You may not know it, but your kitchen is one of the biggest resource hogs in your house. You use electricity and natural gas for your appliances. You use water in your sink and dish washer. Your fridge is stocked with foods grown and transported from all over the world that require chemicals, water and fuel to be produced and transported. And then there’s the non-recyclable packaging that goes straight to a landfill.

Here is a list of things you can do in your kitchen to lower your environmental impact, and also to live in a healthier home. We have recommendations for appliances, products and new behaviors.

Any chance you are planning a kitchen remodel? We also have great recommendations for you– wonderful new materials for countertops,cabinets and floors, leads on top-rated green architects and interior designers, and more. Just scroll down if you’re focused on a remodel.

Get Green in the Kitchen

1. Use energy-saving appliances. You can greatly reduce your power and water usage and your greenhouse gas production by using Energy Star appliances. Energy Star appliances can save as much as 50% of your energy and water use, and can cut your carbon footprint by 1000+ pounds, compared to standard appliances. Click here to see Energy Star models.

2. Use compact fluorescent lighting. Compact fluorescent lights use 1/4 the energy and last up to 10 times as long as standard bulbs. And they come in versions that are dimmable, recessed-ready, and daylight spectrum–any version of light type you can think of. Each high-use bulb you replace will save up to $10 and 100 pounds of carbon dioxide per year, and they last for many years. Click here to see our wide range of CF lighting options.

3. Recycle and Re-use. Can you rinse that ziplock and use it again? Can you reuse the containers you got from take-out? And don’t get plastic bags every time you go to the store for groceries– take durable reusable sacks with you. Click here for reusable grocery bags..

4. Eat Organic, Eat Local. Not only is eating organic healthy for you and your family, but it keeps chemicals from running off into our oceans and rivers from non-organic farms. Eating food sourced locally–like from farmers’ markets– means tons of carbon dioxide are not released into the atmosphere in the process of transporting food to you. To learn more about eating organic,see our selection of great books on organic food and cooking. Also, you can find a farmer’s market near you to get delicious, organic, locally-grown foods.

5. Get green cleaners. Each time you spray a standard cleaner on your counter you breathe in a fine mist of harmful chemicals. Use non-toxic, organic dish soap, detergent and cleaners to protect yourself and your family. See our selection of green cleaners.

6. Compost. Don’t throw out those coffee grounds and banana peels– save landfill space and make your own rich potting soil using a composter. It’s easy! And there’s even a model that works right in your kitchen. Find the composter that’s right for you.

7. Only run your dishwasher when you have a full load. It takes the same amount of energy to run a full or a half load– so wait another day and fill up that machine. Also, remember that washing dishes or pots by hand takes more water than doing them in the washer– so go ahead and put them in the machine.

Remodel Your Kitchen the Great Green Way– it’s healthy, sustainable and gorgeous!

If you remodel a kitchen the “normal way” you’d likely use some combination of new woods for cabinets, marble or tile for countertops, and perhaps some new tile or wood flooring. These standard materials consume resources and contain many toxic chemicals. Fortunately there is a very different way to design and build your new dream kitchen– a way that is sustainable, healthy and jaw-dropping gorgeous. We’ll show you how.

First you should find an architect or an interior designer who is skilled in working with sustainable materials and knows how to build in an eco-friendly manner. Use our nationwide listing of green architects and interior designers to find a great one near you.

Now let’s focus on materials you should consider. Let’s talk about countertops.

Terrazzo is so beautiful you will not believe it is sustainable. Terrazzo consists of recycled glass and crushed stone held together by cement or epoxy. It is buffed to give it a smooth finish. Terrazzo is low maintenance, long-lasting, and has high recycled content. Recycled materials can make up as much as 95 percent of the materials in terrazzo. Terrazzo from EnviroGlas(pictured at right) and Icestone are particularly good for their high recycled content.

