Natural and Sustainable

How long ago was the last time you checked your tires air pressure? Three months? Six months? Longer? With today’s high gas prices, that inefficiency can add up to significant money. At $3 a gallon for gas, a 25 mpg vehicle with neglected tire pressure will require an extra $60 of gas each year compared to a car with properly maintaned tires. The bottom lins is you have to start with a good tire gauge to maintain that pressure. Most digital gauges cost between $10 and $40, depending on the models’ specific features. Like a backlit screen, LED flashlight, and/or programmable memories that retain your car’s recommended front and rear tire pressure.

Here’s how to improve your car’s fuel economy:

Not everyone is in the market for a new vehicle. But that shouldn’t stop you from improving the fuel economy of the car or truck in your own driveway. Below are a few standard maintenance tips, and the precentage improvement they can house on your vehicle’s mpg.

• Replacing a dirty air filter-up to 10 precent.
• Getting an engine tuneup-average of 4 precent.
• Keeping tires inflated to the proper pressure-up to 3 precent.
• Using the recommended motor oil grade- up to 2 precent.
• Seek out low-resistance tires-up to 6 precent.

How to calculate your fuel economy:

1. Fill up your tank. But don’t top off-the extra gas more than likely will get sucked back into the station’s tanks anyway.Even if it doesn’t, the backfire vapors contribute to air pollution.

2. Reset your trip meter to zero. Now you’re on your own vehicles fuel economy clock.

3. Fill your tank when the time comes. In warmer months, you iwll get more gas for your money in the early morning or late evening, when the temperatures are cooler and gas is densest. Cooler conditions also mean less evaporative emissions from pumping gas, smog forms more easily when it’s hottest outside. In winter months, it’s a good idea to keep your tank at least half full for safety and to prevent freezing.

4. Write down the number of gallons it took to fill your tank and the number of miles on your trip meter. A receipt is an easy place to write these down; most already include the number of gallons you bought. Reset the trip meter before you restart the car.

5. Divide the trip miles by the gallons of gas. Bingo, that’s your fuel economy. For example: 293.1 miles divided by 8.374 gallons= 35 mpg

6. Keep a small notebook in you car or make a simple spreadsheet on your computer to track the numbers over time. There you could also records basic notes on mpg influences such as speed, tire pressure, driving conditions and use of air conditioning. If you see a dramatic drop from one tank to the next and don’t have an obvious explanation, your vehicle might need some maintenance. ( Source: Car and Driver 2007)

**Are you a Chris Daughtry fan, well he is the People’s Choice. Over at American Idol, Reed Dunn has the particulars on the rising star and his band Daughtry. Read about it here.**

*Natural and Sustainable Living Tip: Keep your shades down in the summer and up in the winter to help conserve energy. If you have thick shades leave them down in the winter to help hold in the heat if your windows are drafty. To help conserve even more energy, you might consider replacing your windows with Energy Star approved ones.

When the time comes to pick a rental-car company at the airport with traveling, you may make your choice one whichever company will save you the most moneu, but keep this in mind when making that choice next time you travel: More than 1.6 million rental cars emit carbon on the road each year. With that knowledge alone and gas prices steadily climbing, why not use this guide to make a more eco-friendly, fuel-efficient decision.

1. Enterprise: 3,999 Toyato Priuses and 41,000 vehiucles that run on E85, a fuel makde of 85 precent ethanol and 15 precent gasoline. $60 million pledged to plant 50 million trees over 50 years.

2. Hertz: 3,400 priuses and 35,000 other hybrids. $1 from each of those rentals goes to the National Park Founation to support environmental preservation and education.

3. Avis & Budget: 1,000 Priuses each in California, Portland, OR; Seatle and Washington, D.C.

If you will be taking a trip with children, give Echo Lake Science Center a try. They offer a hands-on learning environment and teach children everything from eco-friendly ways to help keep the earth safe for many more generations to come.

And Always keep in mind when traveling to leave a lighter footprint every time you travel. Check out Eco.Orbitz. This site offers everything from green hotels to a complete low-impact itinerary for a holiday in the jungles of Belize.

**Arkansas beat LSU 50-48 in triple overtime. Over at University of Arkansas blog here at 451 Press there is a link to the RSS feed to read the whole story. Get the whole scoop by clicking here.**

*Natural and Sustianable Living Tip: Find new uses for old things.

