipping expenses.

I'm proud of Houston for taking such an approach rather than to send all of the debris to a landfill. Having lived through Katrina and the aftermath, I am ashamed to say that New Orleans did not have such foresight whether it was recycling trees or rotten refrigerators.

It's always fun when we get to pick more than one winner. This week we had four lucky commenters who will receive a limited edition organic cotton C&C California for Burt's Bees t-shirt in support of the Natural Seal. It has a sexy scoop neck and the warm red color is perfect this time of year.

Our winners each left a comment sharing her favorite Burt's Bees product, which was overwhelmingly the lip balm.


and Sheila (one of the few non-lip balm pickers): My favorite Burt's Bees product is the jewelweed soap. This soap has gotten me through many trials and tribulations with poison ivy the past few years. I am an organic gardener and I am constantly getting poison ivy every year but the Burt's Bees jewelweed soap really gets rid of it fast and helps to prevent future outbreaks.

Thanks to everyone who entered. And remember to try again in this week's giveaway for the super cool Alt Fiber Knitting book.

The Power of Poo

On The Green Couple, Will and Maggie talk about the topic of "human excrement management," including the inefficiencies of modern wastewater management and the alternatives. Very interesting read.

Disconnect Your Downpipes

Green Garden Design has a post up on rain chains, which break the fall of the rain and guide it down to the ground or a rainbarrel. They are really pretty too.

Safe or Not - Brass Household Keys

Is it safe to hand over your keys to your baby or toddler to keep them busy while you try to get an important errand or something done? Jennifer Taggart has the answer.

Tis The Season for Eco-Friendly Toys

Donna at The Frugal Mom Blog highlights KangarooBoo, an eco-friendly toy store that even features a specific pages of toys that are NOT made in China. If you have little ones on your holiday list, be sure to check it out. And how great a name is KangarooBoo?

Not that this comes as any surprise to those who read our Guide to Green Drug Use, but the cocaine habit -- indulged by a great many white collar urbanites -- is potentially the most destructive thing you can do to the environment from the comfort of you own livingroom -- or your favorite nightclub. According to Columbia's Vice President: each gram of cocaine snorted in the developed world equals the destruction of 4 square meters of the world's precious rainforests. Ouch.

Boris Trajanov, a Macedonian opera singer, launched a massive project this week to seriously green the country in one day. Thousands of people, including 1000 soldiers, were bused to designated planting sites where they planted six million trees! That's a lot of trees to plant for a little country of 2 million people.

The idea, according to Trajanov, was to raise awareness of eco issues and generally green-ify Macedonia. The project also helped replant acres of forest destroyed in major wild fires over the past couple of years.

Let's hope this isn't a one-time thing. Organizers hope to spread this campaign across the entire Balkan region next year. Spreading beyond that would be even better, according to Trajanov who said, "If Macedonia, a country of two million people, can plant six million trees, we can only imagine how many trees can be planted in other, bigger countries".

While recycling, driving a hybrid, and buying local helps, there's something pretty remarkable about so many people getting down in the dirt and literally greening a part of their country.

Many people were convinced to give up their bottled water and switch to a home filtration device like Brita for their drinking needs. Unfortunately, those hard plastic filters are difficult to recycle. Finally, Brita's parent company, Clorox, has paired up with the ever green Preserve to recycle Brita filters.

You may remember Preserve from their line of recycled kitchenware or their recyclable "disposable" razors. Starting in January of 2009 Preserve is committed to accepting these filters and recycling them. The hard outer casing is made of plastic #5 and will be used in the company's line of recycled materials. The activated carbon and resin inside the filter will be put to good use as well.

Consumers can get their used filters to Brita by dropping them off at participating Whole Foods or mailing them to Preserve directly. Both options will be detailed on Brita's site in early January. I have to say that Clorox is starting to impress me with their green efforts.

Cloud B, in conjunction with an advisory board of pediatricians and specialists, have created an award-winning line of sleep aides. Their products promote a safe, sound and healthy sleep for children, and subsequently their parents, which alone makes them worth our kudos, but they've taken it a step further. They've gone green.

