Eco-Friendly

3 Marketing Mistakes to Avoid in 2013

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I recently had the opportunity to sit down with long-time friend and wind powered business owner, Lynn Anne Miller of 4GreenPs. Lynn founded 4GreenPs in 2006 after a successful career in marketing for venture-backed tech start-ups and Fortune 500 firms. 4GreenPs started as a traditional strategic marketing firm.

At the same time, Lynn became personally interested in green living and sustainability issues. And so naturally, she combined this passion with her formal marketing expertise and 4GreenPs began working with green businesses.

Mom Made Foods in Alexandria became her first green client in 2008. Since then, her clients have included Elysian Energy, FRESHFARM Markets, Seventh Generation, and the Livability Project.

With her wealth of knowledge from across the marketing spectrum, I chatted with Lynn about the most common marketing mistakes she sees growing businesses make.

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Gardening

How to Create a Sustainable Garden

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Sustainable Garden

It can be a challenge to work out how to live a life that promotes and encourages sustainability. When you’re surrounded by single-use products and non-environmentally-friendly practises, taking the first step is both frightening and tricky. However, you would be amazed at just how easy it is to create a sustainable garden for your family. Here are a few helpful tips and tricks, used by renovations experts, to start you on the right path.

Get the Right Tools

If you’re not a natural-born gardener, then you may not even know where to start. How about beginning with a few essential tools? Head to your local gardening centre and pick up a compost bin, a rainwater barrel, a shovel and spade, and a soil tiller. These few items can put you on the right path to complete sustainability.

Choose the Garden Location

While you might think you can plant a garden at random and see it produce results, a landscaper will tell you that’s not often the case. You have to factor sunshine, water, and shelter into your decision. If you don’t, then you may be extremely disappointed when the time comes to harvest.

If you’re not sure where the best place might be to plant, then draw an area out and watch how much sunshine it gets during the day. Also, pay attention to moisture levels to be on the safe side.

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Eco-Friendly

Pantry Products You Had No Idea Could Clean Your Home

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Eco-friendly Pantry Products

More and more manufacturers are seeing the value in producing sustainable products to clean our homes. They have even shone a spotlight on Australia’s waste epidemic, with the country’s environment ministers looking to use only 100 percent reusable, recyclable, or compostable packaging by 2025.

So if you ask commercial cleaning experts, it’s fair to say we’re on the right track with both what we use to clean our homes and what we put in our rubbish bins within them.

However, you also can’t beat what nature gives us – and it’s a lot. If you’re looking to both cut down your grocery bill and use more sustainable products, then read on. Here are pantry products you may not have known could clean your home.

Vinegar

Vinegar is as versatile a pantry ingredient as they come. While you may not use it a lot for cooking, you will surely find it serves a purpose in the realm of cleaning.

Smudged mirror? Use vinegar. Can’t get that glass perfectly clean? Vinegar comes to the rescue. You can even use it as a rinse aid in your dishwasher. The only thing you can’t use vinegar on is unsealed marble as it can have an adverse reaction.

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Gardening

How Often Should I Be Watering My Lawns?

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Watering My Lawns

It can seem like a bit of a guessing game when it comes to lawn care and when you should mow your lawns. There doesn’t appear to be any “one size fits all” approach, as plenty of variables come into play.

Where you live, your climate, weather patterns, grass type, and current grass health may all factor into the question you’re asking yourself: how often should I be watering my lawns? And have I been doing it wrong all this time?

Don’t Over-water Your Lawns

To keep your lawns thriving, green, and beautiful in what is often a drought-plagued country, you might think that watering more is doing your gardens a favour. It’s not. When you water your lawns a lot, as in, every day, they don’t get a chance to seek out water for themselves and lengthen their roots.

If you over water your lawns, their roots are short, and they are more likely to sulk when you stop watering them as often. What’s more, a damp lawn is an open invitation for moisture-loving pests and disease to move in.

Let Your Lawn Tell You When It Wants Water

Lawns can communicate with you without saying anything, so listen to what they are saying. A lawn that needs water is one that is starting to wilt or change color from green to brown. Read these signs and water when your grass gets to this point. Grass needs time between watering to deliver air to the roots and encourage them to seek water sources deep in the ground.

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Eco-Friendly

Are You Eco-Friendly?

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Eco-Friendly

How would you define your level of sustainability? Do you think you do your part to make the world a better place? Are you trying to leave it in better condition than you found it? Ask yourself these questions, and see if there are improvements you can make, or if you’re already doing more than you first thought.

What Do I Use to Carry My Groceries? 

