Category: Energy & Sustainability

By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Corporate Social Responsibility, Energy & Sustainability, Entrepreneurship, Ethics: General, Green Business, Shel's Personal Life, Social and Economic Justice, Socially Responsible Investing, Transparency vs. Secrecy Tagged with ,

It’s been a good year for recognition of my work for a better world. In October, I was inducted into the National Environmental Hall of Fame (View pictures and read the transcript here.)

And then last night, I received notification that I (as the human face of GreenAndProfitable.com) am the very first business in the country to be certified by Green America at the Gold level (which was a fairly arduous process involving several reviews of an extensive questionnaire covering socially responsible investing, supply chain, commitment to social and economic justice, and, of course, environmental benchmarks, among other things).

I’m thrilled. After 40 years in the environmental world, it is nice to have people notice.

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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Energy & Sustainability, Green Business

Now through Monday morning at 6 a.m., youhave a chance to enter a contest for a brand new Dell Dell 3335dn multifunction printer, which not only prints two-sided at high resolution from any computer on our network, but also scans, copies, e-mails, and stores documents in its memory. I have to tell you, even though I’ve gotten along just fine without in-house copying and faxing capabilities, I’m finding that I really enjoy having them.
Because the company is courting the green market for this printer (which not only can print both sides of the paper but also has some cool energy management features), Dell’s promotion team came to me and asked if I’d like to give one of these printers away. Of course, I agreed–but I put a condition on it. Rather than just give one away randomly, I’ll give it to the person who submits the best sustainability tip via my Twitter account during the giveaway days.

So you’ll be rewarded for your thinking processes, and probably not facing an enormous number of entries. In other words, if you give this your best shot, you’ll have a much better chance of winning than in most contests.
And five runners-up get a copy of my very useful e-book, Painless Green: 111 Tips to Help the Environment, Lower Your Carbon Footprint, Cut Your Budget, and Improve Your Quality of Life-With No Negative Impact on Your Lifestyle.

Disclosure: as is obvious from above, I got one of these printers as a gift and have been using it steadily ever since.

By entering, you agree to both my rules and Dell’s rules for the contest, which are both posted at https://painlessgreenbook.com/win-a-1299-printer-december-16-19-2011.

Note: Posting a comment here or e-mailing me, while welcome, does not enter you in the contest. You must follow the specific procedure outlined on that page. There’s a specific place you need to enter, and your entry has to contain two specific things.

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By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability, Entrepreneurship, Green Business Tagged with ,

Good article in Renewable Energy World, showing that despite such setbacks as Solyndra, solar is actually a pretty solid player these days.

In fact, for the first time ever, the U.S. solar industry installed more than a gigawatt of new capacity. That’s like a whole nuclear power plant, without the risks.

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By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability Tagged with , , , ,

Already getting a fifth of its power from the wind, wants to kick that number all the way to half by 2020, and completely eliminate fossil-fuel sources by 2050, according to Reuters.

Denmark had enough sense to abandon its plans for nuclear power in 1985, before actually building any (though a portion of the power it imports is undoubtedly nuclear).

However, don’t break out the champagne just yet. Denmark plans to replace coal and oil with a large percentage of biofuels. While biofuels are renewable, they are not always clean. Wood-burning, in particular, can contribute massively toward pollution and carbon emissions (and thus toward catastrophic climate change, a/k/a global warming).

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By Posted on Posted in Demographics/Psychographics, Energy & Sustainability, Politics Tagged with , , , , , , ,

According to the Associated Press, there was a huge jump in carbon emissions, worldwide.

The new figures for 2010 mean that levels of greenhouse gases are higher than the worst case scenario outlined by climate experts just four years ago…

The world pumped about 564 million more tons (512 million metric tons) of carbon into the air in 2010 than it did in 2009. That’s an increase of 6 percent. That amount of extra pollution eclipses the individual emissions of all but three countries — China, the United States and India, the world’s top producers of greenhouse gases.

