Blogs & Ecology

Image Credit: Yves Roumazeilles

Organic veggies on the honor system.
Stephen Brooks is the co-founder of Kopali Organics and a correspondent for Planet Green’s G Word .

photo by greenhem via flickr

Paper or plastic bags: which is better?
It's an age old question, when it comes time to check out when grocery shopping: paper bag or plastic bag? It seems like it should be an easy choice, but there's an incredible number of details and inputs hidden in each bag. From durability and reusability to life cycle costs, there's a lot more to each bag than meet the eye. Let's take a look behind the bags.

Where do brown paper bags come from?

Image from HealthyLivingNYC.

While there are books aplenty today about going green, greening your lifestyle and green for dummies, The Climate Diet is the first to offer you greening solutions in terms of a weight watchers diet. The book also shows how you can not only cut emissions but also save money by cutting out the excess in your life.

The thing I love about Graham Hill and Meaghan O'Neill's "Ready, Set, Green" is that when you have a book that is so positive and filled with easy tips, getting green and guilt-free seems like a breeze.

Meat makes the meal?

Ever want to be able to show a non-green friend a quick overview of different renewable energy solutions ? The Environmental Defense Fund is coming to your rescue with a series of short (2 minute-ish) videos explaining solar, wind, wave, geothermal energy, and biofuels. The series is called “Unleash the Future"—only the Intro and Solar videos are up at the moment—and is viewable on the

For all the tinkerers and DIYers out there with a bunch of 50 gallon drums to spare and a small warehouse nearby, I came across a series of videos that illustrate the method of making biodiesel on a small scale. Even though the video says it shows how to make a "large batch", we're not talking commercial production levels here. The first one is posted above; the rest are viewable on the

Photo credit: Getty Images

For as long as our planet has spun 'round the sun, there's been solar energy cascading down on the earth, and, for a long time -- since the 7th century B.C., when glass was used to magnify it -- humans have been working to harness it. These days, technology is a bit better, providing electricity, heating, lighting, and even flight, but the point is the same: use the sun's warm glowing warming glow for our benefit.

Water, water, everywhere, so let's all have a drink (or so we all learned as kids, right?), but it's definitely not as easy as that these days. In honor of World Water Day (which may or may not have been today), let's sit back and enjoy an explanation of the water cycle.

Getty Images

You can't see them, but they're all around us. They aren't listed as ingredients on the objects we bring in our home, but they're often there. They're volatile organic compounds, or VOCs, a wide range of carbon-based molecules (organic compounds) used in a wide range of products that find their way into our homes. Under normal conditions, they vaporize, effectively leaving their host and entering the air (that's the "volatile" part) where they combine with other airborne compounds to form ozone, which isn't good to breathe.