I wish I could take credit for the title of this post, because it so fits the season. I found this article about the appliances sucking our energy dollars out of our pockets at Yahoo! Green and wanted to share.  After reading the article to DH this morning, he had to poke fun at me because I used to give him a difficult time when he would go around the house unplugging things before we would go out of town (and prior to approaching storms).

What’s wasting energy in your home right now

By Lori Bongiorno Posted Thu Oct 9, 2008 9:34am PDT

“Virtually all of your electronics are sucking up energy even if they’re turned off or not being used. Some of the biggest culprits include your TV, computer, and printer. Even your electric toothbrush is drawing energy when it’s plugged in and sitting idle.

On its own, the “vampire power” used by one device might seem miniscule, but collectively it amounts to more than $4 billion a year of wasted energy here in the United States. What’s more, the Department of Energy says that about 75 percent of the electricity used to power home electronics is consumed while the products are turned off.

The easiest (and most obvious) thing you can do is get up right now and unplug whatever you’re not using. Candidates include:

• Your hand-held vacuum in its charging station
• Power drills
• Automatic coffee makers
• The VCR you haven’t used in nearly a decade
• The TV that’s collecting dust in the guest room
• The empty refrigerator in the garage


{snip}

Check out the remainder of this article HERE and the related How to Reduce Vampire Power article at Huddler’s Green Home Blog…where you will find a great Dracula graphic displaying a phantom load chart.

These next couple of days our family will be going through our household to unplug and to add appliances to surge protectors to reduce our overall phantom load usage.The surge protectors will not only reduce wear and tear on the cords, but make it easier to “unplug” by just  flipping a switch.

So, are you up for the challenge?  What lengths do you go go to, or would you go, to reduce the vampire sucking going on at your house?

Stay tuned for the soon to be released America Unplugged Challenge!

I have to admit that on more than one, two, ten…heck…20 occasions, I have forgotten my bags. Either in the car…or still at home. We drive almost 40 miles to do any major grocery shopping, so going back home is rarely an option. I have, however, trekked back to the car to retrieve my multi-colored, eclectic managerie of bags. I also admit, bringing home twice as many plastic bags as I have recycled bags from our major shopping trips.

The other day, I came across this article in the Wall Street Journal…thus the title for this post.

An Inconvenient Bag… the green giveaway of the moment–the reusable shopping bag– is a case study in how tricky it is to make products environmentally friendly. 

It’s manufactured in China, shipped thousands of miles overseas, made with plastic and could take years to decompose. It’s also the hot “green” giveaway of the moment: the reusable shopping bag.

The bags usually are printed with environmental slogans as well as corporate logos and pitched as earth-friendly substitutes for the billions of disposable plastic bags that wind up in landfills every year. Home Depot distributed 500,000 free reusable shopping bags last April on Earth Day, and Wal-Mart gave away one million. One line of bags features tags that read, “Saving the World One Bag at a Time.”

View Slideshow

But well-meaning companies and consumers are finding that shopping bags, like biofuels, are another area where it’s complicated to go green. “If you don’t reuse them, you’re actually worse off by taking one of them,” says Bob Lilienfeld, author of the Use Less Stuff Report, an online newsletter about waste prevention. And because many of the bags are made from heavier material, they’re also likely to sit longer in landfills than their thinner, disposable cousins, according to Ned Thomas, who heads the department of material science and engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

{snip}

Some, such as the ones sold in Gristedes stores in New York that are printed with the slogan “I used to be a plastic bag,” are misleading. Those bags are also made in China from nonwoven polypropylene and have no recycled content. Stanley Joffe, president of Earthwise Bag Co., the Commerce, Calif., company that designed the bags, says the slogan is meant to point out that the bag itself is reusable, taking the place of a disposable plastic bag.

Some plastic bags are, in fact, made with recycled materials. The polypropylene bags at Staples are made from 30% recycled content, according to company spokesman Mike Black. Target sells six types of bags, including a $5.99 variety made from recycled plastic bags, says spokesman Steve Linders.

And yesterday, at the Clinton Global Initiative, a public-policy gathering in New York of business and political leaders, Wal-Mart pledged to reduce plastic bag waste by about 33% in every store world-wide in the next five years. Starting next month, the company will sell a new blue reusable plastic bag with a small amount of recycled material for 50 cents, half the price of its current black bag, which is 85% recycled plastic, says spokeswoman Shannon Frederick.

