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.

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.”

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!

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!

Another week has passed, another poll has closed, and we made our research upon

What is more Eco? Email or Fax?

In the case of emails, even if you count in the energy use of the computers involved, it is still much less than that of old-fashioned fax or snail mail. In the case of faxes, there is the paper and toner, as well as the electricity used by the machines. E-mail is clearly much better, so why should we spend the time demonstrating that? And is that really the final answer of this week’s issue?

When we are talking about regular, common-sense email, everything is nice and shiny, the birds are singing and the trees are dancing. But what about spam email? This is the one that needs to concern us, due to its multitude and frequency.

“The average business email user is responsible for 131 kg of CO2 per year in email-related emissions, and 22 percent of that figure is spam-related. This spam energy is equivalent to the emissions that would result if every business email user burned an extra 3.3 gallons of gasoline annually”, according to ICF and MacAfee. The same report has studied the CO2 spam email emissions of 11 countries and the level of spam-related emissions generated in any country is usually proportionate to the number of email users in each country and the percentage of a country’s email that is spam. “Countries with greater numbers of email users generally use more energy for a global average of 22 kWh per user per year.”

Once the spam emails have been sent from the zombie PCs and conventional mail servers, it takes an average of three seconds for a user to view and delete a spam message. Although spam filters block approximately 80 percent of spam before it reaches the user, the massive quantities of email spam and the increasing ingenuity of spammers leave a large number of spam messages in end user inboxes. Approximately 104 billion user hours per year go to reading and manually deleting spam.

Spam filtering also makes up a significant portion of PC energy use — up to 5,542 million kWh annually or about 16 percent of overall spam energy use. But compared to the energy that users consume searching for false positives and viewing and deleting spam messages, the energy expenditure of spam filtering seems like a small price to pay.
The average GHG emission associated with a single spam message is 0.3 grams of CO2. That’s like driving three feet (one meter); but when multiplied by the yearly volume of spam, it is equivalent to driving around the earth 1.6 million times.

Spam filtering saves 135 TWh of electricity per year. That is equivalent to taking 13 million cars off the road. If every inbox were protected by a state-of-the-art spam filter, organizations and individuals could reduce today’s spam energy by 75 percent or 25 TWh per year, the equivalent of taking 2.3 million cars off the road.

The same study, conclusions that “the energy required annually to create, send, receive, store and view spam adds up to over 33 billion kWh”, that’s equivalent to the electricity used in 2.4 million homes, with the same GHG emissions as 3.1 million passenger cars using 2 billion gallons of gasoline.

In the second part of our article we must return our face to faxing and see how Eco-friendly is that way of communication. Of the top of the internet’s mind, there comes this statistic: over 15 million trees felled each year in the United States just to get enough fax paper. That is shocking! Of course, if we take it as a whole, fax machine is well-known to be an evil killing machine for our trees. But, you see, things have evolved lately and nowadays you can fax someone over the internet. It’s very easy, almost the same as using an email account, like Yahoo or Google Mail – the software producer gives you a platform that you can use as simple as any other software on your computer. Squidoo.com gives us many other details over this procedure that resembles the elementary use of an email address. This is one way of reducing the carbon footprint of a fax machine.

Also, Advsuv.com tells us that the era of those robust, energy-consuming, tree-killing fax machines has passed away and new ways of sending a fax page have rose. Amongst the various advantages of the new Internet fax we find: “First and foremost, the cost of an additional fax is completely cut off. No additional charges for fax machines, fax paper, printer, ink, etc. Because Internet faxes are sent as mixture into a soft copy e-mails are easier to distribute and organize. A pile of paper could be saved. In this way we can guarantee us a bit ‘of the feeling that we do something to save the environment as well.
Users of traditional fax machines will not be plagued by problems like lack of fax paper, the cost of additional phone lines, fax transmission errors, etc. All these problems are practically nonexistent, if you have sent or receive faxes online.”

Looking at this problem on a whole, we might come to some conclusion like:

• If you think of spamming for your publicity, think again and DON’T – it’s not only annoying, but also a big energy consumer.
• Spam filters save us time as well as CO2 emissions.
• Regular emails are more eco friendly, but they aren’t all Green – the servers, the peripherals, the traveling on other servers until it gets to your inbox – all that consumes precious energy, thus has CO2 emissions.
• The fax concept has updated over the years and nowadays fax machines are more and more non-consumers.

Following our last week’s article, we asked ourselves and we asked you another question regarding the carbon dioxide footprint of new technology and our daily actions:

Which is greener – a digital photo frame or a paper photo album?

Every special event, every happy or less happy moment is marked in our minds more or less, depending on the occasion. But try to remember what dress you wore at your cousin’s wedding, so you don’t dress the same way at her baby’s christening… It all becomes a bit foggy now, doesn’t it? In order to prevent such a fashion disaster like this, or just to genuinely smile on reminiscing beautiful memories from your own wedding, you come down to photos. They enrich our lives with beautiful moments, that otherwise would have stayed in the shadow of oblivion.

We all have photo albums at home, with tons of photos from weddings, birthdays or parties. For example, an average wedding will results in hundreds of photos, although usually only the best of them are selected and printed. The exact number varies greatly from photographer to photographer, depending on their skill and speed, but we can easily imagine ending up with over 1000 raw photos after a whole day of shooting (this figure refers to digital photography, not film). From these, only the best ones are selected, edited and printed and you would end up with around 100 images (more or less depending on how big the final album is).

So, what is the carbon footprint of a 100 photos?