In the year 2013 -- which for some reason seems like the very distant future -- Japan's 2nd largest tire manufacturer will offer a lineup of eco-friendly tires that don't rely on any fossil fuels for their production. These babies will contain 0.0% petroleum materials, instead relying on vegatble oil, natural rubber, and fibers from plant cellulose -- at least that's how they think it will go down.

Back in March, Sumitomo released the Ensave 97 tire, which contains only 3% petrochemicals, but they can't quite figure out how to get rid of that last 3%. While they work on that, Sumitomo has set out on a medium-term quest to reinvent their lineup, reducing CO2 emissions, reducing rolling resistance, and eliminating as much dependence on fossil fuels as possible. The average Sumitomo tire contains something like 56% petroleum, so they've obviously got their work cut out for them.

One of the ways they can close the gap is to figure out how to make thier non-petro tires competitive in terms of price -- the 97% petro-free Ensave is 30% more expensive than other tires. Is it worth it?

Just because you live in a condo or apartment doesn't mean that you can't make your home eco-friendly. There are a lot of things that you don't have control over like the landscaping or possibly what's insulating your walls but there are plenty of ways you can green up your dwelling.

As video game consoles get more advanced, their power consumption increases. This evolution of entertainment has led to an estimated 16 billion kilowatt-hours of energy consumption a year from the more than 40 percent of homes in the United States that own at least one of these consoles. This is roughly equal to the annual electricity use of San Diego.

In a recent report by the Natural Resources Defense Council, better power management for these consoles could result in a savings of around 11 billion kilowatt-hours per year. This in turn would cut more than 7 million tons of C02 annually. The NRDC goes on to compare the exact usage of each console, among Microsoft's Xbox 360, Sony's Playstation 3 and Nintendo's Wii. You may be surprised to find out which consoles use the most energy, and why.

Vermont's Burlington Free Press highlighted Holly Rae Taylor a.k.a. the "Compost Maven" this week in their paper. Taylor is, without a doubt, the most committed composter I have hear of. Not only does she bring home table scraps from eating out but she also saves her scraps while traveling and dumps them into her home bin upon returning. She composts just about anything from meat to leather shoes. In order to detour rodents, she uses her self designed composters.

Armed with a master's degree in botany, Taylor worked ata composting company before starting her own online business, Waste Free Living. Her company sells hand-selected items that are earth friendly and practical. There are items to help you with waste and preservation like her composters and canning supplies. But there are also fun items like Hot Chicks cloth napkins and brightly colored Bamboo Lacquerware Bowls.

Taylor and her company strive to be waste free which means rethinking every thing that comes in and goes out. She throws out a whopping four bags of trash a year. Wow.

Yesterday was the official DVD/Blu-ray release of Disney/Pixar's acclaimed hit WALL-E. If you've seen the film then you already know that one of the major themes concerns the care of our planet and what will come from our society of want and waste- but in a fun way.

Things are grim lately in the PETA offices. They have that grisly Cooking Mama parody to attack turkey eaters. Lindsay Lohan was assaulted with a flour bomb because she is a "Fur Hag". And that was just the tip of the (melting) iceberg.

The new PETA ad starring Christine Dolce, aka MySpace star "ForBiddeN" is flat out gory. Besides a big heap of cleavage, the main elements are: blood, gore and a very disturbing skinned rabbit that I'm going to guess is fake.

It is fake, right?

When comes down to it, there's only so much room on a road. And it just so happens that the prevailing mode of transportation in the US is the least efficient in variety of ways -- especially space. When you try to transfer the big honkin' American system to a nation with narrow roads built before the automobile, it can be downright unmanageable.

Forget fuel consumption or carbon emissions for a second -- just the amount of space necessitated by the American dream-cruiser is pretty astounding when its lined up next to other more efficient mode of transportation. The city of Muenster, Germany decided to make a simple, but impressive statement about the efficiency of mass transit. The took 72 people and did a photographic study of the space needed to transport them by car, bike, and bus. The results speak for themselves. Check them out in the gallery below.