GreenColleen

Blog Action Day: Why I take action

2009-10-15T07:00:00.000-07:00

There's lots of great bloggers out there that will write about the political, scientific, and cultural aspects of climate change for Blog Action Day. So instead, I thought that I would write about something more personal - why I am taking action today and everyday to fight climate change.

A couple years ago I drove across country to move from the East Coast to the West Coast (okay, not the most green thing I could do). For those who've done it before, they know that the trip from the East Coast to the Midwest is pretty uneventful....a lot of cities, suburbs, and strip malls.

When you start the trip from the middle of the country to the West Coast, you start to understand what the country must have looked like to the first people seeing the country. Obviously you are still on highway. But, in certain areas, looking to your right and to your left, you don't see any human footprint...no buildings, no roads, no farmer's fields.

Instead, there are fields full of natural grasses bending in the breeze and untouched hills of rock plus the fascinating unique features of the West like the moonscapes of the Badlands and the interruption of the sky by Devil's Tower.

It was these views that reminded me of the impact we've had on nature. It's amazing to realize how much we've changed it and how we can never fully get back what we've lost. Sitting in my apartment in the middle of city, I still have snapshots of of those views in my head and wonder what the hill I live on looked like before me.

Looking at what we've done to our country, it's not hard for me to believe in what we are doing to the polar ice caps, the oceans, and the rest of our environment. And knowing we have these few natural places left, makes me want to save them even that much more.

So, that is why I personally take action today and everyday....What's your inspiration?

Getting back to the heart of things

2009-10-03T16:39:00.000-07:00

Recently I attend an EcoTuesday event at which Marianne Williamson spoke about the connection between spirituality and sustainability. It might seem a slightly strange conversation for a group that bills itself as "a forum for sustainable business leaders". But in fact, after listening to Marianne, I realize that it was just what the doctor ordered.

So often when working in sustainability in business or just getting caught up in your green pursuits, it's easy to feel stressed and anxious. Often you aren't even thinking about the end goal. Marianne reminded everyone at her speech that it is just as important to do what you do with love as to the final product/result of what you are doing.

For me this means, that I need to make sure I take the time to connect back with my passion and beliefs - why I got involved in green in the beginning.... Because I want everyone single person, business and organization to take into account how they are affecting the earth in every decision they make.... Because I was awestruck looking at glaciers in Alaska last year and I want them to always be there....Because I loved volunteering to help save Leatherback sea turtle babies on a beach in the Carribean and I want them to come back every year even when I'm not there...

So why is it important to connect back to this passion? It helps me keep going. Working for green causes is not always easy and there is a lot of discouragement along the way. And, it would be so easy to give up. After hearing Marianne, I pledged that I would find one way every month to re-connect with this passion - whether it is volunteering, hearing a talk like this, going for a hike, etc.

If you are interested getting involved with EcoTuesday across the country, check out https://www.ecotuesday.com/.

Sustainability as a Strategy

2009-09-18T18:43:00.000-07:00

I've just finished reading "Strategy for Sustainability" by Adam Werbach. Werbach's book left me feeling optimistic - I greatly identified with his ideas. Sustainabilty isn't just a community relations or employee engagement tactic - and Werbach lays out how sustainability actually ensures your company grows and thrives in the future.

Use a more traditional definition of sustainability, Werbach says, "It's about survival." He describes how companies should think about how your company's actions are impacted by everything from the environment to local communities to societal trends. When a company doesn't take all these factors into account, it is potentially missing something that will seriously inhibit the company's growth or survival in the future.

He gave the example of Nike being called out for using sweatshops to fabricate its shoes in the 90s. When it had made the decision to move its factories to Asia, it had neglected to realize that the world was becoming more aware of the impact of globalization on local communities. And, it meant they had to deal with a PR disaster that threatened the company's success.

And so, Werbach's book left me questioning what sustainability can bring to our business? The short-term often rules in our business - making the numbers for the street. In that environment, what is our blind spot? What are we missing that could come back to haunt us later? What could we do that would make our business all-around more sustainable?

Collaboration Creates Carbon?

2009-09-12T15:16:00.000-07:00

Recently my company has been trying to promote more collaboration - small teams working on focused projects. I'm definitely supportive of the philosophy. The problem is that it seems to be coming in conflict with our sustainability efforts.