Single-use plastic bags are slowly being phased out throughout the world, but not quite everywhere. What do you use to carry your groceries? Have you invested in material or cloth bags that you can use over and over again? Or, are you still relying on supermarkets and stores to provide you with packaging? If it’s the latter, consider investing in your own bags for future shopping trips.

Do I Recycle? 

We live in a country that actively encourages recycling, so do you partake? Do you separate your paper, plastic, glass, metals, and waste? Do you make a special effort to make sure all trash and recyclables leave your property in the correct bins? And, if you don’t have a recycling service to your home, do you go out of your way to deliver your recyclables to a centre?

A considerable number of products you use every day can be used again, so think of this every time you throw your plastic or glass in your waste bin.

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Eco-Friendly

What Does a Muffler Do?

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First and foremost, a car muffler does exactly what it sounds like. It’s the part of your exhaust that muffles the noise from the engine and creates a quieter driving experience. But it also does so much more. They are used primarily with combustion engines, which are the most popular type of engine in the world.

Just like the muffler, the combustion engine does exactly what it sounds like. It combusts, creating literal mini-explosions within the vehicle. But fret not, these explosions are of course carefully contained, and the muffler conceals the noise created from the combustion.

On top of this, there are a few more specific things they do for your engine. Read on to find out in more detail the many uses of the muffler.

Conceal Noisy Explosions

Again, the muffler’s most notable effect is concealing noise from the combustion engine. It specifically is able to do this through re-directing the emitted sound waves through sets of internal tubes and chambers. The muffler is a cylindrical device attached to the exhaust pipe, from where it filters out the noises.

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Gardening

Getting The Most Out Of Your Irrigation System

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Irrigation System

Experts in everything landscaping, Landscapers Network, have found that one of the most difficult things for landscapers, such as Northpark Woodworks, when designing new garden areas is setting up a decent irrigation system. Water restrictions are common throughout Australia, and it’s therefore extremely important to make sure that you’re irrigation system is efficient, effective and installed properly.

If you fancy yourself as a bit of a handyman, you might decide to install your own irrigation system. While this can save you a bit of money on landscaping costs, it’s important to do some research before you begin. If you don’t, you might find that you’re simply wasting water and that you’re plants aren’t benefiting as much as they should.

With this in mind, we’ve put together a few tips to help you get the most out of your irrigation system. Consider the following:

Make Sure You’re Not Irrigating The Road

Nothing annoys me more than driving down a quiet street in the middle of the day and seeing water flowing down the road from poorly placed sprinklers. To put it simply, this is a terrible water of water – water that you’re paying for with your hard earned dollars!

The whole point of setting up an automatic irrigation system is to make things easier for yourself. Make sure that you’re sprinklers are well placed (if you have to use sprinklers) and that they’re only watering the areas you want watered. Make sure that they aren’t spraying the street, paths or any other irrelevant area.

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Maintenance

5 Tips For Reducing The Fire Risk In Your Building

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Fire Protection

Depending on your workplace, fire protection may be a major consideration. While the fire risk is low in many small businesses, workshops and industrial plants are often at severe risk of fire. Despite this, they don’t always do everything that they can to reduce the fire risk, and fires often break out due to this.

Fortunately for you, there are a lot of things that you can do to reduce the fire risk in your building. Some of these things are very simple, and wouldn’t take more than a couple of minutes to implement. Our top 5 tips for reducing the fire risk in your commercial building include:

  1. Make sure your fire extinguishers are serviced regularly

Fire extinguishers need to be tested at least once every six months, and they need to be pressure tested and refilled at least once every five years. If you fail to do this, your extinguishers could degrade, potentially becoming useless. This will reduce your ability to control a small fire when it occurs, significantly increasing your fire risk.

  1. Remove fuel sources

General clutter around the workshop or other parts of your building can provide fuel for a fire if one breaks out. Clean up clutter and remove potential fuel sources to reduce your fire risk. Make sure that things like flammable liquids and gases are isolated in appropriate storage containers, and make sure that they aren’t near any potential ignition sources.

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Sustainability

Eco Friendly Cleaning

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Eco Friendly Cleaning

The job is finished! The plumbing company you hired have done a terrific job on the complete bathroom renovations. From here on in, you have decided to make a conscious effort to change your bathroom cleaning system. Is there anyone out there that just loves cleaning the bathroom, apart from people with a compulsive disorder? The chemicals you use make the whole job a bit of an ordeal. Apart from the smells, things like ammonia can make you dizzy, some chemicals affect your respiration, and others give you skin allergies. The hazards of cleaning. How to stop all these health problems from starting? Switch to green cleaning.

Why would you want to do that?

