Live Green and Be Kind to the Earth
10 Eco-friendly New Year Resolutions You Can Keep
by Snigdah Sen
Tri Valley Magazine, January/February 2008 Issue

Get smart about sustainability. Start with a virtual tour of Recycle City, an online town-ship developed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s San Francisco office. The virtual city’s residents, their lifestyles, and games about the city are all designed around lessons in sustainability. You can learn new ways to reuse paper, find safe methods for dealing with leftover cleaning products, or tips on how to turn your local gas station into an environmentally-friendly center. Designed for the classroom, Recycle City can be a handy tool for teachers looking for fun ways to inspire students to learn about the environment. Take a tour at www.epa.gov/recyclecity/. While you’re on the EPA’s web site also visit the extensive Green Communities program pages at www.epa.gov. Learn more about how to lead a sustainable lifestyle at Make It Earth 911’s, www.earth911.org, an online resource that provides helpful information about local green options. www.Ecogeek.com will keep you up to date on innovations that are saving the planet. Observe the effects of humans on the Earth with satellite imagery from Google Earth at earth.google.com. www.ban.org is the site to keep you informed on what is happening to that computer you recycled: are its toxic components being properly dismantled or was it sent to an over-seas dump?

Take the test.
Find out how your lifestyle is impacting the earth we want to protect. Play the Great Green Web Game, an amusing and educational online quiz game created by the Union of Concerned Scientists. It tests your knowledge about consumer behavior in America and measures the environmental impact of your choices. Play the game at www.go.ucsusa.org and learn more about the earth and how you can help. At the other end of the spectrum, there’s the new videogame, Energyville, from Chevron Corp., the San Ramon energy giant, which challenges players to meet the energy needs of their own city. It was developed using data and content provided by the Economist Intelligence Unit, The Economist Group’s research arm. Play it here www.chevron.com

Get kids going green.
You’re never too young to be green, so start early and encourage your children to explore green ideas and get involved in local initiatives. Sensitizing your children to conservation early helps them grow into environmentally responsible adults. More than 39 Tri Valley schools have adopted the Go Green Initiative, a program aimed atbringing together students, teachers and parents to develop green practices among children. The program includes composting, recycling, responsible paper consumption and environmental education. Over 900 schools across the 46 states and 10 countries have gotten on the green wagon. To hop on, go to www.gogreeninitiative.org or talk to Kate Jupina at (925) 484-1851. Turn your teens on to the Berkeley-based Earth Team, which works with Bay Area teenagers and teachers to raise a new generation of environmental leaders. The Green News is the group’s monthly online newspaper for and by teens covering everything on the environment - from news storiesto poetry to comic strips. To learn more about how your teen can contribute, visit www.earthteam.net. For those witha flair for being on the air, there’s The Green Screen, EarthTeam’s television show, which carries programming for and by teens in the Bay Area. You can watch episodes of the show at www.thegreenscreentv.net. Tri Valley teen contributors are already putting their multimedia skills to green use. For more information contact Earth Team’s multimedia coordinator Lana Husser at Lana@earthteam.net. Respect Our Earth’s interactive games for kids between five and 10 years old deliver entertaining and informative green lessons – including recycling, composting, solar power, endangered animals and pollution. The software, from the makers of NoteNiks by Sound Advice, costs under $20. The Oakland-based company sells a host of products and educational software on children’s health and the ecology. . For more information visit www.noteniks.com or call Mindy Myers at (510) 547-0125.

Read a book, plant a tree.
Book lovers, take heart. If you are devoted to the printed word and conservation, you have a dilemma. While recycled paper and e-books are gathering steam, many books are still made of virgin paper that requires trees to be cut down. Now Novato-based Eco-Libris offers a guilt-reducing solution just for you that will allow you to give back to nature and encourage sustainable reading. You can make up for the books you buy by planting trees in regions that will most benefit from them. The company partners with organizations in Africa and Latin America –where forest cover is disappearing rapidly — that plant trees on your behalf. For just $5, you can have six trees planted for five books gathering dust in your library. To mark your contribution, Eco-Libris will mail you a sticker for each book you balance this way. The company has more than 400 customers from across the globe and has balanced out over 5,000 books. For more information, check them out at www.ecolibris.net.

Dwell in an emerald city.
Live in a Tri Valley town that is committed to the quest for a green future. Pleasanton and Livermore have mandatory civic, commercial and residential green building ordnances for all new and significantly remodeled buildings and living units. Livermore’s residential green building ordnance becomes mandatory starting in 2008. Also in the works is a joint program by the two cities to set up one-stop solar shops that will provide residents with information about solar technologies and the costs involved, connect you to approved vendors and ongoing rebates, and may even have contractors review your homes and suggest suitable energy-saving technologies. San Ramon and Dublin also have green building guidelines and resources for conserving energy and the environment.

Shop Green.
Buying habits count, so make a point of doing business with green businesses. One easy way to find them is to buy the EcoMetro Guide. The East Bay resource book includes dozens of coupons for a wide variety of businesses, and a handy directory of local sustainable businesses. The East Bay EcoMetro Guide for 2008 is on newstands. The new edition includes neighborhood maps noting the approved merchants, interviews with community members and a CO2 emission calculator. Take a look at www.ecometro.com. Don’t forget to check coupon validity.

