Traveling down a Greener Path

First off I must say that it's probably not a good sign when I do well at something at first and then always get lazy with it later on. It's been far too long since my last post. I won't say that this is an excuse or anything but nothing much has changed in the last two weeks or so. At least nothing that would greatly impact my own personal "going green" movement. That's no good either. Anyways let's get on with the new posting shall we?

I might have lied.. well let a thought slip through my mind. We have done one thing that may or may not be a greener action. It might depend on the model of the appliance you're working with. Since everything in this house is old.. it could go either way. What we've done is actually used the dishwasher.

I remember growing up and being told by both my mother and grandmother that it would be a waste of water and cost money to run the dishwasher. At the time I was a kid and anything that could get me out of a chore was a good thing. Even if it wasn't the better choice.

So the question has been asked many times by many people. Should I hand wash my dishes or shove them all in a dishwasher unit? These days though we have energy star appliances that are made much more efficient than the much older ones. They save water, electricity, and just do a better overall job. Because of these we can do the same amount as we did before but using less resources. This can also be influenced by how your house gets it's power. Of course if you have solar panels giving you energy your impact will be even greater with the switch than if you still get your power from a coal plant. But it's a start right? The one major downside to dishwashers is that they still take electricity no matter how well made they are. Where as your hands.. not so much.

If you do hand wash you might think that keeping the dish load small will make it easier on yourself. While true at first, the more times during the day you do dishes, you'll only end up using more water in the end. If you fill up your dishwasher all the way, no half loads please, it'll use the same water and do more dishes than you would want to in one go.

Some other eco-friendly dishwashing tips include:

• Using a cooler setting. Heating the water is what uses the more energy.
• Use a gentler cycle. The difference it not all that much if at all.
• Do very little pre-rincing. Better yet do none at all.
• Try to use the dishwasher already in your house. Maybe try buying a used one as well.
  

Posted in: Chores, energy on Sunday, July 20, 2008 at at 12:38 AM 0 responses  

I will first admit that I'm not a huge gamer. I'm casual if anything and that might even be stretching the term a bit. I try a few games here and there, whatever DS games my boyfriend might have lying around, a few PC games that aren't the least bit updated, and even some horrendous grinding MMOs that will remain nameless. Now I'm sure most if not everyone knows that gaming takes up a lot of energy but there are ways to help take the ease off the console as well as your energy bill while at the same time lessening how much CO2 gets released into the atmosphere from using electricity.

So how about we start off by looking at the older consoles. Of course these took less energy to run since they had less power behind them. That explains the silly old graphics compared to what we have today.

Source

Not so surprisingly the PS1 used so much less than it's successor. Amazing how much it jumped from one generation to the next though. I wonder how much the PS3 uses at one time.
Amazing. From the second generation to the third the watts used has jumped more than 160 watts! That's a bigger jump than the xbox which had a huge power consumption in the first place.

So how do you fix this? Well the easier one is to shut off the console when you're not using it. Not this doesn't mean putting it on stand-by with the little light on. Completely shut off the console. Better yet unplug it as well since even when turned off items can still use power.

Secondly try and use less of your console. This varies from person to person since someone may work and not use it anyways while a younger person may have the summer off. If you want to keep gaming but save energy then maybe play your portable games instead. Those don't need to be plugged in while played. If you have the older gameboys start using rechargeable instead of throw away batteries. Those add up fast in the landfills, which they aren't supposed to go in the first place.

So we've worked a little on how to save energy and create less trash with our consoles. What about games that have to do with going green? So it's not the action packed blood splatter of a FPS but you don't mind learning a little from your games do you? Maybe it'll be easier if you play these games while no one is watching. I won't tell anyone I promise.

Depending on what you've played in the past there might already be a game you've known about or even played yourself that's about living off the land. Harvest Moon. This game is all about making it on your own with a farm you've somehow come across or inherited in some way. Plant your food, raise cattle, and make money. This is a very basic game about, in a sense, going green. In fact I've been personally looking for a farming MMO but to no luck.

Maybe free games are more your thing. There's ways to even feed people across the world. So it's not a game like you're used to unless you love the language teaching games on the DS. It's called FreeRice and for every word you guess correctly gives 20 pieces of rice to someone in need of food. Doesn't seem like much but then again the faster you know the words the more you build up. It builds a lot over time.

If you don't mind playing little childish games, hey they're cute and fun, you might want to check out "Michael Michael Go Recycle!" It's simple, cute, and it's just a fun little game to past the time. Granted this is one a site called "Games2Girls" so if you're a guy you might want to play this alone or grab a young relative to play and you can use them as an excuse. Show them the game anyways so they can learn as well.

That's about the most I've found out yet but if you find more games about going green feel free to post them here. Hopefully we can find a nice middle ground for enjoying games while doing our part to not hurt the planet as much as we've done in the past.

Posted in: energy, gaming on Friday, July 4, 2008 at at 7:43 PM 0 responses  

Now this blog is mostly about my view on more eco-friendly habits and how I go about in my own way to try and be nicer to the earth. Today I think I'm going to go a slightly different way. What would a green life be if you only worried about mother earth? Yes we need to take care of the plants, land, and air supply but don't you see something missing?

Animals. You can't be completely eco friendly, to me at least, if you completely forget about our animal friends. They too make the great circle of life happen. So where am I going with this? Well I have this one site that I have saved as my homepage. Every time I open a new window I click on one simple link and contribute .6 bowls of food for a poor animal in a shelter. Now maybe you've heard of this or even do this yourself. Great! Of course you don't have to do this but I found it simple enough. Whatever you choose is fine.

Again I'm not saying you have to do this. Just getting this out to anyone who wants to help but has never seen this. Then again I have no idea how many visitors I've had. Oh well I'm sure I've had a few.

