Ways to go green and save money

Much about going green can save you money.

January is the month of resolutions and also the time that Christmas credit card bills start coming due. A time of optimism and belt tightening.

Not everyone makes New Year’s resolutions but early in each new year most people do think about ways to improve their lives. Consider it a bonus then when making a change for the better can help your pocketbook as well.

Case in point: resolving to be more eco-friendly. Although it sometimes gets a bad rap for being expensive, much about going green can actually save you money.

Last year the World Watch Institute came up with a list of 10 ways to go green and save green, ideas for saving money while making eco-friendly lifestyle changes. Here are a few from the World Watch list, and a few of my additions.

1.      Think before you buy. Do you really need it? Will you use it? Can you borrow or rent it instead of buy it? (A Patagonia ad last fall featured one of its jackets with the headline "Don't Buy This Jacket" and asked customers not to buy what they don’t need and to think twice before buying anything.)

2.      Eating less meat is one of the best things that you can do for the environment. Going meatless, even one day a week is (environmentally speaking) like taking your car off the road for a few months. Buy better quality, locally-raised meat and eat less of it. On average we eat twice the protein that we actually need and skimp on vegetables.  Try for a meatless meal at least once a week. You and the environment will be healthier for it. The bonus: plant-based protein (like beans and lentils) is cheap. 

3.      Buy in bulk when it makes sense for your family.  Bulk means less packaging and lower per unit cost.

4.      Use natural cleaners like baking soda and vinegar instead of buying conventional cleaning supplies. Natural products are cheap, and easy on the environment.

5.      Reduce your energy consumption. Turn your thermostat down a degree or two, switch to compact fluorescent bulbs (CFLs) as your old incandescent bulbs burn out, unplug appliances when they’re not in use to avoid power sipping. Wash clothes in cold water and use a drying rack or clothesline when possible instead of the dryer.

6.      If you pay for water use, taking steps to use less can save you money too. Take shorter showers, use a low-flow showerhead (saves on energy use), use a dishwasher instead of the sink washing and only run the dishwasher when it’s full. If you are sink washing, only fill the sink half way. Install a faucet aerator on each faucet.

7.      Avoid bottled water and other packaged drinks and drink more tap water. Buy a good quality travel mug or stainless steel water bottle so you can bring your water with you.

Resolutions or not, making a few eco-friendly lifestyle tweaks can be a simple way to leave money in your pocket.

How to choose greener electronics

Think big picture when you choose your next electronic device.
A small enviro footprint can be part of the cool factor.

How many old electronics do you have lying around your house? The pace of innovation is so fast these days that within 18 months the industry can deem something virtually obsolete and be pushing consumers to upgrade. Even if you don’t want to buy a newer version, often you have little choice since some items cost more to repair than to buy new and many items can’t be repaired because replacement parts aren’t available. In our disposable world, electronics make the list of things “designed for the dump”, items made to be disposable. Crazy but true.

This approach to electronics consumption is creating mountains of e-waste, clogging our landfills with toxic PVCs (poly vinyl chloride – nasty stuff), flame retardants, lead and mercury, and more.  

The good news is that some electronics manufacturers are working to green their products and their manufacturing processes. Helping nudge them along is the Green Peace Guide to Greener Electronics. Published regularly since 2006, it is helping build awareness about the environmental impact of electronics and lobby electronics manufacturers to be more environmentally responsible.

The guide ranks the top 15 TV, computer and cell phone manufacturers. These companies are rated on their greenhouse gas emissions and their plans to reduce emissions, on the energy efficiency of their products, efforts to eliminate hazardous substances from produces, use of recycled plastics, and durability and ease of repair. Manufacturers’ supply chains are part of the evaluation as are take-back programs and recycling initiatives for obsolete products.

In the 2011 report HP tops the list with a score of 5.9 out of 10, followed by Dell (5.1), Nokia (4.9) and Apple (4.6). The scores aren’t stellar but year over year the leaders are improving their efforts to create all-around greener products.

Choosing top-rated electronics is one way to help the industry move in the right direction.  Just review theguide before making your next purchase. You can also do a lot to lessen the environmental impact of the electronics you already have. Reduce energy consumption simply by turning off computers and other electronics when they’re not being used. If you have them plugged into a power bar, turn that off too when they’re not in use.

