Toasting the New Year

These days there is a green alternative for practically everything. You can even find an organic champagne to bring in the New Year. There are actually several eco-friendly champagne and wine choices.

• Organic Champagne offers a wide variety of wines, beer, liqueurs, and, of course, champagne. You can narrow your search further by choosing vegetarian, vegan, fair trade, and biodynamic.


• The Organic Wine Company sells eco-friendly products from certified organically grown wine grapes, including vegan and biodynamic.


• K & L Wine Merchants includes a selection of earth friendly champagnes. Use their search to look up biodynamic or vegetarian.

Raise your glasses to the new year in full green style!

Green Web Hosting

Yes, I skipped a day again. Christmas is a bad time to try to post daily, so many things to do and think about. I actually saw this ad on Facebook and followed the link, and was pretty impressed overall.

Sustainable Websites offers green web hosting at an affordable price, with a number of extra features. The site states that they offset 100% of their energy usage with certified wind power. Highlights of the $10/month Basic package include:

• 1 GB disk space


• 10 GB bandwidth per month


• Unlimited email accounts, subdomains/parked/addon domains, and MySQL databases


• Content management and advanced shopping cart software

And other useful things like search engine submit, chatrooms, and discussion boards. The Small Business and Professional packages are similar, just with larger disk space and bandwidth. If I ever get around to having a website ready to host, I'll definitely keep this company in mind.

Green Your Gift-Wrapping

Get creative with your gift wrapping this year to help save money and the planet. If you already save gift boxes and bags to reuse, that's great. Someday I'll be that organized. So, for the rest of us, here are some alternatives to buying more wrapping paper.

• Newspaper - Grab one (or more) Sunday newspapers and start wrapping. Try matching different sections to either the present or the person


• Any old boxes, and I mean any. Empty cereal boxes, checkbook boxes, juice pack boxes (like Capri Sun, Hawaiian Punch), baking soda, computer part boxes (sound/video cards, etc), whatever you have on hand


• T-shirts - especially cute for the inevitable socks and underwear gifts

Or anything else that occurs to you. Depending on how creative your wrapping gets, the packaging may end up being talked about more that the gift itself. But since the whole idea behind Christmas is exchanging gifts and spending time with loved ones, that's all right.

How Green is Your Computer?

If you're looking to upgrade or replace your computer and want to make sure to get an environmentally conscious one, or you're just curious about how your current pc rates on the green scale, take a look at GreenPeace's report on the 18 top producers of computers, mobile phones, TVs, and game consoles. Currently Nokia is on top due to their voluntary take-back program, and Nintendo is at the bottom. Greenpeace ranks the companies based on their policies regarding toxic chemicals, recycling, and climate change. Specifically, the group looks at how each company is working to eliminate hazardous substances in their products, taking back and recycling their products once they become obsolete, and reducing the climate impacts of their operations and products. The rankings are updated every 3 months, with the latest version published in late November.

Building Green - Modern Green Living Home Directory

All right, this post isn't exactly about saving money. Actually, for me it was more dreaming about the future. But I found so much interesting stuff I just had to share.

Moderngreenliving.com provides resources for designing, building, finding, remodeling, and furnishing a green home. You can search for green architects, contractors, realtors, and more. Or find a green apartment or condominium all over the US and Canada.

Or you can just do what I did for about an hour, browse the furnishings. There is so much cool stuff out there, and each product lists how they're green, like using recycled materials or responsibly harvested wood.

Sigh. This site just shows how beautiful green living can be.

Use Your Beauty Routine to Go Green

Oops! I didn't get a chance to post yesterday! This is the first chance I've had to be at my computer, so I'll double up today. My first post (technically yesterday's) has to do with saving money/going green with your daily bathroom routine by getting rid products you don't necessarily need to use. This means you won't need to buy them anymore, therefore eliminating packaging that would probably end up in landfills and, obviously, saving you money.

Try using your sunscreen as your moisturizer too. For normal skin, it should be sufficient. Combination skin may need a little moisturizer, but at least you won't be going through it as fast.

Unless your skin is very, very oily, you don't need astringent or toner. Cleansing and rinsing well is enough. If you feel you must use an astringent, pick up some cheap Witch Hazel and put a little on a cotton ball to wipe across your face.

Explore some other ideas too, like makeup that can be used on eyes and cheeks, and making your own scrubs.

Environment Games at ARKive

You want your children to care about the environment, but you don't want to bore them to tears with lectures. So how can you get them interested without it seeming like more work? Show them a fun website where they can play environment games, of course.

ARKive Education offers a nice selection of Flash games for kids ages 7-11. Keep sand lizards and ladybird spiders alive, or solve sliding puzzle pictures of various animals. Design a habitat for a ferret, or play a traditional word search game.

There's enough on the site to keep kids occupied for awhile, and they're likely to absorb enough information from the games to bombard you with "Did you know..." comments for some time after that. I know I'm looking forward to that with my youngest.

Calculate Energy Savings Easy and Fast

You've heard about adjusting your thermostat and switching to compact fluorescent bulbs to save money and reduce emissions, but do you know how much you can really save? Use EnergyGuide to find out. Just enter some basic general information (nothing personal like your name, address, etc) and get personalized recommendations on how to save in your home or business. The energy guide offers tips and solutions, as well as in-depth analysis on various appliances. You can also view available green energy providers in your area. Overall, a very useful and informative site. Take a look!

Join a Waste Brigade at Terracycle

Help reduce waste and earn some money at the same time by signing up for free with Terracycle. You collect the used items (listed below) and send them to Terracycle and get paid for each item you collect. They will even send you shipping materials for free.

Open Brigades

• Cookie Wrappers - pays $.02 per wrapper


• Drink Pouches - pays $.02 per pouch


• Energy Bar Wrapper - pays $.02 per wrapper


• Yogurt - pays $.02 per 6 oz. container, $.05 per 32 oz


• Bear Naked - pays $.02 per bag


• Toasted Chips - bulk collectors will have $.02 per bag donated to charity


• Wine Corks - no amount listed

Visit the Terracycle website to learn more about which particular products are eligible and other details. A little extra money is a nice incentive to help keep waste out of landfills!

Cheap Eco-Friendly Lip Balm

Making your own lip balm for winter lip protection is a fairly simple process. All you need are a few ingredients and supplies and some time. The ingredients can be found at grocery stores (like the olive oil and the vitamin E, honey, and chocolate chips), and craft stores (such as the beeswax and tin containers). And you get the added bonus of being able to use extra amounts for Christmas gift-giving.

Ingredients

• 4 oz extra virgin olive oil


• 3 oz beeswax


• Optional - 1/2 vitamin E capsule (preservative)


• Optional - 1 oz honey or 3-6 chocolate chips (flavoring)


• Optional - a little bit of lipstick for coloring


• Small tin containers

Directions
Melt oil and beeswax together in a double boiler, then remove from heat. Do not boil.
Add any optional ingredients, and cool to lukewarm, stirring occasionally.
Pour the lip balm into the tin containers.

Give your new lip balm a day or so to set before using. If you want to give it as a gift, make cute labels or tie with ribbons.

Green Green Green

It doesn't matter how you feel about global warming or the environment in general, making changes to be more green in order to save more green sounds like a good idea. So with this blog I hope to share ideas and tips once a day or so about stuff that helps the environment and saves time or money too. And I promise my posts won't be at 2:45 in the morning again.