Living in the Bay Area, most of our employees' commutes are relatively long (either in distance or time stuck in traffic). In addition to supporting a number of public transportation options, the company has allowed working from home - for a day or two a week - both to reduce the number of commuters on the roads and to help reduce employees stress.

Unfortunately, in trying to promote more collaboration, one of the tactics has been enforcing a "no work from home" policy. The thought is that if you are in the office you'll have no barriers to collaboration.

The result of this policy may be more collaboration but it sets us back on our carbon footprint reduction goals- commuting is a major contributor to our company's footprint. And it will probably have secondary impacts - increasing employee absenteeism, for instance.

As with most organizational problems, I don't think there is an easy answer to encourage collaboration - and so I wonder if there is a more innovative way to make collaboration happen while not increasing the days we commute.

Could we restructure our days in the office so that we have more quality dedicated collaboration time? E-mail, presentation creation, and other individual work could be done on the work from home days.

Could make better use of the technology to collaborate more effectively? Maybe we could require everyone to be on instant messenger and engage on our brainstorming website regularly.

I'd love to hear from other organizations that have struggled with these same issues and found creative solutions....

I'm back...musings on sustainability...

2009-09-07T20:01:00.000-07:00

Many things have kept me away from my blog for awhile, but I'm back writing about my experiences trying to make everything a little more green at work and at home.

To start out, I wanted to talk about how sustainability has fared during this recession. I've seen a lot written on all sides. I attended the Corporate Eco Forum a few months ago and it seemed that many big companies were continuing to invest as they had before in sustainability. And, more generally, it seems to make sense (or at least I hope) that the recession will encourage people to consume less and adopt more green behaviors (recycling and reusing).

My company has continued to support our sustainability department which - in the face of multiple rounds of layoffs - I definitely see as a positive sign. But, I have seen a different type of negative impact on our green efforts.

As many are concerned the debate over health care will overshadow the ability to get any meaningful legislation on climate change on the books, the recession has also distracted many people in our company. Participation in our Green Team events has dropped off dramatically. Even the random suggestions we often get e-mailed to our Green Team e-mail address are few and far between.

Why? We don't have a lot of data but we've come up with some theories. Maybe people are keeping their heads down. They might think that participating in Green Team events will give their manager the impression that they are neglecting their work and give them a reason to lay them off. Or, maybe they just have a lot more work now and any green activities have just fallen by the wayside.

These are all understandable feelings but I believe that participatin in green is an opportunity for the company and for employees to be more innovative and relieve stress. So, how can reinvigorate our Green Teams?

Should we create some very easy, low impact way for people to be engaged in the Green Team to start getting employees engage in some small way? Should we re-focus our efforts mainly on product innovation related to green so that it is part of everyone's job? Or both?

We'll talk more about this....

Reflections on Reducing

2008-03-09T14:32:00.000-07:00

As I mentioned in my last blog, I planned to write about “reducing”. This is apropos because, for the month of March, one of our employee sustainability teams is planning a variety of activities around reducing waste. They are sponsoring a paper cup reduction contest between the buildings on the Mountain View campus. And as you might remember from a prior blog, paper is 1/3 of waste going into municipal waste stream.

According to Metaefficient:
“In 2005, Americans used and discarded 14.4 billion disposable paper cups for hot beverages. If put end-to-end, those cups would circle the earth 55 times. Based on anticipated growth of specialty coffees, that number will grow to 23 billion by 2010—enough to circle the globe 88 times. Based on hot cup usage in 2005, the petrochemicals used in the manufacture of those cups could have heated 8,300 homes for one year.”

Check out the impact of your own coffee habit here

Clearly, we have an opportunity to reduce our use of paper cups to both save money and reduce the amount of waste going into landfills.

In addition, I’ve been thinking about reducing quite a bit since I’ve also been reading “Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic” by John De Graaf, David Wann, and Thomas H. Naylor. Basically the premise of the book is that the more stuff we consume, we are not necessarily happier and better off.

Stemming from a PBS documentary, the authors describe how Americans feel the need to constantly consume and it is having detrimental affects on our environment, families, and communities. The authors describe “affluenza” as “a painful, contagious, socially transmitted condition of overload, debt, anxiety, and waste resulting from the dogged pursuit of more.” (p.2) And they track its symptoms, causes, and then describe what we can do about it – personally and society wide.

