• Newspaper: Wrapping gifts in recycled newspaper is probably the most basic thing you can do to stay eco-friendly this year while sending a positive, green message. Feel free to decorate the newspaper with some blackout poetry, colorful drawings, or whatever you feel will make the presentation more creative.
• Eco-Friendly Wrapping Paper: If you’re not a DIY kind of person, you can always support green companies by purchasing pre-made wrapping paper. Smockpaper, for example, is a company that specializes in recycled papers; their wrapping paper is 100 percent recycled, and it’s also double sided! Another vendor is Sophia Victoria Jay, who also sells on 100 percent recycled paper and offers several holiday items aside from wrapping paper such as cards and gift tags.
• Reusable Grocery Bags: Sometimes people just need that extra push to stop using brown paper bags and go the cloth route. Help them get there by giving your gifts in reusable grocery bags. Once they have reusable bags, they’ll have no excuse when going to the grocery store. You can find holiday styles of these reusable bags in many stores.
• Thrift Stores for Ideas: There are plenty of great finds in thrift stores: baskets, bags, and snazzy containers are just a couple of things you’ll be sure to find there.

Now that you have the wrapping sorted, if you’re clueless about what to get as a gift, there are plenty of great ideas to choose from. Everyone loves flowers, and a potted plant would be sure to bring a smile to anyone’s face. Include a couple packets of seeds and that’s icing on the cake!

If the person you are buying for doesn’t have a green thumb, Etsy offers a bunch of cool handmade products, and there are many products on the site that are eco-friendly. If you search, you will be certain to find something perfect there. There’s literally everything you can think of, from watches made of recycled garage door openers to one of a kind necklaces made of bark!

Photo credit: Hamed Saber

Even if you drive a petrol-engined car rather than a hybrid vehicle, you can still do your bit for the environment by using less fuel, a practice that will save you cash at the same time. You just need to pay more attention to the details…

Have a look at your tyres…
Did you know that a single tyre that is under-inflated by two pounds of pressure can increase your car’s fuel consumption by 1 percent? And you have four of them, so the tyres alone can increase your spending on fuel by 4 percent. So be sure to check your tyres’ air pressure at regular intervals – most garages have an air pressure gauge and pump you can use for free.

Make your car lose some weight…
This doesn’t mean you have to rid your car of panels, seats and your spare tyre, but you’re bound to be carrying around some unnecessary weight in your vehicle – we all do it. Take a quick look in your boot and remove anything that isn’t strictly necessary – for example, if you won’t get a chance to drop off those empty bottles at the recycling centre until the weekend, store them in your garage until then. And what about that roof box or bicycle rack which you haven’t used in a while? All these objects add more weight to your car and make it burn more fuel. For every 5kg of weight you get rid of, you can reduce the engine’s fuel consumption by an average of 0.1 percent, so give your car a spring clean-out today…

Keep an eye on your speedo…
Maintaining your speed on motorways is the best way to lower your car’s thirst for fuel. When you drive fast, more fuel is needed to combat the increasing air resistance. A good solution would be to keep a steady pace of 65mph (105km/h). If you decide to drive at the maximum speed of 75mph (120km/h), be aware that your fuel consumption will increase by 20 percent! Another point to consider is city driving. Speeding towards stop signs and traffic lights needlessly and then braking rapidly wastes fuel as well. By pressing the accelerator and brakes more frequently than necessary, you are using more petrol than you would if you drove at a steady pace.

Let your engine rest…
Turn your engine off when you are not on the move. Research shows that if you are stationary for more than 10 seconds, the car will actually burn less if you stop the engine and then restart it. So, if you are going to be sitting at a traffic light for a minute or two or you are going to wait for your passenger to arrive, you can save some fuel by turning your engine off, as an idling car can burn as much as 4 litres of fuel per hour.

Listen to traffic reports…
Pay closer attention to traffic reports on the radio before leaving your home or office, as these tips may enable you to choose a less congested route that will not only be more eco-friendly, but will also save you time and reduce stress.

Clean your car’s air filter…
The air filter prevents dirt from entering the engine of your car. Driving your vehicle with a dirty filter can reduce its fuel economy by 10 percent! Luckily, this problem can be easily avoided. The air filter is easy to clean, so you can do it yourself regularly, and it should also get cleaned each time you service the car. In time, the air filter will suffer wear and tear and need to be replaced, but this is a relatively small outlay.

Get fit…
And last but not least, you could walk or cycle instead of using your car, particularly if your destination is close by. As the weather improves as we come into summer, consider getting some fresh air while keeping fit, saving money and reducing your carbon footprint by avoiding unnecessary car journeys.

