Going green – we hear it so often, but what does it really mean to go green? In some cases it’s about much more than making a global impact on a local scale: it can also be a way to save money during a recession, try something new and learn through doing. From self- to home-improvement, design to decor, here are dozens of carefully chosen, essential ways to craft an eco-friendly lifestyle that are good for you, your pocketbook and the planet.

Overall Strategies for Personal Sustainability in a Recession

(Image via: Tracy Olsen)

Personal Sustainability in a Recession: There is only so much we can do to control the world around us so the best place to start going green and saving money is in your own life, home and expenses.

Specific Sustainability and Money-Saving Tips: Once you decide on general strategies for going green you will need these – an arsenal of 25 essential tips for actually making your life greener.

Daily Ways to Go Green: Sustainable options stare us in the face every day, from how we travel to how we transport our foods and work with what we have. Here are some common-sense tips for going green daily.

Giving Green: Eco-Friendly Presents on a Budget

(Images via: RobLee and ArtzyViva)

Cheap and Eco-Friendly Gifts: You don’t want to come off as a cheapskate, so hide your frugality and do something good by giving a green gift that still fits within your personal budget.

Giving Meaningful and Green Gifts: The kind of gifts we give say a lot about who we are as people. Sure, there are thoughtful object gifts but you can also give of your time, money and more.

Green Gift of Your Time: Want to give something but don’t have the funds? Well, one great way to help the world and save money on presents is to give the gift of your own time and energy.

House and Home: Making Use of What You Have

(Image via PageDooley)

Reduce, Reuse, Remodel: So, you are closing in on the end of your remodeling project but you have run out of money. Here are some ways you can still make the most of your planned interior redesign project.

Recycling Around the House: When most of us think of recycling we imagine tossing something into a box that is whisked away – but there are many things you can creatively reuse around your own home.

Even More Upcycling Ideas: So many things got thrown away casually when they could become something entirely new with little or no effort – try to upcycle before you recycle.

Eco-Friendly Fashion: Affordable Green Apparel  Strategies

Stylish Second-Hand Stores in the US: Saying yes to second-hand clothing is a great way to go green and find fashions that won’t be pushed on you at the mainstream stores.

Make Clothing Last Longer: We all have our favorite clothes and shoes we had to lose to wear and tear, so like good health care you can and should take steps to prevent problems before they become too big to handle.

Wash Less, Save More: Wash your jeans a little less often and save the equivalent energy of turning off thousands of light bulbs – a fairly simple way to save money, time and energy all at once.

Sustainable Consumption: Money-Saving Food and Water Tips

(Image via: HLK)

High Food Prices Explained: Why is food so expensive and, more importantly, what can you do to save money without sacrificing your favorites or cutting down on quality?

How to Eat Well on a Budget: Cutting back on your grocery bill does not have to mean eating Mac-and-Cheese or otherwise compromising the quality and taste of your meals.

Cheap and Safe Non-Organics: The idea of buying only organic fruits and vegetables sounds nice in theory but in practice it isn’t necessary. Here is a list of safe-to-eat conventional versions.

How to Stop Wasting Groceries: In a recession especially it becomes important to make the most of what we have – particularly if as much as 1/3 of your groceries may be going straight into the garbage.

Water-Saving Strategies and  Tips: Cutting down on our use of water is only going to be more important as this vital natural resource becomes the center of increasingly many power plays around the world.

Reduce Waste: Reuse Everyday Household Goods

(Image via: Jenna Carver)

Keep Fruits and Vegetables Fresh: One of the best ways to save money is to be less wasteful – and one of the biggest sources of food waste is your fruit-and-vegetable drawer.

Reuse Old Make-Up Brushes: There are so many things that we throw away on a regular basis that can be repurposed quite easily and successfully for other projects – this is just one very good example.

Reupholster Your Sofa: A great DIY project, reupholstering your sofa is a way to save massive amounts of money you might spend on new furniture while also reducing your waste.

Mulch Leaves to Reduce Waste: One of the most painful things to see in the Fall is the number of big plastic bags filled and waiting on the curb to be taken away – when they could be composted right at home.

How to Green Your SUV: It sounds like an oxymoron – what, you ask, could a green SUV possibly be? However, if you are stuck with one of these fuel-suckers you can at least mitigate its damage!

