Author Archives: KatlynEarnhardt

5 Green Gadgets That Will Make Spring Cleaning a Breeze

by KatlynEarnhardt Posted on March 31, 2017

It’s that time of year again. Time to roll up your sleeves and tackle all the dirt and clutter that happened while you were getting through the winter months. That’s right — it’s time to throw open the windows and get down to spring cleaning. To help you in your efforts, here are five green gadgets that will make spring cleaning a breeze.

Spring Cleaning Gadgets

1. Lay the Groundwork

First up is an app that will help you get started. While you’re perusing the cleaning aisle, list in hand, the GoodGuide app will help you find the best products. According to GoodGuide, the app gives ratings on more than 200,000 products based on their ingredients to determine if they are healthy, green and OK to use in your home. This app even gives information on the product’s manufacturer. Just type in the product or scan the bar code to view the details on the best products for spring cleaning.

Even if you don’t have a smartphone, you can use the GoodGuide database here.

2. Light It Up

If you’re like me, you don’t notice when a light has gone out in those multi-light fixtures until the last one goes. During spring cleaning, I make it a point to check all the light fixtures. I write down all the types of bulbs that are needed, and then when I’ve gone through them all, I go to my local hardware store to pick up replacement LED (light-emitting diode) bulbs.

Benefits of LED lights:

LED lights are extremely energy efficient. The U.S. Department of Energy says that increased adoption of LEDs over the next 15 years would “reduce electricity demands from lighting by 62 percent, prevent 258 million metric tons of carbon emissions, and eliminate the need for 133 new power plants.”
LEDs do not contain mercury (the other green bulb, CFL, or compact fluorescent lamp, does contain mercury).
LEDs do not heat up when they’re on, so they are safe to handle and less likely to start a fire.
LEDs last a long time. According to Bulbs.com: “Many LEDs have a rated life of up to 50,000 hours. This is approximately 50 times longer than a typical incandescent, 20-25 times longer than a typical halogen, and 8-10 times longer than a typical CFL. Used 12 hours a day, a 50,000 bulb will last more than 11 years.”

3. Dust and Dirt (and Other Yucky Things), Be Gone

My oldest daughter is like a canary in a coal mine. Whenever there’s a speck of dust in the house, she starts to sneeze. This makes dusting serious business in our house and dusting without toxic chemicals a necessity. The hardest places to dust are the softest places in our home: curtains, cloth upholstery and mattresses.

Dr. Michael Lee, the founder and president of Raycop, developed a green gadget that cleans and sterilizes these fabric surfaces. It’s an allergen vacuum that uses UV rays to sanitize these materials. Dr. Lee developed this product after hearing concerns from his patients about allergies and asthma symptoms caused by the microscopic irritants in dust, dirt and pollen.

Through Raycop’s scientific research and development, they have created this vacuum that traps and eliminates dust mites, pollen and dirt.

“Similar to the technology used in air purifiers and manufacturing cleanrooms, Raycop incorporates HEPA (High Efficiency Particulate Air) into its devices. The HEPA filter captures particles as small as 0.3um and traps 99.9% of allergens without releasing them back into the air.”

This is a perfect green gadget for keeping your home clean and healthy all year-round.

Give It a Good Washing

This next on our list of spring cleaning gadgets is a must if you’re in the market for a new clothes washer. A front-load washing machine is the most energy efficient on the market and will help you wash all your linens and things as you march through your spring-cleaning to-do list.

Front-load washers require less water; they use between 18 to 25 gallons of water compared with around 40 gallons per wash for traditional top-load models.

Make sure you look for the Energy Star label, which is good advice when you’re looking for any new appliance. The Energy Star–certified clothes washers use about 25 percent less energy and 45 percent less water than regular washers, according to Energy Star.

Visit Consumer Reports to help find your new front-load washing machine.

Freshen All the Air

The indoor air quality in our homes has become worse over the years. This is partly because we are building them more airtight and because of the army of cleaning products we unleash into our homes. To freshen your indoor air, open your windows to let in that fresh spring air.

Then employ our final green gadget, the Kuro Cube, to purify, refresh and reduce odors in your home. This little dynamo is made without artificial preservatives, parabens, harsh chemicals, dyes, fragrance, silicone, dimethicone, phthalates, sulphates, petroleum, talc, bismuth oxychloride or nanoparticles, according to CarbonBeauty.com. It works best in smaller spaces like drawers, closets, the car or your refrigerator. It remains active for one year.

Now that your indoor air is clean, instead of using toxic chemicals to tackle the rest of the house, check out “6 Simple DIY Cleaning Solution Recipes.”

