Looking for some green gift ideas for Christmas? There are a number of resources online to help:

• TreeHugger.com has their annual holiday gift guide with 12 categories and over 100 gifts. Everything you can think of is covered here from gifts for the Foodie to the DIY’er in your life.
• Porter McConnell writes a blog called “Slow Christmas” where she writes about how to do things like skipping the craziness of the mall and actually enjoying the holiday season. Take a look at the about page of her blog — I couldn’t agree with her more!
• Yahoo has a product-centric green gift guide for the holidays. While there are a number of questionable so-called green gifts here (especially the green gadgets), Yahoo does try to explain themselves with a blurb on each product on “Why it’s green”. Yahoo’s guide is an aggregator of sorts - a number of products they list are recommended by well known green Internet sites (which they link to).
• There are a number of great social networking pages such a the Facebook Group pages “Green Christmas” and “Lets have a GREEN CHRISTMAS” that have ongoing discussions and user contributed posts
• For the green geek in your life check out CNET’s Holiday Gift Guide which highlights super efficient tech gadgets. However, watch out for the gimmicks like the solar clad Samsung Blue Earth phone.

Here’s a couple interesting ideas I came across:

• If you are sending a gift to someone this Christmas consider using UPS carbon neutral shipping. Essentially UPS estimates that carbon emission of your shipment and purchases carbon credits to offset them (passing the costs along to you of course). Even better, through 2010 UPS will match the carbon offsets purchased for the first one million dollars.
• I’ve seen a few articles on renting a live Christmas tree lately. An example is RentXmasTree.com which Rents out live Christmas trees to folks in the central coastal California area. The company grows potted pine, cedar, redwood and cypress trees which are dropped off at your door to be rented for the holiday season. Afterwards they are picked up and tended to during the year until the next Christmas.

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While looking through (of all places) my wife’s ‘O’ (Oprah) Magazine I came accross a short snippet about ‘Eco-Font’ a new true type font that uses less ink by containing little holes in the letters.  The font is the brainchild of a Dutch company called Spranq who were looking for ways to reduce the environmental costs of printing.  The swiss cheese-style font uses 15-20% less ink and perfectly readable when the font size is kept to 12pt or below.  The fonts designers recommend using a font size of 9 or 10 and using the font anytime you are printing draft documents or internal memos

Ecofont is free to download at Ecofont.eu and is compatible with Windows (Vista and XP), Mac OSX and Linux (the website provides installation instructions).  Eco-font is based on an open source font, and Spranq is inviting developers to improve the font further.  Other language character sets are under development.

I came across an interesting new mashup the other day, RoofRay, which uses google maps and solar array modeling to help consumers evaluate solar solutions for their home or business.


You start by typing in your address, whereby RoofRay displays a google map view of your home or business location zoomed in. You then can draw an appropriately shaped solar grid on your roof and enter the approximate roof slope (in one or multiple segments), whereby RoofRay will calculate the array performance. Roofray then gives you the ability to conduct a financial analysis on your proposed array - including installation costs, upkeep costs and ROI based on your utility bills (which you can enter).

RoofRay is one of the best mashups I’ve seen in a while - to find out your home or business’ solar potential check out RoofRay.com. Also check out Sungevity.com, which uses similar technology and will give you an installation quote from their network of installers.