Green Living Tips has 24 handy tips for using lemons around the house in place of harsh chemicals or poisons. Here’s my favourite three:

Microwave
Heat a bowl of water and lemon slices in your microwave for 30 seconds to a minute; then wipe out the oven. Stains will be easier to remove and old food odors will be neutralized.

Laundry
For bleaching purposes, add 1/2 cup of lemon juice to your washing machine’s rinse cycle and hang clothes outside to dry.

A teaspoon of lemon juice thrown into your wash can also help your clothes to smell fresher.

Ant Deterrent
Pouring lemon juice around areas that ants frequent is said to repel them.

[Editor: I've heard of using orange peel/juice as well for keeping ants out.]

Lemon image from André Karwath via Wikipedia

Shopping online? Getting your packages shipped to your door. Saves you driving out to the mall and back, and with companies like FedEx making efforts to use greener vehicles and cut fuel consumption, surely having them handle the delivery must be the environmentally sound thing to do (assuming, of course, you really need what you ordered!).

I thought so too. And keeping fuel costs to a minimum not only makes sense for the planet, but should also help FedEx save some money. Then I saw a tracking record for a package that was being shipped to me from a city around 40 miles from my home:

According to Google Maps, the FedEx Oakland location that the package arrived at last night is 7.5 miles from my home, the package’s destination. Around 6:30am today it left there, and I assumed it would be on one of their delivery trucks heading here. But no, look where they sent it – Memphis, Tennessee!

Somebody at FedEx in Oakland actually loaded a package for delivery to an address less than 10 miles from where they stood on to a plane, and then flew it approximately 1800 miles to their hub in Memphis. At some point today, probably without even considering the stupidity or cost (to the planet and to FedEx) of these actions, another worker at FedEx in Memphis will load the package back on a plane, and send it back to Oakland – another 1800 miles.

So, my little package will have travelled around 3600 extra miles. Nothing green about that, and no matter how fuel efficient your vehicles, this is never going to be the right thing to do.

I actually called FedEx to see whether this was some kind of mistake. Perhaps the web site tracking information was wrong, or perhaps the parcel had accidentally been put in the wrong box. But no, from what the very kind customer service person told me, it seems that it is normal to route packages through their hub in Memphis like this.

Do other shipping companies work this way too?

In support of this year’s Earth Day, the folks over at Top Ten Reviews have reviewed a number of environmentally friendly apps for the iPhone, including iNewz Green, another ourLivez product like Vertography, and are also giving away free copies of the app to some of their readers.

ourLivez will also be giving away some free copies of iNewz Green for Earth Day – follow them on Twitter and watch for promo codes to be released throughout the day.

Although we’re not posting new content to the blog here quite as often, you can keep up with all the things we’re finding in green news thanks to our iNewz Green application for the iPhone and iPod touch.

How come?

Well, iNewz Green has this neat feature that allows us to share any interesting article we read with everybody else via Twitter. Simply follow us on Twitter, or even add our Twitter feed’s RSS to your favourite RSS reader.

Become a Sharer

You were always told to share growing up, so why not continue that now? If you have an iPhone or iPod touch, install iNewz Green on it and as you read the green news, if you see something you like, share it with your Twitter followers (if you’re not a Twitter user, you can also share the stories you find interesting through Delicious or regular email as well).

This morning I was sent a link to an amazing collection of art by Chris Jordan called Running The Numbers. The thumbnail of the detail view to the right really doesn’t do it justice either – you have to see the full size image to understand exactly what this image is. What it represents is 28,000 42-gallon oil drum: the amount of oil consumed in the US every 2 minutes.

And then keep looking at the other images in the collection. Others that stood out for me were:

• One hundred million toothpicks, representing the number of trees cut down to support the junk mail business (what a total waste);
• One million plastic cups: the number used on US airlines every 6 hours;
• Two million plastic bottles: the number used in the US every 5 minutes (that’s an amazing 576 million bottles a day!);
• 426,000 cell phones being “retired” every day in the US (most probably still working perfectly);
• 1.14 million brown paper bags: the number used every hour in the US;
• And finally, 60,000 plastic bags: the number used every 5 seconds in the US (that is over 1 billion every day).

