Free Green TV

We’ve previously talked about Joost (Aka The Venice Project) that is an free Internet television application with over 20,000 shows which also allows viewers to instant message, channel chat and share their favorite television shows.

What we haven’t really talked about is the green and environmental shows that are available.

National Geographic Green Channel - Presents quality programming with ecological and conscious messages about the environment.

Green TV - A web TV channel dedicated to the environment. The aim of green.tv is to raise awareness of environmental issues, especially climate change.

e² Design:The Green Apple - The first episode begins in New York, a city that is leading the charge to green its industrial skyline with several groundbreaking projects. New York combats the urban myth of the bustling city as a “concrete jungle.”

Joost is a great free service and some of the excellent green programming is sure to take up some of the time that would have been otherwise spent watching Yoga 4 Dudes. Not that I’ve seen that of course.

Green Link Love - Other Great Green Sites 5

You can read the previous editions here: one, two, three and four.

Thing That Make You Go Green is a site that is dedicated to chronicling the progress of a few ordinary folks called JB, Paul, and Hendrick, as they try to go green. I liked the style of the site such as global warming will make you less fat, and how, in their opinion Best Buy should be ashamed of itself.

This month I also liked Green Me’s Ecological Cooking book review which has a few recipes I might try.

Reader, friend and contributor Trisha sent us this site about Hypermiling. That is “a method of increasing your car’s gas mileage by making skillful changes in the way you drive, allowing you to save gas and thereby have an easier time withstanding the rising oil and gas prices”

Billy Warden sent us an email about his Greening the Generations blog. He spent a decade contributing to L.A.’s smog and now he’s trying to raise a green family in Raleigh, NC. He shows helpful green discoveries, such as this one focusing on sexy summer sustainability.

Swap Tree was another site sent to us, that like the much missed Swango allows users to swap books, CDs, DVDs and video games for free. All users have to pay is the shipping and handling cost. It’s actually pretty cool, and shows you what you can swap for your unwanted stuff, or what you need to offer in order to get that wanted item. I hope to have given it a trial run by the time you read this.

Real World Green is a new site from For Your Imagination. It’s a new video series that are a collection of tips that, being followed, will make apparently your life style more environmentally friendly. Some interesting videos are available, such as “donuts are not green”, and “how to green your dishwasher”.

Greenzer is a new shopping portal site that is exclusively for “green” products, offering people the chance to shop at online merchants including Patagonia, Zappos, eBags and GAIAM. Products are offered across ten categories, and must meet a minimum green requirement. When I asked what this requirement was, their answer was “Greenzer.com decides if a product meets the requirement for the site by judging a product’s overall impact on the environment (i.e. does it run on rechargeable batteries?), its green attributes (is it made from recycled materials? Does it use organically grown materials?), green labels/certifications and the manufacturer’s overall green practices”. Not a bad idea, I like parts of it such as the water bottle cost comparison

Marilyn, from the excellent Intelligent Travel blog sent us this link from The Green Guide on how hair clippings can be used to remove oil spills.

Finally Greener Cars is a very handy guide for comparing the “greenness” of vehicles. It’s the official website for ACEEE’s Green Book is a unique consumer resource providing Green Scores rating the environmental friendliness of every vehicle on market.

If you have an interesting site you would like to be featured here, just let us know.

Is MoreEco Another Great Way To Get Free Green Stuff?

After doing a review of Green Rewards, I was told of another website called www.moreeco.com which also aims to reward people doing green shopping by giving them points to amass and then buy more green stuff with.

One way it differs from Green Rewards is that it gives you points for shopping at green stores only, rather than all, or a lot, of your online shopping. Also the rewards include some good stuff like planting a tree with your points.

I’ll investigate further and let you know how I find it. Also if you’re not reading enough at the moment, there’s a pretty cool blog with some interesting stuff on there. Called BeMoreEco, it contains some fun bits and pieces.

Green Rewards Website Review

There are lots of sites out there offering cash back or points when you do online shopping – like ipoints, Pigsback and Quidco. As far as I’m aware however, there hasn’t been one that’s specifically focused on being green and rewarding you for your ethical shopping until Green Rewards contacted us for a paid review of its site.

