Green Daily

Earthsaver hangers are made from a bioplastic sourced from 100% corn. They are 100% compostable and are made in the USA. According to Sustainable Is Good, Wal-Mart is carrying the hangers for $3.50 for a set of five, considerably more than your average pack of plastic hangers, which you can often see for a dollar or so. However, their design is supposed to be "heavy shirt" friendly, so the added eco-friendliness is not the only benefit.

There is some doubt about the ability of these hangers to be recycled, according to Gary Barker of Greenheart Global via Apartment Therapy. Also, if they do end up in a landfill, according to Baker, they will last just as long as a conventional plastic, over 1,000 years before degrading.

As we all try to sort out the pros and cons of bioplastics, maybe the most important thing to do right now is to buy hangers of high quality that you will use for as long as possible, regardless of their material source.

Looking for the perfect holiday gift for a nature lover? Here's an idea: adopt them their very own olive tree. Nudo is an olive grove in Italy that farms in earth friendly sustainable ways (not in the soil-eroding highly mechanised methods used by many large farms) and you can have your own little tree in their grove. For £65 you get a one year adoption which includes: an adoption certificate and booklet about your tree, a Spring Package of all the extra virgin olive oil your tree produced, and an Autumn package of lemon olive oil and handmade soaps.

You can even pick out your exact tree if you want, and they encourage people to come visit the grove to see how it works and give their tree a hug.

For those of you who take pride in having hundreds (or thousands, or millions) of connections on Facebook, MySpace, or wherever, but wish your "friends" spent more time tackling the tough issues, this is your lucky day. The new social networking site Zelixy is based on a similar model to it's popular predecessors, except in addition to making friends, users are focused on the environment.

With a mantra of "1. Change yourself. 2. Change others. 3. Change our world," the site is hoping to interest your greener side with news, contests, education, and lots of user-submitted video content ala YouTube, or the new Current.com.

Navigation is a little clunky, and it's not the most atheistically pleasing site I've ever stumbled across, but, assuming it takes off, the site might be a cool way to keep in touch with fellow greenies from around the globe. Check out my new profile here.

[via Plenty]

Bioplastics, plastics made from corn, sugar cane, potatoes and other plants, are an alternative to conventional petroleum-based plastics, but environmentalists are cautious in their support, according to a recent AP article by Mark Jewell.

The manufacturing process of bioplastics produces carbon dioxide and their source materials require water and land to grow. Bioplastics are also about three times more expensive than conventional plastics. Bioplastics' benefits include being biodegradable, lacking toxins like polyvinyl chloride (PVC) and reducing the whopping amount of petroleum that currently goes into manufacturing traditional plastics.

As complex as this issue is, consumers are not really digging into the details, according to the article. However, companies are trying to use bioplastics to appeal to the environmentally-conscious consumer. For example, Target and Sam's Club are offering gift cards made from bioplastics this year. Metabolix, a bioplastics manufacturer, is counting on the consumer "that is willing to pay to basically feel better about using plastics."

One thing I'm not is crafty. I do like a canvas or cloth tote though, for my grocery shopping, carting my son's lunch bag and sweet snugly panda bear (who goes by the name Stillwater) to preschool, and pretty much all else. We're getting pretty good about saying no to paper and plastic giveaways (not perfect, but pretty darn good).

If I were to get a little crafty, could I make my own totes?

Apparently it's easy. Go here for instructions on making canvas bags, and here to make cloth. Kind of like paper or plastic -- only different!

Stephanie Ernst, on her blog, Vida de Palabras, talks about her switch to handkerchiefs in an effort to reduce her paper consumption. Ernst had already replaced her paper towels and napkins with cloth versions and had switched her toilet paper to recycled toilet paper.

Upon her switch to handkerchiefs, an unexpected bonus was in store; she found that using them was actually more comfortable than disposable tissues.

Ernst recommends Hankettes organic cotton handkerchiefs from Kidbean.com. A three pack costs around ten dollars and comes with its own little travel sack. Kidbean also offers a pack of eight Hankettes, that come in a pretty box that looks just like a conventional tissue box. You can refill the box with washed handkerchiefs. The box of eight costs $28. With regular use, Hankettes should last up to four years.

Ernst finishes up with reassuring her guests that she will stock regular tissues (from recycled sources) for when they visit.

Living in a relatively small town (30,000 or thereabouts), when a special person dies, the news goes on the front page of the local paper -- as absolutely should be the case with 85 year-old Edward Cotton, whose efforts to save trees in Western Massachusetts are legendary.

Cotton worked for 56 years to preserve trees. He did so because it was his passion, giving countless unpaid hours to the cause and donating money toward saving Dutch Elms in town. Joined in recent years by a group of concerned citizens -- Tree Stewards of Northampton -- he would give tree tours to anyone who asked.

