Summer is almost gone and with it, all the goods our earth has to offer. Therefore, before that happens we turned our eyes in search of someone that does not let those goods perish in vain, but actually makes a good use of them in an eco-friendly way.

Today we talk with Rebeca Krones, the Co-owner of Tropical Traders Specialty Foods, LLC. What does she do, to be more specific? Well, that’s where the title of today’s post kicks in: Tropical Traders produces the Royal Hawaiian Honey brand (www.royalhawaiianhoney.com).

Rebeca started the company in 2005, along with 2 other co-founders: her father, Michael Krones and Luis Zevallos. Together, they formed Tropical Traders, in order to fill the need for locally-produced, raw and organic honey within the state of Hawaii and the U.S.

But who gets buzzed by all the bees? you will ask. That will be her father, Mr. Michael Krones. He keeps all the bees in good shape so that they offer as much honey as it is possible, while Rebeca and Luis pack, market and distribute the products.

As it would be normal, when running a business like the one above, the company is not the only green thing in Rebeca’s life. She is an extremely eco-friendly person herself. Besides running a business that is dedicated to supporting sustainable farming, she is “dedicated to conscious consumerism and consumption, while recycling, composting and re-using as much as possible.” Also, another key advice in order piece of advice on her behalf, when owning a green business is making it authentic. “Make sure you can make the process and story behind your product transparent.” Rebeca tells us proudly.

If the green-ness of her business isn’t quite explicit on its own, here is a certification that will prove to you that she means it: the raw and certified organic honey they produce at Tropical Traders is the first product in the U.S. to obtain certified Carbon free status: 100% of the emissions generated by the packaging components, and in the production and distribution of our products is offset by investing in reforestation and renewable energy projects.

Although 2005, the moment when it all started seems a million years ago, they have succeed in this field because of the dedication and hard work they put every day in their products, but also because “we constantly watch the bottom-line and make cash-flow a priority”, says Rebeca.  And the only kind of motivation they need (and they get it day by day) in their customers’ gratitude and addiction to the products. “When I get a phone call or an email telling me someone absolutely loves our honey, it makes my day!”

We wanted to know if they know their competitors and if they ever had any minor quarrel with any of them, but Rebeca, as the kind and gentle person she is, (and she needs to be when handling thousands of angry and stinging bees) tells us that she not only knows very well all her competitors, but also admires them very much and admires their work as well. “I know them, and I admire them, because I know it takes a lot of effort to do what they do.” Thumbs up for the fair play!

She found GreenWeb on Facebook, here: http://www.facebook.com/greenweb and followed the impulse to send us a request to write about her green business story. We hope she isn’t sorry!

So, there you have it: the story of a family who donated their time, efforts and money for the greater good of us having the sweet nectar of buzzzzzing bees at our table anytime.

Today we go back writing about green businesses, businesses that make a difference, which start with a spark in one’s mind and end up with millions of fans and activists. It is important to know that we have no benefit from this, all we want to do is build a community of people that are interested in someone else’s work and ideas and start talking about each other, because communication is the essence in everything.

Today we have the opportunity to introduce to you a very special person, from who we learnt a great deal of new and interesting things. His name is Craig J Clark and he is the CEO at Craig Clark Corporation.

When we first laid eyes on his website, http://www.craigclarkfoundation.org/, we admit we didn’t understand much of it, but when reading more carefully, we realized that he made us understand chemistry in a few simple words and opened our eyes upon simple and very easy-to-do truths.

Craig first started experimenting with splitting water when we was 14 and that is when he realized the power and importance of Hydrogen in everyone’s life. In spite of that, his Hydrogen dream took life in 2010, when his online foundation came to life.

The Craig Clark Corporation, at this stage, is only a hobby business, but his plans for the future are as high as mountains. The main and most important goal is to roll all donations into the construction of solar/hydrogen farms in order to supply the world with solar hydrogen, while the second big plan is to “lift three billion people out of poverty and into a standard equaled to the living standard of Americans”.

What made us raise our eyebrows, metaphorically speaking, on his story, was the fact that he does not consider himself to have a green business (although it is), and he would rather avoid the word “green” in what he is doing, as he does not want to attract anybody’s attention with the “green business” title. “It’s like the title the second coming of the Messiah. Many have claimed this title, but no one in the world has been awarded that title by 1,000,000,000 Christians” says Craig. “I’m not going to add the green label to my web site, just to be successful.” Even though he does not say his business is green, Craig has a CO2 reduction formula that reduces 589 grams of CO2 for every $3, 19 donated.