In addition to the environmental issues represented by these numbers I’ve highlighted, there are also other social issues in the collection, including an image representing smoking, healthcare and even the issue of prisoners, both in the US and in US run detention facilities outside the US.

Light Bulbs

One image though I have a slight disagreement with: the image of 320,000 light bulbs floating in space. Said to be equal to the number of kilowatt hours of electricity wasted in the United States every minute from inefficient residential electricity usage (inefficient wiring, computers in sleep mode, etc.). The issue I have with this statement is that it is missing the real solution to this problem. The solution is not for consumers to unplug everything. The solution requires two parts:

1. More equipment designed to really use a lot less power when in sleep mode;
2. More electricity being generated from clean and renewable sources.

The second of those is perhaps the most important. Once we can produce enough electricity from clean renewable resources, why shouldn’t we use it to make our quality of life better? Sure, cutting consumption helps keep the bills low, and in the short term, while the world still depends heavily on dirty coal, and other non-renewable resources for our electricity, will help reduce emissions. But the logical extrapolation of that argument is to say that we should just stop using electricity completely. That’s a stupid argument. Much better to talk about how we can use technology to bring our clean generation levels in line with our consumption needs. Sure, don’t waste electricity unnecessarily, but the Vertography position is one of moderation. Sleep mode, done correctly, is a useful compromise, and better than just leaving the kit on all the time!

Here’s a great idea, though sadly not well executed in this instance: a Sloan dual flush mechanism for commercial toilets.

Many new flush mechanisms for residential use are coming with a dual flush option that can be used to save water. Typical modern single flush toilets will use 1.6 gallons of water per flush (gpf), or 6 litres. That is already a big saving on older units that could use as much as 5 gallons per flush). A dual flush unit adds a 0.8 gpf option for flushing liquid waste.

While the savings at home can be significant, the savings in a commercial installation are much higher since we spend so much more awake time at work than at home in general. So, installing dual flush options for office facilities and in other commercial buildings makes a lot of sense. If done right.

The photo shows the sign affixed to the wall above a new, eco-friendly flush unit installed in the building where my office is located. All sounds good, but I have two problems with this particular installation:

1. The reduced flush option is activated by pulling the handle up, which means most people will continue to use the full flush without even thinking about it.

2. It was fitted to a urinal, which should never need the ‘solid waste’ option.

The combination of those two flaws makes this particular installation essentially useless. A regular 1 gpf urinal flush mechanism would probably have been a better choice for this location, especially since most people will press the handle down.

While walking through Venice, we noticed an unusual looking public bench being installed. Looking somewhat out of place amongst the very old buildings, this bench has a number of metal stalks coming out from its center and reaching towards the sky. On the top of each of these stalks is installed a small solar panel.

I have no idea what these solar panels are going to be used to power. If I had to guess, I would say that there are batteries under the seating and the power will be used to provide lighting after dark. The lower one of the two collectors in the close-up shot looks like it might have a light fitting there. And if it is light the rest of the Venetian public lighting we saw, it will be using CFL, or perhaps another low power technology (perhaps LEDs).

Venice is famous for many things, gondoliers, glass, its canals and architecture, but included in that list are its street lamps.

Take a look at the photo to the right, and you will see a photo of one of those famous lamps, in the area of St Mark’s square, and the bulbs inside each of those pink lamps are compact fluorescents. The same was true for most of the street lighting we saw around the city. I haven’t seen any other city with so many CFL bulbs in use for its street lighting.

One of the reasons for the recent silence here in the Vertography blog has been a short trip we took back home to the UK. While there, we also took a side trip down to the beautiful city of Venice, in Italy, for a few days. As a result, we booked two return flights: one between San Francisco and London, and one between London and Venice.

When booking the trans-Atlantic flight, on United Airlines, we were offered the choice to pay for upgrades and given links to partners for booking cars and hotels, but nothing more. When we booked the Venice flights with EasyJet, a UK based low cost carrier, right there on the booking page, in addition to other offers, we were offered the option to buy carbon offsets for our flight.

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Have read a couple of articles recently that presented ideas for using our road networks as ways to harness the sun’s energy.

The first article, in Inhabitat, talked about a solution from Australian company Going Solar. Their idea combines solar panels with a sound barrier along the sides of freeways that pass through residential areas. This cuts the noise level in the houses, while at the same time supplying them with electricity.

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