Blogs & Ecology

Eating for the sake of your body and the planet doesn’t mean giving up on the foods you love. It does mean becoming more actively aware of where your food comes from, how it’s produced and how its production affects the Earth.

Fundamental to greening your diet is eating ‘real’ food. Processed and refined foods are, let’s face it, not good for you. Most of them are produced as part of the push by marketers to ‘make your life easier’ but they’re usually laden with chemicals, additives, pesticides, and barely disguised GM derivatives.

:: Get crafty with old, mis-matched kitchen bowls.

:: Avoid mall madness. Show the kids that cool, unique back-to-school clothes can be found at thrift stores.

:: Tour the Midwest mindfully. Eco-tour Chicago with help from our Green City Guide: Chicago.
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Researchers discover a new method that could make the open road a solar energy source.

Green Home Huddler rounds up a list of handy green pocket guides.

EcoLibris reviews A Spring Without Bees by Michael Schacker.

The Boston Globe reports on backyards containing lead in the soil.

The Travelodge hotel in London invites guests to sleep in shipping containers.

Treading lightly on the planet and minimising our impact on the world’s forests doesn’t have to end when it comes to what goes inside our homes. Whilst SA might lag behind Europe and the US when it comes to eco design, there are nonetheless still green alternatives available, if one just knows where to look.

How green is your exterior wood?
This green guide began as a venture to find eco-friendly doors to replace our wooden verandah doors. As the hunt got underway, we realised that our difficulty was not going to be finding the right price or the right company to replace our doors, but sustainable wood.

Electricity Overload Leads to Bad Energy Saving Decisions

Do you suffer from "electricity overload"? We don't mean the number of plugs crowding your outlets. We mean the short circuit in your brain when you try to figure out:

• Do you save energy by turning lights off for only a few minutes?
• Which takes more energy: leaving air conditioning on all day or cooling your house after you come home at night?
• What is a watt?
• Do I pay twice as much for an appliance running on 240V as one on 120V?

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Recycling is the third component of the ‘reduce, reuse, recycle’ mantra – the “3R’s” of waste minimisation. Whilst this mantra has become commonplace, it is a cornerstone of saving our environment, and the recycling bit is the part we can easily get on top of.

Some experts have added “re-think” to the mix, questioning the entire manufacturing process and calling for a new approach. It’s also become fashionable for organisations to add their own R’s to the mantra, like replenish, renew, respect, responsible etc.

Everyone’s talking solar, which is no real surprise given the power crisis. It isn’t just a national crisis however but part of a far wider reaching global energy ‘over indulgence’ in dirty, non-renewable energy.

Whatever the reason for reading this – whether it’s that you want to take advantage of Eskom’s solar water heating incentive programme, or that you want to live a greener life - there is an urgent need to shift to renewable, non-polluting energy sources, like the sun, to provide our energy needs.

Image courtesy procsilas at flickr