At the stage he is at, he only takes the business one day at a time, due to his fresh start, but we found out important information about him, that will surely help him develop his strategy in the near future in the best manner he will possibly can. One of these facts is that he is the world’s only binary programmer. “My first binary program was 32 bit digital color which gave birth to the entire digital age. My next invention in the field of binary programming is 1024 bit binary running on a 68 bit processor. This invention corrects my mistakes with the digital age and will cause the entire digital age to be build.”

He has an advice to anybody who wants to start a green business: Be Honest! Build a website, use 100% correct scientific method which will lead to 100% correct scientific conclusions. This is being true to yourself, your business, your clients, and true to the Earth!

We are up to great things and that is for sure! And because we want you to know what exactly are we doing and be a part of our big community, today we will take a break from our usual blog posts and share with you the latest news on what GreenWeb is up to!

Let’s see how it all started. When we first started GreenWeb, as a small team and without much interaction in the business domain, we began by searching big companies in our domain of activity and studied the path they went on, what helped them succeed and what motivated them to go on. After researching this field for a time, we ran into www.startupbootcamp.dk and so we thought that applying to their program wouldn’t hurt anyone. And it paid off!

As we speak, we are in Copenhagen, Denmark, because we are amongst the 10 teams that Startupbootcamp selected for their program this year!

Startupbootcamp is a member of Techstars global affiliate program and it has been put together by Alex Farcet, an “entrepreneur, business angel, board member, startup coach and independent consultant” as they describe him and Rainmaking, which is a partner-based company in the business of starting companies.

We will stay in Copenhagen for 3 months and with the help of a bunch of specialists, mentors and people who want to see us rising higher and higher we will try (and succeed) to develop GreenWeb into a big, solution-finding oriented company that will hopefully challenge Greenpeace. (We are just joking about that.)

What we hope on your side is that you continue to be as supportive with us as you have been so far, wish us all your best and stay tuned to see the changes.

New month, new week, new post, new approach – new everything! After the “What is more eco?” and “Green Doodles” series, which we love and really tried to bring to you any amount of new information through them, today is a new and inciting beginning for us again!

In the few months since we started this blog we met a lot of interesting people, companies and projects all interested in being green. Unfortunately, maybe the “eco” trend has flown away or green is not the new black anymore, we don’t know the causes, but the fact is that it is tough to be a green activist in these days. People, either doesn’t care about what you do, or think that is not so important.

Therefore, we sat and think what we could do to help new and interesting green businesses to be heard, and so came the “Go Green All the Way!” idea. It is very simple: we give anybody who wants the opportunity to tell their story. The green one. We want to give everybody the chance to express their beliefs, methods, and means of being green and helping the environment in the best way they can. Maybe you learn from them. Maybe there is something new in the “green business field” that you didn’t know, or maybe you are just curious. Whatever of the three above, we are sure that something will get you interested!

We have first met Andrea through Twitter, when she mentioned that she monitors her website’s CO2 emissions with the help of our script. We thanked her politely and then searched her on Facebook to see her page. We liked it and told her a few words. This happened more than a month ago and since then, not a day has passed without a least saying “Hello!” She has become more that a customer to us, she is our friend. That is the reason why it went without saying that Acailawen Designs was the first green business to talk about.

After we talked to her a few times, it became obvious that Andrea Acailawen has been an environmental activist ever since before she was brought to life. Unlike many others that use green as a marketing method, she has embraced the green way of living in her own personal life, alongside with her husband, photographer and partner to Acailawen Designs, Christopher Wright.

Andrea first started in the jewelry fashion business in 2005, when she was doing prop pieces for photography, but it was much later, in January 2009 that she opened her own jewelry design pieces for customers, without leaving the people she has been working for all those years, though.

“Acailawen Designs offers its customers an elegant selection of couture jewelry and accessories in a growing series of collections that are hand-crafted with a commitment to environmentally responsible design practices” says Andrea, but what exactly makes her work environmentally friendly?

She works in an industry that is traditionally known to be dirty in the eco way. Sources materials that she works with, as well as manufacturing processes have a lot of issues surrounding them, so, in order to minimize the impact of her company over the environment, she has experienced and learned to do things in a much safer way.

Firstly, she makes sure that the materials used in crafting the jewelry is coming from a responsible source. Also, as a designer, she took the No Dirty Gold pledge and she refuses to use gold that comes from dirty mining practices. In addition to that , and maybe the most important thing, all of the silver and more that half of the copper, bronze and brass that she uses in her art are reclaimed from recycled materials.

The process in which she obtains the materials she uses is unique to those that work with metals. The metals are reclaimed from recycled materials. It’s a meaningful distinction in the jewelry community, because it defines how the material is collected. There’s more to it than recycling an old object into a new one. The process involves a mixture of metal extraction and reuse of unused scraps – making it unique.

