provided by Zap! Electric Cars, a local Sonoma County business

1. Use Less Water in Your Garden

About one-third of all residential water use goes toward lawns and gardens, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Unfortunately, much of this water is wasted through runoff, evaporation, overwatering, or inefficient landscape design.

By adopting some simple landscaping techniques you can create a beautiful lawn or garden that uses up to 60 percent less water, requires less fertilizer and pesticides, and saves you time and money.

2. Plant a Tree!

Did you know that trees improve water quality, reduce erosion, promote biodiversity, and absorb carbon dioxide (a greenhouse gas)?

The typical internal-combustion car produces 10,000 pounds of C02, so you would need to plant 200 trees to neutralize your carbon emissions in just one year. ZAP has set up a program to plant 200 trees for as little as $25. Learn more at www.zaptrees.org.

3. Use Alternative Transportation

Leaving your car at home can be a life-changing experience! You probably don’t realize it, but the average car can cost consumers thousands of dollars per year. Using a bicycle in place of your car can help you save money, get more exercise and have more fun enjoying the beautiful outdoors.

Carpooling or mass-transit may seem like an inconvenience, but when you consider the spare time you can use for other pursuits, the time it takes to find parking, or even the opportunity to socialize, alternative transportation can be a rewarding, exciting experience.

4. Eliminate Junk Mail

Did you know that each year millions of trees and billions of gallons of water are used to create junk mail that never gets recycled? There are several things you can do to reduce how much junk mail you receive.

Get off of national mailing lists by sending your name, address, and signature to:

Mail Preference Service
c/o Direct Marketing Association
P.O. Box 643
Carmel, NY 10512.

When you subscribe to a magazine, buy something from a catalog or online store, or donate money, be sure to say: “Please do not rent or sell my name or address.” If you don’t want to receive catalogs or solicitations from the charitable organization, ask that your address not be added to any mailing lists.
Call your credit card companies and banks to make sure your address isn’t sold.

Say no to credit card offers by calling the credit reporting industry’s opt-out number: 888.567.8688.
When you receive unwanted mail, take a minute to call the company to remove your address from its list.
After using junk mail—and any other paper you don’t need to keep—as scrap paper, recycle it.

5. Use Rechargeable Batteries

Once they’re all used up, recycle your rechargeable batteries. Did you know more than 350 million rechargeable batteries are purchased annually in the United States? When these batteries no longer hold a charge and are thrown away, they can cause serious harm to human health and the environment.

About 75 percent of municipal solid waste is either sent to a landfill or incinerated. Neither of these methods is suited for the disposal of rechargeable batteries. You can ensure your rechargeable batteries (from laptop computers, cell phones, PDAs, cordless power tools, camcorders and remote control toys) will be properly disposed of by dropping them off at many large retailers.

6. Buy Local, Organic Produce

These large-scale, agribusiness-oriented food systems are bound to fail on the long term, sunk by their own unsustainability. But why wait until we’’ forced by circumstance to abandon our destructive patterns of consumption? We can start now by buying locally grown food whenever possible.

By doing so you’ll be helping preserve the environment, and you’ll be strengthening your community by investing your food dollar close to home. Only 18 cents of every dollar, when buying at a large supermarket, go to the grower. 82 cents go to various unnecessary middlemen. Cut them out of the picture and buy your food directly from your local farmer.

7. Replace a Gas Vehicle with an Electric

Even counting the emissions from power plants used to generate electricity, electric vehicles can reduce automotive emissions by more than 90 percent. Recently, the Department of Energy issued a report that millions of electric cars can recharge every day using nighttime, off-peak electrical generation, a vast, untapped renewable resource.

For more information about exciting Zap! news including electric car transportation go to: http://www.zapworld.com

My cousin Val just won an Emmy Award!

She deserves EVERY bit of recognition for her show.

She’s a determined, creative and driven
person and her show “Natural Heroes” is a reflection of all the years of hard work she has put into this project.

Valerie A. Landes, a local resident of Sonoma County has always been an extremely talented person who is continually involved in positive, uplifting messages to give the world and to our community.

Her message of “people doing good in their environment” has been well received not only in Sonoma County but all over the country.

The third season is currently airing on KRCB, the PBS station for the North Bay and beyond, Mondays at 7:30pm, and across the country on about 60 PBS affiliate stations.

I’m so excited for her!

Here’s to more exciting, fun and inspirational shows she will create in the future

What Did She Wear to the Emmys?!
The last word from eco-minded KRCB-TV producer Valerie A. Landes was that she’d been nominated for an Emmy and struggled with what to wear to the awards gala in San Francisco.

Well, Valerie went — and won. Her Emmy for “Natural Heroes,” a nationally distributed series on folks who help the environment, is her and KRCB’s first.

When Valerie claimed the coveted trophy, she wasn’t dressed in some lavish new gown that she might don only once in her life.

“In the spirit of reuse and re- cycle,” she told the crowd, clutching her Emmy, “I am wearing my glamorous wedding gown.”

Are you struggling to find ways to promote your business?

or maybe your budget is tight and you can’t afford to spend any more money marketing but you still need to get the word out about your service or product.

There is hope!

Below are seven totally free ways to promote your business… all of which you can do starting right now!

1. Fun with Blogs
Blogs are easy to set up, cost next to nothing (you just need an Internet connection) and let’s you write anything you want: product features and benefits, events, customer reviews.

Place a blog on an existing sale site, and you can improve your web ranking (because of the keyword-rich content) and encourage customers to regularly visit the site for updates.

They can also help you connect to your market (especially if you have a popular columnist) and answer questions posted by users. Get started easily at: http://www.Blogger.com
 
2. Announce It On Craigslist!
Craigslist is a centralized database for a particular city that has announcements on the local sales, job openings, property rentals, and even concert schedules. It is one of the most successful forms of free classifieds, getting 5 billion hits each month, 10 million registered members, and averaging a web ranking of 34.  It has also won several web awards.
 
Event postings are free, though you may have to pay $25 for job openings on the New York and Los Angeles pages (the a section called “Gigs” lets you post low-cost and unpaid jobs and internships for free). Post it now at: http://www.Craigslist.org
 
3. Web Directories
Unlike search engines, which usually group web sites according to keywords, web directories create their own categories and subcategories (like “Women’s Health” or “Insurance”).  Each category carries links; hopefully your website will be one of them.

One advantage of the web directory is that it (more…)