Breakfast: good for you and the planet!

Many teens either skip breakfast or grab something starchy and sugary on the way to school. However, from a nutritional point of view, breakfast is the most important part of the day. The solution? A fast and easy breakfast smoothie. You can make your own with protein powder, yogurt and frozen berries, or try Vega smoothie mixes. They have protein for energy, plus all your vitamins and minerals to start the day right. Vega compared its Whole Food Optimizer to a “traditional North American breakfast” including hashbrowns, eggs and bacon, and a “light North American breakfast” including yogurt, cereal and banana. According to the Vega website, there are 38 times more greenhouse gas emissions created by traditional breakfast and 10 times more greenhouse gases created by the light breakfast compared to Vega. Thus, switching to Vega for a year would be equivalent to turning off a 60 watt light bulb for 12,500 hours, or 521 consecutive days (Source: http://sequelnaturals.com/).

Transportation

If no school bus is provided for your school, consider car-free ways of getting to and from class every day. Walk, bike, or create a “walking school bus”, where a group of children walk to school supervised by one or more adult. It’s safer in numbers, easy on the planet, good physical activity and simple for parents, who can take turns supervising. Visit http://www.walkingschoolbus.org/ for more details. If all else fails, carpool or take transit.

Waste-Free Lunch

• Use stainless steel water bottles instead of plastic disposable ones. As I’ve mentioned before, stainless steel is non-toxic, durable, easy to clean and does not rust. Green Bottle (http://www.greenbottleonline.com/) has plenty of fun designs kids will love to brag about to their classmates. They come in 12 oz, 20 oz and 25 oz sizes with a variety of lids including sport tops.
• Look for non-toxic, BPA free Tupperware such as Preserve. Some companies like By Nature and Bento Box Systems offer complete lunch sets for kids including cloth napkins, reusable bags and storage containers. Nubius Organics sells toxin-free reusable cutlery made from bamboo.

Clothes

For back to school clothing shopping, thrift stores are the way to go. Treasure hunting at second hand stores can be just as much fun as showing off the new fashions. It’s amazing to see how many designer labels and never-worn items there are. Plus, kids and teens love having unique pieces that’ll be the envy of all their friends.

For new clothes, even the biggest stores such as Roots Canada, H & M and The Gap are jumping on the organic cotton bandwagon for kids clothes. It’s never been easier to find eco-friendly clothing close to home and at reasonable prices. Just make sure the percentage of organic fibre is high—be wary of 10% organic cotton/90% polyester blends! Bamboo, hemp and soy are other great earth-friendly fabrics.

Supplies

• Before school starts, sort through supplies from the previous years and keep whatever possible. You’ll be saving money in the process.
• Refillable pens and pencils are a smart alternative to disposables. Or, if you prefer, Earthzone pencils are made out of 100% post consumer recycled newspapers—no wood used!
• Paints should be water, not oil based.
• From binders to notebooks, avoid PVC plastic, instead opting for cardboard and paper. In all your paper purchases, look for recycled and non-chlorine bleached options. Remember that unless it says “Post-consumer waste” it may be scrap paper that never left the factory. Try Ecojot Notebooks—they come in cute, stylish patterns and are 100%  post-consumer recycled. For printer paper, most big brand retailers offer recycled options as well. Along the same lines, reduce before you re-use—don’t print rough copies of assignments unless absolutely necessary.
• Backpacks should ideally be made from all-natural materials, such as durable hemp. Otherwise, check out PVC free options at http://www.nubiusorganics.com.

At-School Projects

Environmental class projects don’t have to be reserved for Earth day. There are tons of fun ways to encourage environmental activism to suggest to teachers and school staff. Younger children may enjoy taking nature walks, going on field trips to the recycling depot, and planting trees in the school yard. Students in older grades may wish to start a class vegetable garden and school compost project, or petition for organic options in their school cafeteria.

Apple recently released their new line of MacBook and MacBook Pro laptops, which are mainly made from aluminium. They say that they are their greenest latops ever and claims that they are “highly recyclable and even more energy efficient”, and that they are “designed with the environment in mind”.

