Green Options

Even to the average lawyer, patent law is a bit of a mystery. I confess, I am a lawyer and it is almost as foreign to me as the practice of medicine. (I image the specialty of patent law in the legal community is like neuro-surgery in medicine.) In any event, I’ve been doing a bit of research on patent law which I haven’t dealt with since I took an introductory intellectual property law course in my [...]

The incandescent bulb has been the standard in lighting since it was introduced over 100 years ago and we switched from candles. Incandescent lights are very inefficient as they expend a large portion of the energy needed to power them on heat. In the last few years compact fluorescent lights have become widely available and are now a common and easy to find replacement for standard incandescent bulbs. Although compact fluorescent lights are much more efficient than [...]

A lot of people who think about  the environment and efforts to improve sustainability think about “big ticket” items.  However, it really isn’t about the “big ticket” items like landfills or oil spills.  The bulk of the damage we do to our environment is done on the individual level and then magnified by millions or billions.  That’s why it is important for all us to look at our day-to-day activities and try to find ways to reduce our impact on [...]

The transition away from the 100 year-old incandescent light bulb continues to gain steam.  LizardLighting.com, a new e-commerce company, will be launching its new website featuring a full line of energy-efficient LED landscape lights March 1, 2008.  The new LED landscape lights consume about a 1/4 of the energy of a comparable halogen light and will last six times as long—up to 60,000 hours.

“We are very excited about the new Lizard Lighting line of LED landscape lights,” said [...]

The holidays are basically over and now everyone is beginning to take down their decorations and dispose of holiday trash. The holiday season cause a huge increase in consumer waste so we all need to try and do our part to decrease the impact on the environment. This year there were a lot of good articles with tips for holiday recycling. I thought this one was particularly useful:

http://www.star-telegram.com/home/story/391757.html

There was also a big push this year to [...]

The holiday season is typically a time where many of through out the rule book for a few days.  We eat too much, we drink too much, and we buy too much.  All of this holiday excess creates a great deal of additional waste during the holiday season.  In fact, Americans create an additional 1 million tons of garbage each week during the period between Thanksgiving and Christmas.  We also use a lot of extra energy.

This holiday season don’t forget [...]

Halloween is over and even though the trees still have green leaves because of the mild fall we are having, Christmas is just around the corner. Americans consume a lot of extra energy and create and extraordinary amount of waste during the holidays. In fact, it is estimated that we produce more than 1 million extra tons of garbage each week from the period between Thanksgiving and Halloween.

We also consume a great amount of energy. This is [...]

October 29, 2007

I didn’t say it…Robin Williams did. But it makes sense. Clean compared to what? Compared to the black lung producing crap that we used to burn?

I live in Michigan and our Governor has been paying a lot of lip service to environmentally-friendly practices and energy-conservation and so has our regional utility, Consumers Energy. However, that’s about it. The same thing is also going on in Seattle.