You don’t see these around every day! Very unusual but, yet, very festive! Solar powered grass will look great nestled in around your trees or along the walkway. Each set has three sprigs of grass which you can set to steady or blinking. Get thinking of all the places you can put these!
$19.99 at Amazon
Perfect to get you feeling all ‘merry and bright’. These solar powered LED Icicle lights will put out a good amount of light to brighten your path or doorstep.
$23.37 at Amazon
This rain barrel is collapsible making it easy to take with you wherever you go. It will hold 34 gallons of rain water to use in your home. A small spout on the bottom is compatible with a standard water hose. You can buy this barrel from greenhome.com for $74.
Although we love nature, some yard-invading parts of it are less welcome. This sonic deterrent for gophers, moles and other burrowing creatures does no harm, but irritates them and encourages them to move home. It’s powered by a built-in solar panel.
The deterrent costs $17.95 from SmartHome.
Next time you’re headed out into the wilds (or the park) on a picnic, why not take along a hamper that’s 100% compostable? Tree- and petroleum-free in manufacture, everything in these party sets can be recycled and spread on the garden.
Party set pieces start at $5.00 from Real Goods.
Not only are these clever little dryer balls designed to soften fabrics without the use of chemical-laden softeners, they also reduce drying time by up to 25%. They’ll even make ironing easier and reduce lint production.
A pack of 3 sets of boxes of 2 balls costs $48.00 Amazon
An ingenious idea, this loo-top sink saves water wastage by redirecting some of the liquid through a chrome gooseneck spigot. It’ll fit on most standard toilets and even has a soap-dish. Here is a link to a TreeHugger article on Toilet-Lid sinks that may be of interest as well.
The sink is available for $119.00 from Real Goods.
Pure distilled water is great, but most devices need electricity to produce it. This Non-Electric Water Distiller
Available for $369.00 from Amazon
Turn this recycling clutter into top of the line stylish recycle center
Mode™ Premium Home Recycling Center $299.95 from williams-sonoma.com
Perfect for the affluent neat-nick who needs to reduce clutter at any cost by home recycling in orderly and luxuriant style.
This Mode home recycle center has a built-in compactor to crush cans and plastic bottles to help save energy on reducing the frequency of walking to your outdoor recycle container or pickup. No electricity – just the power of the foot pedal – so you will need to expend some energy. The extra time you will spend neatly arranging your newspapers, magazines and junk mail to fit into the small area for paper will allow you opportunity to slow down from a busy, hectic day and perhaps reflect on why did you every buy this thing!
Yesterday the NYTimes had a great article on how American’s preference for using soft toilet tissue is terrible for the environment. The soft, fluffy toilet paper like Charmin can only be made from tree fiber and not recycled paper. Toilet paper made from recycled paper works fine and is used in many European countries. The NYT article quotes Dr. Allen Hershkowitz, a senior scientist with the Natural Resource Defense Council, saying “No forest of any kind should be used to make toilet paper”
Each year we use billions of rolls of toilet paper in the U.S. which means at least 15 million trees cut down,including some percentage of trees from rare old-growth forests. This also involves billions of gallons of water to produce the paper and hundreds of thousands of tons of chlorine for bleaching purposes. I’ve read that it takes approximately 13 gallons of water to make one roll of toilet paper.
Here is an eco-friendly shopper’s guide for home tissue products by the The Natural Resources Defense Council. On this chart it shows 365 (Whole Foods) brand currently you best green option with it’s 100% recycled paper with greater than 80% post-consumer content.
We should put pressure on tissue manufacturers to stop using virgin wood for toilet paper but in the mean time we can start by learning to adjust using more eco-friendly toilet tissue that is more important to be easier on the environment than our bums.