First let me state that I’m reading this book NOT because I want to tell others how they should live their lives, but because I want to take a harsh look @ how I live my life. In fact, I would agree with the statement that I am potentially one of the worst offenders. I live by myself in my own apartment 35 miles from work so that I can have the life outside of work that I want.

That being said, the stats that were very compelling to me were:

The average size of new homes is now more than double what it was in the 1950s, while families are smaller. (24-25)
Americans total yearly waste would fill enough garbage trucks to wrap around the Earth six times and reach half way to the moon.
“Since the 1950s, the percentage of land in our communities devoted to public uses – parks, civic buildings, schools, churches, and so on – decreased by a fifth while the percentage of income we spend for house mortgages and rental payments increased from a fifth to a full half.” (66)

BUT,

The number of people Americans who describe themselves as “very happy” has remained stable or decreased since 1957 while we consume two times as many things.

I understand that many may disagree with what these authors say. For instance, re:my last post on “re-using”, a friend commented that “if we all did what you said and reused, our economy would collapse.” I agree that the extreme is not necessarily desirable or even achievable. And I know that some aspects of consuming are unavoidable – we have to provide for our families and ending consumption altogether is not necessarily fair to them.

Nevertheless, I find it compelling to think about the information and theories in the book “Affluenza”. Putting aside the impact on the environment and the impact on society for a moment, what truly makes me happy? And will reducing consumption in certain areas of my life make me happier?

If you’d like to know more about the book and the information, feel free to visit their pages on the PBS site:
http://www.pbs.org/kcts/affluenza/show/show.html

What's Even Better Than Recycling?

2008-03-02T11:08:00.000-08:00

My group's month of the three R activities (Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle) came to a close Friday with our Book, CD, DVD, and Video Swap in our cafeteria. Employees brought in material they didn't want anymore and others came buy and picked up new books, movies, and music. It was a big hit - one person's garbage is definitely someone else's treasure! Many people asked us to do this again – hopefully we will be able to. With all this enthusiasm around the swap, I thought that I would talk a little about reusing.

While recycling is awesome and a great step, reducing and re-using are even more powerful actions. Why?

Even if you recycle what you’ve used, you still contributed to environmental degradation through the original creation of the product. And unless we buy significantly more recycled products, we won’t use all the material we recycle, making the recycling effort wasted. Reducing and reusing avoids these two potential pitfalls.

A few stats to prove my point:

The industry that makes all these new things we buy creates almost 20% of the CO2, a key greenhouse gas, that we humans create.

Bought any new t-shirts lately? It's estimated that over 2600 gallons of water are used to grow the cotton for just that one new t-shirt.
In 2006, Random House estimated that it used 120,000 tons of paper for its book business. If instead we used recycled paper for that 120,000 tons, we could save over 2 mm trees. And that's just Random House...

Okay, so you get my point. A lot of basic resources we need to live (including our atmosphere) are significantly affected by the stuff we buy.

Recycling is a great way to start, but reducing and reusing are a way of taking your “greenness” to the next level. As described by Treehugger, a good principle to live your life by is:

Reducing the amount that we consume, and shifting our consumption to well-designed products and services, is the first step. Finding constructive uses for “waste” materials is next. And tossing it in the blue bin is last. (The garbage can is not on the list, for good reason.) Through a balance of these three principals you can easily see your landfill-destined waste dwindle fast. A good example of recycling is setting your empty water bottles in the bin on the curb. But by using a water filter and reusable container you can reduce or completely eliminate your need for disposable plastic bottles.

I’ll address “reducing” in a future blog. But since our swap was such a great example of “reusing,” I’ll give you all some more ideas about how to reuse in your life.

SOME EASY WAYS TO REUSE

The most environmentally friendly way to reuse is direct person-to-person transfer like swaps. Giving products and material directly to someone else you know will use it virtually eliminates any additional environmental impacts, like pollution from shipping, etc. that might be incurred by doing something like EBay. (EBay is good though too)

Sign up with Freecycle in your area. When you need something new or have something that you no longer need, post it in your Freecycle group and find someone who needs it near you.
Use the Craigslist Free Section. Created after popular demand from Craigslist users, it’s the easiest way to get rid of things and give it to people who really need it. It took 30 minutes to get rid of a bookshelf I no longer needed and all I had to do was post one e-mail and carry the bookshelf downstairs.
Donate used books to local library or find your local used bookstore. Get your reading material there too! (call the library first to find out if they can take the material).
San Francisco
San Mateo County
Santa Clara
Create a community of “Re-Users” among your friends and colleagues. Whenever you can something that you don’t want anymore, e-mail all your local friends and ask them if they could use it. When you have a party, ask everyone to bring a book to swap. When you are done with your children’s toys, clothes, or other accessories, search out the pregnant women at work and ask them if they need it.

