Struggling to think of a present for someone who has everything? Here are some lovely ideas that are also green and sustainable.

First up, tickets (or a gift voucher) for a theatre, concert or an arts venue. After all, who doesn’t enjoy an evening out?

Alternatively, a year’s membership of a favourite organisation.

One lovely option for people in Dublin, is to become a friend of the National Gallery of Ireland.  It costs €65 (individual) /€80 (family), and includes a year long programme of talks and other events.

How about a plant from your garden?

Or the offer of an evening’s babysitting or to cook them dinner . . .

We all love getting and giving presents. But sometimes, it can be hard to find the perfect present.

I find that the simple, and green and sustainable solution, is to give people something ‘insubstantial’.

As an added bonus, these presents don’t need any packaging, and won’t add to the world’s growing clutter mountain. (And let’s face it, most of us  probably have enough stuff already, anyway.)

Give a gift voucher for a local arts venue, and you are supporting jobs and the local community, while encouraging people to support the arts too.

The list of insubstantial possibilities is as long as your imagination.

And if you like these ideas, you’ll find plenty more useful suggestions in Drive like a Woman, Shop like a Man — Greener is Cheaper.  This practical guide to sustainable living is packed with over 100 tips that will save you time, money and resources.  Just €8.99, in all good bookshops.  And some of the tips will save you literally hundreds of euros!

(c) Mary Mulvihill, 2009

Fancy meeting some like-minded souls, or networking with other green thinkers and green businesses?

If you’re in Dublin next Tuesday evening (November 3rd) then why not come along to the Science Gallery for this month’s Green Drink (6-8pm).

Green Drinks is an international movement, providing an informal space where people interested in the environment can meet to exchange ideas and information.

The Dublin event has been meeting for a year or so, on the 1st Tuesday of each month. It’s a very friendly gathering, organised by Jarrod from LeafLiving.com, and all are welcome.  Don’t worry about not knowing anyone — just take a seat and you’ll soon strike up a conversation with people around you.

But here I should declare an interest, as I’m the guest speaker at the November event. Given the location in TCD’s science faculty, I’ll be looking at how knowing a little science can help us to live a little more sustainably. In the 20 minutes or so that are allowed, I hope to give people some practical techniques for saving time and money, based on the 101 tips in my book, Drive like a Woman, Shop like a Man: greener is cheaper.

Admission is free, and there’s a special 10% discount on the price of the book.  And if you do come along, don’t forget to come up and say Hello!

(c) MaryMulvihill.net 2009

Would you like a quick and free way to ‘green’ your electricity?

The trick is simply to change when we use electricity. And especially, now that winter evenings are on the way, to avoid the electricity ‘rush hour’ of 5-7 p.m.

Let me explain . . .

The Eirgrid control room

Electricity consumption in Ireland rose so much over recent years — all those new homes, all those new appliances, all those switched-on lives — that demand has almost outstripped supply, and new power plants are planned. (Although Eirgrid’s latest report shows demand down 6% on last year as the recession bites.)

Demand is highest from 5-7pm on cold winter week nights,  when supply from power plants has trouble meeting demand. The heating is on, everyone is cooking dinner in homes across the country, and all the power stations have to be brought on stream, including older and more polluting and inefficient ones.

In other words, it’s the dirtiest time for electricity generation.

(And the most expensive: commercial customers can be charged more for this rush hour electricity. So CERN’s LHC experiment will normally shut down each winter: particle accelerators are heavy power users, and winter electricity is just too expensive, even for the world’s biggest experiment.)

Power production is cleanest and greenest, on the other hand, when demand is lowest – usually late at night.

So, if you want greener electricity, and can’t generate your own, here’s a simple tip: spread your electricity use more evenly across the day, and try to reduce what you use from 5-7pm.  For instance . . .

• Leave the dishwasher and clothes wash till later
• Use a microwave instead of a conventional electric oven
• Listen to the radio news instead of the TV

By reducing peak demand, you’re helping to reduce the number of new power plants we have to build!

Look how much we were using this evening!

You can monitor Irish electricity demand and supply in real time on the Eirgrid website. Here’s a recent snapshot of the system (left), taken on the evening of October 20 2009.

Remember: night-time electricity is cleaner and greener. So, spread the workload, and spread the word.

And if you like this simple tip, there are lots more in my practical guide to sustainable living, Drive like a Woman, Shop like a Man.

(c) Mary Mulvihill 2009

This lovely plarn bag featured recently on the Guardian

Plarn,  or plastic yarn.

One day you’ve never heard of it, next day it’s everywhere.

Lately, I’ve become interested in crafty ways of transforming rubbish, and especially plastic rubbish, into useful things and even attractive presents.

One of the simplest tricks I’ve discovered is making plarn from  lengths of plastic carrier bags.