Here are 14 applications and groups for Facebook, a social networking website, which will easily help you to save our environment and climate. If you know about any others please let us know by making a comment.

Plant trees:
1. iChapters will plant one tree for every person that joins their Facebook page. Their goal is to plant 100,000 trees.
2. For every ten people who joins TreeNation’s group they’ll plant one tree.
3. Hotspex will plant one tree with your proverbial ‘name’ on it if you join their group.
4. If you add this application to your Facebook account Outreach International will plant one tree.
5. Earthkeepers Facebook application allows you to plant virtual trees and share seeds with your friends. Each tree grown to adulthood will be planted in the real world to fight deforestation, desertification, and drought.
6. For every 50 people who joins EcoTopia’s group they will plant one tree.
7. You can plant a sponsored tree for free, or buy a tree for $1, if you add PlantYourTree.com’s application to your Facebook account. Plant-trees.org’s application is similar and allows you to buy a tree for $1.

Reduce your carbon footprint:

8. With this application from Big Green Switch you can put yours and your Facebook friends’ eco-credentials to the test by issuing and completing challenges to reduce your carbon footprints.
9. The Climate Pledge application allows you to “pledge” any number of actions to reduce your contribution to global warming. Then you can invite your friends to do the same, and watch as your total reductions (your pledges, plus all of your recruits) add up.
10. With the MakeMeSustainable Facebook application you can see your impact on a larger scale by tracking both the actions you take to reduce your carbon footprint and your ability to mobilize your community and friends.

Other:

11. Help re-green Greensburg! This Facebook application will donate $1 towards replanting the trees in Greensburg if you add it to your account.
12. The We Campaign application lets you earn points from actions you take. For every 10 points you earn a donor will give $1 to help halt global warming.
13. For every 25 people that join this group £1 will be donated to help solve climate change through C&C.
14. Yatrips application makes it easy for you to share rides to the places you want and need to go with your friends and to make new friends, while directly helping to reduce climate change.

They say it’s hard to teach an old dog new tricks, and this is never so true as in the case of adults who find it hard to change habits and characteristics that have been formed over a lifetime. And this is why it’s imperative that we teach our children the importance of good habits right from childhood, when they’re at a more malleable age and tend to listen to adults. Saving the environment may not be child’s play, but it is a child’s place to get involved in the process.

There’s a pressing need today to increase awareness of the crisis called global warming that’s looming large and threatening the very existence of the earth. And there’s no better time than now to educate our kids on the harm we human beings are causing the environment with our indiscriminate and irresponsible use of energy and other resources. If your children understand today how important it is that we save the environment from ourselves, they will have learnt a valuable lesson for life. If not, there’s a serious chance that they may not have a world to leave behind for their children and future generations to come. Here’s how kids can contribute to saving the environment:

• Turn out the lights and other electrical appliances when they’re not in use. Energy not used is energy saved.
• Pick up litter and recycle stuff like paper and metal cans, bottles and cardboard. Recycling helps save on the amount of trash we send to landfills and also conserves natural resources like aluminum and trees.
• Use water sparingly and close the taps tightly so that there are no leaks.
• Ride a bike, take a bus, carpool or walk to school rather than get mom to drive them over.
• Plant trees with their parents or as an initiative at school. Trees are good for the environment because they create oxygen, prevent erosion of the soil, create homes for wildlife, save on air conditioning and heating costs depending on the season, and regulate climate change.
• Take part in neighborhood and school green programs.
• Get parents to buy and eat only organic food.
• Take a quick shower to conserve water.
• Use notebooks without wasting paper.
• Take a lunch box to school rather than a paper bag.
• Use green pencils that are made of wood certified by the Forest Stewardship Council.
• Go on green vacations to places near you.
• Eat food that is produced locally.
• Send emails rather than letters and cards that use up paper and fuel to get to their destination.
• Buy gadgets that are energy efficient and come with the Energy Star rating.
• Buy recyclable products that have the three-arrow-circle recyclable mark.

Getting kids involved in doing their bit towards the environment will go a long way in changing the way they live and in the choices they make.

This post was contributed by Heather Johnson, who writes on the subject of green shopping. She invites your feedback at heatherjohnson2323 at gmail dot com.

Image above is based on a photo by a4gpa.

The Flock browser is based and built on from Mozilla, the same engine that powers the popular browser Firefox. But even so the two web browsers are very much different. Flock’s slogan is “the social web browser.” And that is very much true. Flock is a browser for more social-minded people and bloggers, like me, who like to keep everything just a few mouse clicks away.

