Earth Rated Products

As of a couple of months ago, Costco’s Kirkland Signature brand came out with dish soap, laundry detergent and a couple of other environmentally friendly products.  In fact, the words “environmentally friendly” appear on the products almost as prominently as the brand name so they must be pretty proud of the themselves for coming out with this enhancement.

While I’m all for the greening of Costco products, especially because of the massive impact they can have on consumers, I’m a little skeptical about how green these products actually are. The Ingredients list on the label is way too vague to be helpful, or to prove one way or another how green they actually are.  Does anyone out there have any information to enlighten us on the ingredients? To what extent is this line actually greener?  

I don’t exactly expect the Kirkland products to be on par with BioKleen, Epic or Ecover, but I would like to know where they stand in relation to these super-green products. 

As I said, I’m all for making the products greener  but I’d still like to know what shade of green.

Today was THE day. After weeks and weeks of feeding our worms all the banana peels, coffee grinds, egg shells, lettuce, bread, tortillas, avocado peels, artichoke stalks, edamame pods, artichoke petals, and other miscellaneous scraps from the kitchen, it was time to spread the love! We were looking forward to this day ALL WEEK!

The plan was to take out the lower of two trays in our worm composting bin and use the castings to feed our outdoor plants, as well as to enrich the soil for re-potting 10 indoor plans I bought recently. (Click here to read more about our bin set-up.) To prep for this momentous occassion, we had added the second tray to the bin around three weeks ago and began putting the food in this upper tray in order to encourage our worm friends to migrate up.

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Four months into our experiment with vermicomposting it looks like we are doing it! We are Worm Farmers! But maybe I’m using the word “we” a little too liberally. After all, after setting the bin up with its original bedding and fresh batch of worms, I probably haven’t fed the little critters since the second week of the experiment. However, since it was my idea to buy the bin and gift it to my dear spouse as a romantic gesture of my love, I continue to take credit for its success. (more…)

I was watching Plant Green’s Wa$ted the other night and learned something shocking. Well, shocking to me. Maybe I’m naive? Seriously, I would have believed something like this 10 years ago. But not now. Not today. Not with all the news. Not with all the studies. Not after the publicity from the movie (you know which one) and ensuing Nobel Prize.

Anyway, as I was saying, I was watching Wa$ted the other night and was shocked to see that the show producers were able to find a family that didn’t follow the 3 Rs AT ALL. I mean, zero, nada, zip. They didn’t even OWN a recycling bin! (more…)

OK. So I didn’t include Mr Gore on my original ecocrite post… I pretty much assumed that everyone already knew of his very public and blatant hypocrisy, and I didn’t need to waste the time/space/electrons repeating it yet again. However, after today’s revelation from the Tennessee Center for Policy Research, I feel compelled to ensure that everyone is aware of what the TCPR found.

There are two specific points that really say it all:

1. In the past year, Gore’s home burned through 213,210 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electricity, enough to power 232 average American households for a month.
2. In the wake of becoming the most well-known global warming alarmist, Gore won an Oscar, a Grammy and the Nobel Peace Prize. In addition, Gore saw his personal wealth increase by an estimated $100 million thanks largely to speaking fees and investments related to global warming hysteria. (more…)

Sure. Everyone’s heard the standard tips on how to be greener…

• Change your little energy-sucking incandescent light bulbs for more efficient, lower-consuming CFLs (compact fluorescent light bulbs)

• Recycle everything that your city allows: typically paper, cardboard, glass bottles, aluminum cans, plastic bottles with the chasing arrows around a 1 or 2
• Don’t buy bottled water, buy a re-usable bottle and BYOW from home
• Turn off the water when brushing your teeth
• Turn off lights in unoccupied rooms
• Look for Energy Star stickers when replacing appliances

While all of these tips are great because they are such very do-able “little things”, not much is mentioned about what the next step in conservation should be. You know, once doing everything on the list above becomes a part of your routine. Usually its these baby steps, then on to discussing the giant leap to solar panels. However, with a little thought and patience, there are many additional things we can do to be just a little greener.

Here are five of the little things we’ve started doing at our house: (more…)