It is amazingly quick and easy to do, and would be perfect for kids and school projects.   I’ve posted a little ‘how to’ note here with a link to an excellent 2-minute YouTube video tutorial.

Once you’ve made your plarn (a matter of minutes only), you can knit, crochet or braid it into any number of things.

Judging by the internet, rugs and bags seem to be most popular but I’ve even seen it braided into a pair of waterproof sandals!

The gorgeous knitted clutch bag pictured above is from a recent article in the environment section of the Guardian.

I particularly like the the fact that plarn gives a new lease of life to plastic bags that might otherwise end up in landfill, where they will spend centuries slowly decaying.  ‘Plarning’ — have I just coined a new word?  — may mean we can dramatically reduce the amount of plastic rubbish that we dump.  Something that would greatly help our ‘rubbish diet‘.

I know some people think this kind of ‘recycling’ is nothing more than “slow motion landfill”. But I have to disagree: if we can transform the plastic into something useful, such as a bag or rug, it means that item is not being made anew, so we are helping to reduce the consumption of scarce resources.

Of course, it goes without saying, that we should all be trying to reduce the number of plastic bags we end up with!

(c) MaryMulvihill.net 2009

Making plarn, or plastic yarn, couldn’t be simpler. it’s perfect for kids, and would be great for school projects to use up plastic bags.

(I’ve written more about it here, and what you can make from it.)

The only tool you need is a scissors, plus of course a pile of plastic bags. And it takes just a few minutes.

All you need is a scissors. Simply fold the bags and cut into strips. And that’s it!

Here is a 2-minute simple YouTube tutorial that shows you how

Once you’ve made a sufficient length of plarn, you can knit, crochet or braid it to make everything from rugs and bags and even waterproof sandals.

The only limit is your imagination.  But you’ll also find lots of ideas out there on the web.

(c) MaryMulvihill.net 2009

What could be nicer than always having a big bowl of fresh, organic probiotic yoghurt ready in the fridge.

Making it is easy-peasy and I usually do it while having breakfast. It’s half the price of commercial stuff, and because it has fewer ingredients, it has fewer ‘food miles’ as well.  What could be better.

If you’ve made yogurt before, you probably bought some commercial live yogurt to start, and then saved a fwe scoops from each batch to start the next until, after a few goes, it lost its potency and you had to start again with fresh shop-bought yogurt. All of which was costly and unpredictable.

Well, not any more.

My new, foolproof technique has one crucial ingredient: some probiotic “pixie dust”, aka commercial yoghurt culture.  In other words, the culture that commerical yogurt producers use.

I sourced a sachet from someone selling yoghurt at Dublin’s Temple Bar food-market; it cost €10, and is good for 200 litres of milk… two years later I’m still using it (just store it, sealed, in the freezer)

Or, you can buy a box of 10 sachets here, and sign-up nine friends to share the box with you!

To make 2-litres of yoghurt:
You need:
2-litres of milk (full-fat works best, and I like to use organic)
A pinch of  probiotic  culture (less than 1/8 of a teaspoon works fine)
A timer (essential, so that you don’t forget the heating/cooling milk while doing something else, such as eating breakfast!)
A large bowl & lid to culture the yoghurt
Somewhere warm (I’m currently using a ‘nest’ made out of a sleeping bag (!) in a draft-free cupboard; but I’ve also used a tea-cosy over the bowl, and a south-facing window on a sunny day; and in winter, the warming plate from an old wine-making kit)

Method:
1] heat the milk until nearly boiling (about to lift off!) about 10 minutes.
2] Cool the milk, until it drops to about 45° (so you can just bear to stick a (clean) finger in it and count to 10).   I sit the saucepan uncovered in a sink of cold water for about 10 minutes; remember, the timer!  (if it gets too cold,  just heat it up again a little)
3] Pour the warm milk into the bowl (plastic is best for staying warm; if using glass/metal, preheat the bowl).
4] Add a pinch of the culture, and stir well.
5] Cover, and place somewhere warm and undisturbed for about 10 hours, or over night.
6] Cool fully, before refrigerating
7] Enjoy!

While culturing, try not to disturb it, as this can upset the process.

The bacteria double in number every 20 minutes, so if the yoghurt hasn’t set even after 10 hours, it may just need another 20-40 minutes (happened to me just the once); because it has probably cooled by then, simply transport the bowl (carefully) and set it in a basin of boiling water for 20-40 minutes.

This may sound elaborate, but it really is very simple.  Once you get the hang of it, you can do it in the morning while having breakfast, and come home in the evening to a batch of fresh organic yoghurt, and for a fraction of the price of commercial stuff.

And no plastic rubbish!

And, if you like that, I have a 101 tips for saving time, money and resources in my new book, Drive like a Woman, Shop like a Man.

(c) Mary Mulvihill 2009

From: The Rubbish Diet

We’re talking rubbish, here, folks!