But really, how green are the new laptops?

Greenpeace, who is running a hard and successful campaign for greener electronics, says that the new laptops are “not quite the breakthrough” they “were hoping for”:

“A check of the full specs revealed the MacBook Pro, MacBook and MacBook Air – as well as the LED Cinema Display will now have internal cables free of PVC and will have internal components containing no BFRs. Not quite the breakthrough we were hoping for. These new MacBooks are currently on a similar level of toxics reduction to the Sony Viao laptop series on PVC, and the Lenovo Think Vision in monitors. The BFR free internal components represent an improvement from the bar set by the Vaio line.”

Hank Green, over at EcoGeek, is a bit more negative saying the new laptops are “wasteful”:

“I’m glad to see Apple focusing on the efficiency of their computers, not to mention decreasing the amount of toxic materials they contain. But this new carved-brick process isn’t green, it’s wasteful, and I’m happy to be sticking with my good-ol’ plastic clunker.”

Jaymi Heimbuch, from TreeHugger, on the other hand is a bit more positive:

“It seems that this process allows the MacBook Pro to use 50% fewer parts. In the manufacturing stage, they start with a 2.5 pound piece of aluminum. The end structure is only 0.5 pounds (for the MacBook Air). That means that 2 pounds of aluminum is cut away.

Nevertheless, it looks like this process, despite flaws, has some real improvements for the notebook in the big picture of its lifetime and total footprint.”

Apple explains how green their MacBook and MacBook Pro are on their website.

The MacBook Air is Apple’s latest work of art. It’s slim and looks awesome. But what about the laptops green credentials then? Is it greener than the iMac?

Well, it seems that finally Steve Jobs is on the right path to a greener Apple. The new MacBook Air is completely free from mercury and arsenic. That means it exceeds the Standards (RoHS directive exemptions).

The new MacBook Air’s motherboard is, just like Sony and their Vaio notebooks, free from BFR and PVC. Unfortunately the MacBook Air isn’t entirely free from hazardous chemicals. It still contains PVC and BFRs, but less than other Mac computers.

So will this new MacBook Air make Apple gain a better spot in the Greenpeace Guide to Greener Electronics? Maybe they will, but Greenpeace still wants a “real global commitment to take back and recycling” saying they can “almost taste that Green Apple”, but “unfortunately it’s not ripe yet”.

So what about the energy consumption? As you know laptops are generally much better than the stationary (desktop) computers when it comes to power consumption. And the MacBook Air is no exception. The MacBook Air consumes about 7.4 watts and meets Energy Star 4.0 standards and attained a Silver EPEAT rating.

Last week Apple released their brand new iMac to the world. Like always its one heck of a design and the computer looks great.

But how green is this new iMac? After a massive campaign where Greenpeace and thousands of Apple users demanded Apple to become greener and the growing global warming threat this is one hot topic these days.

Steve Jobs have said that “recycling has been kept in mind from the ground up” in the making of the new iMac. Steve has also posted a green manifesto where he talks about how green Apple will become.

But what about the new iMac then!? Well, to be honest it’s not much to hang in the tree.

So far there has been no word about how the new iMacs EPEAT rating will be. On the brighter side the new iMac have no problems matching the standards of the EPA’s new, more strict, Energy Star guidelines.

The new iMac display is now made with glass and they have replaced the plastic front side with aluminium while they have kept the plastic on the back side. These new things are easier to recycle but they are energy intensive to create.

But there is still no word about a global take back program. And Apple still uses hazardous chemicals like PVC, BFRs, Lead and other heavy metals. Not even the screen is, that Steve promised in his green manifesto, using LED back-lit monitors (LED backlights mean brighter, whiter, longer-lasting and less power-hungry monitors).

Like Giona over at Making Waves said: “One of the pictures that Steve Jobs used in his last presentation showed how the new iMac looks much nicer than the one of their competitors. Next time I would like to see that they are really different, inside too“.