Green Rewards does just that – rewards you for your eco shopping. As the home page tells us: enjoy, shop, earn and redeem. The first thing to note is that while it encourages ethical shopping, it actually has a wide range of partners, not just environmentally friendly or ethical ones. So it’s up to you how to spend your money and earn your points. Partners are displayed in categories like Books, Music & Film or Home & Garden and clicking through will display all the stores in that category and then you go through to that website. If you’re logged in then Green Rewards will track your purchase and reward you with the appropriate amount of points.

Points for purchases vary from store to store and are displayed with the store’s logo before you click through. There’s actually a very good FAQ section that explains everything in much more detail than I can. Basically you spend money and then are rewarded with points in the next 30 days as the purchase gets verified. So far, so much the same as other reward sites, but where Green Rewards differs is that you can only spend the points to do eco shopping in its own Green Shop.

This may seem a limitation but I like the idea. There are things you’ll want to buy that just don’t fit in the green category, why not make those purchases and use the money back (or points in this case) to pay for your green products? The Green Shop has a huge range of products to spend your points on, from eco-friendly table mats to books and games. Each product will cost a different amount of points or offer a split between points and cash. This latter option seems more advisable as it will take a while to earn enough points to get ‘free’ products. For example a CD will earn you 60 points if it’s £10. To buy a £37 Eco Kettle, you need 8,720 points – which is 145 CDs! But for 73 CDs and £21.80 you can buy it as well. That doesn’t really seem much better but it’s not too bad in comparison with other sites I’ve used, the points system just seems to earn you less than if you were getting it in cash.

The idea is that you wouldn’t buy hundreds of CDs but use the site as a portal to do all your online shopping. You’ll soon find yourself building up points and putting it towards purchases, just don’t expect it to happen overnight. There’s no expiry date (as far as I could see) on points so there’s no rush to spend them, just quietly build them up until there’s something you want from the green shop. You can also donate points to charity.

From a usability point of view, the site is clean and nicely laid out, although I found a few of the categories packed full with lots of pages so used the search facility to navigate around to products I wanted.

Signing up is easy, it took less than a minute and you get 500 points for registering. My points balance was prominently displayed on the site and it’s easy to look at your account history.

Overall the site is easy to use and a good idea as a way of getting people to spend their points/cash back in a green way. It just needs to start getting the attention and users other sites get.

How Many PhoneBooks Do you Get?

Obviously with an ulterior motive in hand (but I don’t mind that), web directory 192.com urges us to abandon the traditional phone book and move online.

I won’t bore you with the details but in the UK legally every household has to receive a phone book free of charge. With more than one phone book being in circulation, households receive an average of 3 per year, and the 3 outdated ones add up to 750,000 tonnes of waste in the UK alone.

192.com have launched http://www.saynotophonebooks.com/ and even a Facebook group in order to encourage you to sign an e-petition to get the rules changed to an opt-in system for physical phone books.

Some more environmental facts about the phone books in the UK: Laid end to end they would stretch over half way around the world (22,500km); 680,000 barrels of oil wasted in phone book production (not including the wasted petrol used for their delivery to your doorstep); 2 billion litres of water is used in the production process (not to mention the amount of water wasted in the recycling process); and 437 million kilowatts of energy used in the production process.

Of course using a computer is sometimes easier than a phone book, it’s usually more comprehensive and up-to-date and with online mapping and directions often makes it easier too. However if the computer isn’t on, I still like to grab the nearest phone book. However, which one, as we currently have six! How many do you have? And do they allow you to recycle them in your area?

Donate To Charity Whilst You Search

Gavin, over at Green Options has a great article on the top 15 charity search engines.

This is done mainly by providing a portion of the advertising revenue they receive to charity or green projects. The sites he has listed are:

- Goodsearch
- Everyclick
- Searchgive
- Ripple
- Magic Taxi
- Search Kindly
- GoodTree
- Catch Tomorrow
- Lookie
- Rectifi
- Clicks For Cancer
- Charity Café
- Oblatoo
- The Green Spider
- ClicksCount

To find out how each site helps take a look at Green Options for more details. If you know of any others, please add them below.