Green DIY: Sustainable Make-Your-Own Home Projects

(Image via: Phil Garlic)

DIY Green Home Projects: There are a lot of ways to go green at home but some are a lot more fun than others. From sun jars to milk paint, here are some particularly nifty and unusual ways to keep it green.

DIY Chemical-Free Cleaning:  Standard chemical cleaners are not only smelly and expensive, they are also often about as far from green as you can get. Check out these cheaper and better alternative cleaners.

DIY Non-Toxic Milk Paint: Yes, you read that right – you can create your own paint right at home and, best of all, it is not toxic and made from an everyday material you surely have at hand.

DIY Laundry Detergent in 5 Minutes: Have a few minutes and an urge to do something good for yourself and the world? Save money, stop using chemicals and make your own green laundry detergent.

DIY Wood Polish: Creating eco-friendly wood polish is a lot easier than most people realize. Why go out of your way to buy something expensive at the store when you can use leftover lemons instead?

DIY Soy Candles: Soy is useful for so many things – but did you know that it is also ideal for creating candles? Make your own soy candles in a few simple steps at home.

DIY Homemade Curtains: Making your own curtains at home does not mean you have to have curtains that look homemade – here is a great way to go about it while still preserving your sense of style.

DIY Eco-Friendly Facials: Once again, here is a way to not only go environmental but also save money by doing it yourself. Some of these tips are so old they have been forgotten by many others are fresh and new.

DIY Pesticides and Fungicides: Commercial solutions to pests and fungi are often expensive, not to mention being environmentally unfriendly. Here are some easy do-it-yourself home solutions to these common problems.

Main image: Sarah Parrott

Here’s a whole new kind of scam – pretending to be exposing an animal rights outrage. As greenUPGRADER reports, the “Human Society Of America” (there’s no such organization) claims to have exposed the appalling use of kittens are shark-bait (not true) and are asking for donations to give to animal rights groups (who know nothing of these events). Bless.

At last! A use for discarded banana peel – shoe polish. (A much nicer alternative to the usual variety which is filthy stuff at the best of times, and in some cases is toxic and even stains skin!)

Regarding the fight to reduce carbon dioxide, it’s possible there’s more at stake than we thought. Researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Earth System Research Laboratory now believe that if CO2 levels continue to rise, there will come a point where the global climate’s ability to recover will be so diminished that irreversible changes will take place, despite any countering measures we might undertake – and it would take a thousand years to get back on track.

Count me among those people who obsessively love the taste of vanilla (so good in all sorts of things), but have no idea how to extract its goodness. Correction: count me among them no longer, thanks to bethany actually.

If only the U.S. were as bike-friendly as Copenhagen (although it’s getting there). The cycling mothers of Japan want their government to be as well, in the wake of new laws banning sannin-nori (“three on a bike”). And in a country with a famously low birth rate, some are even threatening to stick to one-child families to make the government pay attention.

Just imagine if your favorite search engine were vetted by a discerning team of researchers who sifted out all the wheat from the chaff so you didn’t have to. Searching a keyword and actually finding what you want? Impossible, surely – but that’s the admirable philosophy behind Sweet Search. Let’s just hope they have a lot of researchers.

And speaking of sweet, here’s my nomination for Wrong Of The Week: the Baskin Robbins Chocolate Oreo Milkshake. Are you sitting down? You would be after this monster – it’s 2,600 calories (that’s not a typo) and 135 grams of fat. In other words, it’s more than the recommended daily calories for an active man in a single drink. I fear for my species.

For happier news, Small Business Trends looks at how rural small businesses in America are going to be shaping up over the next year – and the theme is Local Local Local. We couldn’t agree more (the new President will probably have his hands full with the economy).

When trimming back on a household budget, it’s worth taking a good hard look at grocery shopping. Here are 20 ways to do that courtesy of Woman’sDay – and the star, for me, is #4: “DIY and save.” May 2009 be the year of the Ingredient, sending prepacking packing.

There are people who never seem to get sick, and cheerfully fly around at work in glowing health while the rest of us fight off the seemingly inevitable winter cold that’s doing the rounds. But it’s possible that there’s a secret behind the invulnerability – and it may involve massages, ginger and cold showers. Alicia Potter and Diane Mapes explain at MSN.

With all the current talk of energy independence and living off the grid, it’s surprising to see a major green site arguing just the opposite – but Sarah Lozanova makes a good case for staying grid-dependent at CleanTechnica.

