Freewebs Sunny Cooker has an interesting article on how to go about making a sun powered oven-cooker for basically free, essentially just using cardboard, aluminum foil and a patient knack for following detailed instructions. This would be perfect for adventurous epicurean green cooks, homeless people, frugal types and maybe freegans cooking up a yummy pot of fresh dumpster diving treasures.

Price: $435.00 at the Living Echo.com Other designs and colors available
This gorgeous wall-art fixture from Fire and Water features dimmable compact fluorescent bulbs which when turned down increases the energy savings of the CFL as well as setting the right light for your mood. The shade is made from Environ ( a soy flour and recycled paper mixture) and recycled glass the base is also treated with low-VOC finish.
They have 2 other versions, just as exciting as the one shown here. The size of the one we show here is 4″ Long x 12″ Wide x 9″ High

Think Chair designed by Glen Oliver Low for Steelcase $769.00 (varies options and pricing)
from Unica home.com

If you want the absolute best Green office/work chair then consider not buying anything and just go to the thrift store or fix up an older chair. They won’t result in any new pollution from manufacture, probably won’t off-gas any toxic crap and will keep one more thing out of the landfill a little while longer. The more people get serious about reusing stuff the better. However, you might be in the position to want your business and/or persona to put out a more “professional, stylish, successful and contemporary” aura as well as being a comfy chair that is also eco-friendly. If so, then you might want to consider the “Think” chair by Steelcase.

An ergonomically design-based chair that is also has some serious green cred. This “Think” chair has up to 37% recycled content and is 99% recyclable. Weighs 32 pounds which saves energy in shipping and the energy used in manufacturing this chair is reported to be much less than as similar chairs. Also the chair is shipped fully assembled to reduce packaging and they manufacture these chairs closer to their markets in Europe and North America to reduce shipping and energy use. While this chair is designed to make recycling simple, I doubt you’ll need to anytime soon due to it being built exceptionally well and generally cool and comfortable chair to keep around. The chair has won varies certifications, labels and declarations on its green design, see Steelcase’s website for more info.

Recycled 45 rpm Clock $30.00 at gigglefishgifts.com

Even if your Dad isn’t old enough to get nostalgic over sock hops or rhapsodic with Elvis singles he can appreciate the trend to give new life to old.
These clocks are available in a variety of rock and soul titles, made by Vinylux who have recycled about 200,000 records in a variety of forms including coasters, bowls, ornaments and more. This record clock is made with laser–cut out numbers, aluminum hands, acrylic stand, requires AA battery.

Recycled Rubber Mulch Mat - 3 ft x 20 ft $229.99 at Conservastore.com

A great way to save water for your garden and yard as well as help eliminate weed growth is to try this recycled rubber mulch pad. It is an inch thick and can be cut with a utility knife. It should last up to five years with ordinary use. The roll weighs 180 lbs so shipping costs may be a consideration. If you order 3 or more they will give you a break of some sort. From the photo on their website, it has a naturalistic brownish coloration that shouldn’t be too jarring in the garden, but personally - unless I had a huge space in my yard or garden that I wanted to cover, I wouldn’t bother with it as I prefer the look of a natural mulch. But it would make sense for many other situations where you didn’t want to conserve water and eliminate weeds.

Need lumber for a pet project? Aren’t into the nasty selections at Home Depot - chemically treated woods from unsustainable clear cuts? A thought provoking article can be found here on Verdant.net about all the in’s and outs of obtaining free building materials. Make your projects green by recycling old growth lumber thrown away by clueless contractors. Here is a link at the California Construction and Demolition Debris Recycling site to more great info on recycling lumber, while it specifically relates to California, much of it is relevant to most anywhere.

CAN-RAM Aluminum Can Crusher $17.50 from Conserv-a-Store

Yesterday I looked at the BigBelly trash compactor bin, here is another trash crushing device, the CAN-RAN, this time its priced for average people serious about their recycling and not just crushing beer cans in their hands to impress onlookers with how high their testosterone levels are.

