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Brave New Leaf
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A green newbie trying to assess her impact and transform her lifestyle to be more sustainable. Covers green projects and products.
Recent Posts Tagged With 'audit'
Carbon Footprint Check-In
It's time to see how I'm doing with my carbon footprint for the year 2008. As a reminder, I've set a 2008 New Year's Resolution to cut my carbon footprint in half: from 22 tons to 11 tons. On initial......
I'm Quitting Diet Coke to Save the World
It's getting around time to green my food and beverages. I've done the research, and now I'm ready to make some changes. I'm going to start with beverages first, because it is a much more finite universe. A quickie beverage......
Dishwashers are a greenie's dream
Dishwashers are a greenie’s dream: an appliance that works AND is more efficient than doing it the manual way. Several studies show that today’s dishwashers save energy and water overall doing your dishes by hand (not to mention time!). But......
More help with calculating a carbon footprint
I found a couple of more useful carbon emissions calculators, that I thought I would share. 1. TerraPass Flight Carbon Calculator (http://www.terrapass.com/flight/flightcalc.php) This groovy calculator lets you type in the specific arrival and destin...
Hot Water Heater Audit
Up until recently, my energy audits have pretty much ignored my appliances. Which is an enormous thing to handwave. Appliances are huge energy suckers. But my arm muscles are too measly to roll them out of their designated areas to......
Energy Audit #3: Where does my power come from?
This article is part 3 of a series. Read previous article. Growing up, I was blessed with four younger sisters. As a result, I was intensely interested in where babies came from, and received several progressive "birds and the bees"......
Carbon Audit: Evaluating my Automobiles
Read other articles in the Carbon Audit Series: an ongoing investigation into our carbon footprint. My husband and I own three cars. Yes, that’s right. Two people, three cars, 12 wheels, and 15 seats. Let’s just say that my husband......
The Carbon Audit: Evaluating 4 Carbon Footprint Websites
Read other articles in the Carbon Audit Series: an ongoing investigation into our carbon footprint. I admit it. After starting my energy, water, and waste audits, I’ve been delaying an audit around my carbon emissions. Mostly because I’m not sure...
The Waste Audit
After the relatively straightforward energy and water audits, figuring out how to do a waste audit was a pretty big challenge. Living in a condo, we don’t even keep a large trash can in the garage that gets taken to......
The Energy Audit: Part Two -- Which household appliances draw the most power?
This article is part 2 of a series. Read previous article. The next question to answer in my power audit was what things in our home are using what level of power. In order to answer this, I spent $20......
The Energy Audit: Part One
I’m auditing myself to figure out what my environmental footprint is. Part of this analysis needs to look at the energy that I consume. To keep this initial energy audit simple, I’m going to just look at electricity. I have......
The Water Audit: Part One
I started with water because it seemed like the simplest to do, initially. Water isn’t a particular problem up in the Pacific Northwest, but there may be upcoming water shortages worldwide if global warming hits full force, so I should......
