LED lightbulbs will be greener, but right now they're pricey - while CFLs are usually less than $2 each. And it's a field of constant innovation.
Between $15 and $50 per bulb over 5 years.

Red-hot innovation. Remember burning holes in paper with a magnifying glass? These appliances focus the sun's rays onto your food and cook it as thoroughly as a traditional oven - without using a spark of electricity. So simple you can even make them yourself.
These replace the standard convection ovens which use around $0.10 of electricity an hour - and then there's gas.

There are mineral-salt-powered equivalents to washing powder, like the Ecoballs "flying saucers". And yes, they work.
$200-$400 per 1000 washes.

Over half of American homes don't have them: that's a lot of homes being heated when they don't need to be. Install one today (say, a Ventstar Flat Stat) and watch your heating bills plummet.
Calculate your exact saving here (Microsoft Excel spreadsheet).

They're wasteful and polluting - and avoidable. Use one of the newer brand of push reel mower - or, if you have some money to invest, solar-convert!
With a gas-powered lawnmower, an hour's grass-cutting is around 100 miles in your car.

You use the most fuel at low speeds and when you start your car. So short trips really aren't worth it - cycle or walk instead. Give yourself longer to shop (you can cut down on gym time to balance things) - and carry less by shopping more often. 
With rising fuel prices, you can expect any fuel economy savings to grow and grow.

Make sure everyone's in before turning the key. And waiting for someone for more than 60 seconds? Kill the engine. You're more likely to consume more fuel idling than restarting.
It's been estimated that idling Burger King customers waste 16 million gallons of gas a year.

Prepacked sandwiches: all that plastic, and how much money? So make your own: it's vastly cheaper and more fun (you get to choose the fillings).
Personal estimate: Making my own - $15 /wk. Shop-bought - $30-50/wk.

Tumble-drying needs huge amounts of energy (see below). So go for a combination of an eco-friendly spin dryer for when it's raining, and washing lines (standard or fancy) for when the sun's shining.
Tumble dryers use around 2.5 kwH of electricity per hour. Compared with the rest of your appliances, that's huge. Dry naturally, and you'll save $100s a year. Oh, and millions of tons of CO2.

If your room's a bit gloomy, don't just reach for the lightswitch. Think about how to get more daylight into your room - whether simply by moving furniture around, or guiding the light in with sunpipes or mirrors.
Banishing the lights for the night will have a significant impact on your electricity bill. Even turning them on an hour later than before will make a difference.

Catch rainwater in water butts or more sophisticated arrangements, and you have a ready supply of water for anything except drinking (you'd need fairly expensive filtration to make it safe).
Up to half your water bill.

We want to see the return of Victory Gardens, using every neglected square inch of everyone's back yard to grow vegetables. Food miles turn into food inches, and the results taste better than you could have imagined if you're been eating the mass-produced variety. Also, buy locally produced food - it's just other people's Victory Gardens!
Huge savings on grocery bills.

There's a great deal of concern about energy being invisibly wasted, particularly with modern devices that have a "standby" setting. So when you've finished with the electronic marvel of your choice - unplug it.
Anything from $50 a year upwards per household is spent on keeping those little red LEDs glowing.

It's cutting-edge, so it's certainly not cheap - but ground source heat pumps are the next big thing in eco-friendly house design. They run some of your water supply through the ground where it picks up natural geothermal energy. Result: toasty-hot water for free!
Your central heating bill will evaporate.

If you can find an alternative to using your electric A/C unit, use it - but remember that it's much less eco-hostile to cool the house down than it is to heat it up. So when the house gets cold, think layers layers layers.
See it as a challenge - to make your Winter electricity bill lower than the summer one!

As Allison noted a while back, 90% of the energy used to wash clothes goes into heating the water. Wash on a cooler setting, and you save energy...
...and that saves you money on your bill. Couldn't be easier.

Meat is the most expensive item on the average food bill. It's therefore ironic that we eat too much of it - and no, I'm not vegetarian (although that's an excellent argument against meat as well). Meat is a delicacy, not a staple - so don't be afraid of having a few no-meat days during the week.
500g T-bone steak - $20. Just sayin'.

If you're the average American, you buy four bags of groceries, and you throw one of them straight in the trash. No, really. So learn to make the most of the food you buy: soups, stews, freezing, composting, you name it.
One quarter (or more specifically, 27%) of your food bill, right there.

With technology, everyone loves shiny and new things - particularly us men (a genetic flaw, perhaps). But if there's a second-hand, perfectly functioning alternative, we should go with it. So become a retrophiliac, and always try to buy last year's technology, first- or second-hand.
Regarding full retail price, look at what happened with the iPhone.

There's no cutting corners on quality clothing - except when a professional tailor is doing it for you. If you want to look fabulous on a budget, trawl your city's second-hand options and find items that are near your size - then have them adjusted.
A guy's perspective: in this manner I saved $200 on a suit last year.