With the Flock browser you can stay connected with all your friends from the major social websites such as Digg, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr and Twitter, for example. You can easily share photos, links, text and videos with your friends. With its built-in blog editor you can post to your blog over at Blogger, Livejournal, Typepad, WordPress and many more. Flock also has an awesome RSS reader, which looks great if you got a larger monitor.

And with Flock’s eco-edition you can browse the web a little “greener.”

The Flock eco-edition is packed from the start with green blogs, green RSS-feeds, and news sites such as National Geographic, Treehugger, Ecorazzi, Green Yahoo! and many others.

If you decide to use the eco-edition 10% of all search engine-earnings generated by you and others who use the same edition will go towards an environmental charity.

“Flock believes in providing users who download the Flock Eco-Edition a means to give back by donating 10% of search proceeds to the environmental charity of choice, as deemed by the voting of the community of Flock’s Eco-Edition users at the end of this year. Flock makes money when people search through the browser. So the more you search via Flock Eco-Edition, the more we’re committing to give back.”

The eco-edition will also come with its own “green” skin. I personally don’t like this skin. And because somehow you can’t change to the more pleasant and default Flock browser skin I had to delete the eco-edition and download the default Flock browser. Of course I still kept all the green bookmarks and RSS-feeds.

The Flock eco-edition is a great browser if you can tolerate the “green” skin it comes with. It does misses a few good features that it’s “cousin” Firefox 3 has, but I guess that will be fixed when Flock 2 is released. I really recommend this browser to bloggers or people who often hang out at places such as Digg, Facebook, YouTube and Flickr. The browser is free to download and use. It works on Windows, Mac and Linux.

As you might have noticed by now, the summer has finally arrived for us here on Green Blog. That means the posting level will be low for another couple of days, until its starts to rain, of course. Instead of making just a dull and uninteresting post about our wonderful summer holiday I want to share with you two interesting emails we’ve received during the past days:

The first one comes from Jeff:

Let me begin by saying I love your blog. In today’s world, people don’t pay attention to the issues that really matter—the issues facing the future of our species and our home.

One of these issues is the emerging world water shortage. Our water is running out and it boggles my mind that more people aren’t concerned. It is going to very soon affect everyone in very big ways.

I decided to take action, so I created a presentation to explore the water issue and to get more people thinking. It is called THIRST. I thought you all at the green blog might be interested in checking it out. You can view it here: http://www.slideshare.net/jbrenman/thirst/

And no, it’s not just emails that love our blog that gets through our attention-filter!

The second email comes from Bryan:

My name is Bryan Migliorisi and I am writing to you today in hopes that you will help publicize on your blog a small social network with big potential.

The Staga Network is a site I created over the past year or so with the goal of helping people in nearby neighbourhoods. The idea is simple: You give away things you no longer use to people nearby.

By doing so, you can clear out the ‘clutter’ in your own home, you help someone who may be in need, and most importantly you help reduce unnecessary trash. Since the communities are based on your local neighbourhood, everything is free and there is no need to mail and ship anything (which also helps eliminate excess emissions).

http://www.staga.net

Also, don’t forget to welcome two of our new authors here on Green Blog: Christine Reed and Jennifer Kaplan. And don’t forget that you can talk with all of us over at our Green Forum, registration is free, simple, takes just a few seconds and you can even help us plant trees.

Do you like to take long, and especially hot, showers regularly? Besides making your skin dryer you will also waste money and water (30% of all home water consumption is in the shower) on those long hot showers.

But fear not! Technology in form of “high-tech” sandglass timers is here to help you.

When buying a shower timer you should look for a four minute timer. Don’t forget that the timer should also be waterproof!

But why four minutes and not just invest in a water-efficient showerhead and shower as much as you like? Because by using a brand new water-efficient showerhead for 15 minutes will still waste more water than a 4 minute shower under an old showerhead.

The sandglass timers from the image above come in six different waterproof designs and the price starts at $3 for the most basic one.

Changing Microsoft XP power scheme settings determines whether or not power-saving CPU features are activated in a machine when idle.

All modern desktop CPU’s past the AMD Athlon XP and the Intel Pentium 4 (ie. AMD A64 & Intel Core and upwards) have some kind of speed-stepping feature built into them, which is utilised via Windows XP’s power management settings as per Orthogonal Thought’s blog.

What does this mean? Well, basically, if we all switch our desktop computer’s power scheme to ‘Laptop/Portable’, our computers will drop the cpu voltage and frequency when idle (provided the motherboard supports it, and most do), saving 30w (on average) – it’s like switching to an energy-saver lightbulb, essentially – and has absolutely no performance impact when not running idle.

Learn more: Intel SpeedStep, Windows XP, and confusing Power Profiles