You can also patronize businesses certified by the BayArea Green Business Program, coordinated by the Association of Bay Area Governments. The group’s website at www.greenbiz.abag.ca.gov/ShopGreen.html lists by county over 1,000 businesses and agencies that meet the program’s environmental standards from auto repair shops to restaurants and laundry services, including several in the Tri Valley.

There are dozens of web sites that make it easy for you to shop for eco-friendly products and services. Ecofabulous.com is a San Francisco web site devoted to sustainable, sexy stuff including eco-bling that’s also good for the planet. The Thrifty Planet Resource Guide’s online data-base of businesses in the U.S. that sell environmentally conscious merchandise is at www.thethriftyplanet.com. Locally, try the herbal vitamins, supplements, organic cotton and wool bedding at Green Bodyin Danville. To learn more about healthy living, natural remedies, and classes you can call (925) 820-3131 or visit www.greenbody.eastbaysocial.com.

Make a green fashion statement. Try out Goza Gear‘s T-shirts, which is also a certified Green Business. The Livermore-based custom screen printer and embroiderer uses recycled and organic cottons and eco-friendly accessories for its products, including non-toxic inks and dyes for printing. To place your order, call Steve Melgoza, (925) 371-6732 or reach him at steve@gozagear.com. Find out more at www.gozagear.com/index.html. For fun, fair and organic baby clothes, try www.speesees.com. Shop the vintage and second-hand stores in downtown Danville like Second Impressions. Brian Klosterman’s Your Safety Place in Dublin is a one-stop shopping store for gadgets, gear and equipment that can help with anything the environment throws at us when it does act up, including FDA-approved long term water storage tanks. “You can go without food for a few days, but you can never get enough water,” says store manager Shirley Schultheis. In addition to all the gear, Klosterman, a former Silicon Valley exec, offers free personalized disaster preparedness lists and carries pre-made kits for home and car. He also sells appetizing freeze-dried Mountain House and other food with a very long shelf life.

Go green within.
If your home is where your heart is, and you feel for the environment, you might want your interiors to be green, too. Pleasanton’s RarEarth Furniture offers furniture made by artisans in Asia, the Middle East and Central America. The artisans use reclaimed wood from a variety of sources, including old teak houses, discarded railroad tiles, pony carts and felled trees from coffee plantations. You can also get advice on how to design an eco-friendly home using milk cartons for flooring, green fabric, vegetable dyes, and more. Visit www.rarearthfurniture.com or call(925)468-7460.

Garden green.
Having a garden is the nicest way to say thank you to Mother Earth, but bad practices can turn it a wasteful and environmentally unfriendly endeavor. The U.S.Environmental Protection Agency’s Green Scapes program provides green solutions for landscaping, helps preserve natural resources and prevent waste and pollution. Whether you run a business or are a homeowner, get all your gardening advice, from soil maintenance to composting, here at www.epa.gov/greenscapes. Attend the Bay-Friendly Landscaping & Gardening Conference Feb. 29 at Martin Luther King Jr. Student Union at UC Berkeley. For more information, visit the Stop Waste.org website, which is packed with helpful advice and resources on landscaping and gardening, at www.stopwaste.org.

Find out how to conserve water in your garden. Drop by Dublin’s pretty and eco-friendly water conservation garden at www.dsrsd.com.

Travel Green.
Whether you are traveling in or out of the state or country, a host of eco-friendly travel options await you. Tourism comes at a cost to both you and the environment. But there are lots of travel agencies offering environmentally-oriented vacations and packages that help you travel smart and green. Visit Orbitz’s new eco-tourism microsite at www.orbitz.com.

Sustainable Travel International’s fascinating a world of vacations, including adventure travel and eco-tours that protect and positively impact the cultures and environments, plus volunteer vacations. www.sustianbletravelinternational.org In California, the state’s Integrated Waste Management Board runs the Californian Green Lodging program that certifies hotels as green across the state. The program was established to encourage people traveling on state and government business to stay at eco-friendly hotels. When you plan your next holiday or business trip, scan their list for certified green hotels. Check out the 100-odd hotels at www.ciwmb.ca.gov.

If friends or colleagues are visiting the Tri Valley, suggest two local hotels, the Sheraton Hotel in Pleasanton and the San Ramon Marriott Hotel, both of which have earned a spot on the Bay Area Green Business Program’s list of eco-friendly businesses.

Build green.
Conservation begins at home. Buy your dream house from local builders who offer a variety of energy-saving options like solar heating, optimal insulation and tankless water heaters. Reduce your carbon footprint by picking houses close to BART or near work. D. R.Horton, for example, has built town-houses close to the Dublin BART station. Centex, Lennar, Signature Properties and Brookfield Homes are among the builders in the region that are offering green features. Begin your search for builders offering green options at the Home Builders Association of Northern California’s website at www.hbanc.org/home or the California Building Industry Association’s Green Builder Program (www.cagreenbuilder.com). The Governor’s office is also keeping track of options available in the state. Check them out at www.green.ca.gov. There are also a host of resources online to help you live green at home. Check out the Green Home environmental store at www.greenhome.com.

Check us out for more earth friendly resources and tips for leading a green life.