Photo credit: woodleywonderworks

Chances are, you already do quite a few of these already. These ideas certainly aren’t new or ingenious. However, they are simple, easy and attainable. So if you see something new on the list, give it a go. There are always things we can work on.

Your Two New Best Friends…

…are your reusable shopping bag and stainless steel thermos, of course. The thing about shopping trips and coffee runs is that they’re often unplanned, so you can’t realistically say no to plastic bags or paper cups. The problem is that these one time slip-ups really add up for the planet. But its easy to avoid if you always keep these two essentials with you. Never leave home without them!

Go Veggie Once a Week

It’s probably no surprise that meat production and processing requires an immense amount of water and land—more than is required to produce any other form of food. So even if it’s just once a week, eating a vegetarian meal makes a difference. As an added bonus, a plant-based diet has countless health benefits, including lower cholesterol and a reduced chance of heart disease.

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Photo credit: ccarlstead

It wasn’t that long ago that I was a student, and I was using green ideas as a simple way of saving money. As a student, money is really tight, so you need to be economical in order to survive with the smallest amount of debt. So here are my top ideas that I used when I was at University.

Make your own meals in bulk
If you can learn how to cook easy meals such as Spaghetti Bolognese, Chill Con Carne, Chicken Curry, Beef Stew, you can make them in bulk and freeze the leftovers. I found that I could make at least 4 portions per meal, sometimes as many as 8. These meals typically scale very well. So when you make the meal, you get a fresh meal that evening and freeze the rest. When you’re feeling lazy, you just need to re-heat one of your frozen left-over meals. You just need to cook the pasta or rice to go with the meal!

You save money by buying the ingredients in bulk as well as saving packaging that you would otherwise get from microwave meals. I still use this tip to this day, giving myself a nice cooked lunch for work.

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Today PC World unveiled, via its Advent brand, a new eco-friendly computer called Advent Eco PC.

The Advent Eco PC is made from 75% recycled plastics, comes with electronic manuals, uses 25 watts when idling and is said to save you £35 (about $65) a year on energy. The computers specs are surely enough for the average computer user: 1.5GHz Core 2 Duo T5250 CPU, 2GB RAM, 160GB hard drive, 802.11b/g, and Vista Home Premium.

But, the Advent Eco PC is almost one year late, it should have been released last Christmas. And this is a disadvantage for the computer. The design and specs are not as “mind-blowing” as they are on Dell’s new eco-friendly computer. To be fair, the computer looks like an ugly wifi router, and it’s a bit more expensive than similar green computers.

But if you want to have an eco-friendly computer that will save you money on your energy bill the Advent Eco PC is a good option for you to consider. The Advent Eco PC starts at £599.99 (about $1100).

The ATP 8GB EarthDrive claims to be the world’s first eco-friendly USB drive. The EarthDrive is made from bio-recycled plastics and is designed to be fully recyclable at the end of its life. A portion of all sales will be donated to American Forests and towards the planting of trees.

“The EarthDrive takes our more than fifteen years of effort, design and quality implementation in the memory marketplace to the next level. Now, more than anytime in the history of our company, we are committed to creating products that take into consideration the environmental impact on our world and our global community.” says Michael Plaksin, ATP Vice President of Sales.

The USB drive is shock and water proof, has a built in security software, drive partitioning and password protection. It has a capacity of 8GB and costs $47.99.

The [re]Drive from SimpleTech is an eco-friendly external hard drive that would look great by the side of the new Studio Hybrid from Dell, or by any computer for that matter.

The [re]Drive is Energy Star Level 4 qualified and uses 30% less energy than other non Energy Star drives. The external hard drive is made and designed using recyclable aluminium and bamboo. According to the makers the packaging also comes from recyclable materials.

The external hard drive automatically powers on or off with your computer. It offers 500GB of storage capacity and 2GB free online. It works on both Macs and PCs and costs from around $200.

Hi!

My name is Kim Rowe and I am the Co-Creator and Producer of golivegive.com, a green volunteer travel show.

We want to show people how they can vacation green and volunteer while traveling. We shot our first episode in Los Angeles and provided viewers with a green hotel, organic restaurant, eco-friendly fashion and a volunteer option they can do in a day.

We will, from now on, be publishing our episodes right here on Green Blog for you to enjoy. You can check out the first episode below or on golivegive.com.

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It wasn’t long ago since Western Digital teamed up with Kanguru in marketing a green hard drive for consumers and businesses. Now Western Digital is releasing a 500GB “green” hard drive that uses 30 percent less power than other hard drives.

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Lenovo recently released the ThinkCentre A61e, a brand new green computer. The ThinkCentre A61e uses few hazardous materials, consumes little power and is easy to recycle. Because of that it has received the desirable EPEAT Gold status.

Peter Schrady with the really long title of vice president and general manager, Emerging Products Business Unit says that “the importance of maximizing energy efficiency and being environmentally conscious is touching all aspects of our daily lives, from the light bulbs we use to light our homes to the hybrid cars we drive to the green technology we rely on to run our businesses.”

Un-customized it uses an AMD Sempron LE 1150 processor, 512MB ATI Radeon X1200, 512MB Memory, 80GB hard drive and costs $399. Not too shabby. Sure the computer is ugly (or shall we say retro?) but it’s still one of the more high performing green computers out there.

According to Lenovo using the energy-efficient AMD Athlon X2 dual core and AMD Sempron single core processors can help save up to 50 percent in energy costs annually.

Another good thing is that Lenovo ranks high in the Green Electronics Guide from Greenpeace. They are currently on the 4th place being beaten only by Dell (on third place).

Press Release: Lenovo Raises Energy-Efficiency Bar with Its Smallest, Quietest Desktop PC

The Kanguru Eco Drive

I have posted about the new tower server Primergy TX120 from Fujitsu Siemens Computers that is said to be the world’s most energy efficient server. Not everyone can afford to buy a server, so here is something for us more ordinary bloggers.

Western Digital, one of the most well known hard drive companies, has teamed up with Kanguru in marketing a green hard drive for consumers and businesses. These GreenPower Hard Drives are all internal drives which are available in capacities from 320GB and up to 1TB (1000 GB).

Western Digital claims that these new GreenPower Hard Drives is saving up to 40% in power consumption. Western Digital says they accomplish this through several technologies such as balancing spin speed, transfer rate and cache size; automatically unloading the heads during idle to reduce aerodynamic drag and calculating optimum seek speeds.

These new GreenPower Hard Drives goal is to be “Energy Star 4.0” compliant. That means a minimizing their carbon footprint while realizing savings in electricity costs.

According to Western Digital data-centres that use “10,000 drives can save $100,000 in annual energy costs, and reduce CO2 emission by 600 metric tons”.

Also, don’t forget to check out Kangurus eco-friendly hard drives. These eco-friendly hard drives have three power modes that allow you to save up to 75% on the energy usage. The drives are fully RoHS compliant (no hazardous substances).

http://www.wdc.com/en/company/greenpower.asp
http://www.kanguru.com/35ecohd.html