In particular, how to make yoghurt plastic tubs disappear with a little ‘pixie dust’ — about which, more in a minute.

The small bag  pictured here, weighing just 128 g, is  pretty impressive: it’s all the rubbish that one English family threw out in one week.  Admittedly, it took them time and effort to reduce their rubbish to this small amount  — not least, becoming familiar with all the different types of plastic that can (and can’t) be recycled.

The whole weight-reduction story is told in their blog, The Rubbish Diet — well worth reading for tips on how to get rid of rubbish.

That final bag of persistent rubbish, which could  only be binned, contains “the tops of [some] takeaway containers, a few ice lolly wrappers, a foil lined plastic blister pack and some yoghurt top lids as well as some scrunched up yellow tape”.

It was the yoghurt tops that caught my eye.

Because I’ve a very simple, and money-saving way to make those disappear.  It needs only some probiotic ‘pixie dust’ . . . and in a few hours you can turn milk into yoghurt (see the foolproof recipe here).

It’s dead easy — I do it while having breakfast — and best of all, it will even save you money: homemade yogurt is half the price of commercial stuff, and because it has fewer ingredients, it has fewer ‘food miles’ as well.

Plus, what could be nicer than always having a big bowl of fresh, organic probiotic yoghurt ready in the fridge.

And, if you like that, I have a 101 tips for saving time, money and resources in my new book, Drive like a Woman, Shop like a Man.

What’s a green building?  One covered in solar panels and bristling with turbines?  One that proclaims its greenness by looking different?  One that costs 15% more than a ‘conventional’ building?

For British architect Howard Liddell, the answer is none of the above.

At a one-day symposium on sustainability in TCD recently, Liddell outlined his ideal green building: it looks conventional, costs no more to build, but is so well insulated and airtight that there is almost no need for heating, and certainly no need for what he calls “eco-bling”.

The main problem, as he sees it, is that technologies are an expensive add-on with a long payback time.  The sensible and cost-effective route to a green and eco-building is effective insulation.

Unfortunately, eco-bling is flavour of the month, and Liddell was particularly critical of new building regulations in some British local authorities that now require a minimum 10% of on-site renewable technologies — expensive and ineffective wind turbines on top of buildings, when they should be on remote, windy sites.

In an inspiring presentation, Liddell,  principal architect with the British-based Gaia Group, argued that we need to make insulation sexy. “Eco-minimalism, not eco-bling.”

Effective insulation alone, he said, could halve the energy demand, and significantly reduce fuel poverty.

The main challenge, in Ireland as in Britain, will be to retro-fit a high standard of insulation to existing buildings. What’s more, each building will need an individual solution.

And you can’t just fill cavity walls with foam, he argues: those walls were designed to breathe so, if you block them up, you simply create a moisture problem on the inside.

Likewise, it is not enough to seal every crack with gunge.  For a start, the gunge will crack, so you won’t get an airtight seal. And again, you have to worry about moisture buffering.

Other issues that he identified are: effective testing of a building’s air tightness; and indoor air quality in an airtight building (especially moisture content, and off-gassing from materials and furniture), making choice of materials essential.

To be truly ‘green’, he recommended using sheep’s wool insulation, as he felt there were issues with the chemicals used to treat insulation made from recycled newspaper.

In a wide ranging and fascinating talk, Liddell also recommended: mass-timber construction (not just beautiful to work with, but also good for sequestering carbon dioxide); ‘nail-free building’ (securing well designed, well fitting pieces with just a few screws), which doesn’t damage the wood and makes repairs and alterations, and recycling much easier; and low-flush toilets that use less than 2 litres of water — already achieved on aircraft toilets.

If Liddell is right, and every building leaves a customised solution, then on the plus side this would be a major job creation project architects, and the insulation and construction industries.

For more on Howard Liddell’s eco-minimalist architecture, check out his new book here.

Mary Mulvihill’s new guide to easy, sustainable living is Drive Like a Woman, Shop Like a Man (2009).  Click here to suggest a tip, and be in with a chance to win a copy of the book.

(c) Mary Mulvihill 2009  http://marymulvihill.net/

Each week brings some new technological idea for ‘fixing’ the world’s rising CO2 problem. Such as capturing the gas and storing (sequestering) it underground or on the ocean floor.

These ideas often strike me as far fetched, costly, and difficult, and I can’t help thinking it would be simpler, cheaper and quicker to find ways of reducing our greenhouse gas emissions.

But one ingenious idea caught my eye this week. It comes from Iceland where, let’s face it, they need a little good news these days.

CarbFix plans to turn CO2 into stone. Powered by Iceland’s unlimited geothermal energy, they will chemically convert the gas into calcite, the carbonate mineral that is a major component of limestone. Unlike sequestration, this would permanently lock the gas into a stable mineral form, so there would be no fear of the gas leaking out catastrophically.