Metals can also be reclaimed from leftover scraps that are saved from other jewelry and metal projects. She collects up all of the leftover scrap metals from each project she does, including wire, sheet scraps and even metal shavings. When she has collected enough of it, she melts it down and turns it into ingots that can then be pressed back out into new wire or sheet. She also obtains leftover scrap metals from others who would normally just discard them.

Last, but not least, organic and biodegradable alternatives to toxic chemicals are used, whenever it is possible.

These are a few of the practices that she does in the studio to reduce her company’s CO2 emissions, but surely not all of them.

Since she is so dedicated to helping other artists and artisans, as well as anyone activating in the green field of business, she also gives everyone an advice that is clearly to be heard: “First, assess the type of business that you run and determine its strengths and weaknesses, from an environmental standpoint. Then, look for ways to build upon your company’s strengths, while reducing its weaknesses. Writing a green business plan to grow your eco-friendly business is incredibly helpful.”

At the end of our discussion we asked her what was her opinion about Greenweb, and especially about monitoring your website’s CO2 emissions. “It’s too important and easy not to.”

Today is our forth and final (until further notice and request) part of out Green Doodles. What we must say is that we had enormous fun writing them, and even more fun researching upon them. And we really hope that you have fun too reading them.

Some of the things we wrote here were out of our curiosity for them, but some of them were written as a request from our readers, which wanted to know more on green tea, aliens, the green M&Ms and so on.

Green Tea

We have to start by saying that there is no other food or beverage that is known to have as many positive health benefits as green tea, and to prove it there are record showing that the Chinese used it as a medicine ever since 4000 years ago. Green tea has been used as both a beverage and a method of traditional medicine in most of Asia, including China, Japan, Taiwan, Vietnam, Korea, India and Thailand, to help everything from controlling bleeding and helping heal wounds to regulating body temperature, blood sugar and promoting digestion.

The secret of the green tea lies in its high content of anti-oxidants, which are extremely efficient in preventing and also curing cancer, lowering the LDL cholesterol and inhibiting the abnormal formations of blood cloths that lead to thrombosis.

What makes green tea so special, among the other forms (black, oolong) is the way in which it is processed. Green tea is made from unfermented leaves and reportedly contains the highest concentration of powerful antioxidants called polyphenols. By contrast, black and oolong tea leaves are made from fermented leaves, which results in the EGCG being converted into other compounds that are not nearly as effective in preventing and fighting various diseases.

Since we don’t want to go any more into its curative properties, we are sure you know all the diseases green tea is good for, or into its etymology since it is far too complicated for us, we thought that might be of interest are the various tea drinking customs.

There are several special circumstances in which tea is prepared and consumed, some of which you can find here:

• Serving tea as a sign of respect – in Chinese society, the younger generation always shows its respect to the older generation by offering a cup of tea.
• Serving tea at a family gathering – Chinese family values are shown by how often younger and older families meet and serve tea together.
• Serving tea to apologize – in Chinese culture, people make serious apologies to others by pouring tea for them.
• Serving tea to express thanks to your elders on one’s wedding day – in the traditional Chinese marriage ceremony, both the bride and groom kneel in front of their parents and serve them tea. That is a way to express their gratitude.
• Serving tea to pass on the tradition.

In Japan though, tea has been brought about 1000 years later, in the 9^th century, form China, by the Buddhist monk Eichu, this according to the legend. The form of tea popular in China in the era when Eichu went for studies was “cake tea” – tea compressed into a nugget. This then would be ground in a mortar, and the resulting ground tea decocted together with various other herbs and/or flavorings.

Quotes about “GREEN”

Green has not only been a source of health, food, beverages and many more, but it has also been an inspiring source of different quotes and funny sayings, some of which, we will give you right now:

• If you refuse to be made straight when you are green, you will not be made straight when you are dry – African Proverb
• If I keep a green bough in my heart, then the singing bird will come – Chinese Proverb
• Lord, keep my memory green. – Charles Dickens
• O! beware, my lord, of jealousy; It is the green-eyed monster which doth mock the meat it feeds on – William Shakespeare
• An optimist is a person who sees a green light everywhere, while a pessimist sees only the red stoplight… The truly wise person is colorblind. –  Albert Schweitzer
• You could cover the whole earth with asphalt, but sooner or later green grass would break through – Ilya Ehrenburg
• A hedge between keeps a friendship green – German Proverb
• The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence. – Dutch Proverb
• One piece of green wood is enough to stop the others from burning. – Bahaya proverb
• Green maize abounds at the houses of those without teeth – Shona Proverb
• Three things cause sorrow to flee; water, green trees, and a beautiful face – Moroccan Proverb
• Green with envy = appearing jealous; appearing envious.
• Sure as God made little green apples = absolutely certain.
• Have a green thumb = to have the ability to grow plants well.
• Green around the gills = looking sick
• Give somebody/something the green light = to give permission for someone to do something or for something to happen.
• The green-eyed monster = the feeling of being jealous.
• The rub of the green = if you have the rub of the green, you have good luck, especially in a sports competition.

