gas

Top 10 Ideas for Saving Gas, Money and Driving Green

RiverWired.com — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 00:00:00 -0400

Gas prices getting you down? Carbon emissions weighing heavy on your shoulders? At RiverWired we want to reduce your worries as we help you reduce your footprint. Instead of talking problems, we offer some solutions for saving gas and improving mileage. Now more than ever, you have big reasons for driving green.

1. 15 Tips For Better Mileage -- Want to Get 70 MPG in Your Toyota Prius?

2. The Hype About Hypermiling

3. Two Wheels Are Greener Than Four

4. Honda Civic GX Tops List of Greenest Cars

5. Driving Green = Fewer Greenbacks

6. Five Tips to Find the Cheapest Gas Near You

7. Top 10 Most Fuel-Efficient Cars: Save Gas, Save Money

8. Record Month For Selling Gas -- Saving Cars Getting Better Than 30 MPG

9. GE Backs Electric Cars -- This Time For Keeps!

10. Top 10 Green Things to Do While Stuck in Traffic

Is Kiwi Fruit the Fuel of the Future?

scleaver — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 00:00:00 -0400

What’s small, fuzzy on the outside, green on the inside, and may be filling our gas tanks as well as decorating our fruit salads?

You guessed it, the kiwi fruit.

New research out of New Zealand adds kiwi fruit to the list of potential biofuels. Two companies, Scion and Zespri Innovation, are working on ways to turn the 14.5 to 15.6 million trays of kiwifruit waste produced each year into biofuels and other products, including adhesives and bioplastics, according to the New Zealand Herald. If the project pans out, kiwi refineries would be near existing kiwi processing plants and would be similar to wineries.

New Zealanders, like David Roberts, chairman of the Green Growers Association, are excited about the prospects. “The Green Growers Association has been asking for a long time for research into [a] way of using reject fruit and turning it into bio-gas makes sense,” he told the New Zealand Herald.

Here are more fun kiwi facts: the fruit is already known for its laxative, blood thining, and meat tenderizing properties.

Photo from the New Zealand Herald.

Save on Gas: Out Of The Frying Pan And Into The Gas Tank

scleaver — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 00:00:00 -0400

Is $4 a gallon gas getting you down? Take a tip from Greg Melville who uses leftover cooking oil to power his 1985 Mercedes diesel station wagon (read his article “Greased Lightning” in The New York Times).

Melville converted his wagon back when gas was hovering just above $2.00/gallon. Now, friends who laughed then, are asking to look under the hood now. “Of course,” Melville wrote, “what they find there isn’t entirely pleasant. Waste vegetable oil power is a dirty business.”

How does he do it? Apparently, Melville has a supplier at a local restaurant who saves him five-gallon containers of oil, with French fries and meat scraps suspended in the slime, for pick up once a week. He then heats the oil and pours it through a filter back, working in his garage that smells as good as any fast food restaurant. Then, he pours the oil into a 15-gallon tank, part of the grease-power kit he purchased for $1,000, that heats the grease so it will move quickly. So far, he gets about 20 miles to the gallon, and has reduced his carbon footprint by more than half.

Melville recently took his grease-guzzling car on a cross-country road trip that we’ll all be able to read about in the forthcoming Greasy Rider: Two Dudes, One Fry-Oil-Powered Car and a Cross-Country Search for a Greener Future (to be released this October).

The lesson: (fortunately) we don’t eat enough French fries to power the entire U.S. fleet of cars on leftover oil, but with grease at the ready, we may have some real alternative fuels.

Photo from Studio2f.com.

Three More Ways to Save Money on Gas

khallgeisler — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 00:00:00 -0400

Anyone with an Internet connection, a newspaper subscription, or an addiction to cable news knows the basics of gas saving by now: drive the speed limit, check your tires, no jackrabbit starts. Here are three more advanced tips to get the most out of that pricey gallon of gas.

Keep the engine warm. A recent Smart Money article pointed out that cars use more gas to start up when the engine is cold, like if it's been sitting for two hours or more. Try trip-chaining, where you run all your errands at once and don't leave the car off for more than a few minutes. The Smart Money people say you could save over $100 this summer by using this tip alone.

Drive right, the UPS way. UPS drivers have long planned routes that require more right turns than left turns. This makes sense to anyone sitting in a left-hand turn lane, idling, waiting for that @(#$ light to change ... come on ... come on ... while right-turning cars stream by your passenger window.

Make sure your next set of tires is fuel-effiecient. The greenest option is always to work with what you've got until it needs to be replaced, but if you're in the market for new tires, make sure they're going to up your mpg, not drop it. Those big, styley, low-profile tires can sap as much as 10% of your fuel efficiency. Shop around, ask questions, and find tires that have low rolling resistance for the best mileage.

Reduce Your Business Travel By Meeting Online

jplatt — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0400

Over the last few years, my wife and I have traveled to more than 20 states and who knows how many cities for business meetings, classes and conferences. Each trip required time, money, and a heck of a lot of jet fuel.

But lately, a greener alternative has popped up. More events are being held online using web conferences and webcasts. Not only does this save the stress of travel, its also avoids the high fuel costs associated with driving or flying to these events. And yes, it saves us and our employers money, too.

A web conference is just like a meeting around a conference table -- only everyone is at their desks on their PCs. Ideal for spread-out workforces, web conferences offer flexibilty and easy scheduling without trying to get everyone in the same room at the same time.

Webcasts are more like a TV broadcast, but often with some form of interactivity. Ideal for classes, lectures, sales presentations and other events with few speakers but a large audience, these allow you to reach a large number of people without anyone having to travel.

Beyond travel, webcasts have other environmentally friendly benefits you might not think of right away. Live meetings typically come with reems of printed materials -- handouts, folders, etc. With an online event, all of that material is distributed digitally. By not printing these materials, companies save money and reduce waste (because let's admit, 90% of those handouts are going to end up in the trash the next day).

Speaking of waste, how many meetings that you've attended have been catered? And how much of that food is usually left over and needs to be thrown out? You can't feed people over the web, so that saves more money and avoids more garbage.

So the next time someone invites you to fly across the country for a meeting, ask them, can we do it online instead?