Be sure to recycle old electronics. The Fundy Solid Waste Commission accepts old computer systems (monitor, hard drive, printer, speakers, mouse, keyboard, scanner,) and other electronics Saturday mornings at the Household Hazardous Waste facility. (The computers are shipped to Resnet, a non-profit in Edmundston NB where they are disassembled to salvage working components and recyclable materials. Some systems are refurbished and donated to low-income families and non-profit groups.) Old cell phones can be dropped off at Future Shop, Staples, Superstore and some cell phone dealers.  The Future Shop drop box also accepts CD players, MP3 players, CDs, DVD players and ink cartridges.

The ultimate goal is to have manufacturers create longer lasting, updatable products. Choosing the greenest products today is the best thing we can do to push manufacturers in the right direction.

This New Year, go on an energy diet

The New Brunswick Lung Association announced this week that they will be running a pilot program to help households monitor, manage and reduce their daily energy consumption. The 100 households chosen to participate in the program will be outfitted with energy metres enabling them to monitor how much they’re spending on electricity. The idea is that awareness will lead to change and that participants will begin to reduce their power consumption when they can see clearly what’s hogging the power in their homes.

According to the Lung Association, studies show that home energy monitors can motivate behaviour change in individuals and reduce electrical consumption between 5% and 20% which in turn reduces our dependence on dirty forms of power generation (ex.  coal fired generating plants). This means less air pollution, a key goal of the Lung Association.

Whether you’ve signed up for this pilot or not, it’s safe to say that we could all start the New Year on an energy diet, especially after the energy excesses of the holidays.

Wondering where to begin? The typical household energy consumption breaks down like this: 60% for heat, 20% for hot water, 15% for appliances and 5% for lights. You’ll get the biggest bang for your buck if you start by doing all that you can to keep the cold out and the heat in. An energy audit can help you identify sources of heat loss in your home, and offer many do-it-yourself fixes. Keeping your furnace in good working order is important, including changing your furnace filter regularly. Turning your heat down just one or two degrees offers big savings as well. For every degree you lower the thermostat during heating season, you'll save between 1 and 3% of your heating bill. (Programmable thermostats make this easier).  A sweater is worth about 2 degrees in added warmth and a heavy sweater about 4 degrees. To make the most of your hard-earned heat check that beds, couches and other furniture aren’t blocking radiators.

Tackling your hot water usage is another energy saver. Check your hot water heater to see that it’s set no hotter than 120 degrees (any hotter is a waste of money.) Install low flow shower heads for a more efficient use of hot water (up to 60% less for a typical shower). Limit or avoid hot water clothes washing. Cold water washes use 90% less energy than hot water washes and today’s detergents are formulated to work well in cold water.  

To reduce the amount of energy consumed by appliances, match your appliance size to your need. Ensure that your refrigerator and freezer seals are snug and that the rear coils are clean. Become less dependent on the clothes dryer and use a clothes line or drying racks instead, especially for large items that take longer to dry.

Reducing your energy consumption is a painless diet that leaves money in your pocket and will help to make our air cleaner. Here’s to New Year’s diet resolutions!

Last minute Christmas tips



1.    On Christmas morning, sort wrapping as you go, creating piles for trash, recyclables and reusable ribbon, bags and paper. Tuck them away for next year.

2.    Remember that wrapping paper is not recyclable. Choose reusable bags instead and save them from year to year.

3.    Cardboard boxes and packaging, as long as they’re not soiled or waxed, can be recycled. Some boxes might be worth saving to reuse at another time. Flatten the boxes you’re going to recycle for easy storage.

4.    On rigid plastic packaging, look for the recycling symbol with a number in the middle. Any plastic with a number between 1 and 7 can go in the blue bins. They’re few and far between on children’s toys but it’s still worth checking.

5.    Don’t get lazy over the holidays when it comes to basic household recycling. Nuf said.

6.    Keep composting over the Holidays. If you’re hosting a gathering and using disposable plates, buy paper plates and toss them in the compost bin for an easy clean up.

