The greener side introduces us to Ron See and his remarkable invention.  “My whole family and I have been living off-grid since 1997,” he says.  “We use solar panels and a battery bank for most of our power supply, propane cook stove and hot water and a diesel generator for back up. I also have 2 windmills for battery charging that we are working towards installing. I run a small metal recycling and hauling business in Hartstown, PA. I have personally cleaned up over 2000 tons of scrap steel, and other metals from farm dumps old fence rows and businesses in the past 13 years.” Inspired by a contest in a Pennsylvania resort town that dared people to make and race flotation devices from old bottles, See decided to craft, patent, and sell his own raft.

Miguel of The Greener Side loves this contraption.  “You don’t need to purse your lips or buy a pump to blow it up. Instead, insert a bunch of 2-liter bottles to keep the $50 raft afloat.” See claims it is more durable than regular rafts.  He even says it’s “puppy-proof.”

Hey, we’ve all heard the rap about how hemp is the most flexible (and underused) natural material in the world.  The green people at ThisNext have a rival candidate to consider: bamboo. That single tag alone yields a truly amazing array of enviable objects, all made from bamboo.  We’re talking flooring, tableware, kitchen tools, fishing gear, furniture, shirts, and jewelry.  Let’s take a peek…

...continued: Bamboo-a-rama on ThisNext

The Ramsay Home Project started out as a blog from a family building its own green home from scratch; it’s now become much more than that – a great resource for anyone even thinking about taking on that particular challenge.  Recently the Ramsay folks pointed towards another “great home building blog” Paso Straw Bale Construction Blog, “In the year 2000 I started straw bale dream house that would be ecologically sound, environmentally friendly, and a place to finally call home,” Lesliehm says.  “In choosing Dave Exline/Three Little Pigs Construction, I ventured into house building hell.  This is the story of the building of that house. The story of what happens when you trust someone you should not. The story of bad decisions, poor quality work, and lack of accountability. The story of what it takes to salvage what was once thought unsalvagable.”  Sadly typical, home-buildilng-types tell us…but this one has a happy ending.

 “I would like to see a world where permaculture, green building, energy-efficiency, gardening, eco-groovy crafting, art, thrifting, environmental sustainability, and social justice are normal, everyday stuff,” says mimulus of Greenjewls.  “I want a world where healthy children can grow up to inherit a healthy planet.” And sustainability often means finding the perfect piece of equipment, investing in it, and even celebrating it…like the Aeternum Ellipse Pressure Cooker. 

“In the beginning I used it rarely,” she says, “scared off by mom’ s horror stories of exploding bean pots and terrified of the hiss. But the last few years it has become one of my favorite kitchen tools.  With the ohsawa pot and pressure cooker you can have great brown rice in 20 minutes…a few more minutes for steam fluffing, and presoaked beans take 10-15 minutes. Cooking with these tools vastly reduces the amount of natural gas/and or electricity needed to cook food. Pressure cooking helps to tenderize cheap cuts of meat and cuts down on the amount of time in the kitchen.”   As good as all this is, Greenjewls wishes there was an even cheaper way to go, but “unfortunately I have never seen a good pressure cooker at the thrift. This is definitely one tool that is worth the splurge.”

EcoGeek has found another breakthrough product: LED lamps that can replace even more incandescent bulbs than ever – these for decorative purposes.  Mule Lighting’s new LEDison series of LED lamps fit into standard Edison-base sockets, and can replace 10 to 60w incandescent bulbs in commercial applications (like shopping malls). “The LED lamps have ten times the service life of the incandescents they replace, and use only one watt!” Phillip Proefrock tells us. “An even greater cost savings is realized when the annual maintenance costs of replacing incandescent bulbs is considered.  Unfortunately, they’re not yet being mass produced and are probably pretty expensive (since they wouldn’t tell us how much they cost.)  They don’t quite produce the amount of light we usually expect from household lamps, so compact fluorescents are still probably a better choice, for now. But progress continues, and these are another neat little step along the way.”

You find good blogs in the oddest places…like Justin Rowlatt’s Ethical Man, buried in the web site of the BBC.  In this ongoing “mission to lead a more ethical life,” Justin experiments with Eco Balls, a non-detergent clothes cleaning alternative  that “claims to allow clothes to be washed without the use of detergent…The balls look like fat little flying saucers and, as befits their eco status, they are green.”  The blurb on the side of the box claims that they “unleash ionic cleaning power to penetrate deep into clothing fibres to lift away dirt without fading bright colours.” But do they work?  Justin and his wife Bee (who, he confesses, does most of the washing) says they do about as well as their regular cleaning product, “but I haven’t tried to do whites yet.”

Auto IT is an autoblog out of the UK that’s keeping an eye on electric cars in the Old Country. And they have some interesting insights into a new arrival, The Nice Car Company’s Mega City. The new battery system and light design may get the speed up to the promised 40+ mph, but that’s more than necessary for the Mega City’s target market: drivers that frequent the notoriously overcrowded streets of metropolitan London, where nothing goes 40+ mph. Auto IT likes what it sees so far, but the jury is still out. “Potential buyers will not be able to verify any of these details for a while yet - the first Mega City test drives will not be available until October, and the first customer deliveries will not hit London’s pot-holed boulevards until November at the earliest.”