Why are aliens green?

Why we chose “aliens” as our final topic for today’s doodles? Apart from being a requested topic, we were interested ourselves to find out why, in the acceptation of so many, are aliens always depicted as green little monsters. Here is what we found out!

Considering the fact that aliens are, in fact strange to our knowledge, we can only think of the answers to this question. And for that, we have three variants. The first of them is that taking into consideration that nobody has yet seen creatures from outer space, and that at this point into history they are imaginary, green is really the alien color for skin. Coloring their skin green, in our imagination is nothing but the attempt to separate them, in our minds, from the society. So in early space fantasies and science fiction stories, one way to make them appear extremely different from us was to imagine them as having a completely nonhuman color.

The other hypothesis, that is somehow related to the one stated above is that if you stick to nonhuman colors for skin, you can stay completely away from any racial associations or symbolism, in much the same way that Sesame Street has a lot of blue guys and other toy colors for people.

Finally, once “little green men” became a cliché for Martians, the cliché kept repeating itself. In cartoons, all you have to do is show little green guys with some kind of weird things around their heads or faces, and the audience knows you mean space aliens. It’s an easy kind of shorthand for humorous purposes.

If, in fact aliens do exist, we believe it is a matter of one’s choice. So far the skeptics have their disbeliefs, while the believers have reason to think they are true. What is true is that we have now finished our green doodles’ chapter number four and we really believe you loved it!

Here is the third part of our green doodles. Seeing the need of knowledge that many of you have expressed during our “Green Doodles” campaign, we try to diversify as much as possible our subjects each week, without forgetting our main piece – green. We have found out many interesting things ourselves about this symbol, many things that we had no clue about, but which turned out to be extremely logic, once you’ve looked at them in a different manner than the usual one.
In order to start today’s story about green, we will present to you the ultimate green face known worldwide.

The Green Man
The face in the leaves stares down at us from the roofs, pillars and doorways of our great cathedrals and churches; he appears on second century Roman columns in Turkey and in Jain temples in Rajasthan. He is found all over England, some parts of Wales and Scotland and a few rare places in Ireland.

The Green Man is the representation of a god of vegetation and plant life in the English culture. He symbolizes the life that is found in the natural plant world, and in the earth itself. In the British Isles, a thousand years ago, the forests were vast, spreading for miles and miles, farther than the eye could see. Because of the sheer size, the forest could be a dark and scary place.
The Green Man is typically portrayed as a human face surrounded by dense foliage. Such images appear as far back as the eleventh century, in church carvings. As Christianity spread, the Green Man went into hiding, with stonemasons leaving secret images of his face around cathedrals and churches. He enjoyed a revival during the Victorian era, when he became popular with architects, who used his visage as a decorative aspect in buildings.

Legends connected to the archetype of the Green Man are everywhere. In the Arthurian legend, the tale of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a first example. The Green Knight represents the pre-Christian nature religion of the British Isles. Although he originally confronts Gawain as an enemy, the two later are able to work together – perhaps a metaphor for the assimilation of British Paganism with the new Christian theology.

Many scholars also suggest that the tales of Robin Hood evolved from Green Man mythology. Allusions to the Green Man can even be found in J.M. Barrie’s classic Peter Pan – an eternally youthful boy, dressed in green and living in the forest with the wild animals. Today, some traditions of Wicca interpret the Green Man as an aspect of the Horned God, Cernunnos.

Famous Green Characters
As we have seen so far, green surrounds us in many legends, myths as well as many urban legends as well. It has been with us, surrounding us, from medieval times and will remain for centuries to be.
Seeing this, people started to put green in everything – from paintings to architecture, from ancient forms of art to contemporary works, green is surrounding us wherever we are. It is also present along with our most beloved TV characters, the ones we grew up with and that we love dearly.

One of these characters is the Green Lady from Star Trek. She is Marta, the nutty but nubile green lady from the 1969 “Star Trek” episode “Whom Gods Destroy”. But unfortunately for her, she is not the only green lady in Star Trek; Susan Oliver played a lime-colored hottie in the original pilot, “The Cage,” and popped up again in the “The Menagerie.”

Another green figure in the entertainment sector are, in fact, 5: the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird were just goofing on comic-book trends in the early 1980s when they cooked up the idea for these heroes on the half-shell. Comics, cartoons, toys, live-action TV shows and films, video games and all sorts of merchandise have turned the pizza-loving Michelangelo, Donatello, Raphael and Leonardo into iconic adventure heroes for several generations of young fans.