You could use it to save space in your recycling bin by crushing used cans to a third of their normal size. If you are industrious you could bring the volumes of crushed cans to your handy aluminum scrap facility and they will reward in silver coin. Being green doesn’t stop you from being mean, so you could use it to piss off homeless people rooting through your bin for cans on recycle pick up days.

Seriously though, this could be handy for the family who uses way more aluminum cans than is good for them.

Enhance your USB WiFi with cheap Chinese cookware

Tired of excessive consumerism? Some people are sick of buying expensive computer hardware when more simple solutions can suffice? Here is a link from a New Zealand site that shows some ingenious ways people have found to make and dramatically enhance a Poor Man’s WiFi. Here is a link that clearly explains what you need to do to make one of these (shown above) I have a pretty fast connection already and I don’t work from a coffee shop so I haven’t tried this myself but I like the funky angle of this and I am happy people are finding ways to make computing more affordable and accessible. Just make sure you aren’t using any trans fats!

Hurricane CD clock from recyclingcds.com £5.99 or $11.63 US Many more amazing styles of CD clocks and be found here.

Have you a million old CDs of old software, work projects, aol disks, junk mail CDs, realtor CDs, CDs with god know what is on it? What can you do with the DVDs and CDs when you finally tackle this hidden pile of junk? You can’t just dump them all in the trash where they will last for hundreds of years slowly leeching nasty chemicals and you aren’t able to put them in with your usual recycling. So what to do?

You may not be aware but for a fee CDs and DVDs can be recycled for continued use as a CD or DVD through such places as Green Disc.com who will recycle and or reuse your computer related waste for a fee. They seem to specialize in recycling all forms of electronic media and their cases: diskettes, zip disks, CDs, DVDs, video tape, game cartridges, DAT, and virtually all other type of computer tapes. Further information can be found here.

Creative and industrious types will find wonderful new lives for their cds as lamps such as this awesome CD Lamp made by Chad shown here. Here is a site that shows exactly how to make similar CD lamps.
Here is another link that discusses a variety of ways you can reuse your CDs in creative ways - some even practical enough to actually do!

Back in 2004 a California lawmaker introduced a bill that would require companies like AOL to include a self-addressed envelope with the CD so if you didn’t want it you could just mail it back - seems like a great idea to me! Here is a c|net link to an article about this.

A complaint occasionally heard about wind turbines is that they produce low-frequency sounds that are disturbing to some people. According to an ariticle in The British Wind Energy Association this is just a myth, but what if you like the sounds that wind can make? An amazing range of artistry and invention exists in the world of wind music making. There is often an eerie quality to the sound, reminiscent of science fiction movies. I like to imagine these wind sounds are the music from the earth gaia herself.

The Plastorgan shown in the above photo fascinates me the most because it’s free, keeps some plastic bottles out of the landfill, encourages people to unleash hidden talent, and makes for more interesting neighborhoods. All you need to do is make one slit of a certain size in the side of a plastic bottle, paint it with a cool design, put the cap on the bottle and glue or somehow fasten the cap to a bamboo pole and stick the pole in your garden or yard - the more the better, with all different sizes of bottles and slits to create a wide range of tones and timbres. Check out the sound of the above grouping here. You can see more samples and info on how to build your own plastic bottle wind organ as well as other kinds of wind organs and harps here. Here is another link in which a few people share their experiences with these plastic wind organs.

If you want something a bit more sophisticated than plastic bottles then your options are wide open. There are many resources available from extremely expensive wind sound sculpture to affordable garden wind harps.

One site, mohicanwindharps.com offers a number of reasonably priced contemporary wind harps as well as the traditional Aeolian Harp, one of the oldest known musical instruments made by the ancient Greeks. You can listen to the sound one of these harps makes here.
more links on wind harps here.
appalachian heritage alliance.org
soundscapes international.com