Challenging another common assumption is Carly Weeks for GlobeLife Health, who argues that free-range chickens may not have as great a life as we suppose.

The problem with science (a journalist friend tells me) is that nothing’s certain. It’s woolly, vague, full of probabilities and possibilities. In other words, no good at all for stringing an arresting headline together. But this is because EcoGeek’s Law Of Incremental Suck matters more than exact deadlines laden with doom. Every day is progress – every day helps. It doesn’t help sell newspapers, but that’s just too bad.

Roofs should be alive! Our obsession with green roofing is hardly a secret, so you’ll understand how much fun we had looking through these examples sent in to the Huffington Post by its readers. But now we want more – MORE. Any others that you’d care to suggest?

Hello, what’s this: people eating a billion frogs a year? No, it’s not a bizarre Monty Python sketch but a sober analysis of UN trade data…and even John Cleese et al. couldn’t make some of these delicacies up!

Image: Peter Giger

Steven Chu (pegged to be the next U.S. Secretary of Energy) wants refrigerators to become an example for practical, green, forward-thinking legislation. It’s a matter of setting standards – and you can read the full story over at the New Yorker.

Rather than wastefully dousing entire newly-planted fields with water, why not focus on each plant? That’s the thinking behind the WaterBoxx: it’s designed to give a new tree a helping hand through its difficult first months by capturing water and preventing against evaporation. When a sapling is ready for bigger things, the WaterBoxx is cut away. As European Water News reports, this invention has withstood perhaps the ultimate test – growing trees in the Sahara.

Reuse before you recycle! We’ve shouted this from the rooftops before, but it’s well worth repeating (or re-shouting). Jo Oliver over at Go Domestic has 35 things to say on the subject.

We dare you to read these Earth-oriented quotes at RawFoodInfo and not feel inspired. Dare you.

It’s not too late to grab those last few Christmas presents (and to be honest, if you’re a guy like me, you’ve just started shopping). And if you’re panicking because you haven’t the time to rack your brains for the perfect gift, check out Johanna Smith’s roundup of the Web’s green gift guides.

For me, Winter fare is hale and hearty – it’s a time to throw subtlety out the window and rough-chop ripe, seasoned vegetables into stews and thick soups and onto roasting trays. Of the 5 best winter vegetables recommended by Jessica Mordo at Eat Drink Better, I’ll go for the squash every time (and maybe a slice of homemade pumpkin pie for dessert, thanks).

And while we’re on the subject of good food, could you include TV dinners in that category? How about if they’re vegetarian, organic and non-GM? Testing whether these labels are lipstick on a pig is Grist’s Kate Sheppard, testing out 7 “natural” TV-meals.

In the wake of the failed US auto industry bailout comes the wholly unsurprising news that ailing Chrysler intends to throw itself bodily (desperately, you could say) into the electric car market. The road will be a rocky one, but it’s increasingly heading in the right direction.

Just to remind us that animals come in all shapes and sizes including “XXS”, WebEcoist has a roundup of the smallest beasties we ever did see.

Leaky faucets are more than just an annoyance – check out the USGS Drip Accumulator to see what we mean. (Thanks to The Daily Green for the link on this).

Over at Think Simple Now, there’s a fascinating (and provocatively titled) article called “How To Achieve Anything“, based around the Tony Robbins OPA technique. Does it work for you?

Now some in-depth thinking. Being a committed champion of green values is often about challenging opposing viewpoints…but when those viewpoints are just so entrenched, why should we even bother trying? One reason is that sometimes we really aren’t sure why we change our minds. You can read an example of this over at PsyBlog.

“Keep it together. It’ll be fine? Where are your keys? Is everyone in the car? Where are the sandwiches? Stop fighting, both of you! Where’s the dog? GET HIM OUT OF THE SANDWICHES. Look at the time! Where are my keys?” We’ve all been there, and it’s Christmas, so in some shape or form, we’re all heading there as well. The important thing is to keep maintaining your healthy daily routines, as Blissfully Domestic explains.

Some good news on the environment, and a head-start for President-Elect Obama’s sweeping eco-reforms: the EIA prediction for US carbon emissions by 2030 has been revised to be almost 10% lower than previously estimated. The reason? Rising fuel prices…and the promises of President-Elect Barack Obama. Its certainly grounds for optimism.

Have a great weekend, everyone!

Image: tanakawho