SanJoseGreenHome.com

Homes in Mexico built from garage doors salvaged from Bay Area and LA. Photo is a courtesy of The Reuse People. http://thereusepeople.org/

You’ve heard the saying: “One man’s trash is another one’s treasure.”  Nothing can be more true when speaking about the actual parts of your house.  We reuse and recycle things like plastic to paper without giving it a thought so why should it be any different when it comes to our home?  Various parts and systems of the house can be often reused in other properties and often re-purposed for building homes for the less affluent ones in Bay Area or even across the border.  Amazingly, deconstruction can even be more cost effective than plain demolition. 

The questions abound… If you are tearing down an old home or a part of it do you demolish or deconstruct?  Do you take it to a landfill or would you rather have someone else enjoy your “trash” as their treasure?  What’s more cost effective and what’s more reasonable for the environment?  Most people believe plain old demolition is the way to go but hold your horses; you may be up for a surprise.  

Salvaging means deconstructing the house piece by piece to keep the materials and systems in tact.  The advantages can be enormous: 

• Salvaging saves embodied energy – the energy that was used in the work of making a product. This lifecycle of each product includes raw material extraction, transport, manufacturing, assembly, installation, disassembly, etc. 
• Salvaging can actually improve a standard of living – allows low income members of society to buy materials at a fraction of the cost.   This can really mean the difference between a straw barn or a functional house, like in the case of homes in (more…)

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Oh my goodness, it’s 50 cents off of eye lash extensions at Longs this week!  Great deal on our dead sea sodium dense soup at Safeway!  You’ve just been pre-approved for a new tractor!  Rush… offer expiring soon! 

Offers like these are haunting our night dreams.  No wonder an ever increasing amount of people find that sifting through countless pages and clipping coupons is not their cup of tea.  If you’re looking for a solution to this one pound of week of useless paper madness in your mailbox then read on.  I have a solution for you.  

As you know, one of the chracter traits of a green home is waste reduction and junk mail can be the lowest hanging fruit.  Fortunately, you can liberate yourself from it in 5 minutes by following a few simple steps.  I’ve done it and it works.  And if you are a true grocery queen (or king), I’ll show you how you can simply find the same coupons online.

But first, here are a few junk mail facts to clip out from Do Not Mail Campaign of Forest Ethics:

• It takes more than 100 million trees to produce the total volume of junk mail that arrives in American mailboxes each year—that’s the equivalent of clearcutting the entire Rocky Mountain National Park every 4 months.
• The manufacture of junk mail releases more greenhouse gas emissions per year than the emissions released by 9,370,000 million average passenger cars. 
• Annually 28 billion gallons of water are used up to process the paper.
• Scarce landfill space disfigures rural areas and pollutes ground water.
• Approximately 340,000 garbage trucks, and all of the fossil fuels required to power them, are needed to haul away mailings that don’t quite make it to the recycling bins.
• 50% of all junk mail is thrown in the trash, unopened and unread.
• The list goes on and it’s not pretty.  Whether these numbers are very accurate is a question but one thing is certain – junk mail pollutes and unnecessary wastes our resources.  

No one is against savings these days but does it have to come at such a high cost to  the environment?  Here is what to do if you are ready to put an end to this needless junk: 

1. Our biggest offender in San Jose and entire South Bay Area is the (more…)

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Composting can be either an enjoyable or a dreadful experience, can it not?  Personally, being a landscaper I love to play with dirt so to me it’s sort of like playing in sand box – fun!  

Composting is good for the environment and it’s a smart way to put the nutrients back in the ground.  It helps to reduce greenhouse gases by sequestering carbon back into the soil; storing the carbon for plants to use. Sequestering is actually considered by the US Environmental Protection Agency as a carbon ‘sink’, because it takes the carbon (C) out of (CO2), and leaves just the oxygen (O2) to float into the atmosphere. EPA has more info on this if you’d like to read more. 

In our first month of composting at home, my wife and I reduced our trash waste from three 30 gallon bags all the way to one bag. Wow! We now get excited to see how much we can do to reduce our waste. Our worm bin in the garage and the outdoor stackable bin are also put to use and are doing great. 

If you have not tried composting yet then I would like to invite you to consider it. Relax, you really do not need to run out a buy a pound of worms to get started.  There are a few simple ways to ease into it.  

For example, you can begin by (more…)

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