With the holiday shopping season around the corner, don't forget the eco-lover on your list. From milk-based paint to solar-powered backpacks, here is the latest roundup of green products that you will feel good giving. For more ideas, check out our collection of eco-conscious accessories.

View a slide show of 9 eco-friendly products

2 Comments

1. 1. RedRoseAndy 11:31 AM 11/11/09

   From the moment that we switch our radiators on half of the heat given off by them is lost as it goes into the wall behind them. We can, however, get around this problem with an invention from a then schoolboy that got onto the Tommorows World program decades ago. He had learned from School that heat is given off by way of conduction, convection, and radiation, so when his Grandmother had problems meeting her heating bills the schoolboy reasoned that heat loss due to conduction and convection could be stopped by putting a lining of cardboard covered with silver cooking foil behind his Grandmothers radiators. Heat loss through the wall is now slashed by nearly 50%, and rooms heat up faster when the heating comes on. The Fire Brigade said at the time that the cardboard was not a fire hazard as behind the radiator is the least damaged part of a room in the event of a fire. And this saving cuts the CO2 emissions of your house.
   The UK has 107 main power stations that produce 30% of CO2 production, that is, one power station produces 0.28 % of our CO2 emissions. 26% of our energy is used in space heating so we can guess that the equivalent of 27.82 power stations are used for space heating. If we can cut our space heating needs by nearly half with this simple invention we can reduce the number of power stations that we need by 13.91, and thus cut the total UK CO2 emissions by 3.9%. And we do not need as many new power stations as we did. How about it?

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2. 2. Dennis Fletcher 04:36 PM 11/18/09

   Another great green idea is to get rid of paper(printing, handling, storing, retrieving and disposal) by figuring out ways of using eDocuments instead. If you have a home accounting system, you can email invoices and do electronic banking (called Banking Automation) to eliminate paper checks and bills. If you own a business, you can use one of the many well-developed Document Automation software packages to convert most of your business/office paperwork to electronic documents.
   
   The one I'm most familiar with is iDocs by inFORM Decisions (Rancho Santa Margarita, CA) for the office. It runs on all IBM midrange computers. A typical Document Automation solution will support scanning and creating eDocuments, emailing and faxing them to other parts of the organization or customers/suppliers, archiving and retrieving eDocs and the design of graphic forms for accepting data in prescribed formats.
   
   Eventually, the world, including most businesses and families, will be paperless and we will all wonder how we ever put up with all those primitive paper documents!

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