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10 Unexpected Uses for Common Items
Tweet Share on Facebook July 30, 2009 Comment (8)Here's a brand-new website that combines good financial and environmental sense: AltUse, a social-media-inspired repository of home remedies and household tips that are all-natural, and can also save you money. Many home uses are handed down from previous generations, before we could buy products to solve all of our household needs. Back then, if we had puffy eyes, people wouldn't head for the beauty counter - they'd put tea bags or cucumbers on them. Dirty kitchen surfaces weren't cleaned with a multitude of chemicals - they were scrubbed down with vinegar and some elbow grease. Users can turn to the site for natural alternatives to traditional cleaning and household care solutions, many of which will save them money, or for quick help when they're in a bind with a certain type of stain. The site isn't just useful for housekeeping, though - you can learn lifehacks for pet care, beauty and fitness, as well.
Since the site is brand-new, the design is a little clunky, but the idea is solid: Allow anyone to submit their home remedies, and rate others'. That way, only the most effective alt-uses will get a mark of approval from the site.
Check out 10 unexpected uses for common household items submitted by users, below. Think you have a better one? Sign up for the site and rate the solutions, or add your own. -
The Myth of the Green Cigarette
Tweet Share on Facebook July 28, 2009 Comment (17)Cigarettes are the most-polluted item in the world, so needless to say, smoking is not very green. Considering that only 10 percent of cigarettes are disposed of properly, any effort to reduce the amount of waste caused by smokers is a good thing, right? That's the thinking behind makers of several brands of e-cigarettes - a trendy new smoking alternative that dispenses nicotine through vapor, rather than smoke, in a reusable, odorless cigarette-like device. E-cigarette users can "smoke" indoors without affecting others. They never need a lighter, and prevent hundreds of butts from being stubbed out on the pavement, since the device uses rechargeable batteries and refillable cartridges.
Totally green smoking is too good to be true. Turns out, the electronic smokes - which are marketed on several websites as healthier than real cigarettes - can be as harmful as traditional kind. According to an FDA press release:Because these products have not been submitted to the FDA for evaluation or approval, at this time the agency has no way of knowing, except for the limited testing it has performed, the levels of nicotine or the amounts or kinds of other chemicals that the various brands of these products deliver to the user.
The FDA’s Division of Pharmaceutical Analysis analyzed the ingredients in a small sample of cartridges from two leading brands of electronic cigarettes. In one sample, the FDA’s analyses detected diethylene glycol, a chemical used in antifreeze that is toxic to humans, and in several other samples, the FDA analyses detected carcinogens, including nitrosamines. These tests indicate that these products contained detectable levels of known carcinogens and toxic chemicals to which users could potentially be exposed.
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Central Park Airport Proposal Brings Internet Fame to Environmental Parodists
Tweet Share on Facebook July 22, 2009 Comment (2)Central Park is New York's largest undeveloped tract of land - an urban oasis for recreation and the arts. It's about time we did something that is actually useful with it, says the Manhattan Airport Foundation, a group committed to "transform[ing] this underutilized asset into something we so desperately need today" - an airport.
More than 19,000 people have signed a petition to bulldoze Central Park to create an airport in the center of Manhattan, eliminating the lengthy trip to JFK and LaGuardia. There are detailed maps, and financial backers. As for our favorite Central Park landmarks - don't worry. In the F.A.Q section of the group's website, it says, "Under the current plan the Imagine mosaic and Strawberry Fields will be preserved, however, they will be located indoors within the main terminal concourse. Tavern on the Green will be given the option of applying for a franchisee lease in the concourse food court."
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Lower-Income Consumers More Likely to Pay Extra for Green Products
Tweet Share on Facebook July 21, 2009 CommentFrom the department of counterintuitive news: One marketing study (PDF) has found that lower-income consumers, rather than affluent consumers, are more likely to pay a premium for green products. So much for recession thrift, right?
Though the headline is contrary to what we'd expect, there's a perfectly good reason that lower earners would pay more for green products, and it lies in the study's methodology: the low earners surveyed are part of underemployed Gen Y (The study, an internet poll taken by a consulting firm, presumably could not capture the opinions of low-income consumers without internet access). States the report: "Our research also indicated that lower income shoppers are more willing to pay a 10 cent premium compared to middle and upper income groups. This may be heavily influenced by the number of green-minded Millennials who may make up a disproportionate percentage of the lower income bracket because of their recent entry into the workforce."
While half of all shoppers surveyed said that they were willing to pay from 10 cents to 70 cents more for a green household product, age and gender affected how much the consumer would pay. Women and Milennials don't mind spending their green on green, but Boomers do. Across all demographics and income groups, consumers said they could use more information about the greening of their products - a response that shows how we're wising up to greenwashing, and getting savvier about getting what we pay for.
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Wal-Mart Announces Sustainability Index
Tweet Share on Facebook July 16, 2009 Comment (2)When so many products come labeled as "green" or "natural," finding the most sustainably-made stuff can be as tricky as comparing apples to oranges. But Wal-Mart will one day be able to tell you which of the two fruits is greener - along with every other product, from tennis rackets to telephones, in every Wal-Mart store. The company's sustainability index, announced today at a meeting with suppliers and environmental leaders, will evaluate every Wal-Mart product's environmental impact throughout its entire lifecycle, and will condense the data into an easy-to-understand rating for shoppers. Needless to say, it is a major undertaking.
