One of my favorite ways to do a little part for the planet is to compost. I began this venture because I wanted to make the plants in my garden a little happier. I also thought that in the process of helping my garden grow, it would be cool to lessen the trash that I put out in the street or squish down the sink pipes each week. Yeah it may be a little gross on first contemplation, but there are ways to manage it so it isn't such a messy endeavor. What I do is have a little airtight bucket under my sink in the kitchen. Each time I cook a meal that involves vegetable ends that get cut off, egg shell leftovers, or coffee grounds from my coffee maker, I take those leftovers and put them in my little bucket. When the bucket is full I take it out to my backyard and in the corner of the yard I dump it in a compost bin. The city of LA offers really affordable bins that are $20 on sale if you go to their workshops.

Check out this site:
http://www.lacity.org/san/solid_resources/recycling/services/compost.htm
To get one on the cheap and begin your road toward happy plants in your backyard.

But why is composting great, besides helping your garden out? Did you know that of all the trash that we humans output, 25% is comprised of yard waste and food scraps. That is about 63.5 million tons of waste per year in the United States alone. And through recycling your organic waste each year, you are joining a force of people who are preventing the release of approximately 49.7 million metric tons of carbon into the air --about the same amount emitted annually by 39 million cars!

So now that you are all siked on it, you might wonder what exactly goes in a compost bin? Anything plant based is great! I have found that you can put stuff like flour in or bread or pasta, but I wouldn't recommend it. The flour and breads tend to create a weird consistency. Stick to vegetables, fruit peels, egg shells, coffee grinds, tea bags, Halloween pumpkins and paper towels. Paper towels are a great thing, but if you have some cleaning fluid chemicals on them, then skip it. You don't want to put any chemicals in your compost if you can avoid it. And then there is the obvious stuff in your yard like leaves and dirt and grass clippings. Those are all great. You want to try and get a lot of variety in there. So once you have your big compost bin at least halfway full, it is a good practice to overturn the soil every couple months so that everything breaks down faster.

There are a couple things to steer clear of when creating the perfect compost soil for your plants...Do not ever put meat products in (not including egg shells). Fish, chicken, pork and cow meat will attract some nasty bugs including maggots that are not good for compost and also emit a smell so rotten and horrible, you will want nothing to do with composting ever again. So be sure to never put meat in your compost bin. Do not put tree branches in your compost. They take way too long to break down. I would also stay away from leaves from trees like magnolias, or rubber trees (where the consistency of the leaf is thick and waxy with lots of fibers). These kind of leaves take forever to decompose and you would be waiting a couple years before they would break down.

So there you have it in a nutshell. To learn more about starting a compost, check out some of these sites:
http://journeytoforever.org/compost_make.html
http://www.gardenguides.com/how-to/tipstechniques/planning/compost.asp

Happy Gardening!

Maybe it's just that I grew up in Los Angeles. Or have a few hippie relatives ("Remember, don't flush when we visit Auntie's house!"). Or that I just like tote bags. But I've found it pretty easy to adopt some simple green habits that can go a long way in the big picture of being nice to Mother Earth.

In case you haven't noticed, it's totally chic to bring your own bags to the grocery store and other retailers. See my handy blog post from last year's Green Week for more info on that hot topic. Just keep a few bags in your car for those spontaneous shopping stops. Another seemingly no brainer is to turn off the hose and pick up a broom to clean that back patio or front driveway. Not to mention that sweeping is a total calorie burner. At my house, it also counts as "playing with the dog" because our pug stands on the piles of leaves trying to actually catch the broom! Makes you want to come over to visit, doesn't it?

Which leads me to lint. Cleaning the lint trap after every dryer load can actually save you money! Think of all the tote bags you could buy! Some of my aforementioned hippie relatives used to have clotheslines to dry their clothes outdoors. It's a great option if you have the space and the weather, and the prairie dress to wear while you're hanging laundry, but personally, I'm not there yet. I'll just keep cleaning the lint trap, thankyouverymuch.

