He was a well known teacher and has written many books on the topic of environmental conservation. Planetary Exploration, in their article dedicated to Kutch, indicates that this isn’t a popular holiday but it’s a shame seeing as his work was so powerful – they have a lot of information about Kutch, which you can find here:

http://www.planetaryexploration.net/patriot/krutch.html

It goes to show that there are other places in your home where you can reduce your dependency on limited resources.

With their focus on Parents with small families, it’s not surprising that they have a fantastic recent article on how to be an environmentally friendly parent. Check it out here.

See the site for yourself and see how much you like it. They have a great deal of content on environment sites.

Are you a devout “Scruncher” who cannot bear to give up your religious belief – even to save the environment? Well I have news for you. I’m a “Scruncher” and I’ve got just the solution for you!

I realised today that you can get a few squares of toilet paper together and scrunch them up so you are well protected and you have plenty of cushioning. You do as you normally would and wipe but then you fold it in half again and wipe with the newly folded clean part.

You’ll use half as much toilet paper and you have the comfort of scrunching. Go ahead and give it a try, you’ll be surprised how well it works.

For more information about scrunchers and folders and to find out if you are one of the two, check out this site here. They started it!

The document which I linked to from my original article stated that any plant and potting mix with microorganisms could filter Volatile Organic Compounds from the air but I set out to find the best plants for the job.

Here is a list of plants which you can use to clean the air in your home.

Dracaenas
This is an architecturally pleasing plant from Africa which is quite suitable for any room of your home. It’s said to be best at filtering Trichloroethylene and Benzene from our air. If you have a lucky bamboo plant, you’ll also be happy to know that it is a form of Dracaena.

You can find out more about Dracaenas and the different species, including the more popular Lucky Bamboo species, here.

Chrysanthemum
This is the perfect gift for Mothers’ Day. Give you mother a potplant with a Chrysanthemum in it and she’ll be pleased at the sight and fresh smell. These flowers also filter Trichloroethylene and Benzene from the air but they have the added benefit of replacing it with an interesting smell.

Take a look at this page for more on how this plant can improve your livelihood.

Devils Ivy
Perhaps my favourite plant to keep in my room has to be Devils Ivy or Epipremnum aureum, as it’s known scientifically. It’s a fast growing, hardy plant which can be grown hydroponically and filters Benzene from the air.

It’s a great little plant to have and you can keep taking off cuts and sticking them in water to get them to grow from bottles in every room of your house. I’m very proud of the little one I have growing on my desk and sometime these holidays I hope to recycle some bottles for some off-cuts I’ll make. This plant comes highly recommended.

Check out more details about this plant at Wikipedia and the Potho Production Guide.

Clean Your Air With Three Plants
According to Rentokil, it only takes three large plants to reduce volatile organic compounds in your air by around 50-70 percent, in a room the size of 120 sq meters.

If that’s the case, then grab yourself a bunch of these plants and clean up the air in your home. This should be especially important for pregnant mothers or families with infants and small children. Improve the health of your home and the environment in general by eliminating these compounds from the atmosphere.

Lately I’ve been a huge sucker for organic produce. A lot of the time, they taste remarkably better than their chemical-laced counterparts. Not only do they taste astounding, the methods which they use to produce certified organic products is also great for the environment.

Farmers who use organic growing methods emphasize the use of renewable resources which conserve the soil, water and surrounding environment for future generations to come. The products are produced without using artificial ingredients, biological engineering or ionizing radiation.

This means that by buying organic foods, you are supporting industry and farmers who are helping reduce our impact on the environment.

Despite the obvious positives to buying organic food, I have been disappointed at times, with the quality of it. For instance, since there isn’t such large demand for it, there are not a lot of places where you can buy organic food. When you do find places which sell it, they don’t offer a lot of choice and some lines run out (I was at Aldi a few weeks ago and there was no Organic Milk due to the drought). My next quibble, is that they don’t use genetically modified varieties of plants and therefore, they end up being smaller, less tasty or less popular.

This is all on top of the fact that organic foods can cost up to 2-3 times the price of artificially enhanced produce.

At the end of the day though, it is better for your health and the environment, so it doesn’t seem like too much of a price to pay.

According to researchers, this is a startling fact. The solution? Buy more plants!

Many people live in homes where pollution from cars and industry, freely enter and become trapped in our houses. That is, until we breathe them in. In fact, even inside our homes, our furnishings, fittings and housemates are also contributing pollutants to the air we breathe – and I don’t mean the sort of pollutants that results from someone eating too many beans for dinner.

