Samsung Impression ranks #1 for least emissions

Statistics suggest that over four billion people around the world now own a cell phone and it’s not uncommon to find people who use more than one cell phone on a regular basis.

At one stage one of my daughters worked in a data center job that required her to carry two cell phones for business plus her private cell phone. Fortunately for her one was to give her one-way access to a critical server so it was impossible for all three to ring at once but I often wondered how she would manage if by some chance they had all rung at the same time.

From the early days of cell phone use there has always been a concern that radiation from the phone could have an effect on the health of users. Since then there have been reports that suggest that there is no health issues for cell phone users and there have been just as many reports that says that there are health issues.

Whatever the situation really is there’s no doubt that cell phones do emit radiation and people are using their cell phones more and more so there is a greater level of exposure to that radiation.

Should that worry us? Yes it should! Does it mean that we should stop using our cell phones? Well it’s probably way too late to think about doing that because cell phones are part of our lives and more and more applications are being written to encourage us to use our cell phones even more but we can take some steps to limit our exposure to that radiation.

Pick the right phone

The first thing we should do is pick the right phone. Not every cell phone has the same level of harmful radiation emissions but with so many different cell phones on the market today it’s hard for us consumers to know which are good and which are bad.

Fortunately ewg.org has reviewed around 1,000 different cell phones that are currently available in the United States and ranked them according to their emission levels. Six of the top 10 cell phones that have the least emissions are from Samsung and at the very top of the list is the Samsung Impression.

If you’re one of those who simply must have one of the trendy cell phones then the Blackberry Storm is the one with the least emissions … it comes in at number 11. The HTC Touch Diamond also ranks well but most of the Nokia range is well down the list as is the Apple iPhone.

At the very bottom of the list is the cell phone with the worst level of radiation emissions and that’s the Palm Treo 755p. The Blackberry Curve 8830 is right down near the bottom of the list too.

Don’t live on your phone

Another obvious way to limit your exposure to the radiation is to not constantly have your phone close to your head. In other words limit the use of your phone and that’s not going to be easy because human beings are a social group who love to keep in touch and the best way to do that is via your cell phone.

However, there are ways to change your usage patterns so that you do limit the amount of time you have the phone close to your ear. Try sending text messages instead of calling your friends … you might be surprised at how easy it is to conduct a conversation with someone you know via a series of text messages.

You can also get the same message across to numerous friends simply by using the message function that allows you to send the same message to a group of people instead of calling each one individually.

Use the loudspeaker facility if one is fitted

If you’re in a private location use the loudspeaker function that most cell phones come with these days. I have to admit that it does take a little getting used to but it’s not that hard once you have the hang of it and it certainly does get your cell phone away from your head. It also frees up your hands to do other things.

Do some research

You will be surprised at how much information is out there about the harmful effects cell phones can have on their users. Track it down through Google and read all you can … understanding the risks that are involved will help you make informed decisions based on fact about how you want to use your cell phone.

Knowing the facts and the risks will help you aim for outcomes that are good for your health and well being rather than being swayed by peer pressure to conform. And that’s perhaps the hardest thing of all to do. You may understand the risks involved in using your cell phone but your friends may still be living in la-la land and wonder why you are using your cell phone in a different way and that can lead to some issues with your friends.

Don’t be swayed by what they say … make up your own mind based on your research because it may well be that it’s your life that’s at stake here.

Gardening is a great pastime and whether you grow your plants as decorations or to provide food for your table, whether you grow them in pots or have an extensive garden around your house, you still need to be environmentally friendly in the garden.

Now I’m not suggesting for a minute that being an eco-friendly gardener is all that easy. Not only do you have to forgo the convenience that comes with using chemicals sprays to keep the bugs away and fertilizers that make everything grow wonderfully but ultimately do more damage than good to the soil but you also have to spend time searching for insect repellants and fertilizers that might be more eco-friendly. In some cases you’re also going to have to spend time making those alternatives for yourself.

However it is important that you do make the effort to be eco-friendly in the garden so I’ll be giving you some tips here on how to break your reliance on anything that’s not friendly to the environment. It’s beyond the scope of this article to go into fine detail but the Net is loaded with detailed information and a search for some of the terms I use will turn up all the fine detail that you will need.