“Paper Stone” is another great countertop option. Comprised of paper and other fiber suspended in resin, these materials look surprisingly like stone and come in a variety of exciting colors. The material is heat resistant and very durable. It is also easy to maintain with a nonabrasive cleaner and a cloth. PaperStone and Richlite are two of the more well-known brands. Richlite (pictured at below) uses pulp from sustainably managed forests, and PaperStone incorporates up to 100 percent recycled paper pulp.

On to kitchen cabinets.

Everyone automatically thinks “new cabinets” when they start to plan a kitchen remodel. But cabinets are often made from wood harvested unsustainably and saturated with chemicals used in sealing, gluing, and painting. Many of the chemicals used can be cancer-causing and can offgas into your home for years. Fortunately there are some great, safe alternatives.

First, save whatever parts of your existing cabinets that are still servicable. Are the shelves okay but the fronts have to go? Already, you’ve saved a lot of wood and money. For the new cabinet elements, you can use reclaimed wood, or formaldehyde-free pressed fiberboard. Or you can even get cabinets made from compressed plant material (such as wheatboard).

For the best in wood cabinets, you want to find ones that use either reclaimed wood or FSC-certified wood (FSC stands for Forest Stewardship Council–www.fscus.org– and they assure that wood is grown and harvested in a sustainable manner). For reclaimed wood, you can turn to several companies that make cabinets using salvaged wood. CitiLogs uses reclaimed wood and custom milling to produce beautiful products. A company that will sell you reclaimed cabinet-grade wood is Elmwood Reclaimed Lumber.

You can also go the “new but sustainable route” with cabinets. AlterECO manufactures cabinets out of bamboo (a fast-growing grass) and wheat board. (Pictured at right.) Check out AlterECO’s cabinet selection here. Another great supplier is Breathe Easy. Breathe Easy cabinets are made using bamboo, FSC Certified plywood and/or wheatboard (all formaldehyde free). Both companies offer low- or no-VOC finishes. Also check out Kirei board, which makes panels out of the pressed stalks of harvested Chinese sorghum. Visit www.kireiusa.com.

You also have some great flooring options.

Marmoleum is not your grandma’s linoleum. (Pictured at left.) It is made of linseed oil, rosins, and wood flour, affixed to a natural jute backing. It is durable, comfortable to walk on and comes in a mind-blowing array of colors and patterns. To learn more about Marmoleum and find a dealer near you, please click here.

Another great sustainable flooring option is bamboo. Bamboo is a fast-growing grass and is very renewable, durable and attractive. We recommend Teragren bamboo flooring, a company whose mission is to help reduce our dependence on dwindling timber resources by manufacturing flooring, stairs, and panels from bamboo sustainably harvested in the Zhejiang Province of China. Click here to find a Teragren supplier near you.

Also have a look at these amazing tiles made out of recycled rubber– they come in blue, gray, shades of orange, and many other colors. They are both durable and springy, which means they’re easy on your knees. Visit www.ecosurfaces.com to see samples.

Lighting is also critical

Why not use some skylights or solar tubes? Natural light is best for your health and for the environment. If you do need electric lights, there are many great recessed, track and decorative light fixtures that work great with compact fluorescent bulbs. You’ll save a lot of power and money going this route.

Last but not least, don’t forget about appliances. We’ve already mentioned them in the section above, but don’t forget that appliances will consumer energy for as long as they are in your kitchen, so make the right choices from the start and buy Energy Star appliances.

Thanks for learning how to green your kitchen. Please make sure to check out our new Green Products Ratings & Reviews on main site at www.lowimpactliving.com where we’re adding new and exciting features every day!

The 20 teams selected for the 2009 Solar Decathlon have been announced by the US Department of Energy. Each team will receive a $100,000 grant from the DOE to be used for creating a completely solar-powered home for the competition.

The full list can be found in an article at Custom Home Online. The 2009 competition has some international flavor, including last year’s winner, the Technische Universität Darmstadt, as well as the Universidad Polytécnica de Madrid and two groupings of Canadian universities.