Easy Ways to Save the World is a fine collection of practical tips and products that make green living not only possible, but pleasant. Matthew’s info-packed site includes personal recommendations and advice on a wide range of products, like the Ban Beater, a home gray-water system that helps you recycle water quickly and easily.

The Practical Environmentalist gets down to the basics with its recent recommendation on a composting toilet from Envirolet. “These composting toilets are great for cabins, beach homes, or even your very own urban household. Save water and help the environment with a composting toilet!”

Grandinite is a green blog that goes into some unexplored corners…including uncovering this remarkably simple and rather wonderful idea: PlayPumps.  “It’s a simple idea,” the mysteriously named-and-numbered bloggers tell us.  “As children spin on a merry-go-round, water pumps from below the ground. It is stored in a tank just a few feet away, making a safe, plentiful supply of water available in the community.”  Nearly 700 PlayPumps have been installed in South Africa, providing safe water to a million people living in rural communities, and thousands more PlayPumps will be installed throughout Sub-Saharan Africa, bringing the many benefits of ready access to clean drinking water to millions of underserved people.

Rob J. Hopkins’ Transition Culture is an “evolving exploration into the head, heart, and hands of energy descent,” and among his many fascinating topics is spreading the word about the cob house. As one of Rob’s rec, The Cob Cottage Company, explains, “Cob building uses hands and feet to form lumps of earth mixed with sand and straw – a sensory and aesthetic experience similar to sculpting with clay. Cob is easy to learn and inexpensive to build. Because there are no forms, ramming, cement or rectilinear bricks, cob lends itself to organic shapes: curved walls, arches and niches. Earth homes are cool in summer, warm in winter. Cob’s resistance to rain and cold makes it ideally suited to cold climates like the Pacific Northwest, and to desert conditions.” Rob also recommends The Handsculpted House by Ianto Evans, Linda Smiley and Michael G. Smith. It’s “the most compassionate, human and grounded book on building in print. It was the first book I read on building that completely resonated with my thinking on how construction should be about so much more that just shelter making. Buildings, the authors argued, should be so beautiful that they make grown men cry. Amen to that (and the colour photos in the middle are testament to cob’s ability to do just that).

Grist Magazine is a key resource for green news and information, and the same applies to Gristmill, its blog. You’ll find great insight, recent information, smart opinions, and product recs, like the recent article on jeans designer Tierra Del Forte and her line of eco-friendly denim closes. She uses only organic cotton and is made in sweatshop-free facilities, “and she wants her fan base to know it,” Gristmill says. “From the moment a customer looks at a Del Forte Denim display or peeks at a hangtag, she’ll know the jeans are more than just stylin’.”

Stephen Frasier’s Greenism frequently focuses on “applied ecological ethics,” and in the process explores everything from the spiritual side of green living to reliable sources of information on solar energy and plug-in cars. He also suggest a look at Orion, a beautifully designed eco-magazine that “publishes the work of the writers who are shaping a relationship between nature and a new emerging cultural ethic — Barbara Kingsolver, Bill McKibben, Gary Paul Nabhan, Sandra Steingraber, David Quammen, Richard Nelson, Terry Tempest Williams, Barry Lopez, Robert Michael Pyle, Thomas Moore, David James Duncan, Wendell Berry, Scott Russell Sanders, Ann Zwinger, and others — as well many new voices.” Well worth a look!

Few of us are actually building whole structures on a regular basis…but a whole lot of us find ourselves paying – directly or indirectly – for new sidewalks in front of our homes. Green Building Blog suggests looking into sidewalks made from rubber when it comes up again. As he says, rubber sidewalks offer a way to recycle some of the estimated 290 million tires thrown out each year in the U.S., and they do not constrict tree roots the way concrete slabs do.

Kit Cassingham’s ECOnomically Sound isn’t quite what you think it is: it’s actually a fascinating and practical blog on ecologically sound practices for the hotel and hospitality industry…though it can be of use to us all. Great stuff on environmentally wise cleaning, furniture, decoration and more…including these beautiful bedsheets that are made from organic bamboo. “The hospitality industry can actually boost its bottom line by adopting environmental procedures and policies,” Kit says, “making ‘green’ an
ECOnomically Sound decision.”

The Dirty Greek is one of the best-known green blogs in sight, and he’s also got one of the best blogrolls in the field. Sustainable tech, alternative fuels, local food, global warming – he’s on top of it all, with a cram-full blog…including reference to a wonderfully hopeful article in Popular Science about electrical generation from the wind…but not just any wind. “ Sky WindPower Corporation is developing a flying electric generator that would autorotate at 15,000 feet, tethered to the ground with an electricity-conducting cable,” they report. These high-blowing breezes are the strongest and smoothest on the planet, and if the technical challenges can be overcome, they may very well be a rich new source of power from a nearby, unexpected, and entirely invisible source.