Sierra Club Green Home

By replacing your mass produced hygiene products and investing in eco-friendly ones, you can make a positive impact on the environment, your family, and your wallet. Make sure to read more than the price tag of your hygiene products, as most are not biodegradable or handmade.

A few well-placed outdoor lights can make you feel more secure at night. They can help the pizza guy find your door and keep you from tripping over the cat when you’re taking out the garbage.

Poorly used lights, on the other hand, can rob your neighbors of a good night’s sleep, disrupt wildlife, and waste precious energy and hard-earned cash. They may even be harmful to human health.

If you have a baby, whether you breast feed or use infant formula, you will probably use a baby bottle at some point. And probably quite a few baby bottles. If you have a toddler, “sippy cups”–those no-spill cups with lids and a spout–are de rigueur to avoid disasters. But some scientists suspect that the material commonly used for baby bottles and some sippy cups, polycarbonate plastic, could be harmful to your baby’s health.

Give your house a healthy glow using green cleaning supplies

When we get out the rags and the wash buckets, we have the best of intentions. Cleanliness is a virtue, right? And healthy too! Well, if you use conventional cleaning products, perhaps not. Have you ever cleaned your shower or oven and then had teary eyes, [...]

Strong and beautiful, wood is the material of choice for all kinds of home projects, from building a crib to finishing a basement to constructing a whole house. What’s more, wood is a renewable resource. But even though a tree can be replanted to replace one that gets cut down, wood consumption does have consequences.

Most of us are not strangers to recycling. We are familiar with the multi-colored bins and the appropriate way to sort our recyclables. Despite our dedication and commitment to recycling, many items are ultimately diverted out of our recycling bins to landfills.

Any of you old enough to remember the classic rock tune “My City Was Gone” by the Pretenders? Like singer Chrissie Hynde, I go back to Ohio, but my city (Akron, aka The Rubber City) is not gone. Can you imagine my surprise to find a great organic restaurant, VegiTERRANEAN, by none other than Chrissie Hynde herself, on my last visit?

These days it’s fashionable for celebrities to hitch their stars to the green movement. Many of them claim to be green, but in my experience, only a few are really doing substantive things to back up the PR flackery. Ed Begley Jr. rides a stationary bike each morning to power his coffee-maker, admittedly on the lunatic fringe.

Fuel cell technology is an emerging form of clean energy that seems to be within reach for consumers. The main drawback is in the costly expenses associated with the units, in comparison to conventional fossil fuel systems. Fuel cell systems have proven to produce at least twice as much energy and little to no pollution, unlike their ‘dirty fuel’ counterparts.

Small-scale wind turbines have become a viable, if not yet mainstream, means of powering homes with clean, renewable energy. You’ve probably seen clusters of huge wind turbines in rural areas. Those wind farms produce power for the utility grid. A residential wind turbine is much smaller, and rather than multiple turbines, a home typically has just one.