Thread: Green Practices - What do you do?

Here are some of the things we do:

Plant trees
Slowly take out lawn in our rentals and replace with droubt resistant plants and edibles.
Replace lightbulbs in rentals w/ the "green" ones.
Use as much reclaimed material as possible in new construction and remodeling

How else can landlords and business owners go green?

This YAWN thing is cracking me up! As if I was not boring enough already, with the 'accountant' title…

A few things that we do…..

• Replace appliances with energystar (business & personal)
• Lightbulbs (business & personal)
• No more bottled water in the house. The amount of plastics we were putting out to the curb each week started to drive me insane. Got a good filtration system instead
• No plastic bags – I carry a few canvas bags and a basket, in my car. Once you get in the habit, it becomes 2nd nature. I also got myself out of the habit of using the plastic produce bags at the grocery store. This stuff has been on the back of a truck (and god knows where else) up until this point. One more ride down the checkout conveyor is not going to kill me. I will clean it when I get home.
• Frequent road-side produce stands
• Buy locally – this was a tough one for me, as I am an online shopping junkie. Once I stopped to think about how much packaging, shipping, etc. was going into each delivery, it started to make me nuts. I now try to find as much as possible in my own hood.
• Drive less – tough to do here in FL but I do try to plan my day so that I am not making multiple trips to the same areas. Looking forward to getting back to the city, where I can park the car completely except for periodic visits to grandma
• I opt-in for the Sunshine Energy program with the local power company. It costs a bit more but it helps fund renewable energy (sun/wind) resources in our area.
• Lawn - I never had a lawn before moving to FL (not on that I was responsible for anyway). I was lucky to meet someone at the nursery who told me that my life would be much easier, if I selected plants/grasses which grew naturally here - as opposed to trying to force plants which were not natural to this climate with tons of water and fertilizer. Made perfect sense to me.... the less time I spend on lawn work, the better!

I would really like to learn more about solar panels for this FL house. Would have to think I could soak up some serious rays down here. I know next to nothing about how it works though......on the list.

• Totally organic gardening and landscaping
• Compost every bit of packing materials possible (cardboard, in particular) and food scraps as possible
• Energy efficient lightbulbs, but we're still clearly doing SOMETHING wrong as monthly elec/gas are still running $800ish.

- belong to my local CSA (still get some fruits and veggies at the grocery store!)
- moving to green web hosting plan
- all recycled or biodegradable packaging for biz (cornstarch peanuts, etc)
- bring my own bags to grocery store
- no plastics in our kitchen (except those that are part of the appliances or part of lids)
- stainless steel water bottles for kids'
- stainless steel containers and reusable sandwich wrap for kids' lunch (no baggies!)
- wax paper bags for freezer or taking sliced watermelon to school
- buy water in my own re-fillable glass bottles
- no lawn (but we live n the desert!)
- light bulbs, but I did break one once and I am concerned about the mercury content
- fairly fuel efficient cars (but I still want a Prius!)
- eco friendly cleaning products
- organic/local food as much as possible
- most importantly I think we are raising our children to be conscious about this...

Hey, this makes me feel good, but we still have an obscene amount of recycling for the truck every week!

My biggest challenge right now is the massive amount of food packaging we are left with. ug. We are trying to raise as much of our own food as possible - - -

Organic Garden
Chickens (eggs and meat)
Rabbits, Turkeys and Hunting also provide meat.
We can a ton of fruits in the autumn - - - so the packaging there is recycled.
Buy Bulk
Use plarn bags for grocery shopping
And.... recycle what we can.

But it still seems like we produce so much packaging garbage.

Any other suggestions?

See if there's a way to recycle all that packaging garbage; remember the saying of garbage entrepreneurs, "Trash is cash." Then people could use highly-packaged products without worrying about polluting or anything.

My job is a "green" job. Its my job to make sure the water we discharge back to the river is safe. The better I am at my job, the better the river is. We currently discharge cleaner water then we get. That gives me job satisfaction.

At home I'll freely admit that I'm bad about recycling. Not to debate anything, but the energy costs to recycle are actually counter productive unless your recycling plant uses renewable energy.

I have switched my light bulbs at my apartment to florescent bulbs. I know they'll be used long after I leave and I won't see the full saving benefits, but it does save coal usage by a bunch. I also turn off lights when I leave a room.

Think about this one florescent bulb can save over 500lbs of CO2 emissions through the life of the bulb. Just think about items that way 500lbs to compare. Your cast iron tub, a small engine block, 3 full size couches. etc etc.

I can't wait to get into my own house so I can use energy a efficient dryer. Did you know that 1/4 of your electric bill can come from your dryer alone. To help out there, make sure your dryer ducts are clean and efficient and clean out your lint trap every time. Run your dryer for the minimum time, do not set at 90 mins and walk away. If they are mostly dry (you know that kinda damp but not wet feeling when they haven't fully dried), air drying the rest of the way works too. If you can dry cloths on tumble dry that will help as well.

At my coal plant we use 100 train cars of coal every three days. Each car holds 100 ton of coal. Thats 10 million pounds of coal every 3 days. Thats just one coal plant. There is 3 coal plants in Denver alone. To me its worth trying to save 500lbs here and there. Enough people do it, its amazing the effect.

Subscribe to all automated services online. No bank statements, bills, etc... All electronic. Except for magazines; I can't bring myself to read the digital subscription. It puts TU down the drain...no pun.

Gardening.