During Our Green Year, my wife and I have worked hard to make sure that the animal life around the ranch is protected and safe. Sadly, sometimes we see an animal die and it is not a pretty thing to see. Nothing can ruin your day more than when you are sitting in the living room, reading a book, and you hear that loud bang of a bird smacking into the window. Sometimes those birds live and fly away after a few minutes, other times they die, and other times they succumb to a cat who happens to be outside at that time.
During this month, you will have an opportunity to jump start the changes you want to make for yourself in the new year. Maybe you want to lose weight, eat healthier, organize your home or office, or be more active with your children. These are all accomplishable goals, and the best part about them is you can turn them into green living resolutions too. If you have not already joined the green movement, now is a better time than any. So catch up to the others this year and show that you care about this beautiful planet we live on.Weight LossLosing weight is no easy task. If you are going to see results, it takes sacrifice and dedication. While some people enjoy going to the gym, it’s not always the best way to workout. You have to make time to go to the gym and you might be unsure of what exercises are best for you. Instead, you can workout your entire body by bicycling or rollerblading when you have to go to work, school or to run errands. Even if you have to drive part of the way to get yourself within a couple miles of the location, you are still going to be able to burn off calories and reduce your pollution in half.
If you are like most people, the past year offered some unusual weather patterns. The problem is that the reality has not fit with conventional views of what climate change will bring. For a start, if the planet is experiencing global warming why so much cold weather?
Jatropha, a wild shrub growing on uncultivated lands has for long being endemic to India and parts of Africa. Its significance as a bio-fuel also has been touted for long. Now in a first, oil derived from Jatropha has been used to fly an Air New Zealand Boeing 747. This is good news for an industry (and a world) which has been buffeted by stratospheric fuel prices over the last year. 
Renovations are going to be starting in the spring at our ranch to help make it more environmentally-sustainable. Recently we made the decision to go green by using bamboo flooring and crushed glass counters, but then we began to wonder just how green is bamboo? As with anything, there are plenty of good points but there are a few bad points as well.
The world uses almost 100 million tonnes of plastic materials every year, and according to WasteOnline.org, this is 20 times more plastic than we consumed 50 years ago. So much of the items we take for granted are made up of plastic such as grocery store bags, food containers, bottles, organizing bins, trash cans, pet toys, packaging for toys and clothes, etc. Plastic is a versatile material, but when it’s not disposed of properly, it causes a major flaw in our goal to achieve efficient waste management.There are 50 groups of plastics with different varieties, and they are all recyclable. However, you will probably have to do some extra legwork to find recycling centers that accept the less common ones. The following are the most common types of plastic with their standard marking code for recycling: 1. Polyethylene terephthalate (PET) - drink bottles; 2. High-density polyethylene (HDPE) – body wash containers; 3. Polyvinyl chloride (PVC) – shampoo bottles; 4. Low density polyethylene (LDPE) – carrier bags; 5. Polypropylene (PP) – microwavable meal trays; 6. Polystyrene (PS) – egg cartons; and OTHER are any other plastics that do not fall into the above categories such as melamine, which is used to make plastic dinnerware. The American Society of Plastics Industry has tried to make the recycling of plastics easier by designating marking codes for each plastic. These codes can usually be found on the bottom of plastic products, and the number is inside a recycling triangle.
Strange times call for even stranger solutions. Have you ever given any thought to the fate of your hair? Depending on personal grooming habits, a haircut may see large amounts of discarded hair end up on the floor. Subsequently swept away and dumped, one person can generate quite a lot of excess hair.
It is a doomsday scenario in itself. Even the aftermath of a small nuclear war would release 700 million tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere. A new paper in the journal Energy & Environmental Science says that even a small restrained nuclear exchange using just one-thousandth of the weaponry of an all-out nuclear war, would result in 690m tonnes of CO2 entering the atmosphere – that’s more than UK's annual total.