No, GreenMe are not advocating a slovenly lifestyle, just encouraging you to take it outside!! Cancelling your gym membership will not only save you money, it will also lower your carbon footprint!!
Like most parties, it tends to start with drinks, nibbles and casual conversation, until the guests suddenly start swapping clothes.
Invented before the credit crunch but becoming more popular as a free substitute for shopping and entertainment, welcome to swishing.
“Swishing dos” are parties where people swap second-hand clothes, following a few commonly agreed rules along the following lines:
Pick a date and venue, invite friends, prepare some food, let people browse the clothes they have brought while enjoying a glass of wine; at a previously agreed time, count down to the “Swish,” and start swapping. (more…)
Spring is in the air and as the weather finally changes, everyone around me seems to be coming down with a cold. Like so many Irish folks, I am sensitive to foods containing gluten. And, I try to stay away from dairy in the damp weather. And, I’m a vegetarian, hmm…. No meat, no wheat, and (mostly) no dairy. Alas, I’m a professional cook so I spend a lot of time creating recipes to suit a variety of diets. Here’s one of my favorite cold weather meals that’s tasty, satisying, easy to make and good for ya! (more…)
Sustainable investing is helping to change environmentally harmful business practices. A new breed of investors is profiting from green while benefiting the planet. There are several established financial instruments for green investments including stocks, bonds, funds, savings accounts, deposit certificates and money market accounts. All of these types of investments can help the planet and turn a handsome profit.
In preceding articles, The Green Market provided practical demonstrations of the sizable profits available to investors in green stock. In this article I address the benefits green investing offers the earth. (more…)
Want to help save the planet, but also want your wedding to be memorable? The following is a great article written by SUE LEONARD of the Irish Independent on how to make that special day environmentally friendly
We’re all worried these days about global warming. We want to protect our environment and we do our bit to recycle and reuse. When it comes to weddings, though, we tend to throw green ethics aside. (more…)
There are plenty of us out there who think that there is nothing as nice as snuggling up on front of a blazing open fire on a cold miserable night? And let’s face it there’s no shortage of those at the moment. However, gorgeous as it looks and feels it can be an expensive and inefficient endeavor. A fireplace sends most of the heat in your house straight up the chimney emitting as much as 24,000 cubic feet of air per hour to the outside! Bottom line – not very green. But as GreenMe are the no sacrafice, guilt free way to going green we prefer not giving unrealistic green targets. Instead you can limit the loss of heat when enjoying a quiet evening by the fire. By opening dampers in front of the grate (if provided) or open the nearest window slightly – only about an inch you will see a significant difference in your heat gain. Don’t forget to close doors leading into the room. It works believe me and gets you some green creds at the same time! So get toasty!!
Caulk itThis winter I have found that my house seems to be leaking. By that I mean that I have noticed little drafts in certain rooms that I never noticed before. Small spaces and gaps around windows and pipes and wires entering the home create create energy wasting drafts that can cut the efficiency of your heating system. Most caulking products are cheap costing under €10. It’s a no brainer for a cosier home and your saving on your home heating bill too!
On the outside Irish Singletons seem like a passionate bunch of environmentalists, they don’t own cars and are rigorous about their recycling but a recent study by Trinity College has found that people living on their own produce 37% more carbon emisssions than couples and 59% more than those living in threes (no not trees!!).
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
As you may or may not know 96% of the Universe is “missing”. Please kindly check your cupboards to see if you are unwittingly hiding some of it. Thank you!
OK so scientists can’t explain why the Universe is expanding at an accelerating rate rather than slowing down as you would expect, so they have come up with the idea of dark matter and dark energy to explain it.
There’s no proof of either, but it’s a nice idea and helps justify spending billions on Hadron Colliders that might blow us all up, but hey it’s all in the name of science isn’t it so it has to be worth it right?
And scientists have recently detected signs of what they believe might be evidence of what dark matter might actually made up of.
They call this stuff – Weakly Interacting Massive Particles or WIMPS for short. It’s true, check it out if you don’t believe me!
And they have recently detected some anomalies from deep space that might be signs of these WIMPS existing they say.
However why they needed to spend all that time, effort and money looking for WIMPS is a bit baffling really when all they had to do was fly to Copenhagen for the COP15 Conference and find a whole plethora of them there!
In case you are wondering what these weakly interacting massive particles might themselves be made of then the egos of all these so called world leaders could be close. And the bigger the egos the less time they spent there.
The only person who seemed to have any decent grip on the need and the urgency of the situation was the Danish Environment Minister who was hosting the event and she was fairly quickly replaced by, yes you guessed it, a man with a rather large ego because other men who also had rather large egos didn’t like the way she was handling the conference!
So looks like WIMPS make up 96% of the known Universe!
So what might the other 4% be made of?
How about – S.T.U.F.F.? – Strong, Tiny, United, Free-Radical, Forces
They may all be tiny but together they build a future where everyone is included and everyone is part of the solution.
And although it might only make up 4% of the Universe that’s still quite a lot of STUFF to be getting on with!
WIMPS might not give a STUFF about the rest of the world, but who knows before you know it,
“S.T.U.F.F. the Future” could be the new logo for the next decade?
Tony Kearney
20/12/09
www.whoownsthefuture.com