Fertilizers
Let’s start off with fertilizers. Gone are the days when guano … or bird droppings … was the best fertilizer available for home and farm use. These days there are plenty of chemical fertilizers on the market that can help you grow wonderful looking plants and vegetables available but sadly many of them do way more to damage the soil in the long term than might be worth any short term advantage.

So what do you replace those fertilizers with? You replace those fertilizers with your own home-grown fertilizer … commonly known as compost … and best of all, it’s free. That’s right, if you want to be eco-friendly around the garden when it comes to giving your plants a boost all you have to do is use compost that you have developed yourself.

Of course you can buy bagged compost and in some places you can even have it delivered by the truck load but believe me … it’s way more fun to develop your own compost heap. Search online and you’ll find all the tips and tricks you need to get right into composting.

Keeping the bugs away
One of the biggest problems …especially if you have your own vegetable garden … is keeping the insects away from your plants. If you have a flower garden then you might be troubled with bugs such as aphids and such like that want to leech all the goodness out of the plants through the stems and the leaves.

There are some eco-friendly sprays available in gardening and hardware stores but you can also make your own from simple ingredients that you might find around the house. Once again, look online and you’ll find plenty of hand hints that will help you keep those bugs off your plants and allow you to live green.

Snails and slugs are a pest in just about every sort of garden and you could end up with them even if you only have plants in pots. The best way to deal with them without resorting to chemicals is by using a waste product that most of us have around the house almost every day.

If you like your coffee then you’ve got the only ingredient you need to keep the snails and slugs out of your garden. You see, snails and slugs hate the feel of coffee grounds … that by-product of a great cup of coffee … and all you have to do is sprinkle the coffee grounds throughout your garden and those pesky snails won’t cross the trails of coffee grounds that you put down.

Complimentary plantings
If you’re new to gardening you may not have heard of complimentary plantings but it’s something you should investigate. I have to say that I’ve never been able to use this system to entirely eradicate bugs from my gardens but it can certainly reduce the amount of infestation and others report better results than I have experienced so it may work well for you.

To use this method all you have to do is find plants that will grow together and act as a deterrent for the bugs that might attack the more fragile plants. For example there are plenty of bugs out there that really don’t like garlic so plant garlic plants throughout your garden beds. There are a number of other aromatic herbs that will also keep pests at bay as well as adding a pleasant scent to your garden.

The leaves of some plants when used as a mulch will also keep bugs away. Comfrey is one of those plants and you can harvest the comfrey leaves several times a year and scatter them throughout the garden.

This has really just been a very basic primer on how to be eco-friendly in the garden. There is so much more you can do around the garden so please don’t stop here. There’s plenty more information out there to help you to live green in the garden so search for it and use it as you strive to be eco-friendly.

So far in this blog we’ve looked at being environmentally friendly in the garden; we’ve discussed how to do the same when we go camping too. We’ve looked at being eco-friendly by turning lights off and installing energy saving devices and fittings around the home too but there’s one place we haven’t thought about living green and that’s in the kitchen.

Now you might be thinking that if we’ve already talked about growing some of our own food then we’ve said all there is to be said about being environmentally friendly in the kitchen too … but not so. There’s a heck of a lot more that most of us could be doing in the kitchen to be true to our desire to live green and we could be doing it when we’re actually doing the cooking in the kitchen.

Once again, it doesn’t take anymore than a little common sense to be environmentally friendly when we cook and it’s not going to cost us anything either so why aren’t we doing it? Well probably because most of us don’t think about being friendly to the environment when we cook.

So let’s change that right now.

The other day I cooked a roast in the oven … yes I am a male and I do love to cook so I share the cooking duties with my partner. After the cooking time for the roast had elapsed I turned the oven off and took the roast out to let it rest. No sooner had I closed the oven door and turned my back on it than the fan in the oven began to whirr.

I immediately thought that I’d forgotten to switch the oven off so I turned around only to find that the oven was very definitely turned off. What had made the fan operate was the fact that there was still residual heat in the oven and the fan thought that it was still cooking.

Now it takes energy to generate heat and we all know that the less energy we use the better the planet will be and there in the oven I had a lot of wasted heat … and wasted energy. Then I realized that instead of keeping the oven running at full power right to the point when the roast was finished perhaps I should have turned it off earlier and allowed the residual heat to continue the cooking process.

