The annual Enviroweek is back again for 2010 and runs from 12th – 18th September.

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Greenopolis is a new site that provides a whole bunch of positive and helpful environment and sustainability tips.

As a initial taster, here’s a post containing 10 tips for shopping smart and green.

Green Renters run workshops for sustainable living in rental property.

We take a room by room tour through the average rental property looking at simple and cost effective ideas that can be implemented in a short amount of time that will help make your property more energy efficient, sustainable and save you money.

We also look at general lifestyle changes, ideas and advice for greening your life.

The workshops are practical and friendly in nature with plenty of visual examples, discussion and samples. They generally run for two hours.

Here’s the line up…

1. Stay home and celebrate
Seriously, I ‘ve always suspected that NYE is the night for people who don’t go out any other night of year.

As green planet suggests

if you stay home and host your own ring-in-the-new shindig, you’ll save transportation emissions—and, of course, money. You’ll also be able to better control the environmental impact of your night, from sending out email invitations to preventing the food and paper waste that comes from bars and restaurants.

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I’m a big fan of Gardening Australia. I love learning about plants I’ve never even seen before, let alone attempted to grow. Jerry provides great insight into how to create a workable organic garden (I know we were doing ok up until the snail infestation!). I also like the step by step projects suitable even for the blackest thumb, all presented in a factual interesting format without the condescension of some television presenters.

The ABC Gardening Expo is a great chance to learn and enjoy all things gardening. Lots of things to buy, people to talk to and information to gather.

I really like the idea of the  Ask It, Solve It Stage – An informal, intimate Q&A panel format featuring ABC TV’s Gardening Australia presenters as well as other industry experts talking on specific plant care and answering all gardening related questions.

As as far as workshops go, we’d be particularly interested in attending Sally Wise’s workshops on making your own jams and preserves from garden produce.

When: October 2-4, 2009
Where: Caulfield Racecourse
Time: 10:00am – 4:30pm daily

I covered this issue briefly before, but it’s been playing on mind of late after coming across a variety of articles, showing that it’s becoming a topic starting to spark some debate…

What am I talking about? The carbon footprint of the internet!

Surfing the internet, you generally forget that behind the site you are browsing are a variety of power consumers. Your computer, your router, your ISP’s computers and routers, the website hosts’ computers and routers and all the intermediary computers that route you between them, and if you came through a search engine, then that has to be factored in to the equation to.

I think we would all generally agree that the Internet is a good thing, so how can we be more environmentally friendly in our web browsing? It’s a tough one, but here’s a few ideas.

Firstly, researchers are working on power saving routing algorithms, (those algorithms that connect you to where you want to be) based on demand, time of the day and climate vs available renewable energy resources. It’s an interesting concept, but as this Treehugger article points out, it could result in most data centres being powered by coal, I guess it very much depends on the client.

Changing the nature of the backbone of the internet is out of reach for most, so more immediately, what can you do to green up your website and internet experience? Planet Green recently published 6 fairly simple and cost effective tips on how to ‘green’ your website, some are fairly obvious, so aren’t…

Finally (for this article anyway) we have Greenscroll, a kind of carbon offset service for websites, they claim to (for admin costs only, i.e. not for profit) invest a monthly amount of money from you into green power energy projects. An interesting concept, I would be intrigued to know if anyone has had experience in using it.

There have been a variety of phone apps released that claim green credentials, guides to products, carbon emission trackers and much more. Having recently acquired a shiny new iPhone I was intrigued to find out what was available, I was pleased to find a fair amount of genuinely helpful and well put together apps, the only (major for us) drawback was that pretty much every single one was US only. Still, for any of our international visitors, this post may be helpful and personally, I’ve decided to contact some of the developers and ask about being involved in creating localised versions of their applications.

Good guide
www.goodguide.com
A slick, (seemingly) well researched app with plenty of information on 1000s of products, their nutritional value and ethical scores.

Locavore
www.enjoymentland.com/locavore
An app that tells you what food is currently in season in your area.

Green Meter
www.hunter.pairsite.com/greenmeter
An app that evaluates your driving style and choice of vehicle, advising you on how to become a more efficient driver. (Worldwide)

iRecycle
www.earth911.com/iphone/
Based upon your current location, or a manually entered location, iRecycle tells you where your closest recycling points are.

Greenpeace Tissue guide
www.3rdwhale.com/apps
An environmental guide to facial and toilet tissues.

3rdWhale Premium
www.3rdwhale.com/apps
A GPS aware green directory.

Carticipate
www.carticipate.com/
Described as a ‘car pooling’ social network, Carticipate is basically an app to post journey’s you’re making or need to make and match up with appropriate drivers / passengers.

EcoRio
www.ecorio.org
An Android application that keeps tabs on your location and choices of transport and keeps a tally on how much you owe in Carbon Offsets.