Lots of Angelenos are brave and ride bikes to work. Or this thing called the Metro. I hear it's a rail system that actually can get you from place to place in Los Angeles, but I'm not sure I believe it. I mean in San Francisco, sure. New York, of course. But LA? Since many of us will always be dependent on our independence, and the rest of us are scared to ride a bike in traffic, there is the carpooling option. My husband and I work in the same building. In the same department in fact. I'd love to tell you that we carpool to work together every day. That would make me smart, and you "green" with envy I'm sure. But we don't. Most days we can't for a variety of reasons, most of which involve off-campus meetings or video shoots or other glamorous Hollywood-type things. But you should lead by example and find people to carpool with. Seriously, maybe you'll inspire me.

Volunteering. It's the quintessential civic activity. Cleaning up a park, helping out in a soup kitchen, or being a child's mentor are all great ways to spend your time. But let's be real. If you think it's just about selfless altruism, it's not. There's a quote in an Avenue Q song that goes "when you help others, you can't help helping yourself" -- and truer words have never been spoken. Donating your time and energy to something worthwhile makes you feel good about yourself. And ultimately, it's that feeling that keeps you coming back. It's a virtuous cycle.

 

So what's in it for you?
•    Perspective. Helping out in your community gets you out of your bubble and connected with the people around you.
•    Self-discovery. By opening yourself up to new experiences, you might learn something about yourself in the process.
•    Self-satisfaction. It's not a bad thing! Helping others boosts your self-esteem! Embrace those feelings, but make sure you're actually making a difference

Why else should you consider putting in some volunteer time? Well, the benefits to others aren't so bad either. These include helping often resource-strapped organizations fulfill their missions and improving the conditions of other people as well as your surroundings.

 
Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/sundaykofax/

So how do you get started? Personally I find these websites particularly helpful.
•    http://servenet.org/
•    http://www.volunteermatch.org/

They provide a quick and easy way to look for opportunities near you. You can also check with your workplace to see if they have employee volunteering programs. Here in LA, NBC Universal has set up a couple of activities for us during Earth Week, including a beach clean up in Santa Monica and tree planting in Griffith Park. 

 

Are you trying to create the perfect garden at home? If the answer is yes, then check out this fun item you can pick up for free at your local coffee shop!

Used coffee grounds. That's right, I said used coffee grounds. Back in my days working at Starbucks, I used to get requests all the time for our bags of used coffee grounds. At first, I thought there were actual people out there who tried to re-use coffee grounds to make coffee at home. Turns out, some of our smartest customers were using the grounds for fertilizer in their gardens. Not only did it save them money – no more bagged fertilizer at the local gardening store – but they also ended up with a garden smelling like fresh, rich coffee.

Let's play pretend for a second and say I have my own garden, to accompany my Malibu beach house that I share with Ryan Gosling (hey, I said PRETEND). I would head down to my local café and ask them for their coffee grounds.

Your barista will thank you for it. Trust me, nothing is less fun than carrying 40 pounds of wet coffee grounds to the garbage dumpster in the back of the shop. You will be doing them a favor, as well as yourselves.

If you do take my advice with the coffee grounds, it's always nice to pay your barista back with a nice basket of tomatoes, squash or eggplant that was freshly picked from your vegetable garden. Makes the barista feel appreciated for doing their part in helping you save the environment.

So, there you go. Used coffee grounds make excellent fertilizer, it's free, it helps the environment by recycling the coffee, and you are able to grow fresh organic vegetables from the comfort of your own home, AND your barista gets a basket of fresh vegetables as a thank you gift for helping you out. Everybody wins!

I'm a big advocate of urban exploration – walking around and exploring new neighborhoods. It's the perfect green activity for the weekend. You get exercise, cut down your carbon footprint, and get to know your neighborhood.

