Low Impact

Greenfleet is an organisation we’ve mentioned before - they’re a non-profit organisation who have been around for over 10 years and provide an offset service where they will offset your carbon emissions through tree-planting. The idea is that as the trees grow, they take carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and sequester it in their trunk and roots. Initially this was targeted at offsetting people’s emissions from the family car, but has since expanded to include any household emissions.

Their recent accomplishment is to receive accreditation as a “Greenhouse Friendly” Abatement Provider. The “Greenhouse Friendly” Abatement Provider accreditation program is one set up by the Australian Federal Government to provide some measure of… Continue reading

Google seem to have been pretty active in the environmental space - I’ve seen a number of headlines recently about their funding of hybrid car technology, as well as their plans to incorporate Solar Photovoltaic power into their energy mix. And lets face it - when you have as many computers as Google, you need quite a bit of power!

It turns out they’ve made great strides in implementing solar power, and neat little web page to go with it. Check out:

http://www.google.com/corporate/solarpanels/home

At this web page you can see how much solar energy they’ve generated over the last 24 hours and the last 7 days. They’ve also taken the useful step… Continue reading

Planning on getting away for a long weekend? Maybe a week down by the beach? Doing up a checklist before you head off to make sure you don’t forget anything?

If so, add “turn off hot water heater” to the list.

This tip especially applies to owners of electric hot water heaters, although it may be of use to people with gas hot water heaters of the “storage” variety, rather than the “on-demand” variety.

Your basic storage hot water heater has a thermostat that is always keeping the water at a nice constantly warm temperature - 50 degrees centigrade is common in Australia. The key word here is always - a storage heater has no way of knowing whether you’ll want that toasty warm shower at 7am, 8pm, or 3am!

Now… Continue reading