In the home

Images: A glance at green labels

With so many "green" options appearing on everyday products, navigating the marketplace can be tricky if you're attempting to green your life.

Home Depot stamps efficient lightbulbs, low-toxic paints, and other goods as "Eco Options." SC Johnson sells Windex certified by Greenlist, the company's internal effort to reduce toxicants in its product line. Canon labels printers as "Generation Green."

Environmentalists may applaud corporate efforts to sell fewer polluting and poisonous goods and services. But some consumer watchdogs warn that the proliferation of green claims will confuse or mislead shoppers, and prefer that … Read more

Photos: Green homes on the cheap

There are all sorts of tech geeks working at CNET. I'm an energy geek, both at home and at work.

So how do you do the "green building" thing? Well, if you're wealthy enough to hire a sustainability architect, you have a new home built with bamboo flooring and solar panels (and lots of closet space.)

For all the rest of us, I've assembled a photo gallery on ways to "green" your lifestyle using some examples from my home. For a very thorough run-down of resources, check out "How to green your life&… Read more

How to green your life

Want to green your life in honor of Earth Day on Tuesday? Good luck. There's seemingly no limit to the potential catch-22s of trying to do the right thing by the environment.

For example, could so-called green fuel destroy rainforests and drive up food prices? Are organic vegetables shipped from South America really better than those grown conventionally yet closer to home? What if the making of solar panels would pollute a city in China?

Consumers are far removed from the design, mining, manufacture, packaging, and transportation involved in making goods available for daily life, while a complex global … Read more

Cutting down solar costs with satellite imagery

Danny Kennedy may have come up with a way to make solar panels an impulse buy.

Sungevity, Kennedy's company, has come up with a Web-based system for evaluating the solar potential for a given home through satellite data. Customers log onto Sungevity's site and provide an address and some information about their monthly electrical bill.

Within 24 hours, the company sends customers a quote for installing a solar system, an estimate of how much the system will save them over 25 years, the prospective increase in the value of their home, and simulated imagery of what their home … Read more

Cash in trash: RecycleBank gets hefty funding

RecycleBank on Tuesday said that it has raised $30 million to increase its operations in the U.S. and expand into Europe.

The series B round came from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, RRE Ventures, Sigma Partners, and The Westly Group.

The company has developed a novel business model to incentivize consumers to recycle more.

It gives households points based on the total weight of what they recycle rather than throw away. Those points can be redeemed to purchase more consumer goods, like food and coffee.

So far, RecycleBank has gotten 40 municipalities in the northeastern United States to sign … Read more

In China, returning to greener preplastic shopping tech

Chinese authorities in January announced they would ban ultrathin plastic bags, and make customers pay for reusable canvas grocery bags, in an effort to reduce waste.

A Beijing Review article quotes a Hangzhou supermarket manager on the old days, when shopping didn't produce billions of bags worth of waste that will biodegrade only after 200 years, if at all.

"When I was a child, my mother always took me to the vegetable market with a bamboo basket. She put a bowl in the basket for holding bean curd. When we bought sugar powder or salt, the sellers would … Read more

Will social networking stop greenwashers?

Whether marking printers or produce, the increasing number of "green" claims on products can make it hard to separate sincere efforts at sustainability from marketing fluff.

Environmental watchdogs warn that corporate "greenwashing" will lead jaded consumers to abandon efforts to shop responsibly.

However, individuals can counteract the confusion and police the marketplace using online tools, according to Joel Makower, executive editor of GreenBiz.com.

"In this age of the Web, the blogosphere, and social media, I don't think greenwashers are going to get very far or that fraudulent, hugely misleading companies are going to … Read more

Cutting out the mercury in compact fluorescents

Sylvania's micro-mini-energy saver compact fluorescent bulbs have a few novel things going for them, but one of the more interesting is that they hold far less mercury than most CFLs.

The bulbs contain only 1.5 milligrams of mercury. Most CFLs have about five, according to Stephanie Anderson, the company's chief corporate spokesperson. That comes because the mercury is encased in a metal sphere. Conventional CFLs deploy mercury in its natural liquid state. Granted, it's still a pain to get rid of a CFL, but less mercury means less toxins.

Anderson also points out that the bulbs … Read more

Killing the oyster pack

It took about two decades for the packaging creature known as the "oyster" or "clamshell" to conquer the world of consumer electronics. But the hard-to-open casings of plastic considered by many to be toxic could start to disappear soon, according to some experts in packaging and design.

Although clamshells remain widespread, a small but growing number of companies are housing products in packages that are not only easier to open, but manufactured more efficiently with recycled or recyclable ingredients.

Oyster packaging forms what may seem like a hermetic seal around a wide array of goods, including … Read more