Feature photo courtesy of Shutterstock

Read More:
10 Unconventional Tips to Help Minimize Home Allergies
Infographic: Spring Cleaning in the Bathroom
Earth911’s Green Spring Cleaning Guide

About
Latest Posts

Wendy Gabriel

Wendy Gabriel is a freelance eco-writer based in California. Wendy’s work has been featured in numerous publications and websites, including the Chicago Sun-Times, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Fox Business News and Mashable.com. For nearly six years, she was a weekly contributor on a popular radio talk show in the Upper Midwest with a segment titled “Simple Tips for Green Living.”

Latest posts by Wendy Gabriel (see all)

5 Green Gadgets That Will Make Spring Cleaning a Breeze – March 31, 2017
50 Days In: How Trump Is Handling Eco Issues – March 13, 2017
Meet the 7-Year-Old Who Started a Recycling Company – February 13, 2017

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5 Green Gadgets That Will Make Spring Cleaning a Breeze

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Brian Williams Was "Obssessed" With Mitt Romney’s Underwear

by KatlynEarnhardt Posted on April 8, 2015

Mother Jones

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Vanity Fair is out with a deliciously gossipy long read on the troubles at NBC News by Brian Burrough. The focus is largely on Brian Williams and his recent drama but it also goes into the larger culture clashes that have dominated 30 Rock since Comcast took over NBCUniversal from GE in 2011. There was the Today drama. There was the Meet The Press drama. Now the Nightly News drama. Drama with a capital D!

This is the type of story Vanity Fair is so good at. (Back in February they had the definitive insider account of the Sony leaks.) If you like this sort of thing, you should read the whole article.

Here are some of my takeaways from it:

A lot of people are sniping about NBC News president Deborah Turness.

Turness gets a lot of blame for NBC News’ troubles but it’s not clear to me that any of the criticisms really mean much. One of the problems with this genre of story is that it’s necessarily almost all blind quotes and the criticisms are so predictably broad and meaningless. A la:

“News is a very particular thing, NBC is a very particular beast, and Deborah, well, she really doesn’t have a fucking clue,” says a senior NBC executive involved.”

It’s not that this is gibberish, it’s that it is meaningless. Everything is a particular thing. Every place is a particular beast. All this quote tells you is that an unnamed senior NBC executive doesn’t much care for Deborah Turness, not one bit, boy howdy.

When the criticisms do get a bit more specific they’re muddled and contradictory. She is blamed for not being tough enough with talent ( “She’s letting the inmates run the asylum. You have kids? Well, if you let them, they’ll have ice cream every night. Same thing in TV. If you let the people on air do what they want, whenever they want, this is what happens.”) but also dinged for not being nice enough to the talent’s agents? (“She didn’t understand that you communicate with the talent through their agents. Like if WME co-C.E.O. Ari Emanuel calls, you have to phone back the same day.”)

Then there is this stuff:

“It was almost unfair to give Deborah this job,” says one NBC observer. “She was basically overmatched. From day one, it was difficult, even just managing the daily job. Because it’s a big job, it’s got a lot of intricate parts to it, and you know she had a rough time with it.”

…

“Come on!” barks one critic. “Anybody with a triple-digit I.Q. who interviews somebody to come in as president of NBC News you ask, ‘What are you going to do with the 800-pound gorilla? With Today?’ And Deborah’s answer was ‘You hire Jamie Horowitz!’ It was almost like it was Deborah’s cry for help. Like if you’re overwhelmed and you don’t have a lot of confidence or vision, you bring in other people: ‘Help me, I’m drowning.”

Overmatched. Overwhelmed. She was given a job then found herself drowning in it. She hired a male producer from ESPN as a cry for help. This is the sort of language people somehow never use when describing male executives.

Maybe the president of NBC News is bad at her job—NBC News definitely has struggled under her watch—but no where in this whole thing does anyone articulate in any meaningful way how she is bad at her job.

Comcast treats talent with the same disregard they treat their cable customers.

“To be honest, you got the sense they couldn’t fathom why NBC worried so much about the talent; you know, ‘Why are these people worrying so much about what Matt Lauer thinks?’”

NBC staffers resent the fact that Brian Williams has nice hair and good cheekbones.

An industry insider adds, “There is also a lot of envy of Williams’s movie-star good looks, his long happy marriage to a wonderful woman, great kids, and he’s paid millions to read a thousand words five times a week from a teleprompter.”

Brian Williams and Tom Brokaw don’t like each other very much.

“Tom and Brian,” one longtime friend of both men says with a sigh, “that was never a good relationship. Tom pushed for him to get that job. But Brian never embraced Tom. And I don’t know why…. He knows the rank and file will never love him like they did Tom, so he never tries. That’s the reason there’s not a lot of support for Brian over there.”

Brian Williams resents Tom Brokaw for not saving him.

“Tom didn’t push Brian out, but he didn’t try to save him, either.”

…

While he has accepted responsibility for his actions, friends say, Williams is bitter, especially at those who he believes might have saved him.

“I talked to Brian about this,” says one friend, “and I’ll never forget what he said at the end. He said, ‘Chalk one up for Brokaw.’”