As a recent transplant to LA, I came with reservations of my ability to explore without a car. Coming from the east coast and living in cities with widespread access to public transportation, I was pretty spoiled. However, to my surprise, LA can be a very pedestrian friendly city. And with the weather perfect year 'round, it's easy to plan a day to do it. Some of my favorite walking neighborhoods include West Hollywood, Silverlake, Beverly Hills, Downtown and Hollywood. All you need to do is check a bus or metro route and get on your way.

In general, here are some tips for planning a good walk:

· Bring water. Use a reusable bottle (duh).

· Wear comfortable shoes. I can't stress this enough. I once did a walk around Paris in loafers. I was hobbling like Quasimodo by the end of it.

· Aimlessly wander, but bring a map. Serendipity is fun, just be aware of your surroundings.

· Enjoy an urban oasis. Try to integrate some urban green spaces in your itinerary.

· Bring a camera. You never know what you're going to see.

I've found two websites that can plan a good walk:

Google Maps. They've recently introduced a function that gives you directions on how to get somewhere on foot.

Walkscore (http://www.walkscore.com/rankings/Los_Angeles). This website has a Google maps mashup that rates how walkable a neighborhood is and provides points of interest in the surrounding area.

For the really ambitious, here's the itinerary if you decided to walk from LA to New York.

At a rate of 3 miles an hour, 24 hours a day (apparently, it doesn't understand the concept of sleep), Google estimates that it would take about 38 days and 3 hours to walk the 2,800 miles. Good luck keeping up the pace through the Rockies.

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=d&hl=en&geocode=&saddr=los+angeles&daddr=new+york+city&sll
=40.720136,-74.010944&sspn=0.029273,0.063171&ie=UTF8&dirflg=w&z=4

Phillip Javellana
NBC.com Intern

I've been wracked with green guilt. Every day I seem to hear more dire news about evaporating ice caps, deteriorating air quality, disappearing topsoil, algae blooms, smoldering deforestation. Compounding the shame, I'm often hearing about these things while commuting in my eight-year-old car, with its so-so mileage.

Ideally I'd live near where I work or I'd work from home -- both practices that were common until about 50 years ago. Nowadays an hour's commute, especially here in Los Angeles, seems to be the standard. Each morning, I stare out at the freeway before me, lanes clogged to the seams, traffic alternating between speeding and crawling. It could drive a man to desperate measures. And it has.

I have decided to become a hyper-miler, one of those kooky people obsessed with extracting every conceivable mile out of a gallon of gas. The folks who are into this deep have some pretty extreme methods: driving on the painted lines of a roadway or over-inflating tires to reduce rolling resistance (and traction, BTW), avoiding routes that require left turns, "drafting" the cars in front of them. Now I can't quite recommend any of those tips for most folks, but there are plenty of techniques that make sense and can earn you as much as an additional 10% in gas mileage with precious little effort. A few faves:

Avoid the brakes whenever you can. It's all about anticipation. When you see a red light or stopped traffic up ahead, take your foot off the gas the instant you know you're going to have to stop; coasting to a stop is good. Truckers know this technique already --their stopping distances are so long that they have to concentrate and anticipate much further ahead than most drivers bother to.

Ease up to Speed. Slow acceleration is a patient art. Yes, my car is pretty fast when I jump on the throttle -- which I no longer do. In fact, I try to never extend the accelerator more than half way through its range. Can you say 0 to 60 in 15 seconds?

Dump the junk. I finally parted with my 8 x 12' wool moving blanket, five gallons of water (40 lbs.), tire chains (!?), hiking boots, my cassette collection, and a small tool box. What's in your trunk?

Stay home. The ultimate sag mileage improver is to not use the car at all. Can you combine two trips? Work from home once in a while? Walk to the store? We're trying a "no drive" day once a week.