That’s just one of the ways you can be eco-friendly in the kitchen and you’ll find more here are “Conserving in the Kitchen …”

More and more people today are looking at producing some of their food requirements at home. Even if you live in an apartment it’s not impossible to grow some of your own vegetables on your balcony or even on your window sill and it is something that you should really think about doing.

Growing some of your own produce is fun and it’s also deeply satisfying too … there’s something about digging in the dirt to grow your own food that makes you feel connected with the earth. For many years I’ve had an extensive vegetable garden where I’ve grown everything from lettuce and tomatoes right through to broccoli, carrots, turnips and even strawberries and melons.

Doing the work has kept me healthy and being able to put food on the table that I’ve grown does something for my self-esteem so I would urge to try it for yourself. However, you definitely need to be environmentally friendly in your home garden too. It’s easy to fall into bad habits and use damaging insecticides to keep pests down and fertilizers for the soil that do more harm than good.

It’s also easy to be fooled into using hybrid seeds because you think that they’re going to give you a much better crop than ordinary seeds but don’t let the hype fool you. If you want quantity over nutritional quality then go the hybrid seed route but if you want to give your family vegetables that are full of nutritional value then non-hybrid seeds are the only way to go.

Non-hybrid seeds are available in the best gardening stores and nurseries but if you can’t find them around where you live then have a look online. There are plenty of online seed suppliers out there who can supply non-hybrid seeds for all the vegetable varieties you’ll ever want to plant and you should use them.

Growing your own food is about more than just putting food on your table … if you want to live green then it’s about being environmentally friendly too and using non-hybrid plants and seeds to maintain the nutritional value of what you grow. It’s up to you and me to produce the quality that our family deserves.

It’s quite natural for people like you and me to look no further than your state boundaries when it comes to being eco-friendly. We do what we can to care for the environment and so often that’s our almost complete focus.

Even the newspapers that we read don’t often look beyond our country’s borders for stories about the environment. But there’s one catastrophe that’s happening right now on the west coast of Canada that’s making headlines around the world and it’s a reminder that to us that if we want to live green then we really must encourage others to do the same. I should also say that before you think that I’m being a little sensational by using a word ‘catastrophe’ let me assure you that the ‘C’ word has been used by more than just the press to describe this event for the ramifications are going to be felt around world.

The catastrophe that’s unfolding on the west coast of Canada is the lack of sockeye salmon appearing in the rivers. Right now between six and 10 million sockeye salmon should be fighting their way up river to spawn and so far the official count has the number at just 600,000.

The salmon that should be coming back to spawn were hatched in 2005 and that was a record year for hatchings and yet millions and millions of them have just plain disappeared and no one knows what might have happened to them.

A few very hopeful experts are suggesting that the fish might just be running late but more pragmatic experts are suggesting that the reality is that they’re just not coming because they have died in the intervening years. What might have caused the demise of so many fish is open to conjecture but some are suggesting that changing sea temperatures have been too much for them to handle.

Whatever the reason might be the lack of fish has meant that the commercial sockeye fishery has been closed for the season without one fish being taken. Now everyone is waiting see if the pink and Churn salmon have also been affected. That won’t be known till the end of this month when those species should start to arrive.

Because of the length of time it takes between hatching and returning and the fact that no one really knows where the salmon spend those intervening years no one can say whether this is just an anomaly or we’re seeing the demise of salmon in the wild. If it is more than just an anomaly then it will be another year before we know and by then it will all be too late.

So now is the time to start looking beyond our own little part of the planet and we need to start encouraging our representatives in government to begin taking steps to really protect the planet. Of course you know how hard it will be to convince them to do anything but we have to make the effort and we need to start now. If we want to live green then we have to encourage everyone to do the same.

We all know that pollution and greenhouse gases are affecting our health. Asthma and other lung related diseases are one the rise. Cancer rates from emissions and the junk that goes into our food chain. Skin cancer rates from the holes we’re creating in our ozone layers are also rising.