Side note: Want to giggle yourself silly? Say, “Chalk one up to Brokaw” out loud like you’re playing Brian Williams in an off-Broadway play. Repeat until you see the humor. It’s pretty fun.

Brian Williams exaggerated his personal tales of valor and glory because Tom Brokaw is just so great.

“I always felt he needed to jack up his stories because he was trying so hard to overcome his insecurities,” this executive says. “And he had to follow Tom, which brought its own set of insecurities. He likes to sort of tell these grandiose tales. But, can I tell you, in all the years we worked together, it never rose to the point where we said, ‘Oh, there he goes again.’ I just saw it as one of the quirks of his personality.”

Brian Williams thinks in boxes.

“…his wife Jane tried to explain. She said he put things in boxes in his mind. He would only talk about what was in those boxes on-camera.”

I have no idea what this means.

Very serious NBC News people think Brian Williams is unserious.

“What always bothered Tim was Brian’s lack of interest in things that mattered most, that were front and center, like politics and world events,” says a person who knew both men well. “Brian has very little interest in politics. It’s not in his blood. What Brian cares about is logistics, the weather, and planes and trains and helicopters.”

“You know what interested Brian about politics?” marvels one longtime NBC correspondent, recently departed. “Brian was obsessed with whether Mitt Romney wore the Mormon underwear.”

This is so Broadcast News, right?

Brian Williams wanted to be a late night host.

According to New York, he talked to Steve Burke about succeeding Jay Leno. When Burke refused, Williams reportedly pitched Les Moonves, at CBS, to replace David Letterman, who was soon to retire. Moonves also allegedly declined. Though his appearances on shows such as 30 Rock and Jimmy Fallon successfully repositioned Williams as a good-humored Everyman—and thus expanded not only his own brand but that of Nightly News—they were not popular among many of his colleagues.

…

After refusing Williams the Leno spot, Steve Burke offered him a consolation prize: his own magazine show, Rock Center, a bid to anchor what he hoped would be the second coming of 60 Minutes. It wasn’t. Rock Center debuted in 2011 to tepid reviews and worse ratings.

There is a lot more. If you’ve made it this far, go read the whole article.

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Brian Williams Was "Obssessed" With Mitt Romney’s Underwear

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Chart of the Day: America’s Health Care System Is Killing You

by KatlynEarnhardt Posted on January 7, 2014

Mother Jones

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Is life expectancy a good measure of the quality of a country’s health care system? I’ve always been pretty hesitant to use it as a primary metric because….well, I’ll just let Aaron Carroll describe people like me:

One of my issues with the arguments people muster against life expectancy is that they are all so small. They attack some individual behavior or factor that might affect life expectancy in some minimal way, but nowhere near enough to cause the big differences we see. It’s smoking. It’s drinking. It’s accidents. It’s immigrants. It’s chemicals in the water. It’s stupidity. It’s suicide. It’s freedom.

It doesn’t matter that tons of these arguments are just plain wrong. It doesn’t matter that even after you eliminate them from the equation, our life expectancy still sucks. People hold on to them like crazy because they don’t want to believe that it could be the health care system.

OK, OK, maybe I should take life expectancy more seriously as a metric of health care quality. It’s certainly true that American life expectancy, which largely tracked other rich countries in the years after World War II, diverged rather dramatically starting around 1990. Why? It’s true that there could be a thousand different reasons related to culture and food and violence and so forth, but most of those things existed all along. So what happened around 1990?

One plausible answer is that it’s related to divergences in health care starting around then. That’s a tricky thing to prove, however, unless you dig deeply into the details. Recently a team of authors did just that in JAMA and produced the chart below. It shows Years of Potential Life Lost (YPLL) as multiples of the median for other rich countries. A number greater than one means we’re losing more years than the rest of our peers. Here’s the chart:

The dramatic thing about this chart is that the United States does worse than other rich countries in every single area. Sure, it’s possible that there are 16 different reasons that we’re doing worse in 16 different categories, but it doesn’t seem likely, does it? When something is this widespread, the cause is a lot more likely to be something broadly based, like health care delivery. This isn’t smoking gun proof that our Rube Goldberg health care system is responsible for our lousy life expectancy, but it sure ought to make you sit up and take notice. There’s a pretty good chance that you, your friends, and your family are going to live three or four years less than you should, solely because you live in America.

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Chart of the Day: America’s Health Care System Is Killing You

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How the Media Would Have Covered the Birth of Jesus

by KatlynEarnhardt Posted on December 24, 2013

Mother Jones

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Dan Amira:

The arrival of the messiah would have been a huge media event at the time had there actually been any media aside from the guy who announced the king’s royal proclamations from a balcony. Consequently, we are forced to make educated guesses about how today’s media would have covered the story, if it were around back then.

This takes about 20 seconds to read, and is funnier than I expected. Go ahead and click.

Link to article:  

How the Media Would Have Covered the Birth of Jesus

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