Ever wonder how your life changes can make a difference? Here’s some tips to give you the push in the right “earth-saving” state of mind:

• Once released into the environment, the spread of pesticides cannot be controlled. Radioactivity traced pesticides sprayed over the United Kingdom were detected five to seven days later in the southern part of the United States. So always use earth-friendly pesticides on your lawn and garden plants. And if at all possible, don’t use any at all.

• Wrap a package of energy-efficient fluorescent bulbs in recycled paper. Each new fluorescent light bulb reduces greenhouse gas emissions by about 1,300 pounds over its lifetime.

• The government won’t solve our problems of global warming it is up to us as individuals. If you feel guilt about driving so much in your gas-powered car, then everytime you fill up, put 20 cents into a box and at the end of the year donate that “cents” fund, which will be dollars by the end of the year if you start come January 2008, to a local charity.

• When you travel to a beach or resort located on the many hundereds of coast lines make sure that resort or lodge developed the coast in a sustainable way. If they don’t then stay elsewhere. Every person who takes a trip to the coast lines ends up putting great pressure on that coastal area.

• Calculate your carbon footprint. Reduce the footprint. Offset that footprint. And produce your one power whenever and however you can.

• If 100,000 households each installed an eight-foot diameter wind turbine, the cumlative annual CO2 reduction would be 900,00 tons.

• When you make a purchase, remove the package waste there at the counter after checking out. It may seem silly, but if enough people did this, then the stores would have to tell the manufacturers to cut back on package waste.

• When your fishing buddy calls, and you repond, don’t use mailorder wigglers. Anglers as well as home composters are responsible for for proliferation of nonnative species in just wigglers alone. If you travel to a national park or another country, be sure not to bring back anything with you as well. It is not only illegal, it is also harming the environment more than you think. (There is 60 billion metric tons of CO2 released annually by the world’s soil.)

• If one million U.S. airline passengers skipped one coast-to-coast flight, it could eliminate the emisson of one million tons of COs.

• Next time you stay at a hotel or resort, look around, if you can’t tell what country you are in or what continenet you are on, then you are at a place where there is zero unsustainable tourism. Talk to the hotel clerk and managers and let them know how you feel about sustainable traveling. If you are one in a thousand that does this, then the hotel must meet demand.

• If every U.S. home received and paid their bills online, annual greehouse gas emissions would drop by 2.1 million tons.

**Jennifer Hoffman over at the Milwaukee, WI blog has posted some great shots of the Veteran’s Day Parade that was held there in her city. To view these photos and to read more about what Jennifer writes about for Veteran’s Day, click here.**

*Natural and Sustainable Living Tip: Go toxin-free in your own home. Start with the cleaners you use on your shower and toilet. What are they? If they hurt your nose when using them, then why flush those down the drain and toilet and then eventually into our waterways?

FUEL EFFICIENCY: It’s as simple as driving a more fuel-efficient car. Chevrolet currently offers eight 2007 and 2008 models that get an EPA of 30 MPG highway miles. Some models offer the best V8 fuel economy and have a better standard highway fuel economy than some other brands out on the market. It’s all due to new technology and this technology is helping achieve greater fuel economy in most vehicles no matter what the brand.

E85 ETHANOL: For the last seven years, Chevy has been producing vehicles capable of running on a fuel that growns from the earth. The fuel is called E85 ethanol ( 85% ethanol and 15% gasoline). It is the renewable fuel source made from U.S. grown biomaterial. what falls under U.S.-grown biomaterial is corn, and other grain products. It will help us decrease our dependence on petroleum and it burns more clearer than gasoline as well. It has a higher octane rating over gasoline as well. Chevy has over 1.5 millionm E85 FlexFuel vehicles on the road presently.

HYBRID: This fall, Chevy is bringing to the table the Tahoe Hybrid. This hybrid will provide the power of a regular gas-only SUV, but what it will do a step more is control gas-loss and fuel waste. It will also be 25% more fuel-efficient as well. The Malibu® Hybrid will also be added to the line of Chevy cars the end of the fall season.

FUEL CELL: Chevy is bringing to their car line up a test-fleet of 100 hydrogen-powered fuel Equinox® SUVS coming to New York City, Washington, D.C. and Los Angeles in a program called “Project Driveway”. Hydrogen fuel cells use zero gasoline and produce no emissions and it will also help reduce our dependence on petroleum.