7.    Do what you can to reduce food waste. Start with a small serving and go back for more if you’re still hungry.

8.    Compost your Christmas tree. Many communities offer a tree mulching service for easy Christmas clean up.

9.    Save Christmas cards and use them to make gift tags next year.

10.   Bask in all that is wonderful about the Holiday Season and share your joy with others.

The Christmas tree debate -- choose real over fake

Just because an artificial tree is reusable doesn't mean it's environmentally preferable. It's the opposite, actually. Fake Christmas trees have a nasty carbon footprint due to the fact that they're made from petroleum products, usually manufactured in China where environmental regulations can be lax, and shipped half way around the world to reach your home. Artificial trees off-gas, polluting the air in your home, and can't be recycled or composted. Real trees, on the other hand, come from sustainably-managed local forests (in my neck of the woods anyway) and are compostable. Choosing a real tree is one more way to buy local over the Holidays.

Thoughtful gift ideas

Remember the excitement you had as a child during the lead up to Christmas? All you had to do was wait for it to arrive. Not that waiting was easy, but it was thrilling. Fast forward to adulthood and December is often a blur of shopping, cooking and decorating. It’s busy, sometimes stressful and less than thrilling for many.  

To put your Holiday challenges in perspective, the CBC radio program The Current recently aired a show about poverty in Canada and asked listeners to share their personal experiences. One of the stories that stood out was from a mother who, strapped for cash, can’t buy her children gifts. To make up for it she focuses on giving them her time, love and attention. “What you can’t give them in one way you have to make up for in other ways,” she said. Her young children (also interviewed) were grounded, thoughtful and wise beyond their years.  

Her comment made me wonder what some people who do receive loads of gifts (kids in particular) might be missing out on. It also reminded me of a recent chat I had with a friend who said she wished her young daughter’s grandparents would give her daughter time instead of stuff, an afternoon outing together rather than a toy.  

Gift giving can really be so simple. 

Thinking outside of the box (literally) for holiday giving is one way to add more meaning to the Season and giving non-traditional gifts is memorable and meaningful in ways that are especially appropriate for this thoughtful season.  

If you still have gifts to buy (and who doesn’t) or if you’d like to begin a new tradition, consider these worthwhile causes.   

Do Good Today is a Saint John-based organization focused on reducing poverty in Saint John, and supports eight local organizations that are working to reduce poverty in our area. Links on this site simplify the giving process, and let you choose to give time, money, or both, to the Boys and Girls Club, the Resource Centre for Youth, P.R.O. Kids, First Steps Housing Project and others.  

The CBC Saint John annual Harbour Lights Campaign is another initiative that makes it easy to give to many organizations in one shot. The campaign supports food banks from St. Stephen to Sussex so your donation can reach more people throughout our region. CBC is taking donations right up until December 23 so there is still time to give, if you haven’t already.  

Nature Conservancy Canada has “packaged” wildlife habitat to give as gifts, in an effort to raise funds, and awareness, for the habitat crunch threatening many of our native species.

World Wildlife Fund – Canada offers endangered animal “adoptions” and a special initiative to help protect polar bears and their habitats whereby Coca-Cola will match your donation dollar for dollar. Adoption orders must be received by December 18 to guarantee arrival in time for Christmas.

I wish you an abundance of the simple pleasures that Christmas brings.

How do you wrap a reindeer?

Give symbolic gifts of nature this Christmas, and help protect the habitat of caribou, owls, bears, lynx and more. Gifts range from $40 to $400. Visit the Nature Conservancy Canada site for details.

Every Gift of Canadian Nature includes:

• An eco-friendly colour calendar featuring landscapes from across Canada - a daily reminder of your support of these wild places or a wonderful holiday gift to give to a friend to enjoy.
• A special gift certificate to personalize.
• A letter from NCC President and CEO, John Lounds, informing your gift recipient that a donation has been made on their behalf to protect Canadian wildlife habitat

Thoughtful consumption

Last year we turned my children's artwork
into note cards that they gave as gifts to
their grandmothers.

 I love Buy Nothing Day, an annual event that encourages people to take a break from consumption. The event, now in its 20^th year, falls on that wild shopping day known as Black Friday, (the day after American Thanksgiving and one of the busiest shopping days of the year in the U.S.)

Black Friday or not, it’s easy to get caught up in the frenzy of spot sales, buy-one-get-one-free offers and the lure of discount prices.  People come home from weekend shopping trips with heaps of stuff that they just couldn’t pass up because the price was so low. (Mind you, even Frenchy’s and Value Village shoppers fall prey to the same bug. They just spend less in one shot.)

