Heating Our Homes and Helping the Environment

With freezing cold weather upon us, it’s important that we are wise when it comes to how we heat our homes.  It is estimated that the average household spends $1,900 a year on energy costs, but did you know that the energy waste for the average family is between 25-35% of the total energy it uses?  If we are conscientious, this doesn’t have to be the case.  There are easy ways to save energy and several great websites that offer great tips to such as The U.S. Department of Energy, Federal Trade Commission, and Flex Your Power.

Energy Star program has come up with four simple recommendations that will help you HEAT your home and save up to 20% on a typical energy bill.

•    Home Sealing - Seal all air leaks and check to see if you need to add insulation. Pay particular attention to the attic and basement as these are where the biggest gaps and cracks are often found. Check for drafts around windows and doorways by holding an incense stick around potential leaks. If you see the smoke flow horizontally, there is a leak in that area.
•    Equipment Maintenance - Just as you would get a check-up for your health each year, make sure that you get a check-up for your heating system. Have a professional come out to clean any dirt or build-up from your heating system as well as check for routine maintenance that can help it run more efficiently. Something you can do is replace the furnace filter as it will help save energy while improving air quality.
•    Ask For Energy Star products. After testing in individual categories, these products have proven to be more energy efficient.
•    Thermostat. Programmable thermostats help you save energy by adjusting the climate while you are away. Using a programmable thermostat with the appropriate settings can save up to $150 a year in energy costs.

What’s the Greatest Thing We Can Do?

Take steps to lower our energy use (and waste).  We will help the environment and our wallets!

Lighten Up with Energy Star Bulbs

If every American home replaced just one light bulb with an Energy Star qualified bulb, we would save enough energy to light more than 3 million homes for a year, more than $600 million in annual energy costs, and prevent greenhouse gases equivalent to the emissions of more than 800,000 cars.  Just imagine if every light bulb in America were an Energy Star bulb!

Energy Star qualified Compact Fluorescent Light Bulbs have many benefits:

• Use about 75 percent less energy than standard incandescent bulbs and last up to 10 times longer.
• Save about $30 or more in electricity costs over each bulb’s lifetime.
• Produce about 75 percent less heat, so they’re safer to operate and can cut energy costs associated with home cooling.
• Are available in different sizes and shapes to fit in almost any fixture, for indoors and outdoors.

What’s the Greatest Thing We Can Do?

CFLs lighten your house, your wallet, and your energy use.  So what are you waiting for?  Are all of the light bulbs in your house CFLs?

Social Venture Network

It is time to check out Social Venture Network.  Founded in 1987 by Josh Mailman and Wayne Silby, SVN is a nonprofit network that brings together change leaders who are committed to the triple bottom line, people, planet, and profits.  “The idea for SVN came from realizing that there was a generation of people involved in the business community that had progressive social values,” Mailman says. “We decided that it was imperative for us to use our resources to create a new paradigm: one in which business operates to add value to society — without compromising the well-being of future generations.”

As their website states, “SVN believes in a new bottom line for business, one that values healthy communities and the human spirit as well as high returns.”  They have such resources as job listings at sustainable companies, best practices, featured events and conferences, and a great reference 20 Ideas That Changed the Way the World Does Business that we will be profiling here at the Green Wizard at www.ThoughtRocket.com/Blog.

SVN’s mission: to inspire a community of business leaders to build a just economy and sustainable planet.

Right on.

Algae Converted to Transportation Fuels

GreenFuel, founded in 2001 and headquartered in Cambridge, MA, profitably recycles carbon dioxide!  It turns out that algae can be converted to transportation fuels and feed ingredients or recycled back to a combustion source as biomass for power generation.  According to their website, GreenFuel’s high yield algae farms recycle carbon dioxide from flue gases to produce biofuels and feed, reducing net carbon dioxide production as waste becomes profit. Harvesting algae for biofuels enhances domestic fuel production while mitigating CO2.  Wow.

GreenFuel uses Algae because it has several advantages over other crops:

• Algae are the fastest growing plants in the world and can be grown year round, unlike seasonal crops.
• Algae farming does not require agricultural land or clean water, so it does not compete with food crops for these resources.
• While it is difficult to compare one energy crop to another, per hectare of land algae is more productive than corn, soy or palm.
• Unlike other energy crops, the entire biomass produced from algae can be used in end products.
• Lastly, the algae produced by GreenFuel can be used to produce renewable biofuels needed to reduce dependence on non-renewable fuel sources such as coal, oil and natural gas.

GreenFuel doesn’t claim that recycling carbon dioxide will solve all of the world’s energy problems, but they certainly have a great start.  Greenfuel is one example of the kind of innovation needed to save our future.  Pretty awesome.

Paper or Plastic? How about Neither

Plastic bags are a major threat to the environment.  Natural Environment.com has alarming statistics on the impact of plastic bags.