“You wouldn’t like me when I’m angry!” is the line that made The Incredible Hulk, another well known and beloved green character, what he is today. The producers of the Hulk came up with this idea after taking a page from “Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde” and little did they know what this will turn out to be. Did you know that in his first appearance Hulk was gray?

From a Grinch to a grump, we bring you the garbage genius of Oscar the Grouch, the fuzzy misanthrope of Sesame Street who sings “I Love Trash” and gives everybody a major ration of grief. Oscar is given voice by the great Caroll Spinney, who specializes in sweet and sour, as he is also the voice of Big Bird.

With the line that will stay in the animated cartoons history for a very long time: “Ogres are like onions”, Shrek is one of the most loved green characters of our times. Don’t be surprised to find him here because we found out that “Shrek II” is the fourth-highest-grossing film in American history! And here is an inside tip: Mike Myers said that he modeled his Shrek voice on the inflections his mother used while reading him bedtime stories back in his youth. Ouch!

There’s been a lot of frogs in pop culture (the Budweiser frogs, Keroppi, Frogger, Dig’em from Sugar Smacks) but the only one strong enough to jump on this list is Jim Henson’s gentle soul from the swamp. On “Sesame Street,” the silver screen and “The Muppet Show,” Kermit was the most warm-blooded amphibian ever.

The great and powerful wizard of the George Lucas universe is a towering figure in pop culture, even if he’s shorter than a Jawa. Yoda is our final character for today and don’t forget: “Do or do not… there is no try.”

Green Houses
For many years now, people started to be worried about the environment and tried to reduce the consumption of materials, energy and, in the end, everything that involves carbon dioxide as much as possible. We have done our best to reduce CO2 emissions by eating green, living green, traveling green, but this was not enough.

The concept of building green is extremely familiar today, but still holds the high price of almost luxury, even though it is merely a matter of will and involvement. Unfortunately, not many people have a green house or home, motivating their choice with the price that this choice involves, but what they don’t know or consider is that it is not necessary to build one from scratch; nowadays, just making some minor modifications on your already-owned house can spare you a whole bunch of CO2 emissions.
Therefore, we will try to concentrate on some tips that can help you make your house green, instead of saying what building with green materials is all about. There are a lot of things that you can do in order to make your home CO2-emissions free, some of them are really easy and simple and costs-free, some of them are a bit more expensive or time-consuming.

First and foremost, the ultimate modification that everyone should make is greening up your appliances. Get ride of the old fridge, which is the biggest energy-consumer appliance in a home, and basically every electronic that is more than 10 years old. Energy Star-qualified appliances use 10%-50% less energy and water than standard models.

The second tip that is easy to do and saves you some money as well is watching the temperature inside the house by keeping the thermostat low when is cold outside and up when it is hot. Each degree below 20°C(68°F) during colder weather saves 3%-5% more heating energy, while keeping your thermostat at 25°C(78°F) in warmer weather will save you energy and money.

Saving water goes without saying into this list as a major modification of you habits that will not only help you and your savings, but the most important will help the more unprivileged people.

Cleaning can also be green and think of all the money you can save if you stop buying all those chemicals that help you clean up your hose, and start making some of your own with a little help from plain soap, water, baking soda (sodium bicarbonate), vinegar, washing soda (sodium carbonate), lemon juice and borax.

Compact Fluorescent Light bulbs use 66% less energy than a standard incandescent bulb and last up to 10 times longer. Replacing a 100-watt incandescent bulb with a 32-watt CFL can save $30 approx in energy costs over the life of the bulb, so let the light be green also.

Last but not least is saving the trees by saving the paper that you use. You can buy “tree-free” 100% post-consumer recycled paper for everything from greeting cards to toilet paper. Paper with a high post-consumer waste content uses less virgin pulp and keeps more waste paper out of landfills.

These are not all of the tips we can provide you with. You can do a lot of other ingenuous things to save our planet; the most important thing is for you to wish to make a difference.

This completes our Green Doodles for today, but do not panic – there are more to come!

Upon seeing your interest in green after last week’s blog post, we decided to give you more information on what “GREEN” means in different chapters of our lives.  This week we will see what is hidden behind the color green in science, how is green seen in the fantasy world and what is green about religion.

Green in science

Many minerals provide pigments which have been used in green paints and dyes over the centuries. Pigments, in this case, are minerals which reflect the color green, rather that emitting it. The number of green pigments and minerals is so large that it will take us forever to name them all, so you have to just believe us. One of the few we will mention however is the emerald, which is colored green by trace amounts of chromium and sometimes vanadium and is thought by many to have the most beautiful and inciting shade of green. Copper is the source of the green color in malachite pigments, chemically known as basic copper carbonate. An interesting fact is that a long time ago, at the beginning of paintings, painters would use copper in the form of verdigris mixed with wax and turpentine to create green pigmentation in paints. Mixtures of oxidized cobalt and zinc were also used to create green paints as early as the 18th century.

