Being Green Means:
Try being green around the house without making major changes to your life.
You may hear a lot about the prohibitive costs of green design, retro-fitting your home, or sustainable design. The most important thing to take away is that it doesn't have to be an all or nothing proposition. Just try some or a few modifications to your daily routine or purchasing to incorporate some green initiatives.
What to Look for:
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Replace some Light Bulbs: As your incandescent bulbs burn out, replace them with CFLs, which are highly efficient.
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Clean Green: Choose from some of our green certified cleaning products. Baking soda and water can be used for many cleaning projects as can simple vinegar and water.
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Watch your flow: Pick up a faucet aerator for less than $10. It reduces the amount of water used without affecting pressure and can save about 2 gallons per minute. Take a look at some of our efficient shower heads & water filters.
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Buy Green Paint: Choose paints that are low VOCs (Volatile organic compounds).
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Buy Recycled: Whether it's napkins or new place mats. You can also buy used furniture and have items re-upholstered. That saves items from landfills.
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Buy Quality
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When in Doubt, Go Natural
What to Avoid:
- Try to be an informed shopper: Avoid products that use chemicals or ingredients that pose a potential harm, and don't be afraid to ask for a green or organic counterpart of a product you have in mind. Most likely it exists.
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Excessive packaging
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Products with unnatural ingredients: If you can't pronounce it, it's probably not good for you.
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Be a green household leader: Lead by example. If you make an effort to recycle more, purchase organic, or encourage less wastefulness with energy and water.
10 Ways to Green your home from the International Builders' Show
The International Builders' Show contained some big-ticket innovations, but companies this year also promoted green basics: bread-and-butter products designed to maximize efficiency and save cash. Below are a few of Popular Mechanics contributors Roy Berendsohn and Harry Sawyers favorite finds:
Delta H20 Kinetics Showerhead
A water-conserving shower head from Delta.
Delta suses the cuttinge edge technology in 1.5-gal shower heads that don't produce conventional droplets. Instead, the droplets are little serpentine waves. Their shape, the company says, produces a water-conserving shower that doesn't feel skimpy to the bather. Furthermore, the larger droplets retain heat better, making the cone-shaped spray warmer, more comfortable and virtually impossible to decipher.
Kohler Class 6
Over 50 percent of US households have inefficient toilets using at least 3.5 gal per flush, which accounts for 1.6 billion gal of wasted water per year. To help visualize that abstract data, Kohler set up a typical pre-1992 toilet alongside its new high-efficiency 1.28-gpf Class Six toilet, allowing each to flush and drain into a transparent bin marked with measurements. After we spent a few minutes watching—with a typically obsessive PM level of scrutiny—the two toilets cycle, it became clear how the vast difference could add up to an estimated 16,500 gal per fixture.
Icynene's New Insulation
By insulating against heat transfer as well as air infiltration, Icynene's open-cell foam insulation has been an efficient way to seal off stud bays for over 20 years. But the constituent polyol that makes the actual goop has always been derived from petroleum—until now. Icynene's new LD-R-50 polyol switches the petroleum for castor oil, which comes from castor plants grown with no pesticides, fungicides or man-made irrigation.
EcoRock drywall alternative, by Serious Materials
To make standard drywall, manufacturers use energy to heat gypsum at high temperatures until it calcifies. The drywall alternative EcoRock instead hardens via a chemical reaction in less than 6 minutes with no heat needed. Made from 80 percent recycled content, the wall panel also replaces traditional paper facing with fiberglass, creating a material resistant to damage from water, termites, impact or mold.
Whirlpool Resource Savers
Whirlpool's new ResourceSaver Dishwasher only consumes 5-6 gal per load—about half the water used when washing by hand—and it saves the water used to prerinse silverware by firing a high-pressure stream of water. Priced at under $1000, it falls well within the budget of families looking to do away with an old clunker dishwasher.
The company's 25-cu.-ft Resource Saver side-by-side refrigerator is as miserly with electricity as the dishwasher is with water. Sixty watts is all it takes to keep the appliance humming.