Our Second Blog Associate

This is Cathy Rust. She is a Social Media Consultant and a very green person. Her blog as the unusual handle of A Mom’s Guide To Green Building Materials. This makes sense because she is (I assume) a mom and she is also a LEEDS Certified consultant which means that she is the person you call when you want to start greening your house from structural point of view. Or if you want to build yourself a green house from the ground up.

Cathy’s blog is filled with all kinds of interesting stuff and she has agreed to let us pull articles from it that we think would be of interest to our visitors (that would be you).

So have a look at Cathy’s blog, it’s full of good green info. And frankly, you can never have enough good green info.

Cathy Rust
Social Media Consultant
B.Sc, MA, LEED AP
Blog Site: http://becgreen.ca

Things We Do At Home To Be Green – Part 2

Canada to Ban incandescent light bulbs by 2012

This is a continuation of the things that we have been doing and continue to do at our home/office to help the environment. These things are our small addition to the effort that we all need to take on if we are going to leave a livable planet for our grandchildren.

5. We have been using and continue to use ‘green’ cleaners including laundry soap, dishwashing soap, bathroom and toilet cleaner, floorwashing cleaner, etc. We have discovered that Vinegar is a great anti-bacterial cleaner instead of clorine bleach. We also use an orange peel cleaner as a great cleaner that will eliminate any strong odors – great for cat urine/puke, etc.

6. Turn off any un-used lights, TV’s, radios, PC Monitors, etc.

7. Replaced all of our convention light bulbs with twisted energy saving bulbs – saving at least 50% of the energy needed to light our home.

8. Reduce the number of plastic bags that we use but any we do use are re-used at  least twice but in many cases they are re-used more times before they are discarded. Included in this was being involved in a re-cycling process with a neighboring farm where we eliminated any new bags they needed to buy for their market and re-use the plastic bags all around their farm.

You can see even better solutions for the plastic bags issue in previous blog entries.

Click Here: to Find out how Canada plans to ban incandescent light bulbs by 2012

Things We Do At Home To Be Green – Part 1

http://mp.apogee.net/ image

There are a number of things that we can be doing at our homes to help the environment. We have been doing a lot of these for many years and just take it for granted that everyone else does the same.

1. Wash with Cold Water – We have used cold water for more than 20 years to wash our clothes. It means that our clothes are not brilliantly white but we decided that was something with which we could live.

2. Recycle anything that we can – bottles, cans, newspaper, boxes, food waste, etc. One of the things that annoys us is not being able to recycle Styrofoam.

3. Use a fireplace to heat and have the Furnace Thermostat in the same room as the Fireplace.  This keeps the furnace use down to ab absolute minimum.

4. Last year we had to place our furnace and we put in a very highly efficient new furnace. The old furnace was recycle for parts and its metal.

Tell us what things you have been doing to make your living more green.

Click here to read more about water conservation.