Green Goes Simple: The Green Scoop

How to Reduce Waste at Outdoor Parties

By Emily Anderson for Green Goes Simple

Every year, millions of Americans look forward to enjoying the warm weather with their friends and family. But al fresco entertaining can also lead to an increase in waste. When you fire up the grill or hop in the pool this year, try giving your outdoor party an easy green makeover. After all, there’s no better way to truly enjoy the outdoors than by taking the environment into account! With these simple tips, putting a little eco in your event only ups your summer fun.

Go Vegetarian
It takes 1,916 gallons of water to produce 1 pound of beef, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Cattle also produce enormous amounts of methane, a greenhouse gas that’s almost 20 times more harmful than carbon dioxide.

Cutting your meat consumption in half will reduce your eco-impact and help you save money at the same time. Give guests hearty nonmeat alternatives, like portobello mushrooms or vegetarian hot dogs. Even if you serve guests burgers for the first round, it’s easy to offer lighter fare for second servings.

Grill Greener
For a nearly instant eco-change, skip the chemical grill cleaners and get a greener -- and tastier -- clean by rubbing an onion on the cooking surface after each grill session.

You can also switch to natural charcoal, which is designed to get hot faster than other products. Plus, the bag itself can be used to light the fire, which means less waste at the end of your event and no need for chemical lighters to get the flame burning bright. Up the green ante by using an eco-friendly grill, which doesn’t produce ash or release chemicals into the air.

Activate Fun
By upping the fun factor of your outdoor party, everyone will drink less, eat less and produce a lot less waste. So get your guests moving -- and not just to the beverage cooler. Keep them entertained with games, like badminton, bocce ball and croquet -- even a basketball or Frisbee can get everyone in the mood for play. Be sure you provide plenty of shade from the sun and keep lots of sunscreen on hand.

Serve Healthy Food
Take advantage of fresh summer fruits and vegetables and leave out the processed food, opting instead for real cheeses and whole-grain bread and crackers. Plan ahead, make foods that can be easily stored (again, less waste), and stock up on resealable BPH-free food containers to keep the leftovers fresh.

Reduce Your Trash
Plastic water bottles create a huge amount of unnecessary waste and they’re expensive too. Rather than throwing money away on something you can get for free, fill a couple of 10-gallon water coolers and stock up on reusable plastic cups. Skip canned soda; it’s loaded with sugar, anyway. Mix up some homemade lemonade or ice tea instead. You’ll save your guests some calories -- and yourself some money.

While you’re at it, try to avoid using other single-use items, like paper napkins and plates. Instead, buy a dozen washable cotton bandanas -- they’re inexpensive and they add a little eco-friendly style to your picnic table. When you do use paper products, look for recycled and recyclable options. Remember, a little change can go a long way!

Emily Anderson is the author of Eco-chic Home, Eco-chic Weddings and When Changing a Lightbulb Just Isn’t Enough. Her work has appeared in Better Homes and Gardens, Ladies’ Home Journal, The New York Times and her blog, GoodWithStyle.com.

Green Goes Simple: The Green Scoop

Love Your Lawn (and the Earth Too)

By Cynthia Ramnarace for Green Goes Simple

Maintaining a lush, healthy lawn without resorting to harsh chemicals is no easy task. Fortunately, you don’t have to have a supremely green thumb to keep your lawn naturally vibrant.

According to Paul Tukey, author of The Organic Lawn Care Manual, a truly “green” lawn requires patience, diligence and, most importantly, a pair of blinders. “Most people use herbicides because they’re worried about what their neighbor’s thinking,” says Tukey, who is also the founder of SafeLawns.org, a nonprofit organization devoted to promoting natural lawn care. “You have this aesthetic expectation that gets out, this ‘You’re not fit to live in the neighborhood if you let dandelions grow on the lawn.’”

So forget the neighbors and embrace these chemical-free and resource-reducing suggestions for a natural -- and beautiful -- lawn.

Apply organic fertilizer … and wait. Commercial fertilizers spoil lawn owners by producing overnight greenness. Organic fertilizers work by feeding the soil, not the plant, and so it takes weeks before the blades absorb those new nutrients.

“Until your soil is brought back to life with earthworms and all kinds of microscopic organisms that you don’t even think about, your lawn is not going to turn green,” says Tukey.

Spread organic compost. Add about a 1/4- to 1/2-inch of compost across the entire lawn, suggests Tukey. Then water with compost tea (2 pounds of compost for 5 gallons of water). “The nutrients will begin to bring the soil back to life,” he says.

Respect your weeds. Although they can be a nuisance, weeds hold more information than you may think. “Weeds are messengers sent by Mother Nature to tell us something about the soil,” says Tukey.

For instance, if you have a lot of dandelions, the soil lacks calcium. “Put down high-calcium limestone and come back in a couple of years,” says Tukey. “There won’t be any dandelions.” Can’t wait that long? Dig them up, flame them -- which you do by torching the seeds before they can spread -- or spray them with a vinegar-based weed killer.

Keep seeding your lawn. Try not to use the ever-popular Kentucky bluegrass variety of grass, which grows quickly. Instead, opt for a slow-growing variety, such as buffalo grass in arid environments and turf-type tall fescue in regions that get regular rain.