Compost happens...

2008-02-22T23:58:00.000-08:00

Or so says Patricia Becker, Center Manager for Common Ground, when commenting on how easy it is to compost....

On Thursday, our recycling sub-team of the greater employee sustainability initiative hosted a seminar on composting. We were lucky enough to have Patricia Becker, Center Manager, and Neil Jensen, master composter, from Common Ground, an organic garden supply and education center in Palo Alto.

Common Ground has been in Palo Alto for 35 years and started the first recycling program in Palo Alto. Among CG's original founders were those famous gardeners, Smith and Hawken. You can learn how to compost at CG, and also buy starter plants and gardening supplies and take all kinds of classes in gardening.

For those of you don't know much about composting (and even those who do), we first go to the source - wikipedia of course, which describes composting as:

"Composting is the aerobic decomposition of biodegradable organic matter, producing compost. The decomposition is performed primarily by facultative and obligate aerobic bacteria, yeasts and fungi, helped in the cooler initial and ending phases by a number of larger organisms, such as ils, and other families representing ants, nematodes and oligochaete worms."

Composting is a great way to recycle the organic waste you create in your household and reuse it for vital nutrients for your garden and lawn. You can compost yard waste, food scraps from your kitchen, some paper, and other things depending on what type of composting you are doing. All this organic material turns into something that looks like dirt but is basically a superfood for your garden.

You might ask, but "Doesn't that stuff you mentioned just biodegrade in landfills?"

No, not really....Landfills pack in all the garbage - whether organic or plastic or metal or anything else - so tightly that it doesn't get the oxygen it needs to degrade naturally. This isn't a new phenomenon either - archeologists have done studies of ancient societies by digging up their garbage dumps.

But, "it really isn't a big part of my garbage, is it?"

Again, no....a study by the EPA in 2006 said that 25% of solid waste collected by municipalities in the US is food waste and yard trimmings.

So, obviously organic waste like food scraps and yard trimmings are a big opportunity for recycling.

And it's not just something only people with huge large backyards can do. It is easy to compost in small backyards. There are even solutions for composting in apartments and houses with no backyards. The nice thing about composting is that the material you put in is reduced to 1/3rd of its original amount during the composting process - so you won't end up with more compost than you need.

Note to San Francisco Residents: The city compost for you - just get the Green Bin. House residents can get one for free from their waste management company. Apartment dwellers, ask your landlord to get a green bin. Check out more info below.

Want to learn more about composting?

To start composting in your backyard, the best way to learn is to take a class:
Composting classes @ Common Ground
Composting classes in San Mateo
Composting Classes in Santa Clara

Other Composting Resources:
From the EPA
From Earth 911
California Integrated Waste Management Board Resources
Composting Terms Glossary
Sam Mateo Resources
Santa Clara Resources
http://www.compostguide.com/

Composting for Apartment Dwellers and Houses without Backyards:
SF Goverment info on city composting program
Apartment Composting Tools/Machines
Information on Worm Composting

Living the Message

2008-02-20T21:27:00.000-08:00

Our employee sustainability initiative team had our first informational open house last week where we recruited volunteers to our Green initatives.

I was excited to get people involved, but interestingly, what I learned from the event was equally as valuable as more volunteers...

In planning this open house, our founding sustainability team members not only tried to create a great event, but we tried to do it in an environmentally friendly way and told guests about it. For instance, we used as much re-usable material as possible (whiteboards, re-usable signs, laptop presentations instead of fancy posters) and advertised that we did this on purpose.

We felt it was important to "walk the walk" with our sustainability initiative particularly in the beginning. We worry a lot about our message getting diluted if we get criticized for doing things in an "unsustainable" way. If you turn people off from the beginning because you don't seem genuine, you've lost them forever.

