PracticalEnvironmentalist
Useful environmentally friendly news and advice.
subscribe to our RSS Feed

Practical Environmentalist

Browse the Archives  You are Browsing the May 2007 Archive:

Closer look: First Zero Energy home in Frisco, Texas (near Dallas)

I noticed last week that the first Zero Energy home built up in Frisco, Texas (an exurb / suburb north of Dallas) was on the market. So over the Memorial Day weekend, I went up to take a look at it and see what I could learn about green building techniques.
As I have mentioned in [...]

Popularity: 8% [?]


What to do with all of those empty plastic water bottles?

From Flickr.
Today’s NY Times has an article about the 215 billion beverage containers that Americans buy every year. (That’s right. 215 billion. Every year.)

Turns out that the nickel deposit laws passed in many states around the country doesn’t usually cover bottled water — just beer and carbonated beverages. In the 1970s, water in plastic bottles [...]

Popularity: 2% [?]


PZEV Vehicles of 2007: These cars have the lowest emissions

Photo of a 2007 PZEV Ford Focus by Jalopnik on Flickr.
I was flipping through a local magazine in Dallas, and I saw an ad for the Subaru Forrester and Outback PZEV models, which are probably in the magazine because Dallas has so many problems with clean air.

Anyway, now is the part of the blog post [...]

Popularity: 10% [?]


The idiotic way to “save” gas money and “conserve.”

Here’s a new one from today’s NY Times that has me completely dumbfounded.
People concerned about the high price of gasoline are keeping their big cars and SUVs and adding a third small car like a Prius or a Yaris or a Civic so that they can save money on gasoline.
Pierre Tremblay, 67, of Howell, Mich., [...]

Popularity: 3% [?]


Green Building renovation. What to do with construction debris?

Erin, a local blogger in Dallas who also does a weekly radio segment about green home improvement, has a great post about keeping construction debris to a minimum.
We have been thinking about this issue at Clean Air Gardening lately, as we do a green renovation on a building that we recently purchased.
Our building used to [...]

Popularity: 3% [?]


Alley Gardeners: Reclaiming Urban Spaces

The other day I read an article in a local free weekly newspaper about the “underground” activity of alley gardening.
Places like alleys are typically forgotten communal areas in our neighborhoods. That means that sometimes they fall prey to illegal trash dumping or even more nefarious activities such as drug dealing. [...]

Popularity: 5% [?]


Wind Power in the News Plus Jay Leno’s Wind (Power)!

The U.S. seems to me to underuse wind power. Wind power has become a very important source of renewable energy throughout the world. So why doesn’t it “fly” here in the States?
Popular Mechanics covers the controversy with a list of the three biggest causes of the lack of investment and possible solutions to [...]

Popularity: 7% [?]


Green building renovation update. Insulation!

We’re still working diligently on the new Clean Air Gardening building, getting it ready for a move in in August or September. You might have seen our previous post about renovating the building for LEED and Energy Star certification.
 Here’s an insulation product that we are looking at for the ceiling of the building. Does anyone [...]

Popularity: 4% [?]


Need your help! Which environmentally friendly features should our new building have?

Readers, I’d like your help!
Clean Air Gardening has purchased a 13,000 square foot building in Dallas. We are renovating it before we move in to attempt to make it LEED certified, Energy Star certified, or both.
We’ve already hired an architect for the interior layout of the building, who has planned out the showroom, offices and [...]

Popularity: 11% [?]


Wal-Mart scoffs at Google’s miniscule 1.6 megawatts of solar, starts installing 20,000 megawatts

Google thinks they’re all cool and “not evil” for announcing the planned installation of 1.6 megawatts of solar power for their corporate campus.
I was pretty impressed with that, until I saw that Wal-Mart is starting with installation of solar power for 22 stores that will generate up to 20,000 megawatts of electricity per year.
Take that, [...]

Popularity: 44% [?]


« Previous Entries