One former faculty adviser to a university Decathlon team lamented the reduction of the Solar Decathlon to a more narrow range of design concepts. The first few Decathlons were wide-open events, with very different designs. But with certain criteria in place, the strategies have been narrowed down to address the specific problems posed by the Decathlon challenge. These are still good designs that are being produced, but they are now tuned to a set of particular requirements and criteria.

Homes designed for the Decathlon should perhaps be viewed in the same spirit as one views Formula One race cars compared to ordinary cars. In the cases of both the auto race and the Solar Decathlon, the competitors are tuned for specific ways of maximizing the allowable methods for winning a contest. While some developments in the competition may trickle down to more prosaic, domestic uses, it’s not a representative testbed.

We’ll certainly be looking at the entries when the Decathlon is held; however, I don’t expect to see great numbers of them making an appearance in a neighborhood anytime soon. Like race cars, they are great to look at, and fun to think about using, but for most of us, they aren’t a practical alternative to what we have now.
Image (Kansas State/Univ. Kansas 2007 entry in front of Washington Monument) via Curious Cat

December 28th, 2007 by Jim Gunshinan

Broke Your CFL? Don’t Panic!

The typical dose of mercury in a CFL is about the sizeof a pen tip 

(circled in red), and these doses have been getting smaller and smaller. 

(Photo provided by EPA.)

Australia has already begun to phase out the incandescent light bulb,

and the energy legislation recently signed by President Bush has

begun that process in the United States. Every time I turnaround,

it seems, someone is handing me a brand new

compact fluorescent light (CFL) to advance the cause of energy

efficiency and help save the planet. CFLs are becoming ubiquitous

in households all over California. We taught them in the pages of

Home Energy all the time. And that’s a goodthing, right?

Brandy Bridges, of Ellsworth, Maine may not think so. A cleaning

company quoted her a price of $2,000 to clean her house after

she broke a CFL.The benefits of CFLs are many–they use about75%

less energy than incandescents and last up to ten times longer.

Replacing a 75W incandescent with an 18W CFL will save you about $46

in electricity costs over the life of the bulb, and thatis at current

electricity prices, which no doubt will go up, making today’s CFLs an

even better deal. Energy Star CFLs (www.energystar.gov/cfls) won’t

flicker, give warmer light, and there area variety of them, from

the ubiquitous A-line bulb, to candelabras.

But, and it’s a big but, CFLs won’t give light without mercury.

The average CFL on the shelf at your local hardware store has about

4 mg of mercury in it. Mercury vapor is harmful to humans,and there

is enough mercury accumulated in some of the fish we eat

to make this Californian think twice about ordering salmon for dinner.

Thankfully, there are ways to clean up a broken CFL thatdon’t involve

an overly frightened and/or greedy cleaning company

(www.epa.gov/CFLcleanup), and recycling centers are available, if not

yet ubiquitous (that word again!) (www.lamprecycle.org).

Even if the worst happens and you break a CFL bulb, the EPA estimates

that at most only 6.8% of the 4 mg of mercury will be released, or about

0.27 mg, since most of it is in the glass, electrodes, and in the phosphor

coating on the inside of the glass. Incinerating a bulb willpotentially

release more mercury vapor, if there are no pollution controls on the incinerator.

But even if the CFL released all of it’s mercury–according to Richard Benware,

a graduate student at Cornell who researched CFLs last summer for EPA’s

Energy Star program–it would still be a better choice than an incandescent,

because over its lifetime, the 15W CFL will have preventedthe release of 5.67 mg

of mercury from an average power plant.

Of course, recycling is best, and that is still a problem. Alan Meier,

Home Energy’s senior executive editor, admits to turning

part of his garage into a “temporary hazardous waste holding facility” to

hold his family’s used CFLs, since the nearest CFL recycling center is

13 miles away from his home in Berkeley, through “one of the worst traffic

jams in the United States.” There is help in finding those recycling centers,

near and far (www.earth911.org).

But we need to put the same effort used in making CFLs ubiquitous into making

disposing of them in a clean safe manner just as ubiquitously easy.

You know what I mean.