Another story that caught my eye is a US project to harness solar power from space. Solaren Corp. plans to launch solar panels into orbit, convert the power generated into radio transmissions that can be beamed to earth, and then fed into a power grid. You can read an interview with the Solaren CEO here, on the Next100 website.

Another potentially good news story is research that suggests bacteria can digest oil-tar to yield a cleaner gas resource.  If you’ve heard of the controversial Canadian tar-sands, you’ll know that these enormous deposits are costly and dirty to extract, and to process and refine into a useable form. But as oil prices rise, they are becoming an increasingly important Canadian resource.  This latest research suggests a new, more acceptable way to extract value from the sands.

Bad news however, from a WWF report into fishing fleets, which confirms what many people feared: huge amounts of catch are wasted, and commercial fleets discard a stunning 40% of what they take.  It’s an unsustainable situation, and a disaster in the making unless something radical changes fast.

Not so good news either from a UK report this week into ‘greening’ and future-proofing existing homes.  Most of the homes will still be in use in 50 years time, but improving insulation and energy efficiency will, the Economic and Social Research Council and the Technology Strategy Board reckon, be ‘a herculean task’. The same is surely true in Ireland.

And still with the bad news . . . much of the Canadian province of Manitoba is now underwater, with mass evacuations in place.  (Nasa satellite view here.)

I’m in Canada for 6 months, where the top news story for the last month has been the annual Red River floods in Manitoba and in North Dakota, so I don’t know if this story has reached Ireland yet.  Amazingly, given the scale of devastation, the floods have claimed just one life, so it’s possible the story hasn’t yet reached a threshold that would bring it to European attention.

The floods come with the annual snow melt, excacerbated this year by the long winter, the frozen lakes (which have effectively dammed the river at its northern outlet), the frozen and waterlogged ground which can’t absorb any more water, and even frozen sandbags (which don’t make for a watertight seal).

What has been especially interesting for me as an outsider, is the different approach taken in Canada and, south of the border, in North Dakota which lies upstream.  Canadians are happy to take government intervention, and this has led to major flood prevention works, including a massive canal to diver the flood around the provincial capital of Winnipeg, which seems to have held, despite this year’s record flood level.

North Dakotans, however, don’t take kindly to government intervention — action that would be viewed as socialism! — and there it is every man for himself. Hence the floods have hit harder there, despite the fact that they are upstream of the worst. It’s an interesting socio-cultural difference in approaching climate and environmental problems. You can read about it here – though I see Toronto’s Globe and Mail charges for access to its stories!

And finally . . . know anyone who will take a tonne of metal across the sea this summer for you, and not charge you a penny?  Provided the metal has four wheels, the cross-channel ferry companies are happy to oblige it seems.

Veteran British environment and science writer Fred Pearce is taking on the ferry companies and the fares policy that favours motorists over foot passengers, in his GreenWash column at the Guardian.

If you haven’t already discovered Fred, he’s always worth a read.

(c) Mary Mulvihill 2009  http://marymulvihill.net/

Mary’s new guide to easy, sustainable living is Drive Like a Woman, Shop Like a Man (2009).  Click here to suggest a tip, and be in with a chance to win a copy of the book.

Vu1 stimulated electron bulb

Like many people, I’m a wee bit sceptical about the forthcoming ban on the old incandescent lightbulb, and the switch to CFLs.

Call me old fashioned, but CFLs contain toxic mercury (albeit in small amounts, but here are the EPA guidelines on handling a broken CFL), and it seems to me we would simply be swopping one problem for another.  CFLs are also more complex to manufacture, and therefore start with a bigger eco-footprint than a conventional bulb.

Plus, improved LEDs (already in use for traffic lights and bicycle lamps) will soon be ready for domestic use, and could be a better option energy-wise than CFLs.

(I’m also posting this from deepest Canada, where calculations suggest that, in winter, switching from the warmer conventional bulb to a cooler CFL, will just mean people have to use more heating, and negate any energy savings from the lighting.)

So I was intrigued to read about a completely new energy-efficient lighting technology, invented by a Seattle company, Vu1 (‘view one’), that uses ’stimulated electrons’ and which, they claim, contains no toxic or hazardous material, and is fully dimmable.

The company has just agreed a manufacturing arrangement, and could be on the market shortly, giving us yet another alternative lighting technology to choose from.

Since different rooms and tasks have different lighting needs, it may be that we need a variety of technologies — CFLs for rooms that are lit for long periods, for instance, and LEDs for rooms such as toilets that need to be lit only for a few minutes, and perhaps Vu1 bulbs for task lighting and ambience.

(c) Mary Mulvihill 2009

Mary’s new guide to easy, sustainable living is Drive Like a Woman, Shop Like a Man (2009).  Click here to suggest a tip, and be in with a chance to win a copy of the book.