“There are plenty of lawn grass species out there now that grow more slowly, require fewer resources and have you mowing only every three or four weeks,” says Tukey.

Make sure your grass is at least 3 inches tall. Doing so will shade out the weeds, making it more difficult for them to grow and keeping the ground moist. The shorter your grass is, the more frequently it will need to be watered.

Don’t blow your leaves away. Instead, mulch them with a mulching or push mower. The leaves, like grass clippings, feed the soil.

Turn off your automatic sprinkler. Defaulting to an automatic watering system means you may be wasting water. See if your soil really needs it by digging a hole that is 6 or 8 inches deep, then feeling the earth. If it’s dry, water your lawn until the ground is saturated. If not, wait a few days and test it again.

“Once the soil surface dries out, the roots will naturally gravitate downward to where the moisture is,” says Tukey. “If you water daily, your roots learn to stay near the surface, waiting for their next drink. If they dig down deep, you can go away on vacation for a week and your grass will still be OK.”

Cynthia Ramnarace is a freelance writer in Queens, N.Y. She is a regular contributor to iVillage.com and AARP Bulletin. Her work also appears frequently in American Baby and Kiwi magazines.

I recently returned from a trip to San Francisco. Now, I love San Francisco just like most neo-hippies do, but I do not think that it is the perfect city like many will profess (If I did, I would live there). I say this so that you don’t think that I’m one of those girls on a bandwagon about how San Francisco does everything right. Believe me, I am not that girl. However, the city has nailed one thing fabulously: They’ve found a way to make residents think about landfill size every single time they throw things away.

By Dana Goeglein for Green Goes Simple

You want to be green, but it’s hard to know the difference between reusing and recycling. Fortunately, it’s not that complicated. Recycling and reusing have the same goal: to keep items out of overflowing landfills. The two tactics just go about it in very different ways.

Recycling involves reprocessing an old item -- such as a can, glass or newspaper -- and turning it into something new. Recycled paper products may be reprocessed into toilet paper and old tires may become a compound used to resurface roads.

By Amy Levin-Epstein for Green Goes Simple

Using less electricity at home is a win-win: You reduce your environmental impact and your monthly bill. But it can be especially hard to cut back on your energy usage during the dog days of summer, when tongue-wagging temps make you want to blast your AC. Try following these five tips from Bruce Harley, author of Cut Your Energy Bills Now: 150 Smart Ways to Save Money and Make Your Home More Comfortable and Green, and you’ll be seeing green all season long.

By Elizabeth Barker for Green Goes Simple

By making a few easy changes to your party-planning strategy, you can cut back on waste, reduce your use of natural resources and even slash your spending budget. Here, Green Chic author Christie Matheson serves up eight tips for eco-fabulous entertaining:

1. Ditch the disposable goods and use your own tableware. Not enough to go around? Consider renting what you need or borrowing from a friend. You can also check your local chapter of Freecycle.org, an online community where members give away used household items.

By Amy Levin-Epstein for Green Goes Simple

Sure, protecting the environment can sometimes mean spending more, but there are plenty of ways that greening your life can help keep more green in your wallet. “Living green and healthy can be done on a budget and, in many cases, can actually save you money,” says Sara Snow, green lifestyle expert and author of Sara Snow’s Fresh Living. Here are six tips from Snow on how any family -- with any budget -- can start helping the planet and saving money today.

By Marisa Belger for Green Goes Simple

The jars came first. Instead of sending my growing collection of empty glass receptacles to their usual fate at the bottom of the recycle bin, I did something unexpected -- something wild. I peeled off their labels and plopped them in the dishwasher.

I wanted to see just what would happen if I gave these jars another chance. Full disclosure: I was motivated not only by the thought of transforming trash into something new, something useful, even something cool, but also by the fact that jars were clogging up my kitchen. You see, we’re a jar-centric family, tearing through what I’m starting to believe is an abnormal amount of pickles, mustard (the spicy French and yellow varieties), sauces of both apple and tomato, and jams and jellies.

By Alison Baenen for Green Goes Simple

For most of us, getting dressed is personal. We use clothes to convey a message about ourselves to the outside world and to express, perhaps outlandishly or subtly, our aesthetic sensibilities. As such, the questions we run up against in the closet range from the prosaic (“Do these jeans make my butt look big?”) to the theoretical (“Can I wear this on a job interview?”).

But as more and more designers acknowledge the importance of a growing eco-fashion market, we may well be asking bigger-picture questions as we build our wardrobe: What kinds of material is this fabric made of? How much energy was consumed to create this item? Under what kind of working conditions was this made?

By Elizabeth Barker for Green Goes Simple

Raising environmentally savvy kids is one of the most powerful ways to help them enjoy a protected planet. To foster your children’s eco-education, encourage their schools to go green.

As part of National Green Week (an annual program developed by the Green Education Foundation), schools can devote any week from now until Earth Day (April 22) to projects that help create a more sustainable classroom and community. “One of National Green Week’s goals is for schools to start making environment-focused changes they can stick with for the rest of the year and beyond, so that the program can truly have a lasting impact,” says Green Education Foundation president Victoria Waters.