It all depends if the photos are printed at a professional shop or if you print them yourself (it can get up to 4 times cheaper!). Traditional photo processing is very water-intensive, it uses caustic chemicals, and it can release silver into the environment. If you use a color laser printer, or even an inkjet printer and special photo paper, you can also obtain good images at a lower cost for the environment, although the quality is not as good as professional printed photos. According to Yahoo Green, even if laser printers are more expensive than inkjet printers, you also get fewer printed pages per cartridge with an inkjet than you do pages per toner cartridge for a laser printer and the cost-per-page is less for a laser printer. Also, they say that inkjet-printed paper is almost impossible to recycle. Keeping that in mind, it seems obvious that you are better off printing your images on a laser printer.

Other article written by Brian Nadel, makes an interesting analysis regarding the energy cost of a printed photo, saying that printing 10 individual photos uses 0.2 kilowatt hour of electricity, so 100 sheets would consume 2 kilowatt hours of juice. Of course, the number can vary depending on how much electricity your printer consumes, but if we use it as a reference and consider printing a photo per page, our 100 photos for the wedding album will release around 0.91 kg of carbon dioxide only for printing. Keep in mind that this doesn’t take into account the carbon footprint of the actual album, which will add more to this figure.

On the other side, let’s suppose that instead of a classic photo album, you want to use a digital photo frame to display the 100 photos. Digital photo frames are more expensive than photo albums you print yourself, but you can use them to display the images in different ways, with music and transitions. Another disadvantage is that they need electricity to function, so they are not environmentally sensitive. An 8-inch frame consumes 7 watts or 61.3 kilowatt hours of power over a year, according to our Kill-A-Watt testing over a short period of time (says tomsguide.com ), the equivalent of about 27.58 kg of carbon dioxide. Even if nobody is watching, a digital photo frame will need electricity to power it. So far, we didn’t consider the footprint of making a digital photo frame and how are these recycled, but it is clear that classical photo albums or photo frames are more environmental friendly.

After an album is made it has less impact on the environment and lasts for a longer period of time (I am sure that your grandparents still have their wedding photo album, while you lost some great pictures from you holiday last year by mistakenly erasing them from your computer.) Considering the fact that your photo stack increases constantly over the years, you might end up with a bulk of photo albums that, although look very nice in your livingroom and preserve your photos, are heavy to use and it’s even harder to remember what photos are in which album.

However, although a digital frame might cost a bit when purchased, in comparison to the costs of printing all the photos every time you make them, and the fact that the photo paper is not recyclable, it’s a trifle.

Printed photos for most people might be more environmentally sound and have a somewhat smaller carbon footprint. That said, there is much that the photographer can do to improve his or her impact – use more environmentally-friendly chemicals (they do exist), being careful of water use and reusing chemicals where possible. Disposal of used chemicals must be done safely and in accordance to local laws.

Overall, digital photo frames may consume energy over and over again, but this adds up to 61.3 KWH/year, which you can save in a matter of months if you remember turn switch the light bulb off every time you exit a room.

• If you want to watch the same 10 or 100 photos again and again for a long period of time, you shouldn’t even think of a digital photo frame because it consumes energy for no good reason.
• But if you like to constantly change the photos around you, you might consider a digital frame, as it’s costs and CO2 emissions cushion.

The exchange of information via the Internet increases rapidly. This is a fantastic development that has made many things a lot easier, faster, less expensive and environmentally friendlier. The volume of the total consumption of the Internet and IT, however, has become so high that the total strain on the environment has become a factor worth looking into.

When we use the Internet, we consume power. Any website has a carbon footprint and for this reason, it contributes to climate change. A certain site has a carbon footprint because electricity is required to power the servers that host that website, the computers used to view it, and the global networks that connects them. Much of that electricity is created from the burning of fossil fuels, like coal, oil and natural gas, all of which emit carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.

GreenWeb is an innovative project, in which we strongly believe, that will help everybody, from mothers that blog about effective methods on how to keep their child healthy, to big companies and every site owner regardless of the content or number of visitors. GreenWeb monitors registered websites against CO₂ emissions and takes effective measures to make those websites energy-efficient and carbon neutral.

That is what we do. How do we do it? By taking in consideration all the power consumption devices that are implied when browsing a website, calculating the amount of CO₂ emissions generated per website usage, purchasing green certificates to neutralize your website’s CO₂ footprint, sponsoring NGOs to plant trees. These few steps make a huge difference. It’s the same like eating an organic tomato or a regular one. Although it might seem that it makes no difference, you know it does differ at every single level: the taste, the smell, the fact that it is a healthy vegetable; everything tells you that it is the right way to eat. That is exactly what we are trying to do with GreenWeb platform: show you that there is an ecological way to blog, chat, work, and talk to friends. And, like in the case of the tomato, once you’ve seen the results, once you’ve ”tasted” it, there’s no turning back.

As we like to do things in the right way, it only comes natural to introduce ourselves. We are a few that hope to make a lot of difference; for any more information that you might consider interesting, please click here.

Here at GreenWeb.org we not only love what we are doing, but also we are certain this will make a difference and we will prove it to you! Apart from the website, where you can find all the information that you need to understand how the GreenWeb platform works, we also bring to your attention this blog page, because this is the interactive part of the project.

Very soon you will be able to find here different poles regarding “What is more eco?” – we love to keep you informed – and for this, we promise to offer you a highly researched answer each time. Later on, in a few weeks, we will hold contests where you can show us that you are an eco-friendly person and you care for the world we live in. We want to get in touch with you, find out what you think, what you believe in, what you want and for that you can find us on Facebook and Twitter too.

We would like not only to bring you a product, but also to be part of your community, friends, and, why not, your life. We want YOU to want to make something good for the environment!