The Information Revolution has changed the way we work. Telecommuting is a much cheaper option to spending 3 hours in traffic. Videoconferencing beats the real thing in bucks. So find ways to avoid those costly long hauls to and from work. (Even if the company's paying!).
Or are you saying that your own time isn't valuable to you?

Always support your local traders - they're where you'll most likely to get the best-quality goods. But when it comes to the harder-to-get items...shop online. You save on packaging and (depending on the items) you save on gas, because it's delivered to your door by someone who was on the road anyway.
And yes, shopping online is almost always cheaper - if not quite as tactile and fun!

It prevents urban tumbleweed. It's stylish. And it's tougher than those flimsy supermarket  bags...
...which you're increasingly being asked to pay for (by companies that lack the nerve to ban them altogether).

Household cleaners are expensive. So don't buy them. Go for the natural, non-polluting options that are just as effective, available everywhere and cost next to nothing.
Miracle cleaners miraculously wipe out your budget. Lemons, on the other hand, are cheap.


In the bad old days, you paid extra for an eco-conscious lifestyle. Now, eco-friendliness is the norm - and in more and more cases, not choosing green is the way to overspend.
Choose green, save money, help the planet. There is no catch.

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Weekends are precious things: we don't work them. But we'd still like to click around and have some fun during the week, right? So...

Explore how you feel about the way cities blend into the natural world, by watching it happen with Chicago over at urban/rural/wild, hosted by walkinginplace.

Eco-houses are hotting up the property markets - and Cate Trotter at Inhabitat spotted this scorcher from the UK, going for a princely $14.2 million.

Avoid using cell phones if you're pregnant. That's the findings from new research into the effects of phone radiation (which is something we're all concerned about), as reported in the Independent. Thanks to Healthbolt for a word in our ear. 

The natural world is full of scenic, thrilling sights. However, this gorge-circumventing path is terrifying and utterly bonkers. If you feel a little faint after watching the video, blame environmentalgraffiti. 

First law of BBQs: you're only as good as your grill. And grills aren't all that eco-friendly...until now, with the release of the first hybrid grill (via The Daily Green).

Dave Holmes isn't impressed with the ways our cities work, and he wants to see a healthier, more responsible urban landscape. Read his manifesto for change here.

You may have noticed our love of quirky sustainable bookcases. So you'll understand why these 20 designs over at Web Urbanist flipped our pages. (How about the invisible bookcase?)

Here are a few species bobbing around the Mediterranean that you might not be aware of. It's Klas Ernflo making this serious and grisly point (with a twist of snark). 

One answer to the world food price problem is in our own backyards. Anne Marie Chaker at the Wall Street Journal looks at the growing popularity of growing your own (and what better way to really, er, dig food, so you can't bear to throw it away).

I can learn a lot from Friday night dates with my husband.

For starters, I learned I can convince him to change out of his crumpled work clothes into something chic if I smile real big and hand him a martini when he comes through the door. Once the babysitter arrives and we are ready to roll, we don't just have to walk down to our neighborhood haunts on West Portal, but can actually venture out to new places in the City. Like...the de Young Museum at Golden Gate Park. Yes, on Friday we explored Friday Night at the Museum which a friend had told me about during a morning workout. From 5pm to 8:45, all exhibits are open, including the amazing glass sculptures by Dale Chihuly, which we explored after a glass of wine and observing some very serious tango dancers closing their eyes and strutting across the lobby.

But what is a date without shopping, you ask? Naturally, I had to do my EcoSalon homework (what an excuse) and hit the museum gift shop, where I was blown away. One standout: The baskets woven from telephone wire by Zulu weavers from Aita Design ($300 for the large one). Apparently these fabulous spiral baskets are crafted with methods passed down from generation to generation, including weavers recognized internationally for their work, which is largely done at home. I also learned just because I drool over something and find it fabulous doesn't mean my husband will buy it for me, even if my birthday is just around the corner. Maybe next week I should deliver that martini in baby doll pajamas. What do you think?

Sara’s shameless plug: Hi, it’s your editor. De-lurk, dear reader, and leave this fabulous writer a comment. (We love chatting.) You can also share this post with friends – just click your favorite social bookmark listed below. New reader? Be sure to sign up for the weekly newsletter to win free eco goodies! You can also subscribe to any RSS feed your heart desires.

If you happened to be driving through the desert outside of Joshua Tree California and suddenly came upon Noah Purifoy's 7 1/2 acres of desert sculptures, you might think you'd stumbled into Burning Man after a mysterious, mass alien abduction.

Strange structures emerge from the sun-bleached landscape and burn themselves into your retinas. There is no sound save for the wind rustling through constructions made of discarded rain gutters, bicycles, chicken wire, glass, and old porcelain bathroom fixtures. There are no humans, no cars - nothing but you, the sculptures, the bees, the bunnies, and the wind.

It's a little creepy and a lot mind-blowing. Purifoy started creating assemblage sculpture in the 50s and this spot in the desert was the culmination of his life's work. His art includes commentary on our consumer culture, racism, and other social problems, as it incorporates materials that would have otherwise been trash.

