Soft drinks. Carbonated beverages. Sody pop.

Everyone knows soft drinks by one name or another, but do you know how much waste soft drinks contribute? About 131 billion cans are produced in the U.S. each year (only around 65% of those are recycled), and of the soft drink plastic bottles, only 24% are recycled. Gadzooks!

Not only that, but soft drinks, even though they cost pennies per gallon to make, cost you many times that amount. Why are they so expensive?

So you probably can figure that disposable soft drink cans and bottles are not the way to go. They waste plastic and aluminum, not to mention all the shipping and transportation for those materials. What are you to do if you want to save money and “go green”, as people are apt to say, but you simply can’t bear to be without your precious fizzy drinks?

SodaStream to the rescue. What the heck is SodaStream?, I hear you thinking inside your mind. Welp, it’s a company that sells sparkling water kits. They were charitable enough to send me a sample kit. Here it be.

What’s in the Homemade Soft Drink Kit?

• Penguin Carbonator
• Glass Bottles to make the carbonated drinks in
• Flavors
• CO² container

Basically these kits include a hand-powered machine that injects carbon dioxide into water, thereby making it carbonated. They also have a veritable cornucopia of different flavors you can put into the carbonated water, from sugary soft drink syrups to a wide variety of extracts (orange, berries, lemon-lime, etc.).

I got it about a month ago, and I’ve been making carbonated drinks just about every day. I’ve tried all the flavors I have, and there are a ton more I might one day order and try, but I’ma also try to make my own soft drink flavors.

So if you’d like to cut down on your plastic bottle and aluminum can waste, but you for some reason are unwilling to give up your beloved soft drinks, then I recommend you look into SodaStream.

Veggie burgers. Black bean burgers. Even the elusive Santa Fe burger. Veggie burgers have many names (and lots o’ recipes), yet I had never tried one.

So I decided to take the veggie burger plunge and use my humble cooking “skills” to craft a mouth-watering black bean burger. But first, an eco-footnote…

It takes a LOT more resources to get a pound of hamburger meat than to make a vegetarian bean burger. GoVeg (a completely unbiased website) had this to say on the matter…

It takes 5,000 gallons of water to produce 1 pound of meat, while growing 1 pound of wheat only requires 25 gallons. A totally vegetarian diet requires only 300 gallons of water per day, while a meat-eating diet requires more than 4,000 gallons of water per day. You save more water by not eating a pound of beef than you do by not showering for an entire year.

Gadzooks! Even if those numbers are skewed some, getting meat uses a heck of a lot of water.

Alright, enough with the eco-footprint lesson. Moving on to the…

Black Bean Burger Recipe

This simple veggie burger recipe (which makes 4 servings) calls for…

• 2 peppers (jalapeño, cayenne, or banana)
• About 8 teaspoons of olive oil
• 2 garlic cloves
• 2 shallots
• 2 cups of cooked, drained black beans (a 29oz. can is a just about right)
• 2/3 cup quick-cooking oats
• 2 tablespoons mayonnaise
• 1/2 teaspoon oregano
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 teaspoon pepper

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I saw this and got all excited. Who wouldn’t want to use a free tote bag instead of flimsy plastic bags?! Then I saw that it’s not exactly free, but still pretty dang close. Here’s how to get a “free” tote bag from some woman named Rachel Ray:

1. Buy a Kraft Foods brand product from this list.

2. READ MORE »

Kick off Earth Day by starting a neighborhood garden. Gather around a bunch of neighbors and locals, find a vacant lot, and help “green” it by cleaning it up and turning it into a majestic garden. Here are some great tips for community gardens…

Hopefully those tips will aid you on your journey to your very own community garden.

From the incomparable Onion.

To make a long story short, I won’t have internet at my house ’til Friday, so yesterday I went to Swift Creek Coffee House to leech off their wireless internet.

So as not to be a complete scrub READ MORE »

Here’s a quick way to get free tomato seeds from Campbell’s soup.

Grab a can of condensed soup from Campbell’s, and head over to this site.

Enter in the code it asks for, fill in your address, and voila, your free tomato seeds are on their way!

ALSO, while you’re there, click on the GROW button to donate.

That’s it for today; check back tomorrow for the Carnival of the Green, hosted by yours truly.

Granola. You love it, I love it, everybody loves it. It’s all healthy and natural and mess. But how can you make your own granola?

Welp, it turns out there’s about a million ways to do it; here’s just one way to make your very own homemade granola.

Easy Homemade Granola Recipe

Here’s what you’ll need to make some scrumptious granola.

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