Turning off the lights depends on the bulb. If you still have incandescent bulbs, it is always best to shut the light off when no one is in a room or if you aren’t using the light. Fluorescent lights are a little different, since constantly switching them on and off will make them less efficient. For CFLs and other fluorescent bulbs, if you know you won’t be using it within the next 15 minutes, shut it off.

Maximize the day light. Opening curtains to let in natural light is the best way to do this. However, since a lot of heat can escape through windows, especially older windows, close up the curtains after dark to avoid using more energy to heat your home.

Jim Campbell, President and CEO of GE's consumer and industrial division, explained:

"We are increasing our focus on the development and production of new, innovative lighting products like LEDs, organic LEDs, our new high efficiency incandescent light bulbs and other products that our customers will increasingly demand and require."

LEDs, or light-emitting diodes, use a semiconductor device that emits light when an electric current passes through it. They are a super-efficient form of lighting. An organic LED means that the emitting layer material is an organic compound. They are lighter and more flexible than regular LED lights, and have been used in cell phone displays and digital cameras.

In business, going green is more than a marketing slogan: it's the new way of doing things. It's an edge -- a method by which you can improve your company's bottom line while acting responsibly toward your customers, employees, and the environment.

Back home, you've swapped your incandescent bulbs for CFLs; installed low-flow shower heads, weather stripping and an electronic thermostat; you're eating more local and organic foods; and recycling is finally second nature.

Good job. But how does one scale personal progress in green living to the more complex structures of the 21st Century workplace? At home, you have full control. But in a business setting, there are co-workers, customers, and possibly investors involved -- and nobody is ever in a hurry to change traditional operating practices. Bringing sustainability into the workplace is a long-term commitment, whether you're responsible for two employees or two thousand.

The good news is this: green business is profitable business. So. to help you get started, Lighter Footstep has rounded-up twelve specific specific actions you can take to starting greening the way you work. Pick a few, drop them into your organizer, and let's get started!

As always, we're grateful to Naturalpath for sharing their content with us. Don't forget to look and see which of our blogs posts the NP team has chosen to feature on their site.

And, if you were looking for the second part of NP interview with the authors of Skinny Bitch, you can find it here.

Dear EcoGeek,

I did a survey and I have 33 recessed bulbs in the house (120W)! I've switched all my non-recessed bulbs with CFLs, but I need something for our recessed lighting.

So my question is why aren't these ultra-efficient LED lights being produced in greater quantities (and this bringing the costs down)?

Thanks,

David

David,

Thirty three 120 watt bulbs will keep your house competing with a small star for both power consumption and light intensity, but I'm not here to judge. If you've got the sockets, they should have high-efficiency bulbs in them.

The good news is two-fold. First, you don't have to wait for LED bulbs to show up at Wal-Mart to find a high efficiency alternative because they've started selling excellent recessed CFLs. I've actually got one shooting down on me right now! To match a 120 watt incandescent, you should look for a 23 to 26 watt CFL.

LightFair NYC this year was home to amazing light technology from energy efficiency featuring LED technology to the reduction of mercury content in the fluorescent bulbs. As an environmentalist, I was impressed by the advancement of technology in lighting energy efficiency but was scared at the same time that we as consumers may be short sighted in our quest for energy efficiency by ignoring the proper disposal of these bulbs.

The LED technology impressed me with its long life and lack of mercury content. In addition, Phillips and SLI lighting both featured low mercury content in their fluorescent bulbs. SLI lighting featured the most impressive environmental concern with all of their fluorescent bulbs containing low level of mercury and their bulb glass was free of lead.

Take for example, a recent announcement from Phillips, for a new light bulb called the Pharox that will last 35 years if used four hours a day. The 3.4-watt LED bulb produces light comparable to an ordinary 40-watt bulb. Unlike the current compact-fluorescent options on the market, these bulbs produce a warm color reminiscent of their incandescent predecessors. Additionally, they are better for the environment than most LED equivalents because no mercury, phosphorous, lead or tungsten is used to give them that color.