Prepare to find some great articles that contain tips on living the green lifestyle. Discover how choosing your food carefully, decorating your home in style, or simply learning more about conservation can truly change the world. Read the short descriptions below and click the title to get more info.

LIFESTYLE:

Pros and Cons: Ethanol

Whether you are for or against the use of ethanol as a replacement fuel, this blog lists the pros and cons of prices, production, benefits, etc.

Dig Deeper to Cut Back on Water

There is a lot you can be doing as an individual to save water, aside from the ways you already knew. Find out what you can do to cut back on water usage, including:
- Going vegetarian
- Greywater recovery
- Incorporating green design into your house
- Choosing a living location that doesn’t use up natural resources

Less is the New More: Mainstream Media Edition

Consuming less is part of the green lifestyle. This includes the size of the home we live in. But just because you live in a small dwelling, doesn’t mean it can’t look fantastic!

DESIGN:

Designer Spotlight: Viesso Furniture

Affordable, modern and green, Viesso Furniture uses natural latex or feather/down filling instead of polyurethane for cushions and wood certified by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC). They also use bamboo, recycled steel springs, recycled stainless steel legs, and water-based stains and glues, helping to reduce inside air pollution.

Designer Spotlight: Team 7

Commenting on the sleek style and green efforts of Team 7, this blog will introduce you to furniture that provides aesthetic elegance, as well as green craftsmanship. Team 7 has earned the Austrian Ecological Quality Certification for their ecologically-friendly production practices.

Designer Spotlight: Molo Design

Using mostly paper and textiles as their medium, Molo Designs creates aesthetically pleasing and functional pieces of furniture to accentuate your home decor. The products themselves are 100% recyclable, and recycled materials are used to make the products.

GREEN PRODUCTS:

Fold ‘N Go with Folding Bicycles

To get to where we want to be (in the environmental and physical sense), bikes offer an eco-friendly form of transportation. Since typical bikes are often bulky and hard to deal with once indoors, this blog offers different models of the folding bike.

Dig in a Little Deeper: 100 Mile Diet

People are doing the 100 Mile Diet, which calls for people to only retrieve food from the 100 mile radius around their home. This blog provides tips to maintain this diet, and gives suggestions of where to go while on the 100 Mile Diet.

Walking the Recycling Walk: Where to Get this Stuff

Recycling is more than you think. This blog explains the everyday uses of recycled material, and how you can get in on it by purchasing:
- Clothing
- Bags
- Interior design

Thanks for joining us on the GREEN BLOG and if there are topics that you want to see covered in future blog posts, please take this opportunity to post a comment on this blog post.

The propagation and increased use of ethanol has been a very contentious subject in green circles here in the US; on the one hand, it’s a domestically-produced alternative to oil, but on the other hand, you need engine modifications to use a high concentration of it, burning it results in lower gas mileage, and using corn is an inefficient has huge agro-political implications. Hmm…so what should we think about ethanol? Take a look at some of the numbers and decide for yourself.

90 percent — the amount of the world’s ethanol production that the US and Brazil combine to account for.
4.6 billion — US gallons of ethanol the US produced last year, making it the largest producer in the world.
35 liters — one bushel of corn.
10 liters — the fuel (2.8 gallons) netted from one bushel of corn.
330 – 420 — gallons of ethanol produced per acre of corn.
570 – 700 — gallons of ethanol produced per acre of sugar cane, Brazil’s feedstock of choice.
10 – 20 percent — the reduction in greenhouse gas emissions produced from burning corn-based ethanol, when compared to gasoline.
87 – 96 percent — the reduction in greenhouse gas emissions produced from burning sugar cane-based ethanol, when compared to gasoline.
34 percent — the amount of less energy per volume contained in ethanol, resulting in a similar reduction in gas mileage, if you’re burning 100% ethanol.
50 percent — the amount that the price of corn has risen in Mexico since last year, thanks in part to the increased demand for ethanol.

Proponents of the fuel argue that it’s an important step away from petroleum, and offers to help increase national security because it can be produced locally. Ethanol’s detractors point to blends above E10’s incompatibility with many gasoline engines, and some signs of increased wear and tear on some internal parts, especially rubber hoses and gaskets. Further, whether the energy balance of ethanol — whether the fuel contains more energy than was used to produce it — is positive or negative is debatable, as is whether or not the land used to grow the crop was obtained by, say, chopping down a rainforest, in which case the ethanol produced is just as unenvironmentally-friendly as fossil fuel due to the carbon released by the dead plants.

Moving forward, cellulosic ethanol has the potential to make ethanol a much more energy-efficient fuel, with yields that about double what the starch-based processes yield today. Because every plant contains cellulose, a huge variety of feedstocks — some that would otherwise be wasted, like corncobs, straw or sawdust — could be used. Switchgrass is one such feedstock, and was thrust into the energy spotlight when it was mentioned in President Bush’s 2006 State of the Union address. It grows eight or nine feet tall and is native to the US. Generally, it’s very hearty and will grow in nearly any climatic variation, from the Gulf Coast into Canada. As a crop, it has a very high yield per acre (five to tens tons) with little use of pesticides, and a low production cost, which are two keys for economical production of alternative fuels. However, until very recently, the cost for producing cellulosic ethanol has been prohibitive, and the process has yet to hit mainstream ethanol production.