Simple ways to be green in home office

Whether working or relaxing there are many ways to be green in a home office. Recycling, replacing light bulbs, turning off electronics when not being used are a few steps you can take for starters.

Taking simple steps to use "green" ideas will reduce the cost of energy and supplies in your home office while you are reducing the impact on the environment. At first glance most of these are small items but the cumulative effect is worth the effort.

Better Homes and Gardens
November 12, 2007

How to Be "Green" in the Home Office

Published: 11/12/07, 2:36 PM EDT

Paper

Good: Print and copy on both sides of the paper. Better: Use tree-free paper and recycle. Best: Go as paperless as possible: send e-mails with attachments, write notes on a white board or in a computer program. Bonus: Shred waste material for packing.

Computers

Good: Use the energy saver settings on your computer and printer. Better: Turn off your computer at the end of the day. Best: Unplug your computer (and other electronics) to keep them from leeching "phantom" energy -- electricity they draw even while turned off.

Lighting

Good: Turn off all lights when you leave the room. Better: Replace your lightbulbs with compact fluorescents or LED lights. Best: Paint the walls of your office a light color to take advantage of natural light, preventing you from turning on the lights in the first place.

The Little Things

Good: Reuse paper clips or at least recycle them, otherwise all the extra metal goes straight to the landfill. Better: Don't use rubber bands anymore -- they're made from crude oil and have serious health effects when they're incinerated at the landfill. Best: Refill ink cartridges rather than buying new ones.

A bid to reclaim vanishing night

Looked up into the night sky lately? The stars don't seem as bright and plentiful as they were before.

Part of the problem is the ever increasing glow of outdoor lighting in and around developing areas contributing to "light pollution".

The following news commentary notes "the International Dark Sky Association estimates that 99 percent of the people in the United States and Europe live in light-polluted areas, unable to see traces of the Milky Way or many stars when they walk out of their homes and gaze skyward." This will forever change our view of the stars and night sky unless everyone chooses to reduce the amount of artificial light around homes and shopping areas.

Reducing night time lighting can help preserve the natural beauty of the night sky and efforts to reduce "light pollution will cut wasted energy and greenhouse gases from power plants" and help address global warming issues.

News and Observer
April 22, 2007
Catherine Clabby, Staff Writer

A bid to reclaim vanishing night

CHAPEL HILL - As the show begins, visitors to the Morehead Planetarium see a night sky free of polluting light. Projected onto the dome is a truly dark sky pricked by countless sparkling points. A narrow smudge -- our galaxy, the Milky Way -- is as clear as day.

Then the light grows to a brightness familiar outside the building. The number of stars visible in the virtual sky drops dramatically, to just a handful of tiny bright spots.

"I know, it's terrible," Morehead educator Amy Sayles says sympathetically to a multigenerational crowd of dozens who gathered at the planetarium for "Our Vanishing Night," a program leading up to the Earth Day observances today.

This year, a growing coalition showed itself in the Triangle asking the rest of us to turn down the lights. A group of amateur and professional astronomers has made this plea for decades. Now the astronomers are joined by a new ally -- environmentalists. Read more...

Flourescent bulbs may become the new standard by law

A report in the March 26 N&O pushes the idea of replacing old style incandescent bulbs with new efficient fluorescent ones and discusses a new House bill North Carolina is considering that would eliminate the sale of old style bulbs by year 2016. The article also states "The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates that the fluorescent bulbs use two-thirds the energy of incandescents and last up to 10 times longer."

Read the entire article for more news...

News and Observer
March 26, 2007
Ryan Teague Beckwith, Dan Kane, Jane Ruffin and J. Andrew Curliss, Staff Writers

Lawmakers put energy into limits on light bulbs

When Rep. Pricey Harrison saw Al Gore's Oscar-winning documentary "An Inconvenient Truth," a light bulb went on over her head.

It wasn't an incandescent bulb, but a fluorescent.

At the end of the movie, a list of tips on cutting carbon emissions includes switching to the new compact energy-efficient bulbs at home.

Harrison, a Greensboro Democrat, did that. Now she wants to go one step further, and eliminate incandescent bulbs around the state within a decade. Read more...

Replace incandescent bulbs for energy savings

Ever realize that all those incandescent bulbs in your living space give off light at the expense of also giving off a lot of heat? You can save on your energy bill by simply replacing the old bulbs with modern fluorescent bulbs and get more light with considerable energy savings at the same time and the new bulbs even produce the same "color" of light. For example, a new spiral fluorescent bulb gives off the light of a 75 watt bulb and only consumes 19 watts of energy. The new bulb also outlasts 13 incandescent bulbs. Reducing the heat output also reduces the energy air conditioning units must remove from the air during cooling season.

In case you don't like the white light of typical fluorescent bulbs the new spiral bulbs also produce "warm" light that has the look of light from incandescent bulbs. Or you can opt for the white light if you prefer that.

JP