Getting people to actually use the bags is another matter. Maximizing their benefits requires changing deeply ingrained behavior, like getting used to taking 30-second showers to lower one’s energy and water use. At present, many of the bags go unused — remaining stashed instead in consumers’ closets or in the trunks of their cars. Earlier this year, KPIX in San Francisco polled 500 of its television viewers and found that more than half — 58% — said they almost never take reusable cloth shopping bags to the grocery store.

Grab That Tote, Use That Bag

Tips for getting into the habit of reusing the reusables:

1. 1. Leave bags by the front door or in the trunk of your car and dangle a reminder from your key chain or the rearview mirror to grab them.
2. 2. Put a reminder on your grocery list and make part of the kids’ allowance hinge on whether they told you to bring the bags that week.
3. 3. When stuck in the checkout line without a reusable bag, choose paper or plastic based on the one you think you’ll reuse the most.

In the spirit of fun, I thought I would share a photo of a bit of my reusable bag collection. The very last of the article quotes a woman talking about not using certain bags for certain grocery items, such as dripping chicken containers. Do you have a favorite that you treat differently than the others in your collection? I know I do! Do you have one that is more practical than others?

My favorites are my Mount Rushmore and the purple Co-Op bags..which both came from very memorable trips. The Home Depot bag and Sam’s insulated bags are ones that I would recommend to everyone who asks. You cannot tell it by the photo, but that HD bag is HU-U-UGE! It expands and has a sturdy clip and reinforced bars in the top of the bag. I even use it to take my Ebay packages/boxes to the post office.  The insulated bag from Sam’s was a giveaway for signing up for something…I don’t remember…but it is great to get those frozen items home when its 103 degrees outside.

 ♦

I’m from Texas, so when T. Boone Pickens begins talking about our need to find alternative energy, I listen. T. Boone Pickens is a name synonomous with oil. He was one of the first independent oilmen to build his oil empire on aquisitions rather than complete dependence on exploration.

According to Wikipedia….

Pickens has begun speaking out on the issue of peak oil, claiming that world oil production is about to enter a period of irrevocable decline. He has called for the construction of more nuclear power plants, the use of natural gas to power the country’s transportation systems, and the promotion of alternative energy. Pickens’ involvement with the natural gas fueling campaign is long-running. He formed Pickens Fuel Corp. in 1997 and began touting natural gas as the best vehicular fuel alternative because it’s a domestic resource that, among many advantages, is clean (Natural Gas Vehicles or NGVs emit up to 30% less pollution than gasoline or diesel vehicles) and reduces foreign oil consumption. Reincorporated as Clean Energy in 2001, the company now owns and operates natural gas fueling stations from British Columbia to the Mexican border.

Now, this push toward alternative energy and reduced dependence on foreign oil may boost his bottom line,  but I think that his powerful message will be heard around the world.
Commercials, banners, and more information can be found at PickensPlan.

There are also several videos located at YouTube as well.

Answer: PLENTY!

Lewru, at Wisdom of the Trowel, has a great post Wastrels and the Wastey Wasters They Rode in On….. about how people all around her continually waste resources and seemingly have no clue or care of the negative difference they make on an overburden earth.

She concludes her post with the summation that we all at “different steps in our journey” to becoming a greener society and maybe it is not best to judge (though darn difficult at times), as we all have our own areas in need of greening. She confesses three areas in need of more diligence in her very own quest at reducing waste.

I will let you read her blog to find her three, but I will mention that we have one area in common…solar cooking. My solar oven has yet to arrive (ordered well over a month ago now) and I have not had much success with attempts made with my home-fashioned cookers. My enthusiasm wanes and motivation to “destroy” yet another meal is lacking, so this is the first area I wish to list as needing my attention.

Food storage is an area that I would like to reduce waste. I have not kept on top of monitoring expiration dates, which has resulted in moths and waste.

Making do with what I have is an area that is in serious need in my part of the household.

I want to be better at remembering to take my cloth bags into the grocery. My cup runneth over with plastic bags.

Though small, these four waste reduction areas will see more effort in our household.