Anything that Wal-Mart does has a huge impact. Look at the documentary "Food Inc." (in theaters right now) to see the ripple effect that the company's decision to only sell hormone-free milk has had on the supply chain. Same goes for their refusal to sell baby bottles made from Bisphenol-A. So you can bet that suppliers are going to care about their product's eco-rating on Wal-Mart's shelves. As The Big Money's Marc Gunther said, the plan "has the potential to transform retailing by requiring manufacturers of consumer products to dig deep into their supply chains, measure their environmental impact, and compete on those terms for favorable treatment from the world's most powerful retailer." And if it's adopted by other retailers, which Wal-Mart hopes it will be, it could change our big-box experience for good.
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Merriam-Webster Adds Green Words to Dictionary
Tweet Share on Facebook July 13, 2009 Comment (1)If the words we add to our dictionaries serve as a cultural barometer, this year's additions to Merriam-Webster show that green is becoming further entrenched in our lexicon. Here are the green words added to its latest edition:
Carbon footprint (1999): the negative impact that something (as a person or business) has on the environment; specifically: the amount of carbon emitted by something during a given period.
Green-collar (1990): of, relating to, or involving actions for protecting the natural environment. <green-collar jobs>.
Locavore (2005): one who eats foods grown locally whenever possible.
Staycation (2005): a vacation spent at home or nearby.
Merriam-Webster trails behind the Oxford English Dictionary, which added "staycation" last year, and named "locavore" its word of the year in 2007. We'll see what green words will come next. Perhaps "smart grid", "freegan" or "cap-and-trade"?
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First-Time Parents Go Freegan
Tweet Share on Facebook July 9, 2009 CommentLong gone are the days of the thousand-dollar stroller - that was obvious when the recession hit. But middle-to-upper class parents are taking frugality a step further, according to the New York Times: They're foregoing all costly items for their children in favor of buying used, or taking hand-me-downs. It's the kind of trend that makes retailers quake with fear.
The recession, it seems, has catalyzed a moment of reflection among the formerly free-spending new-parent set: used is good; free is best. New purchases have become more considered, less spontaneous.
Experts say the children’s market is just playing catch-up to a radical consumer shift taking place across all luxury sectors. But some say the new attitude reflects a broader change in perspective when it comes to conspicuous consumption for young children. No longer is it necessary to buy a thousand-dollar changing table in order to prove your parental savvy and breadth of love; if anything, the opposite is true.
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The Printed Blog Newspaper Folds
Tweet Share on Facebook July 7, 2009 Comment (1)But we hardly knew ye. The Printed Blog - the new-media experiment that I wrote about six months ago - has called it quits due to unsteady finances. The blog aggregator newspaper had lofty goals: saving journalism, primarily. But the idea of taking dynamic content from blogs and reducing it into the very static format of a newspaper seemed like a step backwards, not forwards.
Environmentalists were quick to reject the Printed Blog due to waste. During the Printed Blog's lifespan, 80,000 paper copies were handed out, each containing popular content from the same blogs that many members of its target audience already read on their iPhone or Blackberry. The Printed Blog emphasized the tactile experience of reading printed content - but it's safe to say that those who recieve the majority of their news content online don't yearn to turn pages with ink-stained fingers, and that others who prefer to only read news on paper aren't necessarily the right audience for an aggregator of hip local blogs. Of course, if we're going to talk wastefulness, it's only fair to point out that the Printed Blog's total circulation was a drop in the pan compared to major papers like the Washington Post, which distributes more than five million copies per week - but also benefits from decades of branding and reputation.
This is not to kick the Printed Blog while it's down - after all, as the editor said in his farewell letter, "It was humbling to have been so prominently included in the global discussion on the future of journalism and the print media." The Printed Blog was an interesting media experiment, and generated a lot of buzz. But sometimes, a blog is just a blog.
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Good News: Cities are Growing, Suburbs are Slowing
Tweet Share on Facebook July 1, 2009 Comment (13)For decades, city-dwellers have fled to the clean, quiet and spacious American suburbs, where McMansions have popped up faster than you can say "Applebee's." But the suburbs are not proving to be recession-proof, as the latest Census data shows - while cities are growing nationwide, suburban growth is slowing. It's good green news, considering that the average city dweller has a carbon footprint that is much smaller than a suburbanite's. Says the Wall Street Journal:
The Census data underscored how the recession and the real-estate slump have curbed migration, especially to suburbs and outer areas known as exurbs.
The central-city population in U.S. metropolitan areas with more than one million people (excluding New Orleans, where recent growth rates reflect residents returning to the city following Hurricane Katrina) grew at an annual rate of 0.97% between July 2007 and July 2008, according to Mr. Frey's analysis. That compared with a growth rate of 0.90% in 2006-2007, and growth rates around 0.5% in the years between 2002 and 2005, when the robust real-estate market led to new jobs and new housing developments outside the cities, where open land is more plentiful.
