Here is a new idea and timely- purchasing a H.U.G. (Home Utility Gift)!  This is a program offered in my locale by Louisville Electric and Gas (LG&E) for customers who want to warm up their loved ones, literally.  In the winter season where utility bills creep up higher and pull funds away from other categories in the budget, anyone can go ahead and pay some or all of another household’s bill.

“Even with wholesale natural gas costs at six-year lows, many families are on fixed budgets because of the sluggish economy and are trying to manage their energy usage more wisely,” said John P. Malloy, Vice President of Energy Delivery — Retail for E.ON U.S. “These non-traditional gift certificates are the perfect idea for many shoppers because they are unique, convenient, and very practical for any recipient.”

Nevada’s Valley Electric Association calls it Holiday Utility Gift and has other gifting opportunities to help folks out.

Alabama’s Cullman Electric HUG program was started during the 2007 holiday season, but HUG payments quickly became popular all year long as a way to assist.  Since the program was introduced, more than $10,800 has been given.

Pennsylvania’s Equitable Gas, Columbia Gas, or Dominion Peoples,will send you or the recipient personalized HUG certificates, either for you to distribute or for the recipient to include when paying a utility bill.

I’m standing by this sign here at the entrance of a super stuffmart location.  I already have and like my iPhone and I just wanted to get a picture of myself by a huge picture of one.  It was a nice moment for me.

I admit that I remember the 70′s- the gasoline lines, the will-work-for-food signs, the high mortgage interest rates.  I also remember Mean Joe Green’s coke and a smile and Dave Thomas was making it big with his restaurant business and turning it into an adoption awareness foundation.  Could it be that when times are tough- and we’re at a 26-year low mile marker according to Meridith Levinson at Computerworld/Careers- the tough get nicer?

If you want good karma for your career, you certainly will tap into your nice side.  Here at HealthPatio, we have miracles rolling around under the picnic table every day, but out there in the work-a-day world, it couldn’t hurt to take this advice from Heather Gardener with 360jobinterview.com :

Doing good deeds by putting yourself out there for a good cause is an excellent way to at least provide a perspective hiring manager something positive about you. If you get heavily involved this might even prompt someone to talk “nice” about you and your working efforts to help others and provide a solid reference alternative.

After the Swiffer Mop and Before the Vinegar

After the vinegar!

So I’m cleaning my apartment for the in-laws’ holiday visit and my kitchen’s tile grout looks filthy.  I use my Swiffer mop and then scrub with Clorox (the new Green Works version available in stores) to no avail.  In desperation, I seek google’s sound advice.  The solution (literally)?  One part vinegar one part water or a little baking soda paste.  It sounds homey and environmentally friendly and inexpensive, but does it really work?  Just look at the before and after pictures above!

When picking out cleaning products I try to moderate between price and environmental efficacy, so I have an assortment of ‘green’ cleaning products in my apartment.  Some work, some don’t.  But what seems to be most puzzling as peruse my way through all of the cleaning products I own is why have cleaning products in the first place?  Nearly everything I clean, as I think about it, could be easily cleaned with three fully biodegradable, non-toxic household items: lemon juice, vinegar, and baking soda.  The Do-it-yourself website, has a new Going Green topic on its side menu, has a great article called How to Clean Green which lists several recipes for green cleaners. Here are two easy and useful examples:

Carpet Spot Remover
•Cornstarch or baking soda
•Club soda
Blot the spot and apply baking soda or cornstarch immediately. When dry, blot with club soda and vacuum.

Glass Cleaner
•1 cup rubbing alcohol (optional)
•1 cup water
•1 tablespoon vinegar
Combine in a spray bottle and wipe clean with a newspaper. Alcohol hastens evaporation to prevent streaking.

And now, what about everything else.  Hand, dish and laundry soap, for example, isn’t as easy to make from scratch.  I personally suggest buying these products, unless you’re exceptionally handy, crafty an organized. Here are a few of my personal favorites and professional suggestions:

•Method brand soaps, as cliche as they sound, are easy to buy anywhere, use biodegradable ingredients, do not test on animals, use recycled and recyclable packaging materials and make use of government issued carbon-credits for their employee’s transportation and manufacturing process.  Plus, they’re smell great and come in cool-looking bottles!
•I use Green Works dishwashing liquid (water lily scent). It carries the Design for the Environment (DfE) certification, meaning the EPA screens all the ingredients put into the product and markets with the Sierra Club to endorse the ideas of preserving and protecting the planet. You want to hear the kicker? Green Works was created by Clorox! Proof that you don’t have to be anti-institution in order to be an environmentalist.
•For my wood flooring, I use Murphy’s soap; its biodegradable, kosher, cheap, and the bottles are recyclable.

•And finally, I suggested ECOS All Natural Laundry Detergent.  Its HE compatible, smells great, has a soy-based built-in fabric softener, and is grey-water safe (meaning you could use the left over water for your vegetable garden).  All this and it was on sale at Kroger’s!

As for my kitchen cleaning, my in-laws arrive tomorrow and I’m feeling pleased with my greening and cleaning! Word to the wise, you may want to use these cleaning solutions barefoot – its more comfortable and the grime from your shoes won’t be washed onto your newly cleaned tile!  Happy green cleaning!

Treehugger brand Hugg.com, a Discovery company, has decided to close the doors on Hugg, a popular green social news site.

From Hugg.com:

PLEASE READ!