There is no natural source for green food colorings which has been approved by the US Food and Drug Administration. However, chlorophyll, the E numbers E140 and E141, is the most common green chemical found in nature, and only allowed in certain medicines and cosmetic materials. Green S (E142) is prohibited in many countries, for it is known to cause hyperactivity, asthma, urticaria, and insomnia. Apparently, not everything about green is calming, relaxing and pain relieving.

In order to create green sparks, which we love when talking about any kind of party, fireworks use barium salts. Smoke can be turned into green shades by a mixture of different chemicals, like: solvent green 3 or lactose.

Green is common in nature, as many plants are green because of a complex chemical known as chlorophyll which is involved in photosynthesis. Animals typically use the color green as camouflage, blending in with the chlorophyll green of the surrounding environment. Most fish, reptiles, amphibians, and birds appear green because of a reflection of blue light coming through an over-layer of yellow pigment, but the perception of color can also be affected by the surrounding environment.

Green in both old and fantasy worlds

In many folklores and literatures, green symbolizes nature and all of its attributes, particularly those of life, fertility, and rebirth, but also resurrection and immortality in Ancient Egypt: the god Osiris was depicted as green-skinned. Stories of the medieval period talk about green as representing love and the base, natural desires of man. The Chinese term for cuckold is “to wear a green hat“, that is why it is extremely rare to see any Chinese man wearing a green hat. Green is also used to describe jealousy and envy.

We have also discovered that green has signified witchcraft, devilry and evil because of its association with faeries and spirits in the early English folklore. Because of its association with decay, actor Bela Lugosi wore green-hued makeup for the role of Dracula in the 1927–28 Broadway stage production. In the Celtic tradition as well, green was avoided in clothing for its association with misfortune and death. Green is thought to be an unlucky color in British and British-derived cultures, where cars, wedding dresses, and theater costumes green are all the objects of grim superstition.

Green in religion

Green is known to be the traditional color of Islam and there are several reasons for this, but the two most important and worth-mentioning are that Muhammad says that “water, greenery, and a beautiful face” were the three universally good things and the second one is because, for the Islamic people, green symbolizes the Paradise. This idea came ever since the desert-dwelling Bedouin tribes gathered at an oasis, so rare to be found.

Roman Catholics are known to wear green vestments at liturgical celebrations during Ordinary Time. Green is one of the Christmas colors as well; this is dating back to pre-Christian times, when evergreens were worshiped for their ability to maintain their color through the winter season. Romans used green holly and evergreen as decorations for their winter solstice celebration called Saturnalia, which eventually evolved into a Christmas celebration.

This sums up the second part of the doodles we are sharing with you today. We really hope you had fun reading them and maybe you have enriched your acknowledgments concerning green a bit more. Next week we will bring you into our times, talking about famous green characters, quotes about green, but also living green.

Although many people use the word “green” several times a day, constantly, how many of you have ever researched a bit over what green really means or has meant in the past. We were curious to find out the answer, so starting today we will try to sum up the most important features that must be known by everyone, when talking “green”.

The color green
Of course, we have to start with the most basic of all meanings, and that is the color green. According to Wikipedia, the color green is not a primary color, since it is created by mixing blue and yellow, or cyan and yellow. Looking at it on a RGB color wheel, the complement of green is magenta; while on a color wheel based on traditional color theory (RYB), the complementary color to green is considered to be red.
There are 57 different shades of green attested in the world, and when you look at them, you can actually see the difference! The natural greens, from forest to lime, are seen as tranquil and refreshing. Green is considered the color of peace and ecology and it affects us at a physical level in different ways: it relaxes us mentally, as well as physically, it helps us get over depression, nervousness, and anxiety and it offers us a sense of renewal, self-control, and harmony.

Green Holidays
The most well-known holiday all around the world that uses a bunch of green is Saint Patrick’s Day. This holiday was originally a Roman Catholic feast day for Ireland’s patron saint, celebrated only in Ireland since before the 1600s. But it evolved into a secular holiday in the 1700s, when Irish immigrants had the opportunity to make a political and cultural statement along with celebrating St Paddy’s Day abroad.
Nowadays, it evolved into a transcontinental holiday, being celebrated all over the world, from Taiwan to Oslo. But why the color green? According to some sources, blue was the first color associated with St. Patrick’s Day, but that started to change in the 17th century. Green is one of the colors in Ireland’s tri-color flag, and it has been used in the flags of several Irish revolutionary groups throughout history. Ireland is the “Emerald Isle”, so named for its lush green landscape. Green is also the color of spring, the shamrock, and the Chicago River, which the Midwestern city has dyed green on St. Patrick’s Day for the past 40-odd years.

