Welcome ! As a young French Marketing professional with a Master's in International Management I have been selecting since January 2007 the latest headlines and best researches on sustainable development, climate change, cleantech and the world energy sector. Sounds great ? Don't hesitate to subscribe now !
Back to 2009, I had started – but not finished – a series due to help you going towards sustainability. I am proposing you to re-publish it this year and finish it. This series’ goal is to help you cut your carbon and environmental footprint.
I must have four times more subscribers, so hopefully this will reach and help more of you. Please let me know if you have other tips and / or if these ones are actually helping you.
I am starting today with the first one, on heating as it is behind an important part of the energy consumption of buildings, this is where we begin. Continue »
Using clean drinkable water to flush isn’t making much sense economically and environmentally. Yet this is the most practical one. (I don’t really see how people living in huge cities could all use dry or composting toilets)
This is why I believe that each and everyone of us should install dual flush toilets to minimize the quantity required to do so. Using the low flow flush does the trick in the vast majority of cases.
This will enable you to save huge quantities of water and thus lower your bills and environmental impact. So why not installing such a system this week and start saving money ? Continue »
We might be led to thinking that with global warming, we won’t be freezing anymore during winters. Counter-intuitively, this won’t be the case as I wrote in December as global warming may mean colder winters…
So we should better learn how to keep warm while still not touching the thermostat or insulating our houses and apartments. (a sound move for many reasons as I previously wrote).
The French website Ecolo-info wrote a compelling article on the very matter. Here is a short and translated version of my own. Continue »
To the Mother Nature Network : ” Our grandparents (or great-grandparents) — children of the Great Depression — could teach us a thing or two about going green on a budget. “Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without, (…) “
Their carbon footprint was uber-small — they used less water, less fuel, created less waste and imported fewer goods than we do. They took these actions out of necessity as opposed to our modern-day desire to help the planet (…).
Including those useful tips are kick the bottle, Let it all hang it out, grow local, ’rain, rain, don’t go away’, brown bag it and buy less. For more, please check out the full article.
The most probable answer is no. Then today’s post should help you reconsidering buying bottled water. Indeed, according to Annie Leonard’s latest short video the price of a bottle of water is 2,000 times the price of tap water.
I stopped drinking bottled water when I bought a Brita water filter. I could have went straight to tap water but concerns over the plumbing of our old house prevented me to do so.
Bottled water raises several questions and come with many problems. Indeed, it takes an awful lot of energy and money just to drink something you already have in your own home. Continue »
You may remember my article in June on waste in my Towards sustainability series. I was there mentioning the three Rs : Reducing, Recycling and Reusing. which are the basis of a more sustainable management of waste
Now TreeHugger presents us with 7 Rs adding Rot (as nearly 40 percent of the world’s garbage is organic waste and can be composted), Repair, Return, Refill (like it’s done for bottles in Germany) and Refuse.
The slideshow provided by TreeHugger is most inspiring and will give you all the necessary information to drastically cut your daily waste.
For the seventh part of this series – and after having tackled heating, electricity, water, transport, food and waste – I guess it is time for us to see how solar energies can benefit our lives.
I mention solar energies as there are three possibilities : passive solar applications, which are the most basic, solar thermal – which heats water – and finally solar photovoltaïc (PV), which generates electricity.
Even if most of us already use passive solar there are possibilities to increase our usage and go progressively to solar thermal and finish with solar PV Continue »
For the sixth part of the series – see the previous articles on heating, electricity, water, transport and food – I would like to tackle waste in general. This is an important issue as still too much of the things we throw end up in the wild.
The concept known as three Rs is interesting in that regard. Indeed, reducing, recycling and reusing our stuff would provide many advantages societies to Nature, our societies and our economies.
As the economic crises multiply and people find themselves unemployed, a better waste management would prove to benefit us all. Continue »
For the fifth part of these series – see the previous articles on heating, electricity, water and transport – I would like to tackle food in general. This is an important issue for both the health and the environment.
At a time where weight issues keep on increasing – to the World Health Organization, there are globally over a billion people overweight and 300 million obeses – food is becoming an environmental issue because of climate change.
This is important as to the International Panel on Climate Change, agriculture accounts for a fifth of global greenhouse gases emissions. Continue »
CFLs consume up to five time less energy than traditional incandescent and halogen bulbs. This convinced several countries including the European Union and India to increasingly use them.
Now LEDs are slowly reaching the markets. Consuming up to half the energy of CFLs they come in all shapes and colors. Even if they are still very expensive, they can last 35,000 hours and can lead to substantial savings over their lifetime.
So if further to my post on decreasing your electricity use you are switching off your incandescents, why not choosing directly LEDs ? You will find below a list of the main advantages. Continue »