  • Better for the environment
  • Better for your health
  • Better for your wallet.
  • Green cleaning tips

1.The toilet

Baking soda and vinegar. Vinegar – half a cup. Baking soda – 1 tablespoon. After you pour it inside your toilet bowl let i sit there and soak for 20 minutes. Scrub the toilet and repeat every week.

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Gardening

Garden Preparation for Winter

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Garden Preparation

The experts tell us that summer is still with us, but it’s always good to plan for autumn and winter to make sure your garden stays at its best and prepares itself for the next couple of seasons. Many of your plants and shrubs will feel and look good if you give them a proper trim before winter hits. Plants such as perennials and ornamental grasses won’t mind a short back and sides. Landscape plants can retain their shape for the following spring if they get a healthy pruning.

Different Strokes …

Remember – not ALL plants need to be pruned for autumn. If you have rhododendrons, azaleas and lilac, that bloom in spring for instance, don’t cut these back. Just a light trim after they bloom is okay. You don’t want to accidentally prune the flowers.

How About Winter Protection?

There is a phenomenon called “transpiration” in your landscape plants in winter. It means that they lose moisture faster than they can take it in. This can cause severe damage to the leafy tissue of the plants. If this keeps happening over a few winters, the leaves will permanently disappear and that affects photosynthesis.

You can winter protect your lawn and plants with a few sprays to protect them from the cold weather. Perhaps three times is enough through Autumn. These sprays are not 100% fool-proof, but they will certainly go a long way towards protecting the health of your plants.

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Renovation Tips

Let Your Financial Planner Advise You How To Fund Home Improvements

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Financial Planning

If you are intending to make improvements to your home there is no getting away from the fact that they are going to have to be paid for.

The question is ‘How?’. This will be best answered by employing the services of a financial planner.

Whether your project is large or small they can analyse your household budget and based on the amount of money required for the home improvements determine which is the best method of financing it.

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Sustainability

Ways to be Sustainable with Your Fence

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Fencing

According to professional fencing companies, sometimes you have no choice regarding home fencing if contractors have already been and gone, with the type of fence already chosen and erected. Even if you don’t like the fence much or think it is not an eco-friendly choice, it is better to leave the original fence there for at least a few years because that is an eco-friendly action.

Pulling it up and replacing it will cost you more and take up more of the earth’s resources. The best way to practice sustainability with the fence that is there is to look after it so it lasts for as long as possible. Here are some tips on how to make your fence last longer.

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Eco-Friendly

How to Prevent Your Child Developing Myopia

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Child Developing Myopia

Studies have proven that children of all ages are far less likely to suffer from myopia when they play outside for 3-4 hours a day. This might seem like a lot, but you can count at least one hour of a school day; recess and lunch, and then there is sports. With some outdoor furniture to relax in, you can be comfortable while watching over your children.

No parent wants their child to develop any disease or ‘defect’, especially if it can be prevented. The trouble is that most people just don’t realise how many things could easily and simply be prevented by taking the simplest of actions. For instance, many children develop myopia or nearsightedness when they need not, with the result they have to wear glasses for the rest of their lives.

This is not only costly, but can decrease their self confidence and even prevent them from playing certain sports. Yet it is easily preventable. How?

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Renovation Tips

Easy Green Home Renovations

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Green Home Renovations

Home renovations are not only great for improving the look, value, and functionality of a home. They are also a practical way to decrease how much your home costs to live in each year. To get the most out of your upcoming building makeover, why not look into some of these green home renovation ideas?

Insulation Saves Heating and Cooling

One of the main areas where heat escapes your home is the roof. It makes absolute sense to keep it as well insulated as possible. While the roof is typically the easiest to add more insulation to, seeing as there are access points that allow entry, what about the walls? Unfortunately, it’s not usually feasible to just open up a wall to add better insulation. But if you are going to do some extensive renovations that involves opening up or adding walls, you have the perfect opportunity to better insulate your home in the process.

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Maintenance

Does Eco-Friendly Carpet Cleaning Actually Work?

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Eco Friendly Carpet Cleaning

Keeping your carpets clean is imperative to the health and well being of those living in your home. But the process that a carpet needs to undergo in order to stay clean can bring some pretty harsh substances into that home.

There are plenty of environmentally safe carpet cleaning methods around lately.

How do these measure up to the more traditional methods that use harsh chemicals?

And are they actually better for the environment, or are many of them just ways for companies to monetize on the green trends that are taking over the world?