So it’s only natural that we should want to try and turn our decaying environment around and become more environmentally friendly. Fewer emissions will mean cleaner air, food free from carcinogens will cut back on the growing scourge of cancer and the reduction in harmful gases that are creating holes in the ozone level will cut back on some of those deadly skin cancers too.

Natural green gyms

But there are some hidden benefits and some hidden problems that few of us think of when we’re working towards being eco-friendly. In Scotland though health officials are certainly thinking outside of the box and they’re preparing to encourage people to get out in the forests and woodland areas and use them as natural green gyms.

If you live near one of those areas you’ll be encouraged to head outdoors and walk, run, jog or maybe even cycle through those areas. And what a wonderful idea that is … who wants to be shut up in a stuffy, sweaty gym when you can be outdoors in the fresh air getting all the exercise you need.

There’s no doubt that we do need to get out and exercise too because it helps improve rates of heart disease, diabetes, depression, stress and obesity. In Scotland they’re so serious about encouraging people to use the forests and wooded areas that they’re also going to offer financial assistance to landowners to make more areas available as green gyms.

Problems with wind farms

In Canada wind farms may be great for the environment but not so good for human health. There’s something eerily majestic about the phalanxes of turbines that go to make up a wind farm but their beauty may only be skin deep as people who live near these wind farms may be finding out.

More and more people who live near these wind farms are developing an alarming array of symptoms that they didn’t have before the wind farms were built and Canada is one place a close watch is being kept on the situation.

In Ontario a questionnaire was distributed amongst people who lived near one wind farm and over 69% of those who responded indicated that they had developed one or more health problems since the turbines were commissioned. Those health problems ranged from headaches to heart palpitations, hearing problems, heart problems, stress, anxiety and depression.

Of those 69% who indicated that they had developed heart problems a majority lived within a mile of the wind farm. The further the respondents lived from the wind farm the fewer illnesses that were reported.

No one is yet quite sure just what it is about the wind farms and turbines that is causing these health problems but some suggest that these illnesses could be caused by the low-frequency noise that the turbines generate. Unfortunately, while some people are watching the situation no one is yet doing any research into the causes and the government is yet to be convinced that there is any sort of problem at all.

Despite the fact that wind farms may not be quite as harmless as we would like to believe that doesn’t mean that we should stop building them. The emissions from coal fired power stations are far more harmful to far more people than the noise and vibrations emitted by wind farms.

The impact on the environment of the greenhouse gases emitted by power stations will take years and years to mitigate while the unpleasant side-effects of wind farms may be corrected simply be building the farms further away from human habitation.

For most people who want to buy environmentally friendly food the question of what fits into that category can be quite difficult to answer and actually finding the answers you need so that you can make an informed decision on what to buy and what to avoid can take a lot of time and a lot of research.

But when it comes to food and being environmentally friendly there is something that you can do right now and that’s buy food that comes in environmentally friendly packaging. Of course the obvious answer here is to buy food that comes with no packaging and you can do that if you buy your vegetables from the grocery store, your meat from a butcher’s and your bread, unsliced, from a bakery.

Sadly in these days of supermarkets and convenience those stores that I just mentioned are becoming harder and harder to find. Even if you do find them, they may be so far away from where you live that your attempts to be environmentally friendly by shopping there are negated by the gas you use to get to those stores. There’s also the question of what do you do when the products you want simply aren’t available without a whole bunch of packaging.

The short answer is that if you can’t buy your food without packaging then you start looking for the items you want that come in packaging that is environmentally friendly. If the food comes in containers are those containers biodegradable?

If the food comes in a mixture of biodegradable and non-biodegradable packaging what are the percentages used in the packaging? Can you buy the same product from a different manufacturer who does use more eco-friendly packaging?

Look for items that come in cardboard boxes or bio-degradable plastics … shop at stores that provide bio-degradable plastic bags or sell re-usable shopping bags for you to take your purchases home in. Wherever possible avoid products that come in packaging that can’t be recycled and products that come with too much packaging.

And don’t forget to recycle that packaging once you’ve opened it.

You should also look at the possibility of buying products that come in a container that you can re-use. I love honey and I’ve found a store quite close to me that sells it in bulk … all I have to do is keep on going back with the same container and they will refill it for me.

These are just some of the simple ways that you can start being environmentally friendly when you go food shopping.