ELECTRIC: The Chevy Volt® has a revolutionary GM® E-Flex Propulsion Systen. It is different than any other electric vehicle, because it will use a High-Energy Battery and range-extending onboard pwoer source that can run on gas, or biodiesel to recharge the battery while driving. Also the electric car no matter what the brand helps toward the ultimate goal in reducing our dependence on pretroleum and produce zero emissions.

**There are a lot of fun and cool things to do in Sacramento, California on Veteran’s Day. Read Jennifer Springers suggestions for Sacramento, CA here.**

*Natural and Sustainable Living Tip: Babies go through about 2,500 diapers before they’re potty-trained; cloth diapers washed at home cost $0.03 per use, while disposables costs about $0.22 each. Disposable diapers produce at least 70 times more waste than cloth diapers, and Americans trash 18 bil diapers each year. To help reduce this waste, the only other option is cloth. Cloth diapers have come along way since the 50’s and 60’s and some cool brands to try are: Under The Nile velcro diapers, G-diapers starter kits, and Seventh Generations chlorine-free diapers.

Here are simple wasy to celebrate the season in a more sustainable way.

You wake up on January 1st with piles of crumpled wrapping paper, tissue paper everywhere in every color imaginable and gift bags laying all around filled with gifts of uselessness that you may only use once or twice before it ends up in a yardsale or donation box the following year. Not only the gifts lay about but also mounds of leftovers. All of this means, mind-boggling amounts of waste.

Americans toss away an extra 2 billion pounds of garbage weekly between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day. From an environmental prespective, consumption, wheather of matiureal goods or energy, poses the greatest threat of anything we do on the environment.

Being environmentally conscious also reduces your holiday stress. Cutting back on the overdoing and overspending helps keep your immune system strong and winter-cold-resistance. It also brings more personal value to a celebration. Environment consciousness as taking a step back and focusing on the season. You have all your friends and family around, so take advantage of that and spend time with people rather than focusing on gift giving. Do yourself and the earth a favor: Before you decorate your home, wrap your gifts, and set out your buffet, consider these paths to a happier holiday.

• Decorate Your Tree With Sustainability: Every year, roughly 35 million Christmas trees are cut down and sold, serving a major source of holiday waste. First of all, don’t feel guilty about buying a tree. Trees are grown as a sustainable crop. In fact, 1 acre of Christmas trees produces enough oxygen to support 18 people, and provides habitiats for birds and wildlife. Buying an artifical-tree isn’t a better choice, since most faux foliage is made from earth-toxic PVC. The very best thing you can do is buy a live tree, with a root-ball, not a cut one. Live tress can be found at most nurseries and some tree lots. When the season ends you can plant it in your yard or a park. Whether you go cut or live be sure and always recycle your trees. Being a live one to your garden or a cut one to a local tree recycler. To find one in your own area go to Earth 911 or call you city’s public works department.

• Decorate With The Earth In Mind: Decorating for the holidays is a way to show personal expression, yet so many people fall back on petroleum-based products like tinsel, and plastic lawn ornaments. People not only use these products they also use the old fashion lights that blaze forth waste. We waste 40 precent more energy during the holidays than during the rest of the year by burning lights and doing extra driving.

Look for energy-eicient LED (light-emitting diode) bulbs, which burn just as brightly as regular tree lights by use 5 precent of the energy and last up to 100 precent longer.

Rather than filling the house with store-purchased decorations, which typically are mass-produced, easily broken and destined for landfills, make your decorations personal or biodegradeable such as winter squash and pomegrantes accented with fragrant cinnamon sticks and nutmeg into wreaths and centerpieces. Or buy a biodegradeable wreath made from birdseed for your front door. Let meaningful souvenirs and phtographs take the place of glass and aluminum ornaments on your tree as well.

• Put Some Sustainability Thought Into Gift Giving: Most of the precents you buy in December will be discarded by January. Skipping gifts altogether ay beem Scrooge’ish, but some meaningfullness can be put into the gift other than something “throw away”. First, don’t shop the mall on the day after Thanksgiving, which is the busiest shopping day of the year, by observing Internation Buy Nothig Day. Then consider ways to avoid the shopping ills while coming up with ideas for gifts that mioght actually be appreciated. Handmade gifts are the ones more cherished.

Back in the earlier gift-giving days, manufactured goods become more and more available to the masses, the idea of a store-bought gifts gained ascendant, but that era is now coming full circle. For many, a return to handmade gifts has put the fun back into the holidays. People use and keep nomemade gifts because there’s a memory associated with them. As an alternative, gifts of service such as: Car washing, dog walking, foot massaging, have no environmental impact and plenty of personal significance.