Green in urban legends
This urban legend about green that we learned from Urbanlegends.com it has first seen the light of day in America, in the 1970s. What do chocolate, green, ladies and fertility symbols all have in common? Our urban legend of today: green M&Ms are aphrodisiacs.
We all know the graphical representation of the red M&M and the yellow one, but how many of you have seen the Mars Company representation of Green M&M? Not many, I know, because a lot of controversy has been floating around this particular sweet candy. I’ve have heard it theorized that the color green has been a symbol of fertility from time beyond history, but nothing convinces me that tale has a solid truth behind it.

The interesting part of this story is that in 1991, “a smart cookie with a head for a fast buck”, Wendy Jaffe, picked up on the ‘Green M&M’ myth and went in business producing generic green chocolate filled pill shaped candies she named simply ‘The Green Ones’. In order to advertise her candy as much as possible, she started affirming “They make you horny”. Just to prove it, she went on a TV show, “Studs,” and dated two men from the show. One man she gave a package of her candy, the other she didn’t. One man got much more action than the other. This proved positive the magical power of her candy. But this didn’t matter for Mars Company, which decided to sue her for her action.
In the end, the good folks over at Mars denied the Green M&M having the power to seduce anything more than that big dumb M&M yellow peanut.

This completes our doodles for this week. We hope you had fun finding out new and interesting things about Green. Check in with us in the next weeks, to find out more and more about it.

In every household all around the world, every family tries to purchase as many electronics as they can to try and ease the work that has to be done around the house. From the common washing machine, to the kitchen’s food processors everything is made to simplify one’s hand work.

But are all those machineries really helping us as well as the environment, or are they in fact huge energy consumers that simply make a huge hole in the ozone layer? Read this post about: What is the eco way to wash dishes? Washing machine vs. Hand washing and find out what happens in this case.

Up until a few years ago, the dish-washing machine has been thought of as a luxurious object for rich, lazy snobs. Many considered it useless or a big energy consumer. In 2010 though, there are few households that do not contain a dish-washing machine mainly because nowadays women can say out loud that they hate washing dishes by hand, the prices are not that high anymore and because there are more and more dish-washing machines that aren’t that consuming after all.

Homeenergy.org helps us figure some things out and tells us a few interesting facts like: if we take 12 place settings of dishes, that is 140 individual pieces, glasses, china and cutlery and we dirty them up with 7 types of foods like: spinach, eggs, meat, milk and some others, we will find the following results on both variants. We are looking at this problem from two different angles: water consumption and energy consumption.

When all those dishes were washed by hand we discovered that a huge amount of water can be wasted: more than 53 gallons – that is 200 liters, though the average consumption is around 27 gallons – 113 liters. Looking at it from the energy waste position, we find that an average of 2.5 kWh is wasted on heating the water at a desirable temperature. We almost must take into consideration that the total time needed for cleaning all those dishes, ranged between 45 to 165 minutes, with a clear peak around 80 minutes. Comparing this time to how much time it take to load a machine and unload a machine – 15 min – and then wash the dishes, we see that the total elapsed time before the dishes are clean, dried and ready for use may be twice as long using a dishwasher as it is when dishes are cleaned and dried by hand.

Assuming that 140 dishes is the average number of dishes to clean daily in a household, and assuming it takes 80 minutes to wash them, then it takes about 500 hours a year to clean dishes by hand. This is equivalent to 12.5 weeks of work.

A dishwashing machine, in comparison, uses about 4 gallons (15 liters) to clean a full load and consumes between 1kWh (standard cycle) and 2kWh (intensive cycle) of electrical energy. Clearly, when discussing about water saving a dishwashing machine does exactly that!

All in all, we give the following recommendations to everyone that wants to be eco either washing by hand or with the help of a machine:

• Remove large food scraps from the plates before washing
• Manual dish-washing is much more easy if the food isn’t dried on the plates
• Do not prerinse the dishes under running tap water – whether you are washing them by hand or in a washing machine
• The amount of detergent used should be appropriate to the job – don’t use too much or too little
• If you afford an automatic dishwasher, use one – preferably a new one. A full, energy-efficient dishwasher cleans best and has the lowest environmental impact of any method.

Today we want to travel into the past for a bit and recall the stages that music has passed through.