The thing I really like about this site though is that I'm helping feed homeless animals but I don't have to pay a cent towards. Don't get me wrong I would love to buy some of the items they have for sale but right now I don't have a job. Until then I can click once to help. Trust me I have plenty of items I want to buy.

Here are some wildlife funds you can look at as well-



Of course there are many many more where those came from. Just a simple search on google with turn up hundreds of hits. I'll just have to remember these when money starts flowing again.

Posted in: animals, nature, wildlife on Sunday, June 29, 2008 at at 8:47 PM 0 responses  

So today my boyfriend and I took a walk to the closest store to our house. Last time we had gone we saw that they had a machine where you insert your cans, bottles, and plastics into and get money for it. It didn't give actual cash but it printed a receipt for you to take and get cash value in the store.

So this time we packed our bag up with all the coke cans we had saved up. We made our way through the
woods towards our destination. It's amazing what you will find when you walk through woods instead of taking a car. The scene in the woods are fantastic. Great for photo shoots too if you're into photography. On the way there and back we saw huge vultures, cats, and two rabbits. It doesn't seem like much I'm sure but I like seeing even the smallest of birds while walking.

So we finally finish the mile walk to the marketplace and start disposing of our cans. You get $0.05 for each can. After 20 cans we ended up with $0.95. It seems the machine jipped us of one. After we took our receipt we headed in and decided to buy some food since we where running low anyways. I talked my boyfriend out of buying the steak, cows are gassy, and instead bought two thighs of chicken. Not only was buying the chicken better but it was cheaper too. Two huge thighs and legs for $1.80. Sounds good if you ask me.

Then of course we headed back home. So what did we do good today?

1. We walked to the marketplace. That saves gas, money, and we got exercise.
2. We recycled our cans and made a little cash.
3. We bought chicken instead of gassy cow meat and saved money on that as well.
   

Posted in: nature, recycle, walk on Thursday, June 26, 2008 at at 5:51 PM 0 responses  

I've already saved a few green going blogs to my bookmarks and I try my best to check up on them everyday or so. One of these sites is Eco Chick. It's a good read for any female and even the males can enjoy some of it. Well today I looked and one of the new posts was about milk and how it may or may not be recycled even though one would assume it was.

Well I read most of it, I'm a bit lazy, and it made me wonder as well. Does my town collect milk cartons as recyclable? How do I "prepare" it correctly for pick-up day? So I went to google and searched the first two links. I ended up coming across my town's official website. I looked in their recycling section and thankfully they did take milk cartons.

Recyclables:
The following are collected as recyclables, and should be placed curbside, separate from trash.

Cans & Bottles

Posted in: biodegrable, milk, recycle on Wednesday, June 25, 2008 at at 8:00 PM 1 responses  

It all began to hit me when I went to the Wal-mart's magazine and book section. My boyfriend and I usually went there to look at gaming magazines or anything else that happened to catch our eyes. I ended up wandering around the money section and saw "Go green, Live rich" by David Bach. I had remembered that my mother bought a lot of his books to learn about managing or saving money. I was curious so I picked it up and began to read it.

Eat less Meat
Reduce the 1.4 million tons of waste generated by US farms each year.

Use Recycled Paper Products
You save $39-53 annually by switching to recycled toilet paper.
We could all save 19 million trees.

These numbers were huge! I mean I was sure if everyone did everything like this then of course it would add up but even just doing this yourself in your own home could save you thousands. Sure $39 a year for just recycled paper doesn't mean much to a lot of people but considering how there are 146 pages or so of money saving tips.. well you can see where that would lead to.

Of course no one expects us to change over night. We can only do as much as we can at one time to fix our broken habits. I've started to use a lot less toilet paper when I use the bathroom. When I go into a public bathroom I simple let my hands air dry. Water won't hurt you if you don't wipe it off with the paper towel or use who knows how much electricity to power the hand dryer. If you don't like this option though, which one is better? Hopefully this isn't a huge surprise.

Even though that is the better choice it made me think. Wouldn't be better if you could turn it on and off as well. So if you only use it for ten seconds you could shut it off right then instead of it going on for another 30 seconds of so. Why don't they have that option? Do they and I just don't know about it?

Now back to the book. After reading this it really helped me. I started thinking back to when grandma was so frugal with everything we did. Shut off the lights when you left a room. Reuse things like those paper/plastic plates and utensils. It seemed stupid at the time since kids don't give a damn about that but now it hit me. That's ok though because I'm learning from my mistakes.

Alongside all the good advice on how to be a better eco-person and saving money this book gives many wonderful links to green sites. The list goes on and on. Each section has links directly related to the topic at hand.

I would highly suggest anyone to go to the store and look at it. Now that I think back I'm almost sad that I bought it not because I think it's bad but because buying a book wastes paper. No matter how hard I looked I couldn't see where it said that the book was made with recycled paper. I wish I had bought it as an E-book. If you do wish to read this please PLEASE buy it as an Ebook. Not only will you save more trees from being torn down but it's $5 cheaper. See? saving money already. I'll have to keep that in mind for the other books I wish to read.

So this is how my whole little journey started. Just a little book about going green and saving money. Now I think about going to farmer's markets, using less resources, walking, and maybe even someday having my own little farm complete with food and animals. I like this journey.

Posted in: Books on Tuesday, June 24, 2008 at at 3:58 PM 0 responses  

Welcome to Following the Greener Path. Here you'll read about my little "journey" from being a waste monster like the rest of America to try and make a greener life. I'll try my best to include things that I'm not completely following as well since somethings I can't give up. Like internet. Hey we all have something right? Anyways I hope I can bring some information to you.

Now the question is, who will read this thing?

Posted in: Welcome on Monday, June 23, 2008 at at 11:11 PM 0 responses