Rather than asking friends and family members wha they want, ask them what they want to do. We often give tickets to shows or concerts, it has a certain intimacy.

•Wrap It Up Earth-Friendly Ways: If you take the time to come up with personalized gifts, it’s a shame to not use better wrapping paper to wrap it up with, pasticularly when you are trying to think more green. The paper industry has one of the largest ecological footprints in the world. Using recycled paper is very, very important to do during the holidays. You not only reduce forestry waste, you also reduce water, energy and global warming impacts.

Americans waste more paper during the holidays during any other time. Christmas card waste could be cut back by a 10 precent reduction in the already 750 million greeting cards sent anually. This cut back could save 30,000 trees. And if every household in America reused just 2 feet of ribbon this year, the result would be 38,000 miles saved could be used to tie a ribbon around the Earth. Try to reuse and create your own wrapping paper by using old magazines or newspaper.

**If you need to catch up on what’s happening on Law and Order Criminal Intent, why not read all about the latest on the show over at Crime Drama TV here at 451 Press. Read the latest on L&O Criminal Intent by clicking here.**

*Natural and Sustainable Living Tip: Always recycle your old print cartridges. HP has an offer for a prepaid envelope to use when you purchase new cartridges to send back to the company your old cartridges for recycling.

“Winter Wellness Guide” 11 through 15 of 20

11. Have A Bowl Of Qi Soup: A thousand years ago, the Chinese started their tradition of eating a festive soup on the eighth day of the last lunar month (known as la ba) to bring about winter wellness. They beleive that winter is the time for the body to store nutrients and that eating well will bring improved health for the upcoming year, La Ba Rice Soup usually includes rice, red beans, soybeans, peanuts, walnuts, chestnuts, red dates, or lotus seeds. In chinese medical theory, these ingredients are potent anti-aging foods. Red dates, chestnuts, and lotus seeds tonify qi, the vital energy of the human body. To make the soup:
1. Choose any combination of the ingredients mentioned above.
2. Place two-thirds rice and one-third nuts, beans, dates, and/or seeds in a saucepan.
3. Add enough water to cover all the ingredients, then soak overnight. Bring the mixture to a boil and simmer until the beans and rice are very soft. Take one small bowl a day.

12. Save Your Skin: When the weather cools, we turn on our heaters, drying out the air and consequently our skin. Change to a mild cleanser, like Cetaphil, Aveeno, or just a natural glycerin soap, and use it only on those areas that require washing: generally just the folds in the skin, or where skin touches skin. After washing, be sure and moisturize those areas that are prone to dryness-lower legs, hands, and forearms, and upper back-with cream-based moisturizers; the lotion based moisturizers, tend to dry the skin rather than emilliate them. These basic steps can prevent developing dry, cracked, itchy skin later.

13. Spruce Up Your Shower: After your done washing, turn off the water and put seven to 10 drops of black spruce oil in your hands. Black spruce oil is anti-bacterial and anti-infectious, and it supports the adrenal glands, which suffer when we get tired from the winter weather and lack of light. Spread the oil all over your skin from head to toe, except the mucous membrans. Always make sure to rub the oil on your abdomen, since there’s a lot of lymphatic tissue in that area. Then do 30 seconds of deep breathing and rinse off with cool water. When people follow this regimen every morning in the witner, it’s extremely rare that they get sick in any way.

14. Say “Good Day Sunshine!”: Start the day with a sunshine ritual. Get yourself a set of flatware that is bright. Like ones with yellow handles, bright yellow bowls, plates, cups and a matching teapot. Make a pot of warming ginger tea and have a steaming cup with your yellow bowl of cereal and bananas. If you rise before it’s light out and it’s dark, try eating by candlelight. Play music in the morning with a sunshine theme, like “Here Comes the Sun” by the Beatles. The feel is similar to that at the time of the winter solstice. Bringing light from the darkness, and warmth and positive energy as well.

15. Brighten Up: If you live in a climate that gets very gray in winter, without a lot of sunlight, create a feeling of sunlight in what you wear. The first piece of clothing you reach for in the monring, whether it’s a cozy robe or your running gear, it should be in a vibrant color like orange. It will embrace you in warmth and raise your energy level.