Remember back in the 70s when you were cool if you had a boombox hung on your shoulder and you were to Run-DMC or James Brown? I always wondered if the guy that carried that huge thing was deaf. He must have been! And in the 80s and 90s along came the Walkman that allowed you to listen to music as loud as you wanted, without disturbing anyone else on the street. The headphones were a bliss for every single human being that wanted to hear his own thoughts around a kid that loved rock music.

Around the time the millennium changed, things in the music sector changed as well and people wanted to be as stylish as possible when listening to their favorite band, regardless they were in public places or in the comfort of their own private room – the iPod came along. And it has stayed pretty much until now.

But enough with remembering things that are passed and forgotten, lets fast forward to our subject on today’s list: What is the green way to enjoy music? iPod vs. Walkman.

In order to calculate the carbon footprint of these devices, we must first see what exactly is there to calculate. We are leaving from the premises that we do have both gadgets in our hands, so let’s see which way to listen is greener.

If we take the walkman into verification, it is easy to see that to make it work you must feed it cassettes as well as batteries. Taking a simple, common cassette, we have found out that to make such a cassette around 55-70 grams of polyester material are needed, in addition to the magnetic band that stores the songs. This means that one simple cassette that holds an average of 12 songs on it has an emission of 220 – 280 grams of CO2 (1 kg of polyester emits apx. 4 kg of CO2). But what happens if you are on a long trip to somewhere and you are bored to death and you want to listen to music for a longer time?

Since we want to make things interesting every time, we put up an average line for everyone to follow. Let’s say that you listen to 100 songs before you throw the thing away; with an average of 4 minutes per song and 60 minutes as the duration of the entire tape that would translate into 6.66 cassettes, approximately 7 cassettes for 100 songs. That is one long trip to make!

Alright, all this being said, we return to our walkman’s consumption. We have decided that if we want to listen for 6 hours and 45 minutes to a walkman, we need to bring with us 7 cassettes, which sums up to 1540 – 1960 grams of CO2 only for the tapes. But to actually listen to the thing, we need batteries. We all know that the medium life duration of a zinc battery is around 20 h and for an alkaline one is 30 hours. But when running constantly they wear up much faster than that.

For example, a popular model from Sony, the Walkman Professional WM-D6C is powered by 4 standard AA batteries (apx. 4 hours of play time). This gets us to the following calculation: to listen to music continuously for 7 hours we need around 7 AA – batteries (or 3-4 batteries for a 2 batteries Walkman model). Rawmaterials.com states that even though household batteries make up just 1% of the waste on a landfill site, they are responsible for an incredible 50% to 70% of all heavy metals found in the landfill. The solution to this problem could be the use of rechargeable batteries, but they need a separate recharging device and their performance tends to disappoint. Moreover, the average rechargeable battery is only actually charged 8 times before it is lost, accidentally thrown away or the recharger is broken, states Carboncommentary.com.

Of course, modern Walkmans are very different from their ancestors and are in fact much closer to the iPods series from Apple. Jumping over to the competition and new trends, it’s the iPod’s turn to be under the green microscope. In order to make the right comparison, we will keep the same average line like in the walkman’s case.

In order to listen to music continuously for 7 hours an iPod must download the same number of songs – 100. With the average size of 3 MB, this means that you have to download 300 MB. At an average speed of 1 Mb/s, it will take you around 40 min to download all the files, all that having an emission of apx. 480 grams of CO2. As it does not function on batteries, we skip this step, but we bump into charging the devices. According to its technical specifications, an iPod runs without having to recharge it for 14 hours. An MP3.com report stated that this was virtually unachievable under real-life usage conditions, with a writer for MP3.com getting on average less than 8 hours from an iPod (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPod#Battery_problems). This should be enough to listen to our 100 songs, but we have to consider the recharging process which takes around 160 min (http://eec1.ucdavis.edu/epyc/BryanPon-USB-Charging.pdf). If we use a wall charger, the energy consumed would be 4.8 Wh, apx. 2.16 g of CO2. Therefore, in the case of the iPod, it all piles up together, to apx. 482.16 g of CO2.

By comparison, the Sony Walkman W series is a wireless MP3 player built into a set of water-resistant headphones with 2 GB of internal memory. It needs apx. 90 min to fully recharge and can play 11 hours of music, making it more then enough to cover our 100 songs and 7 hours of listening.

This week we want to change the conclusion pattern of all our posts. Instead we want to tell you some true facts about the technology evolution. Last year, a 13 year-old kid was asked to use a walkman for one week, instead of his iPod. In his review he stated: “It took me three days to figure out that there was another side to the tape”, “I mistook the metal/normal switch on the Walkman for a genre-specific equalizer” and “I managed to create an impromptu shuffle feature simply by holding down “rewind” and releasing it randomly – effective, if a little laboured”.

All in all, evolution is the best!