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Whistle Stopper - The Green Book: The Everyday Guide to Saving the Planet One Simple Step at a Time
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List Price: $12.95
Our Price: $6.82
Your Save: $ 6.13 ( 47% )
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: Three Rivers Press
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 333.72
EAN: 9780307381354
ISBN: 0307381358
Label: Three Rivers Press
Manufacturer: Three Rivers Press
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 224
Publication Date: 2007-06-19
Publisher: Three Rivers Press
Release Date: 2007-06-19
Studio: Three Rivers Press
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: Finally a great, and easy sustainable book to read
Comment: Great book for understanding environmental issues and how to address them in a daily perspective. This is a mighty fine way to interpret the kind of footprint we all leave and how to minimize such. Very informative on issues we hardly think about, and yet pose a threat to the environment if not carefully managed. The book is worth every single dollar!
Customer Rating:
Summary: Good for the environment, bad for your wallet
Comment: Great premise. Easy to read. Divided into chapters such as health and beauty, home, etc. Great practical tips on how to help the environment. However, some of the tips won't help your wallet. ie. get voicemail instead of an answering machine. Voicemail is about $20 a month so $240/year while an answering machine is $60 one time purchase.
Customer Rating:
Summary: the green book
Comment: This is a great book for the everyday person trying to do their part is saving the planet. The small things seem so easy, I wondered why I hadn't been doing it all along. Also some unique ideas for around your home.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Not bad, resources are most useful part
Comment: The green book has been featured on TV shows and is a New York Times bestseller. Written by Elizabeth Rogers and Thomas M. Kostigen, I wondered whether it has anything to do with the celebrity quotes and endorsements from people such as Cameron Diaz, Robert Redford, Jennifer Aniston and Justin Timberlake?
Firstly the book is green, not just in colour but also it's printed on 100% recycled paper. Subtitled as `the everyday guide to saving the planet one simple step at a time' the book is more about being "more good" than "less bad" with a series of nicely structured tips.
Each chapter begins with The Big Picture on the topic, whether it be travel, school or shopping for example. Followed by Simple Steps which provides three practical steps to take in that particular area. Then finally The Little Things provides more details and small steps that can be taken.
Chapters are broken up by the aforementioned celebrity quotes, which frankly don't add much to the besides to show how big and clever these people are. Some of the tips can be a little confusing or contradictory, such as suggesting you take your own toiletries on vacation, but then not to check any luggage on the plane. Then also to use the library for books and then saying not to use libraries but go online. OK so these are minor points, but some tips are a little picky, I enjoyd the book more when it concentrated on practical measures rather than small, inconvenient suggestions that don't make much of an impact when done.
What is kind of nice is the comparison it makes for each tip. For example when suggesting if everyone used one less paper napkin a day, the amount saved could be used to provide one to every person who eats a hotdog on July 4th (150m). Or the amount of trash saved is equivalent to the weight of the Great Pyramid. I've never seen a plastic frisbee 2.5 miles in diameter but thanks for the image.
The Simple Steps sections are useful, but not full of that much you can't get for free online anyway, including our very own 100 Ways To Save The Planet. There were some useful facts that you can bring up at parties, like Blu-Ray discs can be recycled as they're 50% paper, natural make-up only needs to contain 1% natural ingredients to be labeled as natural, and the world's largest consumer of aluminum is the anti-perspirant industry.
Customer Rating:
Summary: The best advice in this book is to not buy this book
Comment: I agree 100% with all the 1-2 star reviews. This book is bogus. There is more
clear, practical advice in these reviews than contained in this book.
One of my complaints about this book that wasn't covered yet is the erroneous
and misleading attempts to use crude oil to help the reader visualize the impact
of his or her efforts.
For example, the authors suggest that you purchase retreaded tires for your
car. They claim that if the demand for retreads increased by 10%, "the total oil
savings per year would be about 290 million gallons." The authors take a lot of
liberties with using oil as an analogy to represent energy consumption. In
this case though, they seem clear that its the conservation of "1/3 the petroleum
resources" that the retreads yield over new tires which they are contributing to
the 290 mil. gal.
I don't disagree with these statements. It very well may be the case that it
takes 290 million gallons of oil to produce enough petrochemicals to manufacture
that synthetic rubber. What the reader should really understand is that along
with some new tires , those barrels of oil also would have produced:
149 million gal. of gas
44 million gal. of diesel fuel
35 million gal. of jet fuel
...as well as 55 million gallons of dozens of other products like, candle wax,
lubricating oils, propane, kerosene, asphalt, etc. In fact, only about 4
million gallons, by volume, of that 290 million gal. of oil directly contributed
to the raw material of the tires.
If we depended on oil simply for the rubber, it would be trivial
to find ways to use less rubber. We use the rubber because its
basically a free byproduct of our unquenchable thirst for the gas, diesel, and
jet fuels.
Oil is first and foremost a fuel source. The rubber and plastic that this book
advises you to conserve should really be measured only on the real benefits of
conservation, which are the reduction of landfilled waste and litter.
The authors recommend that you not buy books, or borrow books from the library.
I think you should take their advice for this one.
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Editorial Reviews:
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Ellen DeGeneres, Robert Redford, Will Ferrell, Jennifer Aniston, Faith Hill, Tim McGraw, Martha Stewart, Tyra Banks, Dale Earnhardt, Jr., Tiki Barber, Owen Wilson, and Justin Timberlake tell you how they make a difference to the environment.
Inside The Green Book, find out how you can too:
- Don’t ask for ATM receipts. If everyone in the United States refused their receipts, it would save a roll of paper more than two billion feet long, or enough to circle the equator fifteen times!
- Turn off the tap while you brush your teeth. You’ll conserve up to five gallons of water per day. Throughout the entire United States, the daily savings could add up to more water than is consumed every day in all of New York City.
- Get a voice-mail service for your home phone. If all answering machines in U.S. homes were replaced by voice-mail services, the annual energy savings would total nearly two billion kilowatt hours. The resulting reduction in air pollution would be equivalent to removing 250,000 cars from the road for a year!
With wit and authority, authors Elizabeth Rogers and Thomas Kostigen provide hundreds of solutions for all areas of your life, pinpointing the smallest changes that have the biggest impact on the health of our precious planet.
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