Here's something Cotton wrote in 2004: "We've lost three species of trees in my lifetime: the American chestnut, the American elm, and now we're losing the Canadian hemlock. In my opinion, that's a catastrophic situation. Millions of American elm trees that used to grace our streets are gone now. One year we took 400 diseased elm trees down in Northampton."

Fellow tree stewards in Northampton pledged to make Cotton's legacy of championing trees continue. Maybe the story stretches farther if others are inspired by Cotton in this way: to realize that every town needs a tree steward.

Perplexed in Georgia asks Umbra, of Grist, what is better when hosting a large party at your home in terms of the environment, washing dishes or using disposables. "Perplexed" is further perplexed because her county is currently enduring a water shortage, like the one Sarah wrote about here.

About 5% of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide comes from cement factories. Logic would dictate that you could make a serious dent in global warming by reducing those emissions.

But the New York Times reports that there's a problem with this logic: it's hard to reduce the demand for cement. And when you use green technology to reduce the CO2 emissions from cement factories, you might actually wind up increasing the amount of cement productions -- which means even more CO2 will be generated.

That's because the European Union is providing subsidies for companies that retrofit older plants in developing nations. But when you provide the latest technology, you also tend to make it easier to ramp up production at those plants.

One solution might lie in carbon offsets. Cement plants could be required by regulators to purchase emissions credits from other, cleaner industrial plants which theoretically helps bring down overall global CO2 emissions. Or maybe we just need to start lining roads with recycled paper instead of cement. Yeah, that probably won't work.

Alternative energy is all the rage. Solar power, wind power, hydrogen power -- and now cow power. At least that's the latest brainchild of a One Laptop Per Child Foundation team, who needed a way to power all those laptops, and thought their bovine buddies could help.

The team had tried seemingly every other power source imaginable -- including the alternative energy standards mentioned above -- but when all those proved to be either impossible or too expensive, they created an elaborate system to harness the energy of walking cows. Using belts and pulleys to drive a dynamo borrowed from a Fiat, they powered a generator, which in turn powered the computers.

Moo.

With over a billion mobile phones on the planet, there's a lot of money to be made in collecting old phones for recycling and refurbishing. Fonebak is a European company that works with wireless carriers across the continent to recycle old phones.

Some old phones can be touched up with a new screen or battery and sold as refurbished phones. Fonebank also helps rescue other handsets that would normally be on their way to a landfill, where they could cause serious groundwater pollution.

But it turns out those same metals that can contaminate the water can also be useful in constructing new phones and other products. In fact, Fonebank made £60.4 or about $124 million last year. The company has collected over 3.5 million phones since 2002. But that's just a small dent in the market. There are over a billion mobile phone customers around the world today. And if they don't find an easy alternative, they'll probably throw those phones out when they're no longer useful.

[via Digital Planet]

The New York Times notes that free range eggs are increasingly popular with consumers, although not all egg producers are willing to make the switch.

United Egg Producers estimates that 5 percent of U.S. egg production is either cage-free or organic, up from 2 percent three years ago. Free range eggs -- not organic ones -- are the midpoint, price-wise, between caged and organic eggs (note: not all free range eggs are organic, but all organic eggs are free range).

Even Burger King got in on the act, requesting cage-free eggs back in March. The company cited a desire to promote animal welfare as the reason for the move.

While some call this a throwback to chicken farming as it used to be, it's also the wave of the future -- at least for a growing section of the egg market.

Want to save the planet? Get out of your car. Walk, ride your bike, ride an electric bike, buy a scooter, drop your life savings on Segway -- or simply cruise down the street in a pair of iShoes.

Not exactly the sexiest things you'll ever put on your feet, these motorized roller skates can race down the sidewalk at a not-too-shabby 15 mph, despite by 16 pounds per pair. They run on rechargeable batteries, so -- especially if you've found alternative ways to give your gadgets juice -- their environmental impact is minimal. Plus, those batteries will last up to 7 miles, meaning quick jaunts around the neighborhood will soon be no problem.

The question is: can you use the iShoes without falling on your face?

[via Crave]

Send a scary but beautiful Halloween e-card this year courtesy of The Nature Conservancy.

They've got pictures of black jaguars, uakaris, vampire bats and more, all showing the great biodiversity of the world. See the spiky-headed katydid to the right wishing you a happy holiday!

Another cool feature of their site, you can find a nature preserve to visit this autumn here.

Thinking about buying a hybrid, but balking at the cost? Join the club. While hybrids are the dream car for many eco-friendly folk (or anyone who freaks out whenever they think about how much money the spend on gas), the truth is that they're economically off-limits to most of the population.

But, at least according to Toyota, all that's about to change. The third generation Prius will apparently be half the price of today's models -- mostly thanks to smaller, more inexpensive hybrid technology. There's no official word on when these new hybrids will hit the market, but rumor has it we're looking at late-2008 at the earliest.

If this car is affordable as it sounds, Toyota's goal of selling 1 million hybrids per year starting in 2010 might actually be attainable.