Harmful Carpet Cleaners

In addition to containing VOCs (volatile organic compounds) that are prone to releasing harmful gases into your home, artificial carpet weaves are also an ideal place for mold, mites, and dust to propagate and gather. The first thing you should do is vacuum regularly, but that’s just not enough on its own.

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Gardening

What Is Green Landscaping?

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Green Landscaping

Green landscaping has nothing to do with just having more plant life. It’s a commonly held misconception that having lots of plants, trees, and turf is automatically going to be better for the environment. You might feel more in tune with nature while you’re enjoying your extensively groomed and maintained yard, but the amount of resources that go into many such areas is astounding.

To do your landscaping in a green way, you could choose someone like Lone Pine Landscapes and enter a mindset of saving all resources, including power, money, and time. A truly green landscape is going to encourage the growth and health of local wildlife, without affected the soil, air, or water in a negative way. These can be great places for family and friends to play and relax, without worrying about what kinds of nasty substances they might be absorbing into their bodies, and without fearing harm of the environment.

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Eco-Friendly

Design Your Eco-Friendly Kitchen with Care

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Eco Friendly Kitchen

Modern kitchen design by someone like colray cabinets has certainly come a long way, and in just a relatively short time. You probably still think of terms like “going green” and “eco-friendly” as mere buzzwords that companies use to try and appear progressive and caring of the environment. But sustainable design and building practice is much more than just some fad. It’s a way to allow people to take care with how they impact the planet, while choosing building designs that are holistic and better for everyone.

Planning Your Design

A lot of people don’t like to think about environmentally friendly design because they think it’s too hard or expensive. All it requires is some careful forethought, but that goes for any building or design project that you want to turn out well. One of the biggest keys to working sustainably is doing things to right way the first time. If you choose to install an eco-friendly kitchen design that you can’t live with, ripping everything out and starting again will defeat the purpose of trying to go green in the first place.

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Renovation Tips

5 Green Kitchen Renovation Tips

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Renovating your kitchen with someone like the Kitchen Professionals not only costs a lot, but this type of work tends to take a great toll on the environment. Staying eco-friendly often means spending less money, so keep this in mind when you’re worrying about the possible costs of going green. Below are some great ways to cut down on waste in your kitchen without spending big.

1. Reuse, Upcycle, Recycle
See how recycling is the last thing mentioned above? That’s because recycling uses more resources than simply directly reusing or upcycling. To break something down and turn it into a like-new, practical material is harder than you might think.

Kitchen renovation, as our modern society knows it at least, sees old kitchen fittings undoubtedly ending up a part of our landfill problem. Your old kitchen fittings might not be useful to you anymore. But don’t throw them away, because they might be perfect for someone else’s home. Advertise on social media or classifieds and tell others that you have something they might be able to use. If you were just going to throw it out anyway, why not give things away for free? Take some photos to go with your notices, so people can see that you’re offering something worth having, rather than trying to unload junk.

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Swimming Pools

What Automatic Pool Cleaners Cannot Help With

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Automatic Pool Cleaners

A pool owner’s biggest nightmare is seeing algae growing in their swimming pool. Even running an automatic pool cleaner like a kreepy krauly won’t remove algae, especially if it has been left to grow for a long time.

This is because it sticks to the edges of the pool and protects itself from harm by a slimy covering or a very hard one.

There are many types of algae, of which 4 main types are likely to be found in swimming pools.

  1. Green algae
  2. Black algae
  3. Pink algae and
  4. Yellow algae

While algae is not harmful to humans of itself, it can become a host to bacteria such as e.coli that are. Besides that, it looks horribly ugly and will spoil all the pleasure you have in your pool and swimming in it.  If you have an algae infection in your pool it may not even be your fault. Algae spores can be blown into the pool where they wait for the right condition to grow and bloom.

Nearly all water sources have some kind of algae in them, including the ocean which is where black algae comes from.  Green algae is found naturally in many watery homes such as the local creek or river, or any pool of water.

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Eco-Friendly

Is DIY Home Removal Eco-Friendly?

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eco-friendly home removals

Even the most experienced eco-friendly home owner might come to a dead end when they need to move to a new home. Home removals are said to be one of the most stressful and exhausting things that the average person does.

First you need to consider whether you are going to hire professionals to move your belongings, or if you will just do it yourself.

Figuring out which of these options is better for the environment, and for your wallet, can be a chore in itself. And that’s before you’ve even started to organize things. Take a look at these pros and cons when you’re thinking about easy and eco-friendly home removals.

Moving Yourself: Pros

  • You call the shots. This is a big factor for many people, but you shouldn’t let it be the only deciding factor. If you don’t want people you don’t know going through your things and being trusted not to damage anything, professional movers might not be the best option.

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