As I walked through the landscape of discarded detritus, I was stricken by how us humans impose ourselves on nature. But nature still has the upper hand. Bees and birds find places to build nests within the structures and life goes on.


Purifoy died a few years ago, but the Noah Purifoy Foundation continues to protect and preserve his work.

Images:
Structure, Nest: Vanessa Barrington
Legs: Susan Fleming

Is there such a thing as copying nature a little too closely?

You're looking at the remarkable work of Julie Roberts, a designer from the UK. She's hand-fashioned these lampshades from recycled paper and natural textiles, in varying colours and to order. And her inspiration?

Yes, well, there's the rub. Good decor is all about stimulating the imagination, and...this lampshade certainly does that. It screams "recently vacated cocoon", and brings to mind a host of creatures from spiders to Aliens. (Perhaps that's just a guy's perspective). There's no denying its unique beauty, but neither its slightly creepy air - Ecofriend were similarly bemused.

If you want to go for a cocoon-style eco lampshade that won't have you checking under the furniture with your shoe in your hand, try this square lamp from Kwytza Kraft. It's made from recycled chopsticks, in a range that seems inspired by moth cocoons.

Textile & Paper lampshades via ProductDose; image from Pure Design.

If Nature is an artist, she works at a very advanced level. All that asymmetry, scattered tumbling shapes and apparent chaos...but when we stand back, everything clicks into place in a most unconventional way, in patterns almost beyond our comprehension - and suddenly we're staring at breath-catching beauty.

Simone Lourenço really sees this. Her work is an organically complex mix of chaos and order, lines and swirls, the kind you see in plant life. Into the mix she's worked such diverse elements as Indian miniature painting and Japanese flower design.

Intrigued? Her work is currently on exhibition at the Overtones art gallery in Los Angeles, until June 21st - so go and take a closer look. (Just don't forget to stand back as well.)

Image: Simone Lourenço.

Andy Gregg, the founder of Bike Furniture Design, has created a line of tables and chairs both spider-like and modern. Uniting his love for design with his profession as a bike mechanic, Andy is filling a niche for all these leftover bikes parts. The majority of his pieces come from recycled rims, handlebars and frames re-purposed into intriguing furniture designs. So what do you think: is it cool design with an eco message, or is it bound to go the path of the inner tube chair?





 

Personally, I'm a fan; my favorite is the Vector Lounge Chair. I like how obvious the bike parts are and I love the fat tire arm rests. As many Bay Area bike enthusiasts know, their bikes become like an extension of themselves. With a little of Andy's elbow grease they can continue their bike worship by recycling their old bike parts into truly unique and great looking furniture. All furniture is made to order so contact Andy directly at Bike Furniture to get started.

I’ve heard of sewing and embroidery, knitting and crochet - I’ve even tried my hand at a few of the aforementioned crafts. (Didn’t your grandmother enforce the “you should know how to mend, sew a button and knit a scarf” rule, too?) But felting is new to me.

I've been delighted by Etsy's  Made by Moxie, one sassy and inspired artist known for her needle felted art. She explains her craft as the “…process of turning wool fiber into felt using barbed needles that force the fiber to attach to itself.” Luckily, I don’t need to understand the how in order to enjoy the what.

Check out her rings and bracelets and finger puppets and necklaces. If you ever needed a reason to smile, look no further than the mod pendant I'm ordering in orange ($28).

Even as a small child, Eleanor saw something special in animals. Fittingly, she named her print business after Dr. Dolittle's two-headed llama, PushMePullYou.  I have fallen for the quail print above. Did you know quails are one of the few animals that mate for life?

Eleanor uses environmentally-friendly cleansers in her printing process and every item she creates comes in a recyclable mailer to keep waste out of landfills. Proving that her commitment to a better world isn't just for the birds, PushMePullYou regularly makes contributions to the World Wildlife Fund and from time to time creates limited-edition prints with all proceeds go towards other charitable foundations, like saving the endangered kakapo (a flightless parrot from New Zealand). Oh My! Individual screen-prints available for $40 each at PushMePullYou Design.

Image: PushMePullYou

If the walls in your home are in desperate need of a makeover, you’ll be thrilled to discover that your eco-options for this transformation go way beyond low or zero-VOC paint. If you’re ready to break through the standard bounds of your average wall, then OrangePiel has the edge on innovation when it comes to decorative wall space.

Their creative design team specializes in elaborate wall murals that are printed on PVC-free textiles using an environmentally-friendly UV-cured process. In addition, these technical fabrics don’t require adhesives to be applied; they are simply stretched taut and tucked. With their acoustic options, you can reduce the ambient noise level while embellishing your walls. Search the extensive selection of artist images or opt for customization with your own visual ideas to completely reinvent your living space. (Call OrangePiel for pricing.)

Sara’s shameless plug: Hi, it’s your editor. De-lurk, dear reader, and leave this fabulous writer a comment. (We love chatting.) You can also share this post with friends – just click your favorite social bookmark listed below. New reader? Be sure to sign up for the weekly newsletter to win free eco goodies! You can also subscribe to any RSS feed your heart desires.