But if we had started getting too caught up in running the open house "perfectly" sustainably, we might never have gotten the event off the ground. And it is vital for us to get out there with these events now and get more people involved. In the end, people seemed pretty open and supportive of our event.

So I learned that "walking the walk" is key, but we don't have to be perfect about it. I hope many people gave us credit for doing our best, but saw us as more real because we weren't perfectly green. Hopefully it makes being green seem more attainable -- if you don't think you have to be perfectly green right out of the gate.

It's a delicate balance - always striving to be more green while recognizing action without a perfect plan is also important to keep up momentum. Talking transparently about it helps everyone understand and buy in to the choices you make. So that's the plan for our employee green initiative and also my plan in my own personal green pursuits...

So, in the spirit of "walking the walk"and telling people about it...

For those of you who have been making changes in your life to be more sustainable this year, please let me know what you have done by commenting on my blog or writing on my facebook wall. Let other people know how you are personally striving to be more green....

The Personal is Political*

2008-01-26T23:26:00.000-08:00

So, I took a leap today into a bit of a controversial realm in my blog @ work. Yes, I know you aren’t supposed to talk about politics on a first date or at work. But, since I do talk about politics on the first date, I might as well also talk about it at work.

I was also feeling particularly rilled up since I haven't gotten a lot of participation in my blog from my colleagues. I decided to try a little something different. You may read below and say - "This really isn't that controversial, Colleen." Remember though, that my company really just started a concerted effort to be more sustainability 3 or so months ago. So everything is new and potentially controversial....

In any case, read on and let me know what you think....

The title of my blog is borrowed from an essay written during the Women’s Liberation movement of the 60s and 70s*. I bring it up today because I think the idea is compelling when thinking about the modern environmental movement.

Often when I open my big mouth about the environment, I get into conversations about whether any one person taking action to be more sustainable is a worthwhile pursuit. Some argue that the fact that someone composts and recycles really isn’t going to save the planet. It has to be, some argue, governments and industry making drastic changes in the way they do things to really make a difference.

First, yes, I agree that governments and industry need to take big steps. But I also strongly believe in individual action in each person’s life. Governments and industry won’t change without the influence of individuals. And, I’ve seen in myself how living a more personally sustainable life has taught me about greater global environmental issues. It has made me a more informed voter and political being. And it has made me more vocal and active. After all, I’m writing this blog in hopes of helping to educate, aren’t I? I’m pretty sure that I would never have been doing this unless I had taken those first steps to stop eating meat after measuring my environmental footprint and seeing the impact of the production of meat. (I now recognize this is a more complicated issue than it seems, and I do eat some non-red free-range meat for various reasons. But I still think this first step was an important part of my personal environmental journey).

Sometimes, I wonder if by saying “government and business need to fix themselves for anything to really improve”, it leads us to just give up. It makes the situation seem so insurmountable.On the other hand, wach little action I take to make my life more environmentally-friendly makes me more convinced that others (including the government and industry) can successfully face the challenges of sustainability. I see that each change I make encourages others to make their own changes. Hopefully I start my own small-scale “pay-it-forward” movement for the environment. And maybe each of these people will also become more politically active and join the greater movement to influence change in larger institutions.

If this discussion is interesting to you, I highly recommend No Impact Man’s blog. Colin Beavan has taken being personally sustainable to the next level – he gives me an ideal to strive toward. It is definitely a fave on my Google Reader (yes, I like it even more than Valleywag).

And if you are ready to be a little more politically active about sustainabilty and the environment, check out where each presidential candidate stands on the environment.

*From an essay of the same name by Carol Hanisch

Be Green and Clean

2008-01-20T12:21:00.000-08:00

After starting my blog last week, I got a lot of questions from fellow colleagues. It's clear a lot of them had been thinking about being more green, but just weren't sure how to go about it. It reminded me that helping people find the resources to be more green should be an important part of my blog. So, here's a first stab at that....

I noticed that a lot of the questions I got were about cleaning, so I decided to pull some resources about all types of cleaning together.

FYI, I've made these changes in my actions below and found them very easy to implement.

Wash your clothes in cold water. According to a recent IdealBit e tip, 80-90% of your energy used on laundry goes to heating the water - that's $61 on average per household for washing in hot rather than cold.