Consciously going a day without buying anything can inch you toward what I call thoughtful consumption -- carefully considering what you purchase (Is it necessary? Will it get used? Do I already have some of these? Is there a bit too much plastic packaging for my liking?) It’s a helpful mindset as we all dive into Christmas shopping.  

Like most people, I’m happy to buy or make gifts for those on my Christmas list. But buying for the sake of buying or purchasing something, anything, just to check a name off a list can take the fun out of Holiday shopping. I can sympathise, finding just the right gift for someone can be exhausting and sometimes impossible.

How do you avoid the stress of searching for the perfect gift or buying something just to get it over with (only to have it sit in a closet some place)? I aim for the practical with a touch of pizazz.  Practical is great because it means the item will get used and the pizazz makes it a little special, just right for the Holidays.

I splurge on good wool socks for my husband, the kind that he’d never treat himself to. I treat my mom and sisters to high quality cooking ingredients and they often do the same for me. All of this stuff is enjoyed, and used. 

Here are some other ideas for thoughtful (and useful) gift giving:

Is there someone on your list who loves tea, or coffee or chocolate? Create your own gift basket full of their favourites or some you know they’d love to try but would never buy for themselves. Another idea - baskets of locally-made goods are fun to give, and to receive.

Restaurant gift cards, museum memberships, tickets to sporting events, concerts or the theatre, tucked in a gift bag and tied with a pretty bow are thoughtful gifts that will get used. So are donations to community charities, made in the name of someone special. Can you think of a non-profit that the recipient has a connection with, whether through volunteer activities or direct care?

Thinking before you buy is a good lesson for all of us. It might mean that we come home with fewer things, but less clutter is a gift in itself.

Celebrate Buy Nothing Day!



Black Friday or not, it’s easy to get caught up in the frenzy of spot sales, buy-one-get-one-free offers and the lure of discount prices.  Instead, spend the day unshopping, unspending and unwinding.

Watch the Do The Green Thing video

Fracking costs outweigh the benefits

Fracking puts our waterways at risk, not to mention
 our drinking water and air quality

“If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is" comes to mind as I follow the issue of fracking in New Brunswick. My eco-mind weighs the rosy economic picture that dominates the debate against the fact that fracking is considered one of the top five environmental challenges facing the globe today.

No issue garners that status without some scientific weight behind the worry.

More and more research is coming to light suggesting that the economic cost of fracking (not to mention the social and environmental cost) might far outweigh any economic benefit we could ever hope to realize from the industry.

With just a little bit of digging you'll find more info on what all the worry is about. As an example, the Drilling down series includes months worth of investigative journalism by The New York Times that exposes the key concerns about the industry and shows what it's like for communities living with the fallout of the shale gas bubble.

To form a fair opinion on the issue, New Brunswickers need an honest assessment of the costs and benefits of shale gas extraction. But we're not getting that. Aside from the fact that the Provincial government's online information reads like it was cut and pasted from industry fact sheets, its nothing-bad-could-happen tone is naïve. Governments in many areas have either banned or suspended fracking and others are labouring over whether or not to allow it because a mountain of evidence is accumulating demonstrating that the economic, social and environmental cost is too great to make it worthwhile.

We all need to weigh in on the debate and, regardless of where you stand on the issue, here are some things you need to consider:

* Each well could use up to 80 million litres of fresh water to extract the gas (according to government data). And the government has no idea how many wells could be developed in the province. Our supply of fresh drinking water isn't bottomless.

* For each well, the fracking water could contain up to 800,000 litres of fracking "fluid," a mixture of known toxins. Fracking water is further contaminated with radioactive residue naturally occurring in the rock.

* Contaminated fracking water - that's billions and billions of litres of untreated waste water - will work its way into the Kennebecasis River, other nearby waterways and drinking water.

* There are significant air quality issues associated with fracking. New research by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control found breast cancer rates were increasing in counties in Texas with the highest natural gas air emissions. Meanwhile rates were declining in all other counties.

* The government speaks highly of a new regulatory framework under development to protect our air, water, livelihood - everything we know and love about living in Southern New Brunswick. But how do you build any trust or confidence when an exploration company snubs exploration regulations?

All economic development requires compromise but with fracking the trade-off might be more than you bargained for. If it sounds too good to be true...