*Natural and Sustainable Living Tip: Support your local economy and cut fossil-fuel consumption by keeping your shopping and errand trips local. If you have to drive a ways to purchase something or to pick something up several times a week, try grouping all of those trips into one. If you drive a great distance to work, take up carpooling and cut fossil-fuel waste by half.

Before you add essentials to your medicine cabinet, you may have to make room for them. Here’s what to save and what to purge.

1. Honor the expiration date: Never buy anything without an expiration date or that doesn’t list the active ingredients. When an item’s time is up, toss it. Throw out natural products within six months of opening them. Keep oils like vitamion E and fish oil supplements in the refrigerator so they won’t turn rancid.

2. Know your sources: Alternative remedies don’t have a federal agency over-seeing quality control, so buy from reputable suppliers. Ask your integrative physician, homepath, or naturopath to suggest specific items. Try Willner Chemists and Whole Foods for their reliable brands. Product reports are available at Consumer labs.

3. Use a toxic waste service: To keep chemicals from getting into the water supply, dispose of expired medicines as you would toxic or medical waste. Many towns now have facilities that do just that. Or ask your pharmacist or doctor to dispose of meicines for you or to recommend services that will. Most natural medicines can safely go in the regular trash disposal system.

*Natural and Sustainable Living Tip: Want to get in on the Biodiesel craze? Then your next car purchase (if your current car isn’t biodiesel) should be one of these biodiesel-ready french-fry grease happy vehicles.
• MERCEDES E320 CDI
•VW NEW BEETLE
•VW JETTA
•VW JETTA WAGON
•VW GOLF TDI
•LIBERTY JEEP 2.8 TURBO DIESEL

Read more here!

Need A Lift?

There is a new craze sweeping across the San Fransico Bay area and many other areas, it’s called CarShare. What is it?

City CarShare is a Bay Area nonprofit on a mission to provide convenient, affordable access to cars so that we can reduce individual car ownership—and improve the environment and quality of life in our cities.

They continually strive to make their service so convenient, so reliable, and so affordable that people will prefer using their cars to owning their own. In doing so, their members are helping to reduce traffic, parking problems, and dependence on oil—while promoting cleaner air, quieter streets, and more open space.

In 2001 a group of Bay Area transportation activists launched City CarShare with the help of several local nonprofits and the cities of San Francisco, Oakland, and Berkeley. They have enjoyed strong community support from the beginning and have partnered successfully with local transportation agencies and other community groups. In 2006, the for-profit companies Zipcar and Flexcar entered the market, validating City CarShare’s success.

They are a nonprofit because they feel that is the best way to provide great service to their members for the long-term, while staying focused on our mission. City CarShare remains dedicated to socially responsible car sharing and, true to their purpose and mission, continues to work with community, government and private companies to support the growth and expansion of car sharing.

Best of all, they also have the support of the many thousands of members—a group that is growing fast!

How it works is:

Want to be a part of the mission? Join them, support them or read their guide to starting up car sharing in your community:
• long version (PDF format)
• Short version (PDF format)

(Source: City CarShare.org)

*Natural and Sustainable Living Tip: Tupperware® has been in people’s kitchens since the beginning of time. Okay, well maybe not that long, but Tupperware® and other plastics have been around for over 70 years and it’s time to say BYE BYE. Plastic storage containers are one way to store leftovers that is a no-brainer, but is it the smartest move? In a recent study there were foods left in plastics, one being a Tupperware bowl and contaiminates from the plastic leached into the food itself. PVC (look for #3 inside the recycle symbol on the container) and polystyrene (#6), contain hormone disruptors and other nasty chemicals. This is true for many plastics we use for food and beverage storage on an everyday basis, such as baby bottles. The more you know about plastics the more you can learn about how harmful they are for food storage. The better option is glassware or ceramic because ceramic and glass go from fridge to microwave and back again without leaching toxins. And you should never microwave plastics.

The Evolution™ Series locomotive is a grand machine that is dramatically cleaner than previous GE locomotives and more fuel efficient than anything in its class. It’s what happens when you let your ecomagination run wild.

Proving it’s possible to save both money and the environment.
The Evolution locomotive is the most technologically advanced, fuel-efficient and environmentally compatible diesel locomotive in history. Its 12-cylinder engine produces the same horsepower as its 16-cylinder predecessor—and it does so using less fuel and producing fewer emissions than prior models. This new generation of locomotive proves it is possible to reduce locomotive life cycle costs while meeting U.S. EPA Tier 2 emissions requirements. (more…)