If you are worried about adequately dissolving your powder detergent, just put the hot on for a few minutes at the beginning of the load and then switch to cold.
Or do one load of very soiled clothes in hot and lone of those less soiled in cold --- cutting down by half is better than nothing.

Dry Clean Less and/or In a More Environmentally Friendly Way. Perc, a major chemical used in dry cleaning, is a huge environmental contaminent of up to 10% of the states wells and the EPA even says it is a possible to probable carcinogen. Even some dry cleaning technology without Perc has effects.

First, buy fewer clothes that require dry cleaning. It's such a pain to drop off and pick up stuff anyway, right?
For those times that you must dry clean:
Try an environmental dry cleaner. Try Pressed Cleaners in SF or Blue Sky Cleaners - it picks up and drops off @ your home in the Peninsula and South Bay (including our Menlo Park office).
Ask for no plastic covers and return your wire hangers to your dry cleaners for re-use. If they won't even do these 2 things, find another dry cleaner.

Buy environmentally friendly cleaning products. Most are not only better for the environment but better for you (with less toxic chemicals). For instance, lots of traditional laundry detergents have petroleum in it -- yup that's right OIL! Do you really want that? And those chemicals in your detergent go straight into sources of drinking water. 69% of streams in the US contain disinfectants and detergent metabolites.

Personally I use Seventh Generation for most all of my cleaning products from laundry detergent to upholstery cleaner. I love all of them and feel they work very well. You can find where they are sold on their website.
A new SF-based enviro friendly cleaning supply company is Method. They have some strong net promoters amongst my friends. And they are often available in more traditional stores like Walgreens and Target.
And our famous Elaine, who most of you know, launched Clorox's brand new line of green products.

Clean less and/or with fewer products. No, I don't expect anyone to wear dirty, smelly clothes, but you can easily do without some cleaning to save water and energy.

Wash your car as little as possible. According to Green Earth, a typical car wash uses between 20 to 45 gallons of water per car. A home wash can use between 80 and 140 gallons. Wouldn't that water be better used to make sure we have enough water to drink?
If you really can't deal with the "wash me" words written on your car, try a waterless car wash like Green Earth or Eco Touch.
Fill your dish washer fully before you run it and wash as few other dishes and kitchen utensils by hand. And turn off the hot dry cycle.
Ditch the Swiffer for a re-usable microfiber mop. I bought mine @ Target, but found this one on Amazon. You can just throw the microfiber mop head in the laundry with your other laundry and avoide creating waste of disposable swiffer refills.
Get a green house cleaning service. WAGES bills itself as eco-friendly and provides jobs for low income women (this one I can't vouch for since my small apartment requires no outside help).

AND......Find more ideas on the TreeHugger site.....

Inauguration

2008-01-12T14:41:00.000-08:00

Welcome to my first blog entry....ever!

Hi all - this is the external version of my internal work blog that I started to support my company's sustainability initiative. The purpose of my blog @ work is to create another tool for communicating with my colleagues about my work on the sustainability initiative and the things I learn in the process. I'll have to sanitize some of the information due to confidentiality -- but hopefully your might find some of this information insightful!

And as I say for my blog @ work, I welcome comments, suggestions, corrections, and additional information. I am BY FAR not an expert on this, but I'd like to take you all on my Green journey. And it is a journey - making gradual changes is the way to really make lasting change in your life!

And since this is a New Year, I am going to start my blog with My Green New Year's Resolutions:

1. Be a smarter consumer. I'm using Co-op America's Ten Things You Should Never Buy Again and Five More Things to Never Buy Again lists to get started.

2. Dedicate time to helping others be more green...which is why I am writing this blog.

3. Be more aware of what is going on in sustainability and green in the world. I've started by signing up for TreeHugger's RSS feed in my Google Reader. TreeHugger describes itself as, "the leading media outlet dedicated to driving sustainability mainstream. Partial to a modern aesthetic, we strive to be a one-stop shop for green news, solutions, and product information. At TreeHugger we know that variety is the spice of life, so you can find all you need to go green in our up to the minute blog, weekly and daily newsletters, weekly video segments, weekly radio show and our user-generated blog, Hugg. We also extend our expertise to companies looking for a little green guidance. Past clients include Domino, Sundance Channel and House & Garden. "

So, if you'd like to support my Green 2008 and join me on this trip, please keep reading!