• Plastic bags cause over 100,000 sea turtle and other marine animal deaths every year when animals mistake them for food
• The manufacturers of plastic bags add tons of carbon emissions into the air annually
• Between 500 billion and 1 trillion plastic bags are used worldwide each year
• Approximately 60 - 100 million barrels of oil are required to make the world’s plastic bags each year
• Most plastic bags take over 400 years to biodegrade. Some figures indicate that plastic bags could take over 1000 years to break down. (I guess nobody will live long enough to find out!). This means not one plastic bag has ever naturally biodegraded.
• China uses around 3 billion plastic bags each day!
• In the UK, each person uses around 220 plastic bags each year
• Around 500,000 plastic bags are collected during Clean Up Australia Day each year. Clean Up Australia Day is a nationwide initiative to get as many members of the public to get out and pick up litter from their local areas. Unfortunately, each year in Australia approximately 50 million plastic bags end up as litter.

So, What’s the greatest thing we can do? The popular phrase is Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.

Reduce: Only use plastic bags when it’s absolutely necessary.  When you make a conscious effort, you’ll be amazed at how little you actually have to use a plastic bag.

Reuse:  Use plastic bags as garbage liners, lunch sacks, a suitcase…anything.  Be creative.  Better yet buy reusable bags that aren’t made of plastic.  A great website is www.ReusableBags.com.  They sell many alternatives to plastic bags that are fun, affordable, and durable.  Check them out.

Recycle:  Recycle, recycle, recycle.  There are plastic bag recycling bins at most grocery stores, schools, etc.  Use them!

Let’s end the plastic bag plague.

Shoes for a Happy Planet

Shoes for a Happy Planet™ is Simple’s new motto.  They have developed a line of sustainable sneakers called ecoSNEAKS®.  The ecoSNEAKS® collection uses materials like recycled car tires, certified organic cotton, PET (think recycled plastic bottles), recycled bike tires, and hemp, just to name a few. So they leave a better ecological footprint than ordinary sneakers…  They’re not bad to look at either.  Check them out at http://www.simpleshoes.com/ecoSneaks/ Other eco-friendly collections by Simple are Green Toe® and Planet Walkers®.  Pretty cool.

Check out their story…

And not only is Simple determined to make sustainable, eco-friendly shoes, but they are just as dedicated to the process as they are the product.  They have Ethical Supply Chain Guidelines that all of their business partners must obey.  The following are a few of the guidelines:

• Forced Labor: Our business partners shall not use forced labor whether in the form of prison labor, indentured labor, bonded labor or otherwise.

• Child Labor: Our business partners shall not employ workers below the age of 16, or, in the case of hazardous work, the age of 18. If the legal age for employment is higher than 16, then the higher age shall apply.

• Wages and Benefits: Our business partners, at a minimum, will pay employees wages and benefits that meet applicable laws for all regular hours worked. For overtime hours, employees must receive compensation at premium rates. Employment practices such as training or apprenticeship wages, pre-employment fees, deposits, or other practices that effectively lower an employee’s pay below the legal minimum wage are not permitted.

Read more on the complete list of Simple’s Ethical Supply Chain Guidelines

Green Business and the Triple Bottom Line

It’s time to think in three bottom lines. The TRIPLE BOTTOM LINE (people, planet, profits) will blow your present bottom line away. The “3BL Factor”: invisible to most…unthinkable to many…in another galaxy of value.

Today’s one-of-a-kind record-breaking “3BL” strategies are driven by socially-strategic thinking. If you want to know what you’re capable of, you need “3BL” value. The Triple Bottom Line vision is what REALeadership Alliance helps you create.

What’s the greatest thing you can do today? Here are 5 tips you can put into practice right now to help transform your business into a green business:

1. Turn off equipment when it’s not being used. This can reduce the energy used by 25 percent; turning off the computers at the end of the day can save an additional 50 percent.

2. Encourage communications by email, and read email messages onscreen to determine whether it’s necessary to print them. If it’s not, don’t!

3. Reduce paper waste by using paperless products like Adobe Acrobat for creating PDFs and eFax which sends and receives faxes via email.  Produce double-sided documents whenever possible.  Recycle office paper.

4.  Turn off the lights when you’re leaving any room for 15 minutes or more and utilize natural light when you can.   Buy Energy Star-rated light bulbs and fixtures, which use at least two-thirds less energy than regular lighting.

5.  More TeleCommuting jobs parks more cars, reducing energy waste. Cars guzzle over 136 billion gallons of gasoline yearly.  Present full-time home business owners & telecommuters alone now save approximately 4,439 million gallons per year.
There are excellent resources to learn more ways to transform your business. Both GreenBiz.com and SustainableBusiness.com are free news & learning resources with absolute great content.