Volatile Organic Compounds such as carcinogens and even neurotoxins have been found to exist in our homes. Now is that something you’d like to be breathing in? I’d certainly hope not!

Luckily for us, plants have been found to be extremely effective at eliminating these elements from our homes. I know I don’t want these elements in my system, so I have three plants in my bedroom. They also have the plus of generating oxygen for us to breathe and creating a relaxing and attractive environment in our homes.

So go on and get out there! Buy some pot plants and improve your quality of living.

A 2005 estimate puts Google’s computers at 450,000 in its 25 datacenters, worldwide. This many computers are said to draw 20 Megawatts of electricity per month and cost the company over $2 Million dollars to run. Not only is this an old estimation, Google has since bought new data centers and is planning a new datacenter to be constructed over the next few years.

They announced in 2006 that they were adding solar panels to the Googleplex which aim to satisfy 30 percent of the complex’s energy requirements, by producing up to 1.6 megawatts of electricity. They also plan to become carbon neutral by investing in green activities and buying carbon offsets. In 2009, they are also expecting to build a data center which will take advantage of green energy in the form of Wind power.

As you can see, Google really is working hard to uphold it’s motto (”Don’t Be Evil.”), despite being the giant company it has become today.

PS. I have to admit, it was hard finding the image for this article – I resorted to Yahoo! Google, if you’re reading this, your image search sucks compared to Yahoo’s.

It may sound ridiculous but in some countries, this is becoming more acceptable as common practice for water conservation. Here in Brisbane, Australia, we are in a very severe drought where the city of 2 Million people may have to be evacuated if the situation worsens. I, for one, have adopted this flushing mantra, as I have a bathroom to myself.

Flushing the toilet can use as much as up to 12 litres per flush in an old toilet and a much as 6 litres per flush in an efficient dual-flush toilet. Since I have an old style toilet I reduce my flushes to around 1-2 a day rather than 3-6 which I might normally make in a day, by flushing all the time.

If I had a more efficient dual-flush toilet, I could save even more water but my current system works just as well.

Do you use the “Let it Mellow” water conservation mantra?

It’s great how everyone does their little bit to make sure the house is in order, but are they wasting resources? On one hand, they are but on the other hand I think by living all in the one house we end up sharing resources more effectively and efficiently.

For instance, at dinner time, everyone is in the kitchen at once cooking up their meals. Here, we save on electricity and gas by sharing the oven and lighting that goes into cooking food (which, I might add, comes from a shared fridge). Sometimes when we have barbecues people add their meat on, so they don’t have to heat a pan on the stove. I think you get the picture there.

Next up, with dish washing, we all manage to fill up the dishwasher so there is no room wasted inside the dishwasher, as a couple might have. This means we save on water, energy and detergent costs. Also, mopping the floors and vacuuming the carpet is done as regularly as any place and since there aren’t five people doing it at five different homes, more energy and resources are conserved in that regard.

Finally, when it comes to internet and our home network we are able to share downloads, reducing the time we need our computers on downloading, we share a router and switch and we share a file server to keep all our files. The result – we live happily and we conserve energy which we might happen to waste, living on our own.

That said, I think there are a number of ways in which living in a sharehouse uses more resources. We each cook our own meals, throwing out anything we don’t eat. Some people I live with aren’t as concious of resource wastage as I am and some even blatantly disregard it by having 20 minute showers and using hot water unnecessarily.

Overall though, I think living in a share house reduces the impact of us on the environment as it takes into account the economic principle of economies of scale – where the more people using it, the more efficiently we can use the resources. It’s a pity more people don’t live together or our environment might just be a little better off.

After a bit of searching, I came across Idealighted.com and found a 20 LED Lantern selling for just $8.97! That is astonishing. I’m buying one right now to replace the 9 watt light I’m currently using.

EDIT: They only ship within the United States so unfortunately, I’ll have to wait to find another light I like. If you’re reading this from the US, go ahead and buy one of these – they’re absolutely fantastic lights.

The only downside I see for it is that it’s battery operated which means that people might start using disposable batteries and throwing them away constantly. It’s a bit wasteful but maybe I could rig it up to run off the mains.

For more information about environmentally friendly LED lighting please visit my earlier post here – Environmentally safe LED lighting getting cheaper.

Have you got any LED lights yet?