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Increased reliance on coal (WHY??? WE KNOW BETTER!) has a lot to do with the problem.

And not surprisingly, climate change correlates closely with the growing epidemic of extreme weather events.

Meanwhile, the climate talks in Durban, like their predecessors in Copenhagen a few years ago, don’t seem to be getting much accomplished.

“Double-plus ungood.” Fiddling while the planet burns.

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By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability, People Helping People, Shel's Personal Life, Uncategorized Tagged with ,

Got to brag on myself here. I was deeply honored to be inducted in October, honoring my 40 years of work as an environmental activist and wrier. Now I just found out the National Environmental Hall of Fame put up a whole spiffy page about the event.

I welcome your comments about it here.

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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Energy & Sustainability Tagged with , , , , , , ,

I’ve always said that if we could get most of our hot water from the sun in our antique (1743) house in cloudy, cold Massachusetts (which we do), it should be easy for most of the country to heat water with the sun.

Taking that philosophy much farther, Paul Brazelton’s Minnesota family has just done a deep-green retrofit of a 1935 house—and yanked out the furnace. With frequent temperatures of -20F and spikes well below that, this is a brave thing to do.

But not unproven. Energy visionary Amory Lovins also lives in the snowbelt (just outside Aspen, Colorado). While he doesn’t see the temperature extremes of a Minnesota winter, his no-furnace house was designed and built back in 1983, with technology we’d now consider quite primitive—and he grows bananas in his sunroom. And thousands of Passivhaus Institute-certified EnerPHit homes have been built in Germany and Scandinavia (also not known for balmy winters).

The Brazelton project will be the first certified EnerPHit home in North America.

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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Energy & Sustainability, Entrepreneurship, Frugality/Frugal Fun, Green Business, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies Tagged with , , , , ,

Maybe once or twice a year, I actually get an unsolicited bulk e-mail that is targeted, relevant, and has a subject line that makes me open it. nd while I absolutely detest spam, I don’t object to this. If I am exactly the right audience for an offer, it’s not spam; it means a company is doing its homework and compiling a list of actual prospects.

This morning, I got one with the subject, “recycle related/reuse and swap search engine.” Since I write about the environment and have a 40-year commitment to encouraging reuse, I opened the e-mail.

This is an excerpt:

ecofreek.com is a search engine that searches the web for free and ‘for swap/trade’ items people no longer need from over 45+ major sources, providing the most diverse and accurate results anywhere in the world.

Also included are items for trade like books, sports equipment, antiques, automobiles, bicycles, motorcycles, CDs/DVDs, computers, property, seeds/gardening supplies, and lots more.

We also encourage people to exchange and re-use items though our search engine and also our ‘places to give things away’ section. Feel free to recommend us new resources as well, we have a section we link to other environmental/green sites.

We hope you enjoy your experience at our site and welcome any and all feedback.
Please contact me for any questions about our site/service or working together.

Sincerely,
Nicole Boivin – Founder

She also included her personal e-mail and phone number.

So I went over to look, and I like what I found (mostly).

As a longtime participant in Freecycle.org, I was interested to compare. I found several major differences:

1. The search engine is elegant and allows you to choose a geographic area ranging from your own town or US state to anywhere in the world. Freecycle restricts you to your own community.

2. Ecofreek is web-based, rather than e-mail-driven, which means you can search for what you want instead of just posting a wanted or offered notice and hoping for response.

3. Freecycle is about gifting. While gifting is an option at Ecofreek, swaps are also encouraged.

I did get very weird results when I clicked a suggested link (not a database result) for free samples of Kashi. And I do see that this site will need to be prepared to deal with people spamming the message boards (I saw one or two noncommercial spams). But I think it’s a good addition to the frugality and environmentalism toolbox.

And I will write to Nicole and ask her how I get listed in the environmental section she referred to.

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