On November 17th, 2008, Hugg will no longer accept new submissions or registrations. Hugg will remain publicly viewable until the end of the year, at which time Hugg.com will be closed. The Hugg.com domain will be directed towards a new feature on the TreeHugger forums where participants will be able to post and comment on interesting green links (coming soon). We welcome you to the thriving community at the TreeHugger forums and hope you’ll join us now to carry on the discussion. Go ahead and poke around on the forums – we think you’ll like it and enjoy conversing with such a diverse group of intelligent, passionate people!

We would like to express our gratitude and appreciation to the many Hugg users who have poured time and energy into providing the community with tons of great content. Unfortunately, due to increasing maintenance costs, we can no longer provide Hugg with the resources it needs to continue.

Please email tech@treehugger.com with any questions or comments.

Thank you.

(h/t – Paul Smith)

In the height of hurricane season, it seems proper to feel a bit humbled by natural forces.  Forces that in spite of our best technologies we are unable to control or even marginally predict.  While the damage in comparison to Katrina was minimal, the storm still traveled across ten states and killed over 150 people in the United States and in the Caribbean.

This is all very unfortunate, but was it all bad?  Students of all ages were freed from the bounds of school  to marvel at amazing weather patterns and to *gasp* play without videogames, movies, and IPods.  Maybe they played in puddles or in the breeze. Later, perhaps due to the dark and exhaustion of real outdoor play, they actually went to bed on time!  My brother-in-law at Texas A&M  and my brother at Westlake High School both experienced cancellations.  At Westlake High School, students were released to make room for evacuees from Galveston and Houston who stayed for days in their gymnasiums and auditoriums. What better way to appreciate one’s own home and family then through community service? On a more personal level, I got three days off of work. I got to have purely candle-lit dinners with my husband, and I opened my windows!

And finally, when it comes to pure energy, think of how much money and coal the American people saved by having their power off!  In Kentucky, where I live, 300 thousand homes were without electricity and an estimated 2.6 million homes nation wide!  Let’s do some math!  Say each of these homes was without power for two days (and that’s conservative) and uses the average amount of energy in a day (around 4800 kW/hr).  Lets also say that electricity costs around $0.08 per kW/hr.  Here we go:

2 days x 2.6 million homes x  4800 kW/hr x $0.08 per kW/hr =$1,996,800,000

That’s right!  Ike saved the American people AT LEAST 2 billion dollars in energy savings!  So though I certainly wouldn’t want a similar storm to impede anyone in this way again, let’s look at the positive side of things! We learned how to appreciate energy and maybe you’ll take your city blackout day more seriously!

When you buy the product, you are buying the package, too.  So says my friend Gina who comes half-day on Mondays and a full day on Friday to help me clean up after myself and my family.  I finally realized that I am not a slacker mom if I enlist some help around here.  And Gina makes it nice.

When I came home today in the middle of the cleaning job, my kitchen looked so great AND she organized inside a problem cabinet, that I literally had tears of joy in my eyes and I hugged her.  I feel like a person again!

Another cool thing about Gina is her witty life-lessons that aren’t didactic- they are simply practical.  Case in point, see the uploaded image at the top of this post.  The “bucket” is used in this case for cleaning solution but she says she uses them at home for organizers in the bedroom, bath or kitchen.  In the spring she has used other similar containers as a planter for seedlings or houseplants.   Finally, she tried to tell me how you can jazz up the cutting of the container to make it look like a plastic duck that could be fun for kids to put their little toys in, but I didn’t quite see the procedure in my mind’s eye.  Maybe sometime I will ask her more on that.

It is perfect timing because about a month ago I purchased an empty plastic bucket for $4.50 and just yesterday the bottom corner got smashed up and broken open somehow and I had to throw it away!! Maddening!

So it seems clear that while recycling is ok and clearly better than tossing refuse into a landfill, it’s not exactly an environmental panacea and may in fact promote the very behavior it’s intended to eliminate – egregious wastefulness.  A far superior alternative is Reuse. Why not take something in its present form and reuse it? This concept seems like common sense, but every year billions of pounds of perfectly good stuff ends up in landfills.  [from Project Enterprise]

So if you are wary about re-using plastic containers for your food and potables,  if you want to reduce the volume of plastic that becomes garbage, or if you are like me and really really want to avoid buying empty buckets that break anyway, take this tip from Health Patio via my friend Gina.  Thanks, Gina!

The United States Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Green Power Challenge Winners for 2008 were announced in April and list Fortune 500 Companies, Retail Companies, Colleges and University. The winners consertedly bought only (or almost only) Green Power to maintain the function of their businesses. (The combined green power purchases of these organizations amounts to more than 6.6 billion kilowatt-hours of green power annually, which is the equivalent amount of electricity needed to power more than 676,000 average American homes each year! Visit the EPA’s website for a more detailed table on the top participants in each. Interestlingly, the EPA narrowly escaped its own top ten list, as the 11th organization,

As I waited at a crosswalk on Brooklyn Avenue the other day, I was pleasantly surprised to read “hybrid electric” written on the side of a passing Fedex truck! Intrigued, I did a little research and found that the vehicle I saw was due to the efforts of the Hybrid Electric Vehicle Project of 2004:

The new vehicle [About the FedEx OptiFleet E700] is expected to decrease particulate emissions by 96 percent, reduce smog-causing emissions by 65 percent, and travel 57 percent farther on a gallon of fuel, reducing fuel costs by over a third.

Fedex worked closely with the Environmental Defense Fund and the Eaton Corporation at the beginning. As of April 28 the of this year (2008), 172 of these hybrid vehicles are in use; 93 of which are here in New York which have driven over 200 million miles. This feat is due to the work of other companies including Ford, Isuzu, Iveco, Azure Dynamics and others.

And you thought Corporate America was shamelessly exploiting resources without giving back!