Watch and win. My car's got a nifty "current miles per gallon" calculator as part of its trip computer. It will completely raise your consciousness about your driving style. Yes, it'll creep down into the single digits when you're heading up a hill -- but that's about the only time you need to see it down there. And you'll get a thrill out of watching it jump to 150 MPG or more when you're coasting down a hill.

Now I have to layer on top of this to use some common sense. Don't compromise safety for the sake of saving a bit of gas. But for me, the solace of trying to save energy and reduce pollution is a welcome obsession. It's all about thinking more long term: anticipating traffic, imagining alternatives to the way you've always thought about your car, and considering the wasteful impact of not thinking about the future.

Peter Hammersly
Content Director

By Dana J. Robinson

You hear that phrase thrown around a lot, but I'll bet you rarely stop to think about what each of the three elements really means. We typically just lump it all together and assume it means to put your cardboard, scrap paper and empty bottles and cans into the recycling bins. But we tend to forget about the first two parts of the phrase. Reduce and reuse…how exactly do we go about doing that?

Reducing and reusing actually go hand-in-hand rather conveniently. If you can think of ways to reuse the things you already have, you will reduce your consumption. It's as good for the environment as it is for your pocketbook.

I'm sure you're already thinking of all the wasteful things in your life that you wish had more than one use. The one that always comes to my mind are those pesky plastic bags under almost every kitchen sink. First of all, shame on you for not using reusable shopping bags in this day and age. But I get it…things happen and we all end up with an excess of these things.

Avoiding purchasing new items and start reusing those plastic bags:
- as trash bags in small trash cans, such as in the bathroom or laundry room
- in lieu of packing peanuts when shipping fragile items in the mail
- to pick up your pet's poo after walks through the neighborhood

Here's an example of how I recently began reusing these adorable glass yogurt containers that were piling up after several months of eating the most important meal of the day…

Oh look…this tasty yogurt just happens to come in rather tasteful glass containers!

They're too cute to recycle or (heaven forbid!) throw away, but they sure do take up a lot of storage space.

Here's a great idea! I can use them as votive or tea light candle holders. To be really festive, I could tie a decorative bow around the top to dress them up a bit.

There's always the utilitarian route. They're perfect for storing nail scissors, clippers and tweezers in the medicine cabinet, or for buttons, thimbles and snaps in the sewing room.

Then once you've identified all the many ways to reuse things that were intended to be single-use items, you can find one last way to reuse...a vase! Not only will it brighten up the room, it'll be your own little reward for helping your both your finances and the planet.

Meet Pucci. She is an adorable pug, who at only 9 months old is already on her way to becoming totally "green." She already has an organic chew toy – a monkey we’ve named Charlie.

Her food, by Wellness, is filled with all-natural antioxidants and nutrients. And on the other end of the spectrum, her poop bags are 100% biodegradable!M

Pucci’s latest way to go green is to help save energy around the house. We used to leave a door open for her to go in and out at night, because we don't have a doggie door yet. Recently, I bought bells for the French doors instead and now Pucci rings the bell when she wants out. Some might say she has her humans well trained!

There are lots of ways, big and small, to have your pet go green. The array of green pet products available now is amazing. There are eco-friendly toys, leashes, beds and treats for not only dogs, but cats and birds as well! You can even make your own pet food or treats if you have hours of free time on your hands. I think even a simple change – like switching to biodegradable poop bags – can have a big impact.

A few great sites that will help you get started on going green with your pets are below. There is even a whole blog site devoted to Raising a Green Dog! One great tip they offer is to convert an old suitcase into a dog bed!

Eco-Pet
http://www.shop.ecopetlife.com/main.sc

Great Green Pets
http://greatgreenpet.com

Pucci wants you all to be her friend on Dogbook, so be sure to visit her online and tell how you and your pet are making the change to a green lifestyle!
http://apps.facebook.com/dogbook/profile/view/5197693